Gifts, with Sophie Woodward

Why do we keep gifts that we don’t want, or can’t currently use? What role do these play in our relationships with others, with time, and perhaps even our future selves? Sophie Woodward discusses the richly creative research project that took her into strangers’ homes, drawers and cupboards, and led her to consider the gifts that lie “dormant” in our homes. Such items might appear “meaningless” or inactive, Sophie shows, but are far from dead or unimportant: “stuff” matters. 

Via examples of gifts ranging from inconveniently big plastic toys to alcohol repeatedly gifted by relatives, Sophie explains how, beyond theories of gifts from thinkers like Marcel Mauss on the function of exchange, or Theodor Adorno on the perfect gift, it’s worth a deeper focus on the recipient – people, she observes, have an obligation not just to receive gifts but also to keep them, at least for a certain amount of time.

Plus, we ask: is it ok for recipients to pre-empt and refuse gifts before they’re given, or is gifting the prerogative of the giver? What can we do to reduce material overwhelm? We also celebrate Jane Bennett, who considers the powers of things, beyond the meanings we attribute to them.

A thoughtful and exploratory conversation, crucial in a time of climate emergency, waste, and cost-of-living crises.

Guest: Sophie Woodward; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense

Episode Resources

By Sophie Woodward

• Dormant Gifts: Animating the Imagined and Narrated Pasts and Futures of Gifts (2025)
• Live methods and live things: Cultivating attentiveness to dormant things to develop a vital sociology of the everyday (2025)
• Clutter in domestic spaces: Material vibrancy, and competing moralities (2021)
• Object interviews, material imaginings and ‘unsettling’ methods: interdisciplinary approaches to understanding materials and material culture (2015)
• Sophie’s profile at The University of Manchester and the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• New Materialism – Nick J. Fox (2020)
• Shrinking domesticity – Mel Nowicki, Tim White, Ella Harris (2022)
• Discover our lesson plans for use in the classroom!

Further resources

• “The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies” – Marcel Mauss
• The Opposite of Forgetfulness: Adorno on Gift-Giving – from Stuart Jeffries’ “Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School”
• “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things” – Jane Bennett

Read more about Jane Bennett.

Support our work. Make a one-off or regular donation to help fund future episodes of Uncommon Sense: donorbox.org/uncommon-sense

Transcript

Alexis Hieu Truong  0:06  
Hi everyone. Happy New Year, and welcome back to Uncommon Sense from the Sociological Review Foundation. I'm Alexis Hieu Truong in Gatineau, right next to Ottawa.

Rosie Hancock  0:15  
And I'm Rosie Hancock in Sydney, Australia. We are the show that takes everyday terms and thinks about them sociologically. Today, very appropriately, we are unwrapping a new concept and we're going to talk about gifts. And specifically, we're going to talk about gifts that you receive, and maybe you're not quite sure what to do with but you also perhaps don't want to get rid of them either, or maybe at least you're not going to get rid of them yet. Alexis, are there any kind of particular gifts that come to mind for you that, that might fit my description?

Alexis Hieu Truong  0:52  
Well, actually, like when my grandfather on my father's side passed away, I inherited three hats, fedoras that he, like, always wore. They were, they really meant a lot to me at the time because, like, they kind of reminded me of him, and actually, like, they still smell like him. But, but now, like, I really don't know what to do with them, like, I can't use them because my head is just like too big, and I also can't throw them away. So, that's a, that's a real puzzle for me.

Rosie Hancock  1:23 
Yeah, that's a tricky one. I mean, honestly, I'm, I'm pretty ruthless with things, unwanted gifts included, and am, you could say, selectively sentimental. But, you know, what I do have actually is a box of toys at the top of my son's wardrobe that he's been given, my son's nearly five. And look, these aren't actually the toys he's been given that I dislike and don't really want around the house, because I managed to get those out the door pretty quickly. They're the ones that I think are actually really good toys, but he's not that into them, and so then I hang on to them in the hopes that he's – I'm like, this is a really good one, I really want you to like this one, and so I've got this box of toys that I'm hoping that somehow he might come around to at some point in time. Anyway, look, I love our subject this month. It's about material culture, it's about relationships, but, you know, this is going to touch on things like climate, on class, on space, on the home, on ethics. It's such a rich thing to talk about. It also really nicely relates to our other show on inheritance, with the anthropologist Delwar Hussain that went out at the end of last year.

Rosie Hancock  2:35  
So with us today to talk about gifting, re-gifting and more, is Sophie Woodward, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, where she's a co-director of the Morgan Centre for research into everyday lives. Sophie's background includes archaeology and anthropology, research methods and work in art and design schools, and her latest project has been looking at dormant things, things that we keep but no longer use, and that includes a paper on exactly that in the context of gifts. It's titled: Dormant Gifts: Animating the Imagined and Narrated Pasts and Futures of Gifts, and we're going to put a link to that article in our show notes.

Alexis Hieu Truong  3:15  
Hi, Sophie.

Sophie Woodward  3:16  
Hi.

Alexis Hieu Truong  3:17 
We're going to start with an interesting question, what are the most memorable gifts that you've ever received? I guess I'm kind of curious mainly about, like, the awkward ones, but if you want to be diplomatic you could also, I guess, celebrate the best ones.

Sophie Woodward  3:31  
I mean, I'm going to be sharing this with my family and my friends, so I'm going to go for the good ones I think. The best gift I've ever had is, without question, when I was 10 my mum got me a dog, and I will forever. It was something I was looking forward to so much and I was anticipating so much, and I think it was, without a doubt, the best gift I've ever had. But I do feel slightly anxious talking about that because my daughter's desperate for getting a dog, so that's a slightly risky thing to talk about there. But in terms of the, you know, the sort of unwanted ones, the things that sort of consumes me a bit is gifts that my children get, and so they have a party and you end up with loads of kind of plastic gifts or things that are slightly inappropriate. And if we can delay it and they don't open it all at the time, it's okay, but if it's opened at the time, it's unboxed and you think, I can't even re gift that. So that will probably be my, at the moment, the big thing that I kind of feel is a problematic gift.

Alexis Hieu Truong  4:26  
And so you do research into everyday materialities. What does that mean in an everyday sense?

Sophie Woodward  4:34  
I would talk about it as the stuff of everyday life. And so it's the things, if you look around you and think about the things that surround you. So, I started my career in wardrobe, so I was interested in the clothes people had in their wardrobes. But then I just became interested in the things that we have around us, and often these are the unnoticed stuff around us. So I do a lot of work in the home, for example, it's things like, you know, the pictures you have around you, the mugs you have, the books you have on your shelves, the CDs – if you still have CDs, maybe people don't anymore – all of these kinds of stuff that surround us. And it's thinking about how people navigate and live their everyday relationships through these things, how they experience tensions in their relations to others, how they hold and cherish and love other people. And often, we wouldn't necessarily think that you would do it through the ordinary, unnoticed, everyday material culture that is the stuff around you. But I think actually, when we start to look at it, we realise that this is the medium of everyday life.

Rosie Hancock  5:31  
So I mean, you just mentioned that, you know, you started looking at wardrobes and women's relationship to clothing, with that in wardrobes. How did you get from there to thinking about the dormant gifts in people's homes, like, where did, where did this idea come from?

Sophie Woodward  5:47  
I think when I started in wardrobes, I was became incredibly interested in the stuff that never got worn. And so to me, that was the thing that was the most interesting because there is – at the time when I did this – there was a lot of literature on the kind of public presentation of the self. So, things that people wore in public, maybe linked to particular identities or subcultures even. But I just became so fascinated in things people had in their wardrobe, maybe they'd try on in their bedroom, but it would never make it into the world. And that kind of stuff was just replete with interesting things, like how people felt about their bodies, how they felt about themselves, how they felt about who they could be. And so when I was doing this research, I found myself referring to these things as dormant things. And I didn't really think about the word dormant as being a conceptual thing. I just thought about it as a everyday kind of word, you know, things that people didn't want to get rid of, and they weren't quite dead, but they kept hold of. And so I became really interested in this and after I'd finished my wardrobe project, and I thought, it's not just clothes, is it, that we keep in the home and never make it out? There's so many things that fill our home, and actually most of the stuff in our home is not displayed or used. And I think for me, these things, I thought, I want to know more about them. How might stuff that seems meaningless in a draw, how might that stuff actually really help us to understand how people are navigating tense relationships or relationships with people they love, but they don't love the stuff? And so that's what kind of drove me to it. And so in lots of ways, it just broadened out, I guess, instead of thinking about clothing specifically, it was thinking about multiple different forms of material culture within the home.

Alexis Hieu Truong  7:33  
Hearing you talk really makes me think about the stuff that's laying dormant around me, and how like those things are laying dormant not because they don't, they're not meaningful. It's, it's really because they are so important that, that they're, that they're there. But before we get to the theory, can you, can you tell us what you did for this research that we're talking about today on gifts, like what are some of the questions that led you to this? What are, what methods did you use? Am I reading correctly that you interviewed spaces and you also used a sketch artist?

Sophie Woodward  8:05  
Yeah, that's right. So I think for me, when I was thinking about sampling, traditionally, when we choose the people that we interview or work with, we look at demographics or a particular kind of people. But I thought here, I'm interested in objects and I'm interested in spaces, and actually the relation between what we can keep is massively affected by how much space we've got. It's also massively affected by how many people are living in that house as well. So, I thought what if I sampled through spaces? What if I chose the spaces and the people and then started to look at what was emerging from that? So what that means is I looked at tiny flats, I looked at modern houses – neither of which have any space really to store things – and I also looked at big Victorian houses with attics and cellars. And within that sample, I looked at a range of living arrangements. So I looked at people who lived alone in a massive Victorian house, through to people flat sharing in a tiny space. And for me, that was what opened up this relationship between what people are able to keep and also how they navigate their relationships through them. In terms of the specific methods, I used lots of methods, because – having researched this kind of stuff all my career – I find it incredibly hard to understand it, so you have to come at it from lots of different angles. So the first thing I did is I said to people, show me your stuff and they would walk me through the house, and they would say, oh, here's my attic and here are the things. And I love to be participant-led in that way – so people could show me what they wanted to – which I think is important ethically, but also meant that they were leading where the stuff was and what it was, rather than me leading it. And then I also did space-specific audit. So I said, okay, choose one space – so maybe the cupboard under the stairs or your junk drawer – and show me everything, tell me about it. And when I did some of those, I had a sketch artist with me and she live sketched the interviews, and it was a wonderful method because it was so replete with both the images, but she would also write words she heard when she was drawing it. And it was, I take photographs myself and I am a terrible photographer. My photographs never capture what that thing meant and how it was vibrant or resonant. But I really felt like using a sketch artist did capture that, because she had these wonderful images that weren't trying to be directly representational. They were trying to capture that thing and what it meant. So that was one of the methods I used and, for me, it was just taking lots of different methods to try and see if I come at this from lots of different angles, something is going to be unlocked.

Rosie Hancock  10:38  
So the idea that, there's this idea that material objects have a kind of power, right? Like, like that they are acting in the world or being charged with something. And this seems to be an idea, or a notion, that's popping up all over the place at the moment, theoretically, right, in a wide range of writing, from like the ecological thought of David Abram to the political theorist Jane Bennett – who we will put a pin in, Jane Bennett, because we're going to talk about her later. But this whole kind of, you know, materialism is a big thing, I think, at the moment. And so, you know, as, as you've spoken about already, central to your work is this idea of dormant or dormancy, which kind of highlights that the gifts that you were looking at were not useless or dead or out of mind, but they were just kind of like hibernating, let's say, like they were still charged with something or carrying a type of future potential. Could you tell us about your, your choice of this word dormancy, and kind of how you use it?

Sophie Woodward  11:47  
I wanted to think about these things as being part of life still, because when I talk to people or when they showed me their junk drawers I realised that these things are not dead, they're still part of people's lives, but also they still have futures. So the word dormancy, obviously it comes from the natural biological sciences, and that word is used to refer to a necessary pause, whether it is a seed or a bulb. The idea is that in a hostile winter, the seed cannot flourish and it needs to be dormant for a while before it can have a future life. And thinking in this way really made me feel that the same is true for stuff we have in our home, because so many things, it's not that they are dead and we just haven't got around to getting rid of them. Sometimes, of course, that's the case, but it's also that sometimes they need to have a pause, a rest in the home before we know what their future life is going to be. It might be that we're going to take it to a car boot sale and we're going to sell it. It might be we're going to re-gift something to someone else. But actually, what, what nobody does around things like Christmas gifts is instantly sell them. There's almost a sense that they have to have a little bit of life in the home, even if it's just sitting in a drawer for a week or two. And so I became really interested in this idea of dormancy, because it allowed me to think about these temporal relations, so about the idea that actually things have passed, but they also have potential futures. And just because something is sitting unused, I don't think in any way it's dead. It still has vibrancy. And so sometimes when I would look in a junk drawer with people, you could see their reactions and I thought this stuff still has power. And so I think for me, dormancy allowed me to think about that stuff and that's why I started to develop this idea, because it speaks to both life but also these temporal relations I'm talking about, about futures and about pasts.

Alexis Hieu Truong  13:44  
Okay, so let's turn to some vignettes from your research as a way of like getting to a bit of theory. I remember one example of a woman who had a big plastic fire station thing for her kid gifted by a friend. And then there's like this, the story of a woman with a load of unwanted rum bottles under the stairs I believe. Can you tell us a bit more about those stories and what they share?

Sophie Woodward  14:10 
Sure, yeah. So those are just a couple of examples from my field work that I felt really captured some of the ways in which, so the the example of the fire station is a woman who is gifted a big plastic toy fire station by a very close, someone very close in her life for her child. And she would love to not have this object, and she would love to be able to just put it away in a drawer. But this friend visits regularly and so she almost feels she has to have the fire station out and available. The fire station is really poorly made, it keeps falling out, but she has to have it there because she doesn't want to doesn't want to upset her friend. She has it on the shelf and her toddler sees it and keeps grabbing it and pulling it down. So, it's a constant source of frustration for her, but she loves the person who gave it to her and so she deals with the constant frustration of having this broken toy constantly being out on the floor and having to put it together and put it away. The example of the rum bottles is one where the things are able to be dormant. So in this case, the unwanted rum bottles go in a cupboard under the stairs. And in this particular example, it's a woman and her partner who live in a house with their baby and the woman's partner, every Christmas, his mother buys him a bottle of rum. He used to love rum, but he doesn't drink it anymore. But he doesn't know what to do, because he loves his mom, and he loves the fact that she is buying him something that she thinks he loves, and every single Christmas he opens it in front of her and he drinks a glass of rum, and it's a lovely moment, because she's happy she's got the right gift, he feels loved by his mum, but he doesn't drink it. So, then the lid goes on and it goes onto the stairs, and this is now, I think, about five years in. And so it's a really interesting example, I think, because it opens up some of the complexities around gifting, in that it's not straightforward at all because there are multiple things going on here. There is the person who gave it to you, and the love we might have for that person and the love they have for us. There is the object itself. And so this item is dormant, and it goes under the stairs, but then it has effects, it is an object, it's not something that's intangible and that doesn't create problems. In their cupboard under the stairs there's more and more bottles amassing. They live in a modern house with very little space, and so it starts to create tension with his partner. And so I think what becomes really interesting about examples like this is that the longer it goes on, the more potential there is for upset. And so, I think it raises just really interestingly for me and opens up some of these complexities around gifting and why, why people might keep things dormant. There are very good reasons for it.

Rosie Hancock  16:51  
I mean, I feel like what you were talking about here about, exactly these complexities around why people might keep gifts that aren't immediately wanted, let's say, really opens up this idea of the social role of the gift. And, you know, there's this very famous theorist of the gift, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, and he kind of made us think about the social role of the gift in the way in which delayed reciprocity – so not exchanging gifts straight away – so the idea of like owing each other effectively binds us to each other, and also about the obligation that gifts carry as well. And so it kind of seems that your work, certainly in this like in this area, overlaps a bit with his on this idea of, maybe of obligation, let's say, but you're focused less on exchange and you're sort of actually staying with the recipient, actually. Am I, am I right there? And I'm curious about what's, what's gained by doing that?

Sophie Woodward  17:54 
Yeah, sure. So when I started doing this research into dormant things, I should say that I didn't start off by thinking I'm going to look at gifts. But what happened is that people's houses are full of gifts, like there was nothing, I couldn't not look at gifts because when you go into their attics and the drawers, there's always gifts there. So I ended up looking at gifts, so looking at the recipient was a sort of accident, but actually, I think, reflecting back on Mauss' theory of the gift I think has been a really interesting thing for me, because, I think, we're looking at a very different context, of course. So, you know, I mean, obviously, you know, Mauss was writing a 100 years ago, he was looking at very small scale societies, what he calls gift economies. But what I think is really interesting is how much some of these ideas still resonate in an example like the UK, in a contemporary capitalist economy, in that we still have these ideas of obligation, I think are very important. And so within Mauss he's got these obligations to give, receive, reciprocate. But I think when I started thinking about gifts in relation to recipients, I really started to think that actually people have an obligation, not just to receive it but to keep it for a certain amount of time, and also, in some instances, to care for that. So sometimes the caring for the gift opens up an entirely new dimension, because people are caring for it in order for it to have a future life. So some of this is material care, so let's say, if you put an object straight away in a drawer, it's not going to get wrecked, and it can have a future life. Someone who actually wants that thing can then go ahead and use it. But also sometimes it's care for that relationship, so like the rum bottle he is caring for the relationship he has with his mum. And so I think for me, that it really got me thinking about these other obligations we have around gifting, and actually about this obligation to keep things, and so whilst there may be people who go on eBay the day after Christmas, there are very few people who do this. So for example, there's one person within my research who got all sorts of what we might think of as kind of generic Christmas gifts, she puts them in a drawer and then before next Christmas – sometimes about six months, sometimes as much as a year later – she will resell them all and get rid of them. But she says she has to put them in the drawer because someone's given them to her, and she feels she has an obligation to keep them for a certain amount of time. And that I find incredibly interesting, because it's so widespread across all the people I talk to and I think there's something super fascinating that even when you know you don't want that, and even if the person is not going to come to your house and see the fact – they're not going to say, where's the evidence, where's my gift – but people still carry this feeling and I think it opens up all sorts of other dimensions around not wanting to be wasteful as well, and wanting to be kind of mindful in that respect as well.

Alexis Hieu Truong  20:44  
These situations with the recipients and the givers and these emotions that are charged really makes me think, like, at the time of recording, my sons are, like, four and six, and we have like these birthday parties, right, sometimes when there's, there's a birthday. And the moment where, where the kid starts to open the gifts, right, there's this kind of selective attention about like an ordering like, what gifts are most appreciated, and you can see it in people's face, like,  the sometimes the love and the thoughtfulness that went into making the gift and then coming back to the home and be like, is he still playing with that or so, so that those are definitely significant moments. Sophie, we, we should stress that not everyone you spoke to had laid things dormant in a kind of negative sense, like so or because a gift wasn't like wanted, some objects lay dormant also by necessity, but people kept them because they said something about the future. I guess in this bracket, you could put the person who kept gifts as future mementos of her loved ones, and also the woman who had two African giraffe shaped bookends. Can you tell us a bit about her?

Sophie Woodward  21:54 
Yeah, sure. So I think that's certainly true in that, actually, we would presume that the gift that instantly goes into storage is something that's not wanted, but quite often people did that with stuff that they actually really wanted. So the example of the bookends, I think, is a really interesting one. So this is a woman who lived in an absolutely tiny modern flat. She lived with a partner and her child, and she previously lived in a very large house on her own, but she lost her house, she lost her job, so she had this massive downsizing and also then gained a partner and a child in it. And so she had almost no space but she loves her stuff. One of the things she kept in storage was these giraffe bookends, and she talked about them with so much love, because she said they were the perfect gift, because she loves to read and she loves to display her books, but she can't, and so this would be what we consider to be a super successful gift, but she lives in so little space she can't do it. And it's not just then that they're dormant because she can't display them, for her, having this gift also allows her to carry this dream of one day having space. She remembers that she used to have a house that she had room in, and actually keeping things like this gift of the bookends allows her to hold on to this future dream of the house that she wants to have again. And so actually you can see here the power and also why people might need to have dormant things, because it allows them to hold on to a potential future.

Rosie Hancock  23:21  
And I mean this bookend story points to what you write of as imagining as being at the heart of gifting. And am I right that this resonates with a perspective on gifting from the Frankfurt School, the theorist Theodor Adorno? It seems, it seems kind of opposite to that standard phrase, it's the thought that counts.

Sophie Woodward  23:42  
Yeah, so I think, I find Adorno's ideas on this really interesting. So he wrote an essay about gifting in his book Minima Moralia, and he talks about the difference between the drugstore gift and what he calls real giving. So in lots of ways, I find this very problematic because I think you can buy a generic gift that's still really thoughtful, but it really, I think, resonates even with contemporary practices of gifting because this idea of the drugstore gift is when you don't know what to buy people, it's seen as just a commodity. And actually we can think about, if you think about just before Christmas when you go into the shops and, let's say, you go into Boots or any other store that sells Christmas gifts, you can see there's a big aisle that says Christmas gifts above it, and not just that, it'll sometimes say Christmas gifts for teenage boys, Christmas gifts for the man who's difficult to buy for. You know, we have all of these categories and it's curated for us. So, in some ways, that would be a really good example of these drugstore gifts, although, as I say, I'm not sure that they are always as thoughtless as Adorno implies. But then you have what he calls real giving, which is where you are accepting the giver into your life. Gifting is about this relationship between people, it produces a human relationship, it involves thinking about that other person as a subject, thinking about their identity, their likes and their dislikes. And so I think what this does is it opens up this space for the importance of imagination. And when we are buying gifts, the successful gift is when we imagine the person and we think, yes, this would fit their taste, this would fit their life. And the successful gift is when that's right and the person thinks yes. And I think imagination is actually a really important part of gifting, because we are not only buying something that's expensive or we think is a nice thing, we're imagining that person, and what he would, what Adorno suggests is that this is the real gifting because it creates the real relationship. And I think that if we look at it from the perspective of the, of the recipient then, we're saying that actually someone receives and loves that gifts because they have been successfully imagined by the other person, and they know that and they know that this is an incredibly personalised gift.

Alexis Hieu Truong  25:54  
As a parent, right, I feel that we're – with my own parents, grandparents and so on – we're putting a lot of like rules and so on, like, what, what they should or what they can give to the kids and stuff like that, so as to not to be wasteful. But sometimes that clashes a lot with what they want the gift to signify according to their own values also, right? So and Sophie, like, in preparing for this show our team was talking about like the classed aspects of gift giving and receiving, like what re-gifting means and signifies in different contexts. And also about like climate awareness and how that can play a role, say people adopting a no-gifts policy for kids parties, which can really be a way of saying, like, please, please don't buy plastic type of thing. We'd like to know your thoughts on the ethical implications of this, of saying like you don't want to receive gifts basically, and maybe in particular whether it's the prerogative of the potential recipient to preempt and refuse gifts, or whether, actually, it's up to the givers to give something if they choose and if that's meaningful to them.

Sophie Woodward  27:05  
Yeah. I mean, I think it's unbelievably complicated actually, and I think it's almost impossible to come up with a clear perspective that applies to all of the different instances. So you've talked about, for example, the children's party, and I think that there is a very strong idea around gifting to children and I think often even the saying don't buy gifts to a children's party falls on deaf ears, because there's a sense in which it's seen as, but you have to, and the idea is the child is disappointed to not have the gifts. And so I think it's really difficult then, there are also ideas around childhood as well, and around who do you buy for and what's acceptable? Because I think if we take that for adults, for example, for an adult party, let's say a 50th or, you know, a big birthday where someone says no gifts, it tends to be respected and you tend to not have gifts given. And there's a kind of cultural acceptability around that, in a way that we don't seem to have around children and I think it's really difficult to kind of unpick some of that. There's also another dimension as well around the unwrapping of the gifts as well, and I think with the children's party – and also, I guess to an extent with with adults as well – if the gifts are unwrapped in front of other people, I think this is when it becomes very problematic, because I have three children myself and I've had experiences of when the gifts are unwrapped in front of everyone and you think, first of all, this opens up huge problems because children are unbelievably honest and evidence their disappointment. But also around the, the potential wastefulness there, because I think that, as a parent, if you see a child opening something, you think, oh, if you kept that in the box that would be a great thing to re-gift. And so I think there's also, also things around that and I think that's where being really attuned, I think, into the future lives of things is important because, actually, the future lives that things can have actually are hugely affected by things like whether they're unwrapped or how long they're kept for, and in what condition as well. And I think that comes into what you're talking a little bit about the ecological impact. It's incredibly important for us to think about this, because I see houses that are burdened with stuff and stuff that people never wanted to have, you know, I think it's really important we're not blaming people for having this. I think one thing that I would say from our research is that the assumption that people are to blame is certainly not true. We end up with all sorts of things in the home, and this is a, this is a huge problem for people. And so actually, you can see that there's a big possibility when people say no gifts, but then actually because the gift is simultaneously so embroiled in familial moralities around who should be buying for a child or who should be buying for an adult, or it's your birthday, it's Christmas, all of these kind of cultural justifications are hugely problematic I think you ecologically. But unfortunately, I don't think there's a straightforward solution into how we, how we challenge these because they are so deeply ingrained in, in relationships and relationships of love often as well.

Rosie Hancock  30:12  
This is so fascinating, and it's like touches on so many fraught issues, just even within, probably within most families, right? Like, I mean, the transition from, like, I'm now at the age where like my sister has kids, I've got a kid and our family's transition to Christmases where, oh, we just buy for the kids now, right? We're not buying each other gifts anymore. And I'm a bit like, when did that happen? When did it, when, like, why, why? Maybe I'm giving away that I like gifts too much or something. Before I, before I dig myself any deeper in that hole, we're going to have a word from our producer, Alice right now, and we'll be we'll be back in a moment to talk about the social theorist Jane Bennett.

Alice Bloch  31:00  
Hi, thanks for joining us to hear Sophie Woodward on gifts, which wraps up season four of Uncommon Sense. We've really had a great time this season taking on subjects such as facts, scars, free speech, childhood and ideas of the maternal and, of course, much more. And there is also plenty more ahead in season five, which launches in March. For now, though, you can explore our archive and also our brand new lesson plans, just go into the Uncommon Sense section on the podcast page over at thesociologicalreview.org. You can find the lesson plans in particular on the individual episode pages ready to use in the classroom. And also, don't forget, if you would like to donate to directly support the making of this show head to donorbox.org/uncommon-sense. The Sociological Review Foundation is a charity and we're hard at work getting sociological thoughts out there into the world beyond academia, which we think really matters and we really do appreciate your support. And finally, if you're interested in making a podcast, maybe you're an academic with some funding, or curious about applying to do that kind of thing, well, here at the Sociological Review Foundation, we have an established digital publishing platform and a ready-made community ready to listen. So, if you think we might be a good home for your sociological podcast, get in touch with us at podcasts at thesociologicalreview.org. Thanks for listening.

Rosie Hancock  32:36  
Okay, so this is the part of the show where we like to ask you, Sophie, about someone whose work has inspired you, and today I'm so happy that we're going to be talking about someone whose work has also inspired me: Jane Bennett. So, she is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in Humanities in the Departments of Political Science and Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University in the USA. Just to pause for a moment to say how cool it is that she's kind of co-appointed across those two different, like political science and comparative thought and literature. That's a very cool joint appointment, but I've used her thinking in my own project on urban nature and community gardens and I'm pretty excited to talk more about her today.

Alexis Hieu Truong  33:20  
Okay, so Rosie here knows a bit about her already, but this isn't my field. So could you tell us more about, like, who Jane Bennett is, from first principles, for the uninitiated, let's say?

Sophie Woodward  33:33 
Yeah, sure. So I think in lots of ways, Jane Bennett's work is quite outside my field in some ways, but I think that there's something about her writing that really resonates with me. So she's written a book called Vibrant Matter, and I think that I can't even remember who it was who suggested I read it, but I sort of read it a little bit on a reluctant whim, perhaps. And I started to read it, and she writes about incredibly different stuff to me, she does write about actual stuff, but she's also got this perspective of being a political philosopher. But she's got this really powerful way of helping us to think about the powers things have that are not about meanings that humans attribute to them. And for me, that was the big resonant moment because the challenge for me has always been about, how do we understand the stuffness of stuff, the thingness of things, you know, how do we understand that as social scientists? And bearing in mind, I'm not writing philosophically, I'm actually there in the house with people with the stuff, and I think there's a huge gap in sociology as to how we do that, and I think Jane Bennett beautifully fills that gap, because she's writing about how matter is vibrant and is vital, but it's not in terms of like discrete objects. She's not talking about that object and its relation to people. She's looking at diverse types of materials and things and how these affect our ability to do stuff, but also how they affect, how they have effects on the world. So a lot of what she's writing does massively resonate with how we think about ecology, how we think about nature and of course all of that has a kind of end point, I guess, to some of my material, but I just found it incredibly useful for us to help to think about the diverse materials that we have in the home.

Rosie Hancock  35:22  
So this book Vibrant Matter that you've, that you've just brought up, which, I mean, it's so, it's such a fascinating book. It's, it is kind of like a work of philosophy, she draws on lots of different philosophical thinkers across time to construct, you know, a pretty complex argument, but she does it through all of these incredible like vignettes and examples of really bizarre stuff that you wouldn't necessarily pick right as an example, or you wouldn't imagine a philosopher would use as an example. So I'm curious, you know, if you can tell us a bit more about this book, you know, like, literally, what's, what's in it, what it does, what it achieves?

Sophie Woodward  35:58 
Yeah, so she, so there's two big things I'd say. One is around her idea of what, what is an assemblage and so she comes up with this theory of assemblages. So there's lots of other writers who've written about assemblages, which I have read quite a few of them, and I just didn't feel anything, whereas when I read Bennett's work I instantly can think about how this applies to things like clutter. So when she talks about assemblages, it's a way to talk about multiple different forms of materials and matter and how these relate to each other, and how collectively they have effects. So for her, in the kind of assemblage, even things like an electricity grid is part of it. So it's not talking about kind of discrete objects in that respect. But what I kind of love is the ways in which she develops this theory of the assemblage and because she's looking at how all of these different heterogeneous materials or matters relate to each other, you can think about it as dynamic. So it's not looking at like a collection of things and what effect do they have. It's saying that this is dynamic and it's vibrant, and I think that it allows us to think then about how these assemblages or the effects in the world can change. So for her, this incorporates lots of elements from kind of nature and the world around us as well. But it's about the idea of assemblages, I also think about as almost like constellations of things as well, and it's about how they can have power in different ways at different times. The second point I wanted to emphasise is it's not, so in lots of ways I think about the assemblages, how they have power over us. But what Bennett also does is, I think, she turns this into an ethical and a political task and I think that's also a really wonderful thing about the work. So how would kind of political or policy responses be different if we were looking at the vitality of the non-human. For example, let's say, thinking about things like waste, how would we have different politics or policy if we were understanding this as lively matter that accumulates, that becomes toxic. And I kind of love that idea because it shows that not only is this a really cool approach to think about stuff, it has huge ethical and political implications. And I think for me, I enjoyed thinking about, well, what if we do this within the home and think about the vitality of things and how might this have, not so much political but I guess ethical and sociological implications.

Alexis Hieu Truong  38:30 
Aside from the fact that maybe the gifts that I've received and that lay dormant around the house assemble and become maybe a tripping hazard for me inside of the home, how could we kind of use these concepts from Jane Bennett and kind of bring them back to the, to your reflections on, on gifts and dormant gifts? Could you give us a sort of example of its application?

Sophie Woodward  38:57  
I think it's a great question that, because obviously Bennett's work is not about gifts at all, but, and so I chose this because actually although I'm interested in the literature on gifting, I think sometimes, as I said, when we think about unwanted gifts in the home, we have to think a bit left field about methods, but I think we have to do that about theory as well. And for me, the big connection here is in two ways. One is around the amassing of things, and so what Bennett's assemblage theory speaks to is, as I said, the relations between different things, but it's also then dynamic and so the stuff we have in home starts to amass and to accumulate and to expand. And so the drawer of gifts we don't want but we don't want to get rid of because we don't to offend someone, that starts to overflow, we can't shut the drawer anymore and so actually, this becomes a problem for people. And so whilst in principle, at the level of a value, we might think, oh, we can keep them, but at the level of stuff, we can't. So the idea is, then, I think it helps us to think about the power that these things can have. And it's not just about a power of value and of meaning, it's the power of materials and of stuff, and I think for me that's one of the ways it can really connect. But then the other way is actually, and when we think about the consequences of this, you know, so taking it back to this ethical task, is that actually it has huge implications for things like sustainability. And often people would look at some popular discourses, we often read an excessive amount of stuff in the home as people being wasteful, people being really superficial in their relations with things, consumers being to blame. But actually, when you look at this stuff that people have amassing, often it's the opposite. People don't want to be wasteful. They get given a gift and they're desperate for someone else to use it, and they've got to keep it for a while because they don't to offend someone, but they would love it for it not to go to waste and for someone else to use it.

Rosie Hancock  40:53  
So, I mean, I think, you know, it would be really great to perhaps end with some really practical things on this, exactly this, right? This, this kind of ethical and political implications of Jane Bennett's, Jane Bennett's work, as it relates to gifts, as it relates to the things you know that we have lying around in our house. I'm wondering about, you know, your thoughts on how we, how we might actually concretely put this kind of stuff into action, not just Bennett's, but also, I guess, kind of similar thinkers in this area as well. And I'm curious whether, whether you, like you, have practically changed anything that you do around, around your, around your home in response to this kind of thinking.

Sophie Woodward  41:32  
Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting that question, isn't it, because I think, as I've already said, it's incredibly fraught with so many different things and in so many ways, especially having children, you feel like, how do I do anything differently? But I think you mentioned earlier about having a relation where adults don't get gifts, for example, in a particular situation. But obviously that carries other implications in that you maybe feel like, well, maybe I want something. But I think the idea of not buying for everyone is one thing you can do, but the other, this is going to sound really weird, but also thinking about numbers of gifts as well, or a financial limit, for example. You know, I've had discussions, I'm always having discussions with people around this, my friends, people in my life and actually people also talk about having rules as well around, you know, something that's useful, something that will be really exciting and something you love. Or, you know, having these kind of rules which sound really like they don't fit into the magic of Christmas, but I think sometimes these rules can really help us navigate it. So I think, for me, having some of those kind of rules in places is something we can do and I think in some ways, it makes us feel a little bit, a little bit better. But other things like, this is gonna sound really awful as well but, with kids was keeping all the packaging and not letting them rip it all, because then you can possibly, more easily re-gift it onto someone else and it can still have a kind of future. All of these sound quite anti-gifting in lots of ways, which I'm not, I think there's something magical about the perfect gift, but I think that actually we do need to get practical because we are kind of a bit overwhelmed with this matter at the time, and I certainly see that people struggle with it as well. They want to find a way to deal with it.

Rosie Hancock  43:10  
Yeah, I mean, I think it's just so important to think about because, you know, not only are we in a cost of living crisis and at a time of extreme inequality, it's also the climate crisis as well. So, you know, these considerations are just so essential to think about and be sensitive to. This is where we're going to wrap up today but talking to you has given me so much of what I hear they call social ammunition, you know, a lot to talk about and reflect on beyond my own academic world. It's a subject that, you know, brings up something big in people, I think. So, thank you for joining us today.

Sophie Woodward  43:49 
Thank you.

Alexis Hieu Truong  43:52  
And that is season four of Uncommon Sense all wrapped up. We've had a great time this season. We've talked about scars, fat, inheritance, childhood, desire, the maternal and so much more. And we'll be back in March for our launch of season five, where we're hoping to cover themes like hope, endings, sex, to name a few.

Rosie Hancock  44:14  
Thanks to all of you for listening and being part of our community. Stay in touch with us on social media. Check out our archive on the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org and share us with your friends, family, students. It's a gift with a low footprint that you don't have to keep dormant, I guess.

Alexis Hieu Truong  44:33  
Thanks to our producer, Alice Bloch, our sound engineer was Dave Crackles and thanks to our whole team. See you soon.

Rosie Hancock  44:41  
Thanks for listening. Bye.