Tin Ethnography began with a tin I used to carry everywhere—not an Altoids tin, but a more generic one. Inside it, I kept what I thought of as daily essentials: a small lantern, a few pills, a magnet, a cloth for cleaning my glasses, Band-Aids, a small brush to dust my devices, and a multi-port charger. Each item served a practical function, but together they became something else: a compressed archive of everyday life, a small museum of preparedness.
The image above documents one of those early arrangements. Like Austin Radcliffe’s Things Organized Neatly(Radcliffe 2018), it reflects a desire to find order amid contingency—to turn the random accumulation of useful things into a temporary composition. There is an aesthetic pleasure in that order, but also an ethnographic question: what do we carry, and why? How do such small, portable assemblages reveal the textures of our daily negotiations with material life?
Over time, I began to see this pocket-sized world as more than a personal habit. It resonated with my ongoing work on fragments and with the ways I decompose urban places into their materials—the residues, wrappers, bits of metal, and discarded objects that structure everyday experience. This attention to the partial and the broken recalls Tim Ingold’s reflections on making as a process of correspondence rather than completion (Ingold, 2013). The tin, in this sense, became a methodological lens: a way to practice compression, to see how a city might fit into the palm of a hand.
Each Tin Ethnography will not merely be a collection of curiosities but a spatial and material ethnography in miniature. It will capture the gestures of carrying, sorting, and attending that define how we inhabit the world. In the spirit of Daniel Miller’s Stuff (2010), these ordinary things are not mute; they are saturated with relations—between function and memory, necessity and curiosity, what we keep and what we let go.
My passion for collecting predates this project. I have always been drawn to the small and the overlooked—the way a drawer of fragments, ticket stubs, or found objects can tell the story of a place more vividly than a grand narrative. Collecting, for me, is not an act of accumulation but of attention. As Walter Benjamin (1999) wrote of the collector, the object’s true freedom lies in being rescued from utility. To collect is to suspend the ordinary rhythm of things, to hold them still long enough for their histories to surface.
This impulse aligns with a longer lineage of museological and ethnographic practices. Susan Pearce (1992) describes collecting as a “strategy of the self,” a way to produce meaning through selection and arrangement. James Clifford (1988), too, showed how museums and collectors participate in systems of classification that are always partial, situated, and political. My own collections—tins, fragments, tones, and residues—extend this tradition, but at a smaller scale. They are cabinets of fieldwork rather than of wonder: micro-archives that turn ethnographic attention toward the humble and the provisional.
This small-scale practice also echoes Ezio Manzini’s (2015) notion of design for social innovation, where the everyday becomes a site for creative reconfiguration. By treating the tin as both field and form, Tin Ethnography draws on design thinking not to produce objects but to cultivate attention—to craft what Celia Lury (2021) calls “problem spaces,” in which methodology itself becomes the medium of inquiry.
Through such compression, the tin performs a double gesture: it organizes, like Radcliffe’s neat compositions, yet also fragments, like the urban textures it seeks to hold. It works between tidiness and residue, evoking the tension Rodney Harrison (2013) identifies between preservation and decay in heritage practices. What fits inside is never stable—it shifts with each encounter, each walk, each day.
In this sense, Tin Ethnography extends my broader exploration of fragments, residues, and arrangements. Like Materialtone or Fragmented Ecologies, it treats smallness as both scale and method—a way to think with what is partial, improvised, and intimate. Each tin is a field condensed: an urban study in pocket form, a device for holding the ordinary still long enough to be noticed.
References
- Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Harrison, Rodney. 2013. Heritage: Critical Approaches. London: Routledge.
- Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.
- Lury, Celia. 2021. Problem Spaces: How and Why Methodology Matters. Cambridge: Polity.
- Manzini, Ezio. 2015. Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Miller, Daniel. 2010. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity.
- Pearce, Susan. 1992. Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
- Radcliffe, Austin. 2018. Things Organized Neatly: The Book. New York: Universe Publishing.