Stone age or plastic age?

Extract

Ingold starts his critique with a claim to find recent writing and talking about material culture essentially obscure and orientated to fashion. If one reads Ingold's own writing you will find plenty of references to philosophical figures such as Heidegger and to phenomenology. I find such writing often incomprehensible and obscure, and much of its contemporary use pretentious. I would hope a reader would find that my own recent books, on the cell phone (Horst and Miller 2006), materiality (Miller 2005) and the sari (Banerjee and Miller 2003), are written in just as straightforward a style as those of Ingold, which I much admire, both eschewing unnecessary jargon. Clearly we happen to find very different theories more or less congenial and comprehensible. But I do not think the implication of his opening remarks is a fair one, and I would hope that readers would judge this for themselves.