Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic research analytically describes how material things, acting as extension of selves, inflect shared structures to help manage identity, give permanence to relationship, and ground sense of "placeness", and, in the process, becomes enabler of cosmopolitan desire and purpose.

Paper long abstract:

This study highlights the intersection between things, persons, and places by considering how material things and its flows - DVDs made by local musicians and videomakers about the bundles of roses in styrofoams produced in Bahong, La Trinidad, Benguest Province and sold in key cities of the Philippines - provide understanding on how the cosmopolitan problem of inflecting local village life and sociopolitical relations becomes the problem of locating subjectivity.

In doing so, the study, firstly, looks into the circulation of material things, their inflections within the everyday life worlds, and the ideological understandings of diverse forms and processes that turn them into one thing in one village and another in other locations; secondly, explores the various forms of mediations and constraints - religious, cultural, political, and financial - that contour the possibilities of material things in particular places and times; and, finally, examine the ways in which material things (re)shape cosmopolitan subjectivities, made manifest in agents' desiring and feeling their way through creating an expanded purpose.

By this, my study presupposes that the ways the agents mould and reshape their material things, selves, and local village life are conditioned by predetermined structures - social class, symbolisms, rituals, and beliefs - and, by unveiling the particularities within which agents' translate these structures in practice, reveal their cosmopolitan imaginary that is nuanced, novel, and wide-ranging, even as they are overtaken in significance by others, given the sociopolitical realities where they are embedded.