Shoes are compelling symbols of individual lives and act metaphorically to suggest an intimacy with the person who wore them. In our modern world, celebrity affiliation with specific shoe designers - e.g., Sarah Jessica Parker and Manolo Blahnik - underscores the intimacy of this kind of artifact. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote, Now she knew all of them as people know one another in a country town; she knew their habits and weaknesses, and where the shoe pinched each one of them. The fit of a shoe is intimate information, and possessing knowledge of it suggests extraordinary familiarity. Maxims regarding the intimacy of shoes abound in modern parlance: If the shoe fits, wear it, Walk a mile in someone else's shoes. As artifacts, shoes carry the marks of the individual who wore them in many different ways, physically as well as symbolically. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009.
CITATION STYLE
White, C. L. (2009). Single shoes and individual lives: The Mill Creek shoe project. In The Materiality of Individuality: Archaeological Studies of Individual Lives (pp. 141–159). Springer US. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0498-0_9
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