Anthropology and the Individual A Material Culture Perspective

by Miller, Daniel

• ISBN13: 9781847884954
• ISBN10: 1847884954
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-12-15
• Publisher: Berg Pub Ltd

Summary

Anthropology is usually associated with the study of society, but the anthropologist must also understand people as individuals. This highly original study demonstrates how methods of social analysis can be applied to the individual, while remaining entirely distinct from psychology and other perspectives on the person. Contributors draw on approaches from material culture to create fascinating portraits of individuals, offering analytical insights that convey ethnographic encounters with often extraordinary people from Turkey, Spain and Britain to Albania, Cuba, Jamaica, Mali, Serbia and Trinidad. Exploring relationships to places and spaces such as social networking sites, to persons such as parents, to ethical concerns such as fairness and to concepts such as the ideology of struggle, Anthropology and the Individual shows how the study of the individual can provide insights into society without losing a sense of the particularity of the person.

Author Biography

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at University College London.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Notes on Contributors	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Individuals and the Aesthetic of Order	p. 3
Trading in Fake Brands, Self-creating as an Individual	p. 25
ÆMaking Things Come OutÆ: Design, Originality and the Individual in a Bògòlan Artisan Community	p. 37
Building and Ordering Transnationalism: The æGreek HouseÆ in Albania as a Material Process	p. 51
The Christian and the Taxi Driver: Poverty and Aspiration in Rural Jamaica	p. 69
How Madrid Creates Individuals	p. 83
Aesthetics of the Self: Digital Mediations	p. 99
Unmaking Family Relationships: Belgrade Mothers and Their Migrant Children	p. 115
Fashioning Individuality and Social Connectivity among Yoruba Women in London	p. 131
Creating Order through Struggle in Revolutionary Cuba	p. 145
Food, Family, Art and God: Aesthetic Authority in Public Life in Trinidad	p. 159
Index	p. 179
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