Worlds Apart: Modernity Through the Prism of the Local

by Miller,Daniel; Miller,Daniel

• ISBN13: 9780415107884
• ISBN10: 0415107881
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1995-12-22
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Worlds Apartmaps out one of the new directions of anthropology, that aimed at advances in technologies which create an imagination of new global and local forms. It examines global institutions ranging from bureaucracy to business and from soap operas to beauty contests in regions such as West Africa, Hawaii, Australia, Belize and Egypt. The overall issue is whether there exists either a global level that transcends these loaclized manifestations or a local level that exists other than in relation to a wider domain. Anthropology has traditionally been more concerned with what is often assumed were regional traditions, and may have appeared threatened by increasing transnational institutions. In this book, however, the contributors who have studied these themes in their specific localized forms, show why there may be more, rather than less, reason to carry out ethnographic and comparative research when ethnographic detail is acknowledged to be closely linked to emergent globalforms. This book will provide a firm foundation for future debates about local-global relations as well as demonstrating the continued significance of the contribution of anthropology to such discussions. It will be invaluable reading to all anthropologists and students of anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, human geography and sociology.

Author Biography

Daniel Miller is Reader in Anthropology at University College London.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

List of contributors

Series editor's preface

Foreword

Introduction: anthropology, modernity and consumption

Inconsistent temporalities in a nation-space

Creating a culture of disillusionment: consumption in Moscow, a chronicle of changing times

Bureaucratic erasure: identity, resistance and violence - Aborigines and a discourse of autonomy in a North Queensland town

Around a plantation: the ethnography of business in Cameroon

Learning to be local in Belize: global systems of common difference

Global complexity and the simplicity of everyday life

On soap opera: what kind of anthropological object is it?

The objects of soap opera: Egyptian television and the cultural politics of modernity

Aboriginal art in a global context

Traversing the global and the local: fuji music and praise poetry in the production of contemporary Yoruba popular culture

Name index

Subject index

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