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(s): Daniel Miller (ed.)
Series: Materializing Culture
Publisher: Berg
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 192
Contents......Page 6
Introduction......Page 12
1 Individuals and the Aesthetic of Order......Page 14
2 Trading in Fake Brands, Self-creating as an Individual......Page 36
3 ‘Making Things Come Out’: Design, Originality and the Individual in a Bògòlan Artisan Community......Page 48
4 Building and Ordering Transnationalism: The ‘Greek House’ in Albaniaas a Material Process......Page 62
5 The Christian and the Taxi Driver: Poverty and Aspiration in Rural Jamaica......Page 80
6 How Madrid Creates Individuals......Page 94
7 Aesthetics of the Self: Digital Mediations......Page 110
8 Unmaking Family Relationships: Belgrade Mothers and Their Migrant Children......Page 126
9 Fashioning Individuality and Social Connectivity among Yoruba Women in London......Page 142
10 Creating Order through Struggle in Revolutionary Cuba......Page 156
11 Food, Family, Art and God: Aesthetic Authority in Public Life in Trinidad......Page 170
Index......Page 190
