A Starting Point
This volume represents the collective construction of a specifically anthropological approach to a question at the heart of all social science. How should we simultaneously account for both society and for individuals Unlike most social science books about the individual, this volume is not concerned with individualism nor with the way different societies conceptualize individuals. Because, irrespective of whether people live within a highly individualizing or a highly socialized environment,...
References Szq
Al-Ali, N. 2002a , 'Gender Relations, Transnational Ties and Rituals among Bosnian Refugees', Global Networks, 2 3 249-62. Al-Ali, N. 2002b , 'Trans- or A-National Bosnian Refugees in the UK and the Netherlands', in N. Al-Ali and K. Koser eds , New Approaches to Migration Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home, London Rout-ledge, 96-117. Anderson, B. 1983 , Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London Verso. Bajic, I. 2007 , 'Serbian...
Discussion
Is this a chapter about two individuals, or is it a means to convey something called Jamaican society or culture What is implicit, but needs to be made explicit, is the process of selection, the decision to use these two people to write this chapter. My starting point is that it has entirely different implications from the description of another two individuals, Charlotte and Malcolm, presented in the introductory chapter to this volume. Those individuals were specific to themselves,...
Order and Disorder on MySpace
Throughout her junior and senior year of high school, Ann was an active My-Space user, uploading pictures and commenting on friend's comments on a daily Figure 7.1 Ann's desk and bulletin board. Figure 7.2 Ann's bedroom, one week before leaving for college. Figure 7.2 Ann's bedroom, one week before leaving for college. basis. Beginning in the summer of her junior year, Ann also participated in what she called 'MySpace parties' which involved dressing up and taking photographs individually and...
Isolation and Monoculture in a Somewhat Big Society
In recent work Miller has argued that, by virtue of their exposure to diversity and globalization, the fast-moving populations of London have become 'very small societies' Miller 2006 . In contrast, Cuba's political and social isolation since the decline of the Soviet coalition has made it a relatively 'big' society, in which approximately eleven million people experience a largely shared structure that underlies their everyday practices. The development of mass migration and the globalization...
References Anm
Amit-Talal, V. and Wulff, H. eds 1995 , Youth Cultures A Cross-Cultural Comparison, London Routledge. Aries, P. 1962 , Centuries of Childhood, New York Vintage Books. Bloustein, G. 2003 , Girl Making A Cross-Cultural Ethnography on the Processes of Growing Up Female, Oxford Berghahn Books. Bovill, M. and Livingstone, S. 2001 , 'Bedroom Culture and the Privatization of Media Use', in S. Livingstone and M. Bovill eds , Children and Their Changing Media Environment A European Comparative Study,...
References Otl
Allman, J. ed. 2004 , Fashioning Africa, Power and the Politics of Dress, Bloom-ington Indiana University Press. Barber, K. 1995 , 'Money, Self-realisation and the Person in Yoruba Texts', in J. Guyer ed. , Money Matters Instability, Values and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities, Portsmouth, NH Heinemann, 205-24. Barber, K. 2007 , 'When People Cross Thresholds', African Studies Review, 50 2 111-23. Byfield, J. 2004 , 'Dress and Politics in Post-World War II...
Bodil Birkebk Olesen
While the study of design is closely linked to that of individuals, the study of decorative patterns tends to focus instead on their relationship to or significance for collective entities. Within the field of textile history terms such as 'Kuba cloth' or 'Ewe textiles' classifying a group of textiles by referring to the ethnic or cultural group that made them speaks to a scholarly legacy of conceptualizing material culture and its stylistic elements somewhat tautologically as indices of such...
Anna Pertierra
In carrying out fieldwork in urban Cuba, it is quite evident that this is a society in which the sorts of individuals Daniel Miller has described in his introduction simply do not exist contemporary Cuban life precludes both the heterogeneity and the individualism of London. Indeed, the temptation in writing about individuals in socialist Cuba is to focus exclusively upon the restrictions that seem to exist upon individualistic activities and aesthetics. Yet, as with the other chapters in this...
Gabrielle Hosein
This is a departure from understanding Caribbean societies and cultures in terms of their institutions . . . It searches for other essences beside ethnicity, national identity, pluralism, classes, gender, cultural resistance etc. and instead delves into internal dynamics, cultural creativity, aesthetic, emotions, experiences and the different ways these expose particularities, personalities and unique ways of creating and understanding order. Johnson 2002 21 In the small city of San Fernando in...
Theorizing Aesthetic Authority
Let me first review a set of premises, regarding individuals, aesthetic and authority, engaged by this collection of essays. Authority, for Miller, is grounded in forging, maintaining and conducting relationships. It emerges from the ways that women and men, amidst great social heterogeneity,6 make 'highly integrated meaningful worlds, carefully crafted lives, with considerable consistency or clearly worked through contradictions' 2006 3 . People's relationships may be to their bodies, others,...
Notes on Contributors
Ivana Bajic-Hajdukovic is a Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Weber Programme, European University Institute. Julie Botticello is an Honorary Research Associate, Department of Anthropology, University College London. Magdalena Cr ciun is a PhD student, Department of Anthropology, University College London. Dimitrios Dalakoglou is a Lecturer in Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex. Heather A. Horst is Associate Project Scientist, Humanities Research Institute, University of...
Contents
1 Individuals and the Aesthetic of Order Daniel Miller 2 Trading in Fake Brands, Self-creating as an Individual 3 'Making Things Come Out' Design, Originality and the Individual in a Bogolan Artisan Community 37 4 Building and Ordering Transnationalism The 'Greek House' in Albania as a Material Process 51 5 The Christian and the Taxi Driver Poverty and Aspiration 6 How Madrid Creates Individuals 83 Marjorie Murray 7 Aesthetics of the Self Digital Mediations 99 Heather A. Horst 8 Unmaking Family...
Driven The Taxi Driver and His Van
You are hurtling down a mountainside. There is no lighting the road is full of potholes it is narrow, twisting, precipitous and the van you are in is not small. The driver sitting beside you smells strongly of beer, hardly surprising, since you recently watched him consume his fifth in the last two hours. It's not as if you even enjoy those video games which throw at you a twisting road with sudden obstacles and challenge you to keep within its limits. At least with those, when disaster...
Individualism in Madrid
Most of the chapters in this volume concern the individual but not necessarily individualism, for reasons given by Miller in the introduction. But in the case of Manuel we have to directly confront the issue of individualism because this is a designated component of the person that is clearly given a specific position within Madrid society. It is Manuel that describes and assumes himself to be individualistic. As he puts it 'I need a space for solitude in which I can find silence and...
Julie Botticello
In contrast to most discussions of dress and Diaspora, the focus of this chapter is not on clothing as an expression of political or ethnic identity, but on how clothing mediates the relationship between an individual and her community. Dress, as Oyetade notes, is one of the more prevalent forms of explicit identification among Yoruba people in London, with many dressing in Yoruba textiles and clothing designs in the warmer weather, but especially for ceremonial life, such as naming ceremonies,...
Migration to Greece
Fatos was born in a small Christian Catholic village near Shkoder Northern Albania , thirty-seven years ago. Although his family's immobile property was confiscated in the 1940s, they kept their pre-socialist stone-built8 house where he grew up. Eventually, in 1990, when the borders with Greece opened, he went there on foot. Poor, exhausted and with no papers not even a passport , yet still optimistic, he initially accepted any job offered to him for very little money.9 After travelling around...
References Cli
Barjaba, K. and King, R. 2005 , 'Introducing and Theorising Albanian Migration', in R. King, N. Mai and S. Schwandner-Sievers eds , The New Albanian Migration, Brighton Sussex Academic Press, 1-28. Boas, F. 1887a , 'The Occurrence of Similar Inventions in Areas Widely Apart', Science, 9 224 20 May 485-6. Boas, F. 1887b , 'Museums of Ethnology and Their Classification', Science, 9 228 17 June 587-9. Bourdieu, P. 1973 , 'The Kabyle House', in M. Douglas ed. , Rules and Meaning, Harmondsworth...
Materials Techniques Walls and Technicians
This house is created according to developments in Greece but also has direct links with the migratory destination its administrators and actual constructors live there while the money and the building materials flow from Greece. In fact, the entire house is gradually flowing in from Greece, part by part. Occasionally, Fatos travels with the materials and not the materials with Fatos, as he often argues that there are times he goes to Albania only in order to carry some of them. Over the last...
Marjorie Murray
The intention of this chapter is to demonstrate through an extended essay on a single figure, Manuel, how the concept of individualism is actually rooted in the constraints and possibilities that are given by the experience of living in Madrid. What is encountered here is very different from that which is usually meant by the term 'individualism' as employed in anthropology e.g. Dumont 1986 Strathern 1992 . Rather than individualism per se, what is encountered in the figure of Manuel is a route...
Dimitris Dalakoglou
This chapter addresses two major themes migration from Albania to Greece and the ordering capacities of material culture in the transnational1 practices of Albanian migrants. It examines a house built in Albania by an Albanian migrant who resides permanently in Greece. This house belongs to Fatos2 who calls it 'a Greek house'.3 Despite the semantic and material contradictions embedded in it, Fatos's house in Albania and its construction brings the totality of his contradictory, fluid and...
Building and Ordering Transnationalism
People often use language derived from conventional static spatialities, for example terms inspired by the concept of the nation-state such as 'Greek' and 'Albanian', and consequently the ethnographer must also use them, although we are all aware of the potential paradox when these are employed within an increasingly mobile and transnational world. Fatos, for as long as he continues to work on his home in Albania, will add features which he presents as 'Greek'. In 2007 for example he planted...
References Of Dem
Austin-Broos, D. J. 1997 , Jamaica Genesis Religion and the Politics of Moral Orders, Chicago University of Chicago Press. Besson, J. 1993 , 'Reputation and Respectability Reconsidered A New Perspective on Afro-Caribbean Peasant Women', in J. Momsen ed. , Women and Change in the Caribbean, London James Currey, 15-37. Besson, J. 2002 , Martha Brae's Two Histories European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica, Chapel Hill University of North Carolina. Bourdieu, P. 1977 , Outline of...
The Table
For many years, the family has been renting an apartment in Greece that Fatos renovated himself. He agreed with the owner of the building that he himself would refurbish it in exchange for a reduced rent. The layout of the building does not differ much from most other lower-middle-class homes in the area. Their first- and top- floor apartment comprises two sitting-rooms, two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a storage room, balconies along a backyard and a garage. The ground floor is a shop,...
SpaceCulture Isomorphism
Until recently, most anthropologists classified cultures and their socio-cultural formations e.g. artefacts, kinship systems or habiti according to statically perceived spaces.4 This static and universal type of space was named 'isotropic' and 'infinite space' by Lefebvre 1991 1-9 and 'neutral space'5 by Tilley 1994 7-11 .6 Gupta and Ferguson 1992 have termed this close deterministic association between static spaces and cultural formations 'space-culture isomorphism'. The legacy of...
Manuel and His Aesthetics Clothes Photography and Blog
Manuel has always been concerned with clothes and has always liked adding some special touch to his youthful looks of which he has always been proud. This has involved considerable creative effort in keeping up with his own taste one that is intended to avoid what most people are wearing as well as preferring quality and originality to quantity. This is hard work in the Madrilenian context of exceptional high street homogeneity and even harder for someone with a very tight budget, which has...