A Theory of Shopping offers a highly original perspective on one of our most basic everyday activities - shopping. We commonly assume that shopping is primarily concerned with individuals and materialism. But Miller rejects this assumption and follows the surprising route of analysing shopping by means of an analogy with anthropological studies of sacrificial ritual. He argues that the act of purchasing goods is almost always linked to other social relations, and most especially those based on love and care. The (...) ethnographic sections of the book are based on a year's study of shopping on a street in North London. This provides the basis for a sensitive description of the issues the shopper confronts when making decisions as to what to buy. Miller develops a theory to account for these observations, arguing that shopping typically consists of three major stages which reflect the three key stages of many rites of sacrifice. In both shopping and sacrifice the ultimate intention is to constitute others as desiring subjects. Finally the book examines certain historical shifts in both subjects and objects of devotion, in particular, ideals of gender and love. This treatment of shopping from the perspective of comparative anthropology represents a highly innovative approach to one of the most familiar tasks of our daily lives. Written in a clear and accessible manner, this book will be of interest to students and academics in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, as well as anybody who wants to consider more deeply the nature of their own everyday activities. (shrink)

The New Transnational Activism shows how even the most prosaic activities can assume broader political meanings when they provide ordinary people with the experience of crossing transnational space. This means that we cannot be satisfied with defining transnational activists through the ways they think. The defining feature of transnationalism in this book is relational, and not cognitive. This emphasis on activism's relational structure means that even as they make transnational claims, transnational activists draw on the resources, the networks, and the (...) opportunities in which they are embedded, and only then - if at all - on more distant transnational links. But we can no more sharply draw a line between domestic and international politics in studying transnational activism than we could ignore local politics in studying its national equivalent. Understanding the processes that link the local, the national and the international is the major undertaking of the book. (shrink)

This book presents the results of an experiment in interdisciplinary collaboration to clarify theories of morality and anthropology and philosophy, showing how each may be enriched by borrowing from the other. Pooling the resources and methods of their respective fields-anthropology and philosophy-May and Abraham Edel examine the wide range of moral differences in the world "to establish 'coordinates' for the more systematic mapping of particular moralities, to explore more explicitly the relations of morality to cultural patterns and social processes, and (...) to see how philosophic issues of ethical theory become refined and reformulated when their cultural content is made manifest." The book contains an implicit suggestion that the anthropologist should focus on morality as an independent area of study and that the philosopher should stop treating morality in isolation. Anthropology tends to include morality as an incidental part of other inquiries. Philosophy, on the other hand, tends to cut morality off from the framework of psychological and cultural processes; the result is a kind of deadlock in ethical theory. The Edels observe that to develop a working concept of morality at least as well developed as that furnished for religion, anthropology can benefit from philosophic methods of analyzing concepts and from philosophical ways of conceptualizing problems of ethical theory. On the other hand, philosophy can use the methods of anthropology, to approach morality in more meaningful terms. This study is not addressed only to professionals; its aim, rather, is to "provide an orientation to morality itself in a world in which human problems are becoming extremely complex and have to be confronted directly as moral.". (shrink)

First devised as after-dinner entertainment at a decennial meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists in Great Britain, and first published by Prickly Pear Press in 1993, this expanded edition of _Waiting for Foucault_ represents some of the brightest anthropological satire—mixed in with some of the most serious intellectual issues in the human sciences. Whether he's summing up the state of the discipline or ruminating on the ancients, Sahlins delivers a strong mixture of wit and wisdom.