Descripciones mejoradas de Syndetics:

This fresh and accessible ethnography offers a new vision of how society might cohere, in the face of on-going global displacement, dislocation, and migration. Drawing from intensive fieldwork in a highly diverse North London neighborhood, Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward focus on an everyday item--blue jeans--to learn what one simple article of clothing can tell us about our individual and social lives and challenging, by extension, the foundational anthropological presumption of "the normative." Miller and Woodward argue that blue jeans do not always represent social and cultural difference, from gender and wealth, to style and circumstance. Instead they find that jeans allow individuals to inhabit what the authors term "the ordinary." Miller and Woodward demonstrate that the emphasis on becoming ordinary is important for immigrants and the population of North London more generally, and they call into question foundational principles behind anthropology, sociology and philosophy.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Acknowledgments(p. vii)
• Introduction(p. 1)
• 1 Life(p. 16)
• 2 Relationships(p. 30)
• 3 Fashion(p. 46)
• 4 Comfortable(p. 65)
• 5 Ordinary(p. 84)
• 6 The Struggle for Ordinary(p. 102)
• 7 (p. 121)
• 8 Sociology: The Ordinary and the Routine(p. 139)
• Bibliography(p. 157)
• Index(p. 165)

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

CHOICE Review

In this carefully crafted ethnography offering remarkable insights on the significance of a commonplace garment, anthropologist Miller (Univ. College London) and sociologist Woodward (Univ. of Manchester, UK) seek to understand how and why blue jeans reflect and express important aspects of social life. They worked with 67 residents of a patch of North London, an unremarkable neighborhood whose population reflects the capital's multiethnic composition. What comes through clearly is the degree to which jeans are associated with the normal, the everyday--a sartorial default mode open to all. Specifics depend on context, but it is evident that jeans matter to the people in question. The authors note that the anxieties that people face daily in deciding what to wear, and in what others may think about how they dress, are not frivolous matters. Also, this most personal and most global garment appears to have special significance for immigrant communities in that it crosses potential cultural divides, as it does for gender. More generally, what people look for is something "comfortable," a term that should be understood as more than its physical qualities. Denim, in short, is not a mark of exclusivity, but of community and belonging. Engrossing and accessible; a really good book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. O. Pi-Sunyer emeritus, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at University College, London. He is the author of many books, including the Comfort of Things, stuff and Tales from Facebook.
Sophie woodward is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester and the author of Why Women Wear What They Wear.