A Theory of Shopping

by Daniel Miller

The butt of endless jokes and the focus of considerable anguish, shopping offers significant insights into contemporary social relations and their nuances. This book is about shopping for ordinary things. It is also about love and devotion manifest within families and about the nature of sacrificial ritual. A significant contributor to material culture studies, Daniel Miller is an acute observer and an exceptional storyteller. He approaches shopping not as an end in itself but as a means to discover what people's practices, closely observed, reveal about their relationships. 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 how shoppers develop and imagine the social relationships most important to them through the medium of selecting goods. Among the characteristics of these shopping expeditions are the concept of "the treat," and the centrality of thrift. Miller juxtaposes on his account of shopping various theories that anthropologists have brought to bear on the ritual of sacrifice, including that of the French philosopher George Bataille. He then integrates these elements to postulate his theory of shopping as sacrifice in terms as original and as utterly engaging as the stories he tells of individual shoppers.

Genres: Anthropology, Material Culture, Nonfiction, Sociology

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at UCL, author/editor of 37 books including Tales from Facebook, Digital Anthropology (Ed. with H. Horst), The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach (with D. Slater), Webcam (with J. Sinanan), The Comfort of Things, A Theory of Shopping, and Stuff.

Reviews

[Kasia · Rating 1 out of 5]

the worst thing i've ever read (or maybe i'm just stupid)

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Miller does here what anthropology/ethnography is about, as far as many of its practitioners are concerned – he explores the ordinary and the everyday, in this case shopping as in basic provisioning. If it were an old style ethnography of some distant society, we'd talk about it as food gathering techniques, but in this case it is an ethnography of an area of North London.

He does two useful and important things – he explores the importance of the 'treat' – the thing we buy in most/every shopping outing that is special and for someone (maybe us) that by definition makes everything else ordinary – and 'thrift', a practice and discourse where spending money become saving (I got three for the price of two/saved money by buying something I didn't need because it was cheap and so forth). Secondly, and much more importantly, he explores everyday provisioning not as duped consumers being taken in by promotions and advertising but shopping as a kind of ritual practice that becomes sacrifice – so where a thing or activity become a way of sacralising something else – and in this case it is about making sacred the household/family within.

It is a challenging and in places difficult argument, but it is in the end very rewarding even if I don't buy into all of it. A valuable and important scholarly contribution to consumption studies, to anthropologies of the western world, and studies of gender.

[Elin Söderholm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bara för att man har en hot take behöver man inte skriva en hel bok om det. Dessutom aldrig varit med om någon som refererar till sig själv så mycket, typ varannan referens är till tidigare eller kommande verk av författaren!! Jätteostrukturerat argument, vet inte riktigt vad han ville komma fram till helt, men vissa saker var rimliga. Vissa var till och med faktiskt intressanta på riktigt! Hade gett den 2,5 om jag kunde

[Ella Chang · Rating 3 out of 5]

wasn't THE most dense anthropological ethnography book I've read

[Yana Sanko · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the beauty of the idea to compare shopping as an activity to sacrificial ritual. This wasn't easy vacation reading, but its incredibly insightful. After reading two Miller's books i think i need them all.

[Marisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love Miller's work! Accessible and a great alternative perspective to the concepts of reciprocity and materialism often argued in anthropology - there's more to buying than most of us think!

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Read for uni; review soon]

[غيداء الجويسر]

استعرت هذا الكتاب من مكتبة الجامعة اليوم. لقيته بالصدفة. استهواني. خاصة انه دراسة اثنوجرافية ❤

[Yana Manyukhina · Rating 5 out of 5]

For my review of the book please go to http://ediblematters.wordpress.com/20...