The central goal of the book is to explore the relationship between society and the individual. In his introduction, Daniel Miller argues that studies in anthropology have stressed the opposition between society and the individual, or viewed the individual as a mere microcosm of society. Such a view neglects to acknowledge the coincidence and compatibility of the individual and society where the individual is more than the microcosm of the macrocosm. The objective of the present book is to explore how society and individual exist in tandem.
The book is strongly theoretical and largely influenced by the works of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of the habitus (1977). Miller does not go into depth about Bourdieu’s concept of habitus; however, it is suggested that by habitus Bourdieu means an underlying structure that becomes second-nature to people and gives them their unconscious expectation of the order they anticipate in many different aspects of their lives. All contributors to this edited volume engage in Bourdieu’s theory of the ways individuals are socialized to become members of society through daily association with practical taxonomies embodied in the order of material culture. One criticism of the book, however, is that Miller does not elaborate why the relationship between society and the individual is explored through the medium of material culture, since many essays do not explicitly deal with material culture in spite of using Bourdieu’s theory. Rather, chapters in this volume are organized in a sequence that starts with an emphasis upon objects, then moves to relationships to place, to persons, and finally to the state.
While the book is committed to theoretical developments in the analysis of individuals, its methodology is primarily ethnographic and focuses on one or two key informants who play a major role in the ethnographic work. The book uses the individual analytically to display a pattern of relationships that convey a sense of the cultural order the person lives by. This sense of individual cultural order is termed “aesthetic” by Miller, and is employed frequently by contributors throughout this volume. The mediation between the individual and the social order is apparent in external forms. In the chapters in this book, it may appear as the way a house is decorated, a cloth is designed, or a person is expected to dress or behave. This allows us to discern a relationship between the individual and society that does not rest on an opposition between the two; rather, we see that individuals themselves represent a form of order in the world that emerges out of a creative and partial appropriation of the possibilities in the wider order around them.
All essays in the volume stress the way individuals create their own aesthetic order in which the individual and society are not treated as two distinct analytical perspectives, but instead appear as aspects of each other. The first three essays deal directly with objects. In the first essay Magdalena Cr?ciun reveals how one individual, named Firmala, in Istanbul, Turkey, creates an understanding of himself though trade in fake brands, while in the second essay Bodil Birkebæk Olesen shows that aesthetic economy can be used as a useful tool for understanding ideas of originality and repetition among individuals in Mali. In the third chapter Dimitris Dalakoglou explores how an Albanian immigrant named Fatos, living in Greece, builds a Greek house in his home country of Albania by negotiating individual aesthetic order with social immigrant identity.
The next three chapters focus on the way a person is constructed as an objectification of place and yet has to be seen simultaneously as an individual. In the fourth chapter, by Daniel Miller, the two individuals described in the chapter objectify the opposing qualities of Pentecostalism and the highly amoral world of taxi drivers—an opposition which constitutes the landscape of Orange Valley, Jamaica. In the fifth chapter, by Marjorie Murray, the city of Madrid is itself objectified as Murray’s central informant, Manuel, attempts to conform to the social aesthetics of order like a true Madrilenian, while at the same time constructing an elaborate expression of individual difference in his hobbies, clothes, and blog. In the sixth chapter, Heather A. Horst’s informants in California express individual creativity in their self-presentation in the virtual world, but encounter tension between conformity and specificity.
The next two chapters focus on relationships to persons, but as in all the previous chapters, there is also the clear influence of place and of objects in this creation of the aesthetics of the self. In the seventh chapter, Ivana Baji?-Hajdukovi? presents with some compassion the opposed perspectives of a mother in Serbia and her son Vladimir who is settled in London. While Vladimir prefers to disengage from his place of origin by rejecting all material objects from his homeland, his mother looks for strategies to reconcile with her son. In the eighth chapter, Julie Boticello shows how a forty-year-old woman attempts to negotiate her Yoruba identity in London and satisfy the normative order of the London Yoruba community by using her traditional and Western birthday-party attire as a means of negotiation.
In the last two chapters, materialism that is pertinent is not the material culture of objects, but an external force that creates the material conditions within which people live. In his work in Cuba, Perierra reveals that in spite of living in one of the most controlling states in the world, individuals in Cuba are nevertheless able to assert themselves through quite different relationships to the concept of struggle. Hosein’s concluding chapter, based in Trinidad, is an appropriate end to this volume, as she directly addresses the issue of individual in society by engaging in the concept of “aesthetic authority.” Her chapter proves that authority is a product of both persons and institutions, because effective authority is based on legitimacy where neither what the individual or institution claim matters. Instead, what matters is what emerges from the grounds that each cedes to the other.
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[Review length: 991 words • Review posted on April 6, 2010]