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11 books match the query 'Miller, Daniel'

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Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland

Pauline Garvey and Daniel Miller

University College London, 2021

On the role smartphones play in the lives of the aging in contemporary Ireland.

This volume documents a radical change in the experience of aging. Based on two ethnographies in Dublin, Ireland, the book illustrates how smartphones enable old people to focus on crafting a new life in retirement. For some, the smartphone is an intimidating burden linked to being on the wrong side of a new digital divide. But for most, however, it has become integral to a new trajectory towards a more sustainable life, both for themselves and their environment. The smartphone has reunited extended family and old friends, helped resolve intergenerational conflicts though new forms of grandparenting, and has become a health resource. This is a book about acknowledging late middle age in contemporary Ireland and examines how older people in Ireland experience life today.

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An Anthropological Approach to mHealth

Edited by Charlotte Hawkins, Patrick Awondo, and Daniel Miller

University College London, 2024

A study on the use of mobile health apps and human creativity.

An Anthropological Approach to mHealth underlines ten sixteen-month ethnographies, set across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, that revealed people’s use of communicative apps, including as LINE, WeChat, and WhatsApp’s alternative primary health apps, highlighting the irrelevance of dedicated health apps. Using a “smart-from-below” approach, this book studies these surprising practices and proposes a radically different anthropological method to the development and dissemination of mobile health (mHealth), a rapidly growing sector in healthcare.

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Consuming Motherhood

Taylor, Janelle S

Rutgers University Press, 2004

Consuming Motherhood addresses the provocative question of how motherhood and consumption—as ideologies and as patterns of social action—mutually shape and constitute each other in contemporary North American and European social life. Ideologically, motherhood and consumption are often constructed in opposition to each other, with motherhood standing in as a naturalized social relation that is thought to be uniquely free of the calculating instrumentality that dominates commercial relations. Yet, in social life, motherhood and consumption are inseparable. Whether shopping for children’s clothing or childbirth services, or making decisions about adopting children, becoming a mother (and maternal practice more generally) is deeply influenced by consumption. How can the relationship between motherhood and consumption be revealed, and critically analyzed? Consuming Motherhood brings together a group of sociologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars to address this question through carefully grounded ethnographic studies. This insightful book reveals how mothers negotiate the contradictory forces that position them as both immune from and the target of consumerist tendencies in contemporary global society.

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Governing Divided Societies

Habsburg Austria’s Democratic Legacy and the Czechoslovak First Republic

Philip Howe

Central European University Press, 2026

The authors of this volume challenge conventional notions about Habsburg and Czechoslovak politics, arguing that they were more democratic than they often appear. They use the consociational model of democracy as a means of combining political science and history. The theory, associated with Arend Lijphart, asserts that consociationalism guarantees minorities a say in government and helps preserve democracy in societies that experience deep ideological, cultural, or ethnic divisions. Consociationalism enables the main segments to be isolated organizationally from each other, thus avoiding conflict but affording the leaders opportunities to make compromises for the good of the whole.
Consociationalism has proven its worth as a model for describing contemporary democracies and diagnosing their ills. By exploring the institutions and practices of the Habsburg Monarchy before 1918 and the Czechoslovak First Republic, Howe, Lorman, and Miller prove the value of the consociational theory in analyzing the past. They hold that a multitude of parties, frequent cabinet changes, and reliance on cabinets of experts do not necessarily signal flawed democracies. In fact, they are features of consociationalism. This volume challenges historians and social scientists to view the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy before 1918 as evolving toward consociational democracy and the Czechoslovak First Republic as a fully consociational state.

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How the World Changed Social Media

Daniel Miller, Elisabetta Costa, Nell Haynes, Tom McDonald, Razvan Nicolescu, Jolynna Sinanan, Juliano Spyer, Shriram Venkatraman, and Xinyuan Wang,

University College London, 2016

How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and explores the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences.

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Material Cultures

Why Some Things Matter

Edited by Daniel Miller

University of Chicago Press, 1997

The field of material culture, while historically well established, has recently enjoyed something of a renaissance. Methods once dominated by Marxist- and commodity-oriented analyses and by the study of objects as symbols are giving way to a more ethnographic approach to artifacts. This orientation is the cornerstone of the essays presented in Material Cultures. A collection of case studies which move from the domestic sphere to the global arena, the volume includes examinations of the soundscape produced by home radios, catalog shopping, the role of paper in the workplace, and the relationship between the production and consumption of Coca-Cola in Trinidad.

The diversity of the essays is mediated by their common commitment to ethnography with a material focus. Rather than examine objects as mirages of media or language, Material Cultures emphasizes how the study of objects not only contributes to an understanding of artifacts but is also an effective means for studying social values and contradictions.

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Materiality

Daniel Miller, ed.

Duke University Press, 2005

Throughout history and across social and cultural contexts, most systems of belief—whether religious or secular—have ascribed wisdom to those who see reality as that which transcends the merely material. Yet, as the studies collected here show, the immaterial is not easily separated from the material. Humans are defined, to an extraordinary degree, by their expressions of immaterial ideals through material forms. The essays in Materiality explore varied manifestations of materiality from ancient times to the present. In assessing the fundamental role of materiality in shaping humanity, they signal the need to decenter the social within social anthropology in order to make room for the material.

Considering topics as diverse as theology, technology, finance, and art, the contributors—most of whom are anthropologists—examine the many different ways in which materiality has been understood and the consequences of these differences. Their case studies show that the latest forms of financial trading instruments can be compared with the oldest ideals of ancient Egypt, that the promise of software can be compared with an age-old desire for an unmediated relationship to divinity. Whether focusing on the theology of Islamic banking, Australian Aboriginal art, derivatives trading in Japan, or textiles that respond directly to their environment, each essay adds depth and nuance to the project that Materiality advances: a profound acknowledgment and rethinking of one of the basic properties of being human.

Contributors. Matthew Engelke, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Bill Maurer, Lynn Meskell, Daniel Miller, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Fred Myers, Christopher Pinney, Michael Rowlands, Nigel Thrift

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Social Media in an English Village

(Or how to keep people at just the right distance)

Daniel Miller

University College London, 2016

Daniel Miller spent 18 months undertaking an ethnographic study with the residents of an English village, tracking their use of the different social media platforms. Following his study, he argues that a focus on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram does little to explain what we post on social media. Instead, the key to understanding how people in an English village use social media is to appreciate just how ‘English’ their usage has become. He introduces the ‘Goldilocks Strategy’: how villagers use social media to calibrate precise levels of interaction ensuring that each relationship is neither too cold nor too hot, but ‘just right’. He explores the consequences of social media for groups ranging from schoolchildren through to the patients of a hospice, and he compares these connections to more traditional forms of association such as the church and the neighbourhood. Above all, Miller finds an extraordinary clash between new social media that bridges the private and the public domains, and an English sensibility that is all about keeping these two domains separate.

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The Dialectics of Shopping

Daniel Miller

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Shopping is generally considered to be a pleasurable activity. But in reality it can often be complicated and frustrating. Daniel Miller explores the many contradictions faced by shoppers on a typical street in London, and in the process offers a sophisticated examination of the way we shop, and what it reveals about our relationships to our families and communities, as well as to the environment and the economy as a whole.

Miller's companions are mostly women who confront these contradictions as they shop. They placate their children with items that combine nutrition with taste or usefulness with style. They decide between shopping at the local store or at the impersonal, but less expensive, mall. They tell of their sympathy for environmental concerns but somehow avoid much ethical shopping. They are faced with a selection of shops whose shifts and mergers often reveal extraordinary stories of their own. Filled with entertaining—and thoroughly familiar—stories of shoppers and shops, this book will interest scholars across a broad range of disciplines.

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Understanding China through Digital Anthropology

Edited by Daniel Miller and Xinyuan Wang

University College London, 2026

A reconsideration of the meaning of “digital” in light of China's distinct technological trajectory.

Understanding China through Digital Anthropology questions our understanding of digital technologies by demonstrating fundamental differences in the meaning of both technology and the digital between China and the West. This follows from a longstanding historical divergence in the meaning of and attitude towards the relationship between technology and humanity. The book includes coverage of a considerable body of scholarship on digital anthropology previously only published in Chinese.

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