Anthropology is usually associated with the study of society, but the anthropologist must also understand people as individuals. This highly original study demonstrates how methods of social analysis can be applied to the individual, while remaining entirely distinct from psychology and other perspectives on the person.



Contributors draw on approaches from material culture to create fascinating portraits of individuals, offering analytical insights that convey ethnographic encounters with often extraordinary people from Turkey, Spain and Britain to Albania, Cuba, Jamaica, Mali, Serbia and Trinidad.



Exploring relationships to places and spaces such as social networking sites, to persons such as parents, to ethical concerns such as fairness and to concepts such as the ideology of struggle, Anthropology and the Individual shows how the study of the individual can provide insights into society without losing a sense of the particularity of the person.

About the Author/Editor

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology, University College London.

Contents

1. Individuals and the Aesthetic of Order

D. Miller




2. Trading in Fake Brands, Self-creating as an Individual

M. Crãciun




3. 'Making Things Come Out': Design, Originality and the Individual in a Bogolan Artisan Community

B. Olesen




4. Building and Ordering Transnationalism: The 'Greek House' in Albania as a Material Process

D. Dalakoglou




5. The Christian and the Taxi-driver: Poverty and Aspiration in Rural Jamaica

D. Miller




6. How Madrid Makes Individuals

M. Murray




7. Aesthetics of the Self: Digital Mediations

H. Horst




8. Unmaking Family Relationships: Belgrade Mothers and Their Migrant Children

I. Bajiæ




9. Fashioning Individuality and Social Connectivity Among Yoruba Women in London

J. Botticello




10. Creating Order Through Struggle in Revolutionary Cuba

A. Pertierra




11. Food, Family, Art and God: Aesthetic Authority in Public Life in Trinidad

G. Hosein