Table Of ContentWorlds Apart
Worlds Apart explores the notions of the 'local' and the 'global', topics
which are currently generating a great deal of discussion in many different
disciplines. Anthropology has traditionally been concerned with regional
traditions, which today appear threatened by the spread of transnational
institutions. In this volume, the contributors examine global institutions,
ranging from bureaucracy to business and from soap opera to beauty
contests, in their specific localised forms. Through detailed ethnographic
examples, in regions such as West Africa, Hawaii, Australia, Belize and
Egypt, they show precisely how global institutions, including capitalism
and mass consumption, are manifested in local contexts. Their work
exemplifies the role of anthropologists in this area and provides a model
for future anthropological research. It also shows that an ethnographic
approach will be invaluable to emerging disciplines such as cultural studies
and media studies.
Worlds Apart gives a firm foundation for future debates about local-
global relations, and sets a new agenda, demonstrating the continued
relevance of anthropology in the contemporary world. It will be stimu
lating reading for all students of anthropology, cultural studies, media
studies, human geography and sociology.
Daniel Miller is Reader in Anthropology at University College London.
ASA Decennial Conference Series
The Uses of Knowledge: Global and Local Relations
Series editor: Marilyn Strathern
Other titles in this series:
Shifting Contexts
Edited by Marilyn Strathern
The Pursuit of Certainty
Edited by Wendy James
Counterworks
Edited by Richard Fardon
What is Social Knowledge For?
Edited by Henrietta Moore
Worlds Apart
Modernity through the prism of
the local
Edited by Daniel Miller
3
m i
O
London and New York
First published 1995
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, 0X14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016
Transferred to Digital Printing 2005
© 1995 Association of Social Anthropologists, selection and
editorial matter; the chapters, the contributors
Typeset in Times 10/12 by
Florencetype Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-415-10788-1 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-10789-X (pbk)
Contents
List of illustrations vii
List of contributors viii
Series editor's preface ix
Marilyn Strathern
Foreword xi
Daniel Miller
1 Introduction: anthropology, modernity and consumption 1
D. Miller
2 Inconsistent temporalities in a nation-space 23
M. Rowlands
3 Creating a culture of disillusionment: consumption in
Moscow, a chronicle of changing times 43
C. Humphrey
4 Bureaucratic erasure: identity, resistance and violence -
Aborigines and a discourse of autonomy in a North
Queensland town 69
B. Kapferer
5 Around a plantation: the ethnography of business
in Cameroon 91
J.-P. Warnier
6 Learning to be local in Belize: global systems of
common difference 110
R. Wilk
1 Global complexity and the simplicity of everyday life 134
Kajsa Ekholm-Friedman and J. Friedman
8 On soap opera: what kind of anthropological object
is it? 169
V Das
vi Contents
9 The objects of soap opera: Egyptian television and the
cultural politics of modernity 190
L. Abu-Lughod
10 Aboriginal art in a global context 211
H. Morphy
11 Traversing the global and the local: fuji music and praise
poetry in the production of contemporary Yoruba
popular culture 240
K. Barber and C. Waterman
Name index 263
Subject index 267
Illustrations
3.1 'St Petersburg: street sellers near Primorskaya metro
station', 1993 52
3.2 'In the family circle', Dushanbe, 1967 56
7.1 Miloli'i on the southwest coast of the island of Hawaii 138
7.2 Closer view of Miloli'i, showing the previous squatter area 139
7.3 Close-up of Miloli'i village 140
7.4 Miloli'i and adjacent Ahapua'a Omoka'a 143
7.5 Advertisement for Hawaiian Riviera resort 155
10.1 'Five Tjukurrpas (Dreamings)' 222
10.2 'The white ibis Godbolba' 225
10.3 'The nine ricochets (fall down black fella, jump up
white fella)' 227
Contributors
Professor Lila Abu-Lughod: Department of Anthropology, New York
University, USA.
Dr Karin Barber: Centre of West African Studies, The University of Birm
ingham, UK.
Professor Veena Das: Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Econ
omics, Delhi University, India.
Professor Jonathan Friedman: Department of Social Anthropology,
University of Lund, Sweden.
Dr Kajsa Ekholm Friedman: Research School in Historical Anthropology
and Sociology, University of Lund, Sweden.
Dr Caroline Humphrey: Department of Social Anthropology, University
of Cambridge, UK.
Professor Bruce Kapferer: Department of Anthropology, University
College London, UK.
Dr Daniel Miller: Department of Anthropology, University College
London, UK.
Dr Howard Morphy: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, UK.
Professor Michael Rowlands: Department of Anthropology, University
College London, UK.
Professor Jean-Pierre Warmer: Department of Anthropology, Universite
Rene Descartes, Paris, France.
Professor Christopher A. Waterman: School of Music, University of
Washington, USA.
Professor Richard Wilk: Department of Anthropology, University of
Indiana, USA.
Preface
This book is one of five to have been produced from the Fourth Decennial
Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Common
wealth, held at St Catherine's College, Oxford, in July 1993. Sections were
organised by Richard Fardon, Wendy James, Daniel Miller and Henrietta
Moore, each of whom has edited their proceedings. In addition Wendy
James acted as Oxford Co-ordinator, and it is principally due to her un
tiring efforts that the conference took place at all. As Convenor, I take
the opportunity of acknowledging our debt to her, and of registering
gratitude to Priscilla Frost for her organisational assistance and to
Jonathan Webber for acting as conference Treasurer.
The Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology gave material as well
as moral support. The following bodies are to be thanked for their
generous financial assistance: the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropo
logical Research; the British Council; the Oxford University Hulme Trust
Fund; the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Association of Social
Anthropologists itself.
To suppose anthropological analysis can shift between global and local
perspectives may well imply that the two coexist as broader and narrower
horizons or contexts of knowledge. Indeed, the relationship seems familiar
from the ethnographic record: in cosmologies that set a transcendent or
encompassing realm against the details of everyday life; or in systems
of value that aggrandise this feature while trivialising that; or in shifts
between what pertains to the general or the particular, the collective or the
individual. And if knowledge consists in the awareness of contextual shift,
then such scaling may well seem routine. However, this book does not take
scale for granted. It examines certain contexts in which people (including
anthropologists) make different orders of knowledge for themselves as a
prelude to questioning assumptions about the 'size' of knowledge implied
in the contrast between global and local perspectives.
Marilyn Strathern
University of Cambridge
