Blue Jeans - The Art of the Ordinary

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-520-27218-7
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 184 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 378 g

This fresh and accessible ethnography offers a new vision of how society might cohere, in the face of on-going global displacement, dislocation, and migration. Drawing from intensive fieldwork in a highly diverse North London neighborhood, Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward focus on an everyday item—blue jeans—to learn what one simple article of clothing can tell us about our individual and social lives and challenging, by extension, the foundational anthropological presumption of “the normative.” Miller and Woodward argue that blue jeans do not always represent social and cultural difference, from gender and wealth, to style and circumstance. Instead they find that jeans allow individuals to inhabit what the authors term “the ordinary.” Miller and Woodward demonstrate that the emphasis on becoming ordinary is important for immigrants and the population of North London more generally, and they call into question foundational principles behind anthropology, sociology and philosophy.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Miller, Daniel

Woodward, Sophie

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Sachkultur, Materielle Kultur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. Life
2. Relationships
3. Fashion
4. Comfortable
5. Ordinary
6. The Struggle for Ordinary
7. Anthropology: From Normative to Ordinary
8. Sociology: The Ordinary and the Routine

Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at University College, London. He is the author of many books, including The Comfort of Things, Stuff, and Tales from Facebook. Sophie Woodward is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester and the author of Why Women Wear What They Wear.