Daniel Miller (anthropologist)

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Daniel Miller (born 1954) is an anthropologist most closely associated with studies in material culture and consumption. His theoretical work was first developed in Material Culture and Mass Consumption and more recently in his edited collection Materiality. This is concerned to transcend the usual dualism between subjects and objects and to study how social relations are created through consumption as an activity.

With his students he has applied these ideas to many genres of material culture such as clothing, homes, media and the car, through research based on the methods of traditional anthropological ethnography in regions including the Caribbean, India and London.

His work on material culture also includes ethnographic research on how people develop relationships of love and care through the acquisition of objects in shopping and how they deal with issues of separation and loss through their retention and divestment of objects.

He was originally trained in archaeology and anthropology at the University of Cambridge but has spent his entire professional life at the Department of Anthropology, University College London which has become a research centre for the study of material culture.

[edit] Works

1984, (with C. Tilley). Eds. Ideology, Power and Prehistory.
1985, Artefacts As Categories: A study of Ceramic Variability in Central India.
1987, Material Culture and Mass Consumption.
1989, with M. Rowlands and C. Tilley) Eds. Domination and Resistance.
1993, Ed. Unwrapping Christmas.
1994, Modernity - An Ethnographic Approach: Dualism and mass consumption in Trinidad.
1995, Acknowledging Consumption.
1995, Ed. Worlds Apart - Modernity Through the Prism of the Local.
1997, Capitalism: an Ethnographic Approach.
1998, A Theory of Shopping.
1998, Ed. Material Cultures
1998, (With J. Carrier) Virtualism: a New Political Economy.
1998, (with P. Jackson B. Holbrook and N. Thrift) Shopping Place and Identity
2000, Communication Cultures: Economies, Practices, Spaces.
2001, *With D. Slater) The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach
2001, The Dialectics of Shopping.
2001, Ed. Car Cultures.
2001, Ed. Consumption (four volumes)
2001, Home Possessions: Material Cultures Behind Closed Doors.
2003, (With M. Banerjee). The Sari.
2005, (with Suzanne Küchler) Ed. Clothing as Material Culture.
2005, Ed. Materiality.
2006, (With H. Horst) The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication.