This book is a highly original exploration of what life could and should be. It juxtaposes a philosophical enquiry into the nature of the good life with an ethnography of people living in a small Irish town. Attending carefully to the everyday lives of these people, the ethnographic chapters examine topics ranging from freedom and inequality to the creation of community and the purpose of life. These chapters alternate with discussions of similar topics by a wide range of philosophers in the Western tradition, from Socrates and the Stoics through Kant, Hegel and Heidegger to Adorno, Rawls, MacIntyre and Nussbaum. As an ethnography, this is a book of praise that reveals just how much we can learn from a respectful acknowledgment of what ordinary modest people have achieved. By creating community as a deliberate and social project that provides the foundation for a more fulfilling life, where affluence has not led to an increase in individualism, the people in this town have found a way to live the good enough life. The book also shows how anthropology and philosophy can complement and enrich one another in an inquiry into what we might accomplish in our lives.
Things make us just as much as we make things. And yet, unlike the study of languages or places, there is no discipline devoted to the study of material things. This book shows why it is time to acknowledge and confront this neglect and how much we can learn from focusing our attention on stuff. The book opens with a critique of the concept of superficiality as applied to clothing. It presents the theories that are required to understand the way we are created by material as well as social relations. It takes us inside the very private worlds of our home possessions and our processes of accommodating. It considers issues of materiality in relation to the media, as well as the implications of such an approach in relation, for example, to poverty. Finally, the book considers objects which we use to define what it is to be alive and how we use objects to cope with death. Based on more than thirty years of research in the Caribbean, India, London and elsewhere, Stuff is nothing less than a manifesto for the study of material culture and a new way of looking at the objects that surround us and make up so much of our social and personal life.
Facebook is now used by nearly 500 million people throughout the world, many of whom spend several hours a day on this site. Once the preserve of youth, the largest increase in usage today is amongst the older sections of the population. Yet until now there has been no major study of the impact of these social networking sites upon the lives of their users. This book demonstrates that it can be profound. The tales in this book reveal how Facebook can become the means by which people find and cultivate relationships, but can also be instrumental in breaking up marriage. They reveal how Facebook can bring back the lives of people isolated in their homes by illness or age, by shyness or failure, but equally Facebook can devastate privacy and create scandal. We discover why some people believe that the truth of another person lies more in what you see online than face-to-face. We also see how Facebook has become a vehicle for business, the church, sex and memorialisation. After a century in which we have assumed social networking and community to be in decline, Facebook has suddenly hugely expanded our social relationships, challenging the central assumptions of social science. It demonstrates one of the main tenets of anthropology - that individuals have always been social networking sites. This book examines in detail how Facebook transforms the lives of particular individuals, but it also presents a general theory of Facebook as culture and considers the likely consequences of social networking in the future.
At the end of life, our comfort lies mainly in relationships. In this book, Daniel Miller, one of the world's leading anthropologists, examines the social worlds of people suffering from terminal or long-term illness. Threading together a series of personal stories, based on interviews conducted with patients of an English hospice, Miller draws out the implications of these narratives for our understanding of community, friendship, and kinship, but also loneliness and isolation. This is a book about people's lives, not their deaths: about the hospice patients rather than the hospice. It focuses on the comfort given by friends, carers and relatives through both face-to-face relations and, increasingly, online communication. Miller asks whether the loneliness and isolation he uncovers is the result of a decline of English patterns of socialising, or their continuation. This moving and deeply humane book combines warmth and sharp observation with anthropological insight and practical suggestions for the use of media by the hospice. It will be of interest not only to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, social policy and media and cultural studies, but also to healthcare professionals and, indeed, to anyone who would like to know more about the role of relationships in the final stage of our lives.
This is a book for those looking for different answers to some of today's most fundamental questions. What is a consumer society? Does being a consumer make us less authentic or more materialistic? How and why do we shop? How should we understand the economy? Is our seemingly insatiable desire for goods destroying the planet? Can we reconcile curbs on consumption with goals such as reducing poverty and social inequality? Miller responds to these questions by proposing feasible and, where possible, currently available alternatives, drawn mainly from his own original ethnographic research. Here you will find shopping analysed as a technology of love, clothing that sidesteps politics in tackling issues of immigration. There is an alternative theory of value that does not assume the economy is intelligent, scientific, moral or immoral. We see Coca-Cola as an example of localization, not globalization. We learn why the response to climate change will work only when we reverse our assumptions about the impact of consumption on citizens. Given the evidence that consumption is now central to the way we create and maintain our core values and relationships, the conclusions differ dramatically from conventional and accepted views as to its consequences for humanity and the planet.
As the oldest of institutions, marriage seems outdated in modern times, when each individual is encouraged to break with tradition in order to fulfill him– or herself. And so artists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo seem to be paving the way toward a brave, new kind of marriage, where spouses would be allowed—even encouraged—to fulfill different aspects of themselves in outside relationships. Shared creativity, they believed, would transcend their jealousies and compensate their sufferings: through art, they would rise above conventional marital fidelity, and prove a higher fidelity to art and to themselves. The Love Lives of the Artists tells the stories of Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas–Salomé, Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe, Jean–Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Diego and Frida, and Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin—five couples who approached their relationships with the same rebellious creativity as they practiced in their art. From their early artistic development and their first experiences in love, to their artistic marriages and their affairs—and then to their fights and reconciliations, addictions, nervous breakdowns and continued creativity—The Love Lives of the Artists describes the promise and the price of freedom and creativity in love.
The Third Edition of Business Law: Principles and Cases in the Legal Environment, continues to offer a readable, rigorous, and practical introduction to business law in a format that enhances learning and understanding. With a thorough explanation of the legal and regulatory issues affecting businesses, Davidson and Forsythe utilize outlines, exhibits, questions, and problems to engage students and enhance learning. It presents Classic and Contemporary Cases using the judges’ language. A new Business Application Case threads throughout the book, providing a hypothetical business environment in which students learn to apply the law. New to the Third Edition: Updated throughout, including cutting-edge state cases and federal Supreme Court cases. Carefully edited and streamlined presentation make the book even more teachable and accessible Topics of current interest, such as the college admissions scandal, used in examples Key new cases include: Southern California Gas Leak Cases, where the California Supreme Court speaks on recovery of lost profits (Ch. 6) Carpenter v. United States, where the U.S. Supreme Court speaks on whether a warrant is required for cell phone locator information (Ch. 7) Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior, where the California Supreme Court speaks on independent contractors/employees (Ch. 28) Dell, Inc. v. Magnetar Global Event Driven Master Fund Ltd. where the Delaware Supreme Court speaks on appraisal rights (Ch 33) Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council--new Supreme Court Case concerning the power of labor unions to collect fees from non-union members (Ch. 38) Professors and students will benefit from: Complete topical coverage in a clear and accessible presentation A continuous hypothetical business model that connects theory and practice A Classic Case and a Contemporary Case example in each chapter Rich pedagogy that includes questions, case problems, and writing assignments Visual aids and exhibits throughout the book that illustrate legal and business concepts A flexible organization that adapts to a wide range of teaching objectives and approaches Classroom-tested book, building on the original edition was published in 1984 with Davidson, Forsythe, and 2 other authors The digital Connected Coursebook format that gives Business Law students robust search and highlighting tools, interactive practice questions, outlining software, a news feed, and more, that are all integrated into an easy-to-use, streamlined learning experience.
Here is the revised and expanded edition of Daniel S. Burt's fascinating assessment of the 100 most influential novelists, playwrights, and poets of all times and cultures now with 25 additional entries and some reassessments as well as 25 new black-and-white photographs and illustrations. From Doris Lessing and Gabriel Garc a M rquez to Homer and Marcel Proust, the entries provide a compelling, accessible introduction to significant writers of world literature. All of the writers selected have helped to redefine literature, establishing a standard with which succeeding generations of writers and readers have had to contend. The ranking attempts to discern, from the broadest possible perspective, what makes a literary artist great and how that greatness can be measured and compared. Each profile distills the essence of the writer's career and character to help prompt consideration of literary merit and relationships by the reader.
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
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’.
What do we know about ordinary people in our towns and cities, about what really matters to them and how they organize their lives today? This book visits an ordinary street and looks into thirty households. It reveals the aspirations and frustrations, the tragedies and accomplishments that are played out behind the doors. It focuses on the things that matter to these people, which quite often turn out to be material things – their house, the dog, their music, the Christmas decorations. These are the means by which they express who they have become, and relationships to objects turn out to be central to their relationships with other people – children, lovers, brothers and friends. If this is a typical street in a modern city like London, then what kind of society is this? It’s not a community, nor a neighbourhood, nor is it a collection of isolated individuals. It isn’t dominated by the family. We assume that social life is corrupted by materialism, made superficial and individualistic by a surfeit of consumer goods, but this is misleading. If the street isn’t any of these things, then what is it? This brilliant and revealing portrayal of a street in modern London, written by one the most prominent anthropologists, shows how much is to be gained when we stop lamenting what we think we used to be and focus instead on what we are now becoming. It reveals the forms by which ordinary people make sense of their lives, and the ways in which objects become our companions in the daily struggle to make life meaningful.
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