Abstract | Keywords | Export | Availability | Bookmark

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

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.

Clothing and dress. --- Denim - Social aspects. --- Denim -- Social aspects. --- Jeans (Clothing) - Social aspects. --- Jeans (Clothing) -- Social aspects. --- Jeans (Clothing) --Social aspects. --- Material culture. --- Jeans (Clothing) --- Denim --- Clothing and dress --- Material culture --- Social aspects --- anthropology. --- class studies. --- clothes. --- clothing styles. --- clothing. --- community. --- cultural differences. --- diverse population. --- diversity. --- ethnography. --- fieldwork. --- gender studies. --- global dislocation. --- global displacement. --- global migration. --- globalization. --- great britain. --- immigrants. --- immigration. --- individual lives. --- international relations. --- jeans. --- normative. --- north london. --- philosophy. --- social differences. --- social lives. --- society. --- sociology. --- wealth studies.