ABSTRACT

Worlds Apart is concerned with one of the new futures of anthropology, namely the advances in technologies which r eate an imagination of new global and local forms. It also analyses studies of the consumption of these forms and attempts to go beyond the assumptions that consumption either localises or fails to effect global forms and images.
Several of the chapters are written by anthropologists who have specialised in material culture studies and who examine the new forms, especially television and mass commodities, as well as some new uses of older forms, such as the body. The book also considers the ways in which people are increasingly not the primary creators of these images but have become secondary consumers.

chapter |22 pages

Introduction

Anthropology, modernity and consumption 1

chapter |26 pages

Creating a culture of disillusionment

Consumption in Moscow, a chronicle of changing times

chapter |22 pages

Bureaucratic erasure

Identity, resistance and violence – Aborigines and a discourse of autonomy in a North Queensland town

chapter |19 pages

Around a plantation

The ethnography of business in Cameroon

chapter |24 pages

Learning to be local in Belize

Global systems of common difference

chapter |21 pages

On soap opera

What kind of anthropological object is it?

chapter |21 pages

The objects of soap opera

Egyptian television and the cultural politics of modernity

chapter |23 pages

Traversing the global and the local

Fújì music and praise poetry in the production of contemporary Yorùbá popular culture