A Theory of Shopping [Paperback]

Daniel Miller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2, 1998

The butt of endless jokes and the focus of considerable anguish, shopping offers significant insights into contemporary social relations and their nuances. This book is about shopping for ordinary things. It is also about love and devotion manifest within families and about the nature of sacrificial ritual. A significant contributor to material culture studies, Daniel Miller is an acute observer and an exceptional storyteller. He approaches shopping not as an end in itself but as a means to discover what people's practices, closely observed, reveal about their relationships.

The ethnographic sections of the book are based on a year's study of shopping on a street in North London. This provides the basis for a sensitive description of how shoppers develop and imagine the social relationships most important to them through the medium of selecting goods. Among the characteristics of these shopping expeditions are the concept of "the treat," and the centrality of thrift. Miller juxtaposes on his account of shopping various theories that anthropologists have brought to bear on the ritual of sacrifice, including that of the French philosopher George Bataille. He then integrates these elements to postulate his theory of shopping as sacrifice in terms as original and as utterly engaging as the stories he tells of individual shoppers.

Product Details

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: Cornell University Press (April 2, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801485517
• ISBN-13: 978-0801485510
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #603,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An extremely accessible academic text, August 27, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Theory of Shopping (Paperback)

I couldn't believe it when I laughed out loud whilst reading this text. A strong theoretical base supports this amusing ethnography of shopping - the sort that is done week in, week out, rather than 'leisure' shopping. I highly recommend reading it from cover to cover, rather than trying to skim it as one might other academic texts. It will be of use to anyone studying material culture, social anthropology, and sociology, in that it indicates clearly not only its specific content, but also its methodology. Reading this text makes Miller's classic "Material Culture and Mass Consumption" a lot more accessible to those of us who are just starting to research this area.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A theory, February 21, 2002

By 

Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Theory of Shopping (Paperback)

This book contains a personal theory of shopping based on an ethnographic study of household provisioning in a North London neighborhood in the mid-1990s. Miller begins by describing some of the households and some of the results from his interviews on shopping. In the second chapter, he explores the literature on sacrifice, and in the third final chapter, he makes an argument that shopping and sacrifice, if not the same thing, can at least be considered comparable. His reasoning, if I understand it, is that both acts involving giving something of oneself or one's resources for the greater good.

I remain unconvinced, however. I've never given much thought to sacrifice before, but it seems to me that sacrifice involves giving something back to the deities as partial payment for a unearned favor. On the other hand, shopping seems more to be choosing to trade earned resources. For me, the comparison between shopping and sacrifice just doesn't go through, and since two thirds of the book is spent arguing for the comparison, I was a little disappointed.

Some minor quibbles: the book is definitely written from a British point of view, and some terms or expressions used in the book to describe living situations or shops will be unfamiliar to North American readers. Also, Miller puts great emphasis on the fact that most of his shoppers tend to be women, and that shopping in the environment where he did his work is an activity associated with the female gender. He relates this back to his sacrifice theory and also to feminist studies of housewives sacrificing themselves for their families. He gives very brief consideration to the fact that a predominance of female shoppers may be culturally-based, but doesn't seem to consider it seriously. Nevertheless, there are many cultures, particularly in Muslim areas and parts of Asia, where it would be unseemly for a woman to appear in the marketplace, and where men do all of the shopping, even for their families' clothing. Much of Miller's argumentation would not hold in such an environment. Thus, even if he does have something with his sacrifice/shopping comparison, it is only an artifact of the culture where he did his study, and should not be generalized beyond the shoppers of this North London neighborhood.

4 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars WOOFY SOCIOLOGIST RAMBLINGS, February 11, 2000

By 

Dr. David Arelette (Yarrambat, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Theory of Shopping (Paperback)

This book is about ten good pages and the remainder is a stream of rambling woofy ideas with very little to hold it together.

Beyond the first chapter, the content varies from the social impact of social sacrifice to how the Greek philopshers would rate modern thoughts on mass consumption.

It has very little to do with WHY people would go to a supermarket and HOW they act while they are there - nothing on causality, just lots of words joined together.

Be careful about buying this book. It's a waste of space as far as a text book to assist anyone in business - it's a first year university book for liberal arts time wasters.