This paper examines ways of applying anthropology to the study of households in urban sites such as London. Based on an eighteen month study of one hundred informants on one street in South London, it argues that these people bear little relation to the duality of society and the individual that dominates social sciences such as anthropology. The problem is not only to find a methodological equivalent to ethnography, but a conceptual equivalent to the study of society. Starting from the order that is evident in the detailed configuration of material culture in the home the paper argues that anthropology needs something analogous to, but very different from, psychological `attachment theory' to understand the way orders of relationships to persons and things develop and the differential influence of factors such as parents, peers and the normative order of practice as theorised by Bourdieu. When a `typical' London household might be a Kabyle married to a Norwegian, who don't know their neighbours, the attempt to reduce cultural order to sociological parameters such as gender, class and ethnicity looks fraught and reductive. Actually we need the same commitment to cosmology, holism and habitus that have traditionally been applied to societies. In this paper I illustrate how these can be reconstructed from the study of household material culture. So rather than regarding anthropology as redundant, the paper argues that anthropological approaches to the study of society can be as fully applied to researching this urban micro-diversity as they have been to the global diversity of humanity.
Daniel Miller is Professor of Material Culture at the Department of Anthropology, University College London. His most recent books are The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (with H. Horst, 2006 Berg), Clothing as Material Culture (With S. Küchler, Ed. 2005. Berg), and Materiality (Ed, 2005 Duke University Press).