On any given day nearly half the world's population is wearing blue jeans. This is entirely extraordinary. Yet there has never been a serious attempt to understand the causes, nature and consequences of denim as "the" global garment of our world. This book takes up that challenge with gusto. It gives clear, if surprising, explanations for why this is the case; challenging the accepted history of jeans and showing why the reasons cannot be commercial. While discussing the consequences of denim at the global level, the book consists of some exemplary studies by anthropologists of what blue...

An examination of Internet culture and consumption. The Internet is increasingly shaping, and being shaped by, users' lives. From cybercafes to businesses, from middle class houses to squatters settlements, the authors have gathered material on subjects as varied as personal relations, commerce, sex and religion. Websites are also analyzed as new cultural formations acting as aesthetic traps. At every point, email chat and surfing are found to be exploited in ways that bring out both unforeseen attributes of the Internet and the contradictions of modern life. The material, taken from...

Although so much of the life we care about takes place at home, this private space often remains behind closed doors and is notoriously difficult for researchers to infiltrate. We may think it is just up to us to decorate, transform and construct our homes, but in this book we discover a new form of 'estate agency', the active participation of the home and its material culture in the construction of our lives. What do the possessions people choose to take with them when moving say about who they are, and should we emphasize the mobility of a move or the stability of what movers take with...