In The Dialectics of Shopping, Daniel Miller presents (in revised and expanded form) his Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures delivered at the University of Rochester in 1998. In keeping with the Morgan legacy, Miller’s goals in this book are wide ranging and ambitious. In particular, he argues for drawing closer connections between the fine-grained and intimate goals of ethnography and the grander concerns of philosophy and higher-order theory—a combination, he argues, that is essential to the future of anthropology as a truly ethical discipline. Miller sees crucial similarities between the roles of the anthropologist and the philosopher: The work of both “is to keep culture under scrutiny and to judge it by the canons of those ethical standards that are believed to express reason as an instrument of human welfare” (p. 181). Miller anchors this project—and tries to illustrate how it may be achieved—in a multilayered analysis of the everyday practices and discourses of shopping, using his own field research with household residents and shopkeepers in an “average” (p. 6) North London street. Miller examines how people’s everyday shopping practices and discourses reveal (and work to reconcile) pervasive contradictions between, on the one hand, cultural ideals or normative discourses in modern urban society and, on the other hand, actual social relations and individual behaviors. As a result, Miller argues that contemporary shopping represents a form of cultural dialectics; that is, shopping is a significant (perhaps even the primary) means through which people in modern urban settings seek to reconcile contradictions between the normative and the experiential, the general and the particular. Thus, Miller sees in North Londoners’ daily shopping acts new avenues toward the theorization of modern complex societies.

The central chapters of the book develop this argument in relation to different levels of social analysis: kinship, community, ethical systems, and arenas of global capitalism and transnational business management, or what Miller calls “political economy.” A chapter is devoted to each of these levels, discussing what ordinary shopping trips and neighborhood conversations can reveal about the conflicting motivations and ambivalent negotiations that pervade and define modern social life. Chapter 2 explores contemporary urban kinship and the contradictions between cultural models of love and caring and the often divergent behaviors of family members. Chapter 3 addresses the conflicted position occupied by local shopkeepers as representations of idealized locality and community amidst a geographically mobile, class-stratified, and ethnically divided populace. Chapter 4 shows how broadly accepted ethical goals of social responsibility (specifically, discourses about environmental awareness and the conditions under which commodities are produced) clash with other imperatives, such as the economic constraints facing individual households and moral priorities of thrift. Chapter 5 moves into the realm of globalization, exploring how institutional dynamics of global capital and transnational policy making constrict the possibilities for consumer choice despite normative claims that capitalism is merely responsive to customer demand. Miller ends the book with an argument for linking the goals of anthropological ethnography with the philosophical insights of Hegelian dialectics, concluding with a call for anthropology to “get real”—a project that would entail studying the processes of contemporary societies (including shopping) with greater seriousness and thereby claiming for anthropology “a new role in reconciling through understanding the vast and fragmented nature of modernity” (p. 205). (A warning note here: Readers unfamiliar with Hegel’s 1821 treatise Philosophy of Right may find sections of this last chapter difficult to follow.)

A longtime ethnographer of modernity, in general, and of consumption, in particular, Miller affirms with this book a career dedicated to bringing the mundanities of shopping and consumption into the center of serious social analysis. This in itself is an important reminder (if no longer so unusual a claim) for contemporary ethnography everywhere. Unfortunately, the higher-order ambitions of Miller’s analysis are not entirely fulfilled. The strength of this short monograph rests on the ethnographic material presented in it; Miller’s data is thought provoking and at times quite illuminating. Yet one of the main disappointments of the book is the overall thinness of the ethnography (although we are told that more detailed discussions appear in other and forthcoming publications). Although ethnographic examples are central to the arguments of most chapters, this presentation of field data often seems abbreviated or is accompanied by only minimal contextualization. Other evidence, particularly examples drawn from British popular culture such as television soap operas, is not always adequately explained for a non-British audience. Consequently, the crucial links Miller seeks to establish between the ethnographic and philosophical components of his argument are more often suggested than clearly demonstrated.

To some degree these limitations are caused by the necessary brevity required for a lecture series and the aim (also quite appropriate to a lecture series) of offering innovative questions and provocative suggestions, rather than a complete and sustained development of these. In an effort to expand on some of the key issues raised, Miller has added appendices to several chapters in which he discusses “my rather more dense points of articulation with discussions within anthropology” (p. 5); however, these serve more often as complex tangents to the argument than as clarifying additions. Ultimately, the difficulties of this book tend to frustrate, rather than enable understanding. Adding to this frustration is the fact that the text is strewn with grammatical errors and poorly edited sentences. Unfortunately this makes the reader’s task much more of chore and detracts considerably from the overall impact of Miller’s vision for the future of anthropological inquiry as informed by the study of modernity, consumption, and philosophical dialectics.