Daniel Miller (anthropologist)

Daniel Miller (born in 1954) is an anthropologist who is closely associated with studies of human relationships to things, the consequences of consumption and digital anthropology. His theoretical work was first developed in Material Culture and Mass Consumption and is summarised more recently in his book Stuff. This is concerned to transcend the usual dualism between subject and object and to study how social relations are created through consumption as an activity. Miller is also the founder of the digital anthropology programme at University College London (UCL), and the director the Why We Post and ASSA projects. He has pioneered the study of digital anthropology and especially ethnographic research on the use and consequences of social media and smartphones as part of the everyday life of ordinary people around the world. He's a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). Miller was educated at Highgate School and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read archaeology and anthropology. He has spent his entire professional life at the Department of Anthropology at the University College London, which has become a research centre for the study of material culture and where, more recently, he established the world's first programme dedicated to the study of digital anthropology. A prolific author, Miller criticises the concept of materialism which presumes human relationships to things are at the expense of human relationship to other persons. He argues that most people are either enabled to form close relationships to both persons and objects or have difficulties with both. With Miller's students he has applied these ideas to many genres of material culture such as clothing, homes, media and the car, through research based on the methods of traditional anthropological ethnography in regions including the Caribbean, India and London. In the study of clothing, his work ranges from a book on the Sari in India to more recent research explaining the popularity of blue jeans and the way they exemplify the struggle to become ordinary.