Daniel Miller (anthropologist)


Daniel Miller is an anthropologist who is closely associated with studies of human relationships to things and the consequences of consumption. 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, 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.

Education

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.

Anthropological position

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. His initial work on the consequences of the internet for Trinidad was followed by studies of the impact of mobile phones on poverty in Jamaica and more recently the way Facebook has changed the nature of social relationships.
Miller's work on material culture also includes ethnographic research on how people develop relationships of love and care through the acquisition of objects in shopping and how they deal with issues of separation and loss including death through their retention and divestment of objects. He argues that since we cannot control death as an event, we use our ability to control the gradual separation from the objects associated with the deceased as a way of dealing with loss. Complementary to this work on separation from things are three books about shopping, the most influential of which, A Theory of Shopping, looks at how the study of everyday purchases can be a route to understanding how love operates within the family. He has also carried out several projects on female domestic labour and being a mother, including studies of au pairs, and Filipina women in London and their relationship to their left behind children in the Philippines. Most of these projects are collaborations.
Since the early 2000s, Miller has been researching the effects of new social media on society. Several of his most recent books explore topics such as cell phones, Facebook and transnational families. Together with presenting a theoretical framework for studying social networking sites, his latest work has proposed a new concept of 'polymedia' as an analytical tool to examine the consequences of a situation where individuals configure and are held responsible for their choice of media, while access and cost recede as factors.
In 2009, Miller created a new masters programme in Digital anthropology at the Anthropology Department of University College London. Before establishing a new master's programme in digital anthropology, Miller worked with Haidy Geismar who is also an anthropologist, on the examination of the project. In 2012 Miller launched a five-year project called Social Networking and Social Sciences Research Project, to examine the global impact of new social media. The study was based on ethnographic data collected through the course of 15 months in China, India, Turkey, Italy, United Kingdom, Trinidad, Chile and Brazil. The project was funded by the European Research Council. The results of this project were released in February 2016 under the title "Why We Post". The project published with UCL Press which, by August 2018, have been downloaded more than 500,000 times. The Why We Post monographs are currently also being published in the languages of their respective fieldsites. In addition, a is available on FutureLearn. The course is also available in Chinese, Portuguese, Hindi, Tamil, Italian, Turkish, and Spanish on . In addition a containing key discoveries, stories and over 100 films is available in the same 8 languages.
While studying the Trinidadian and Tobago culture, Miller and Slater established a theory that place did not matter in regards to online spaces. Although it isn't a physical interactive space, the case study still observed a rich, immersive culture. Throughout Miller's research he realized that being Trini online was an important interaction of people and the Internet. The participants in the research referred to themselves as Trinis. They interviewed about 25 Trinidadian UK residents who were observers for the study and gathered a sense through emailed surveys and ICQ chats, of what it was like for diasporic Trinis in the UK area. About 10 of the informants were international students who studied in the United Kingdom for three years and the rest resided in the UK. Miller studied diasporic Trinis from the United Kingdom by using ethnographic approaches that included observation and participation in chatrooms like de Trini Lime and de Rumshop Lime.  These chatrooms were filled with discussions related to sex, music, gossiping or for Trinidadians: 'ole talk'. These terms and specifically named chatrooms portrayed the strength in Trinidadian nationalism through online spaces. The concluding results indicated that geographical place did matter online, especially in regards to the Trini community.
In 2017 Miller launched a second five-year project which consists of ten simultaneous ethnographies in Brazil, Cameroon, Chile, China, Japan, East Jerusalem, Ireland, Italy and Uganda. This project investigates the impact of smartphones on the way people in mid-life deal with issues of health and wellbeing, and explores the potential of anthropology for making mobile health applications more sensitive to social and cultural contexts.

Major works