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\"At the end of life, our comfort lies mainly in relationships. In this book, Daniel Miller, one of the world's leading anthropologists, examines the social worlds of people suffering from terminal or long-term illness. Threading together a series of personal stories, based on interviews conducted with patients of an English hospice, Miller draws out the implications of these narratives for our understanding of community, friendship, and kinship, but also loneliness and isolation. This is a book about people's lives, not their deaths: about the hospice patients rather than the hospice. It focuses on the comfort given by friends, carers and relatives through both face-to-face relations and, increasingly, online communication. Miller asks whether the loneliness and isolation he uncovers is the result of a decline of English patterns of socialising, or their continuation. This moving and deeply humane book combines warmth and sharp observation with anthropological insight and practical suggestions for the use of media by the hospice. It will be of interest not only to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, social policy and media and cultural studies, but also to healthcare professionals and, indeed, to anyone who would like to know more about the role of relationships in the final stage of our lives\"-- Provided by publisher.

This fresh and accessible ethnography offers a new vision of how society might cohere, in the face of on-going global displacement, dislocation, and migration. Drawing from intensive fieldwork in a highly diverse North London neighborhood, Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward focus on an everyday item—blue jeans—to learn what one simple article of clothing can tell us about our individual and social lives and challenging, by extension, the foundational anthropological presumption of \"the normative.\" Miller and Woodward argue that blue jeans do not always represent social and cultural difference, from gender and wealth, to style and circumstance. Instead they find that jeans allow individuals to inhabit what the authors term \"the ordinary.\" Miller and Woodward demonstrate that the emphasis on becoming ordinary is important for immigrants and the population of North London more generally, and they call into question foundational principles behind anthropology, sociology and philosophy.

How do parents and children care for each other when they are separated because of migration? The way in which transnational families maintain long-distance relationships has been revolutionised by the emergence of new media such as email, instant messaging, social networking sites, webcam and texting. A migrant mother can now call and text her left-behind children several times a day, peruse social networking sites and leave the webcam for 12 hours achieving a sense of co-presence. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study of prolonged separation between migrant mothers and their children who remain in the Philippines, this book develops groundbreaking theory for understanding both new media and the nature of mediated relationships. It brings together the perspectives of both the mothers and children and shows how the very nature of family relationships is changing. New media, understood as an emerging environment of polymedia, have become integral to the way family relationships are enacted and experienced. The theory of polymedia extends beyond the poignant case study and is developed as a major contribution for understanding the interconnections between digital media and interpersonal relationships. \"[A] compelling read about the ‘connected transnational family’ … The most compelling aspect of this book, this reader would argue, is its simultaneous engagement with a broad range of entangled issues. It convincingly puts mothers/children, migration/communication, mediation/relationship, past/present/future as well as theory/research practice into close encounter throughout.\" - Nicole Shephard, LSE Review of Books \"Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller seem to have formed a dream team when they embarked on their mutual research project on transnational families and the role of ICTs ... In my view, the book succeeds in what many authors fruitlessly pursue: deriving convincing theory from an abundance of vast qualitative data. It is a highly engaging book that is rich in detail without drowning the reader in it. Its empirical and theoretical innovations make it a highly recommended book for any scholar working on media and migration, long-distance communication and the increasingly complex media environments that enfold us.\" - Kevin Smets, Communications \"An exemplary and groundbreaking study, with contributions to theory and our understanding of polymedia in everyday life, this stands out as an extraordinary read on the technology of relationships.\" - Zizi Papacharissi, University of Illinois-Chicago, USA \"This fascinating, richly detailed book investigates the role that fluency across multiple digital platforms plays in enabling mothering and caring to be sustained at a distance. A genuine breakthrough.\" - Nick Couldry , Goldmiths, University of London, UK \"With deft weaving of interview material and theorization...Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller have produced an important and useful theoretical intervention that advances our understanding of the social life of transnational communities.\" - Radha S. Hegde, Media, Culture, & Society Mirca Madianou is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, UK. She is the author of Mediating the Nation and several articles on the social consequences of the media. Daniel Miller is Professor of Material Culture at the Department of Anthropology, University College London, UK. His most recent books include Tales from Facebook and Digital Anthropology (edited with Heather Horst). 1. Introduction 2. Philippines at the Forefront of Globalisation 3. The Hidden Motivations of Migration 4. Crafting Love: Letters and Cassettes 5. The Cultural Contradictions of Transnational Motherhood: The Mothers’ Perspective 6. The Children’s Perspective 7. Technologies of Relationships 8. Polymedia 9. A Theory of Mediated Relationships 10. Appendix: A Note on Method

While free trade agreements and other intermediary trade agreements allow emerging nations increased access to markets, many low- and middle-income countries lack the capacity required to meet global standards. Deficiencies in quality of product, speed of transport, or quality of regulation can prevent countries from reaping the benefits of trade agreements, particularly with the United States. This report of the CSIS Congressional Task Force on Trade Capacity Building—cochaired by Representatives Charles Boustany (R-LA) and Jared Polis (D-CO)—focuses on how projects to build trade capacity can be planned and coordinated to maximize the benefits of new trade agreements, both for the United States and its partners.

From cultural studies, sociology, media studies gender studies and elsewhere there bas been a spate of books recently which bave attempted to characterize the state of modernity. Many of these have also argued that what is required is ethnographic work to determine how far these supposed trends actually apply to a given population. This book explicitly accepts this challenge. It starts by summarizing some debates on modernity and then argues that the Carribean island of Trinidad is particularly apt for such a study, given the origins of its population in slavery and indentured labour, both forms of extreme social rupture, and the subsequent development of creolisation, the transnational tamily and economic dependency. The particular focus of this book is on mass consumption and the way goods and imported images such as the soap opera have been used to express and develop a number of key contradixtions of modernity. Trinidad also provides considerable material for qualifying and disputing many of the generalisations made in the literature of modernity and postmodernism, for example, the use of concepts such as superficiality, individualism and style.