The particular focus on 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 contradictions of modernity.

Trinidad and modernity; modernity as a general property; Christmas, carnival and temporal consciousness; household as cultural idiom; mass consumption - origins and articulations; modernity as a specific condition.

Daniel Miller Professor of Anthropology,University College London. Recent books include 'A Theory of Shopping', 'The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach' (with Don Slater) and Ed. 'Car Cultures'.