From cultural studies, sociology, media studies, gender studies and elsewhere there have been a spate of books recently which have attempted to characterize the state of modernity.

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'.

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.