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In the final chapter, entitled ‘Miss Nige-
ria, and the emergent forms of life’, the authors
focus on the migrant youth. They foreground
the emergent and dynamic nature of second-
generation migrants’identities that are con-
stantly being redefined by the actors them-
selves. The issues of belonging to and
departing from migrant community as well as
Irish society writ large are discussed against
the backdrop of young people’s own views
on integration. For these people integration is
a lived experience and an embodied practice.
Several critical remarks are due at the end
of this review. In some instances, the use of
philosophical concepts mystifies rather than ex-
plicates the discussed matters, like in the follow-
ing fragment: ‘drivers’voices spoke from
lifeworlds in which Being-in-the-world informs
the conduct proper to human beings’(p. 69).
The decision to focus on migrants with high
social and cultural capital is not explicitly
addressed, although it has significant methodolog-
ical consequences; the community leaders’per-
spective is prevalent in the book. Moreover, the
book creates a romanticised image of migrant
community, in which negative features are muted
or played down. This concerns, for instance, vio-
lence against women: while references to it appear
in some quotations from participants’life histories
(pp. 9, 94), the phenomenon as such is not
discussed. Moreover the general claim of having
captured migrants’everyday life is arguable, since
the monograph concentrates mostly on African
migrants’institutionalised routines (work, school)
as well as civic activities, rather than more un-
structured and diverse forms of the everyday.
Despite these shortcomings, the authors achieve
successfully their main goal with this volume,
which is to make migrants’voices heard in the
current debate on integration.
ANNA HOROLETS
University of Gdan´sk (Poland)
Miller, Daniel and Sophie Woodward. 2012.
Blue jeans. The art of the ordinary.Berkeley:
University of California Press. 184 pp. Pb.:
$60. ISBN 978-052027219.
Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward’s
ethnography of blue jeans wearing in a group
of three residential streets in North London
makes a valuable contribution to contempo-
rary material cultural studies. Drawing on in-
terviews and observations from fieldwork
carried out in these streets mainly over the
summers of 2007 and 2008, Miller and
Woodward generate an original theory of the
ordinary with far-reaching implications.
Starting from the question ‘Why do so many
people wear jeans so much of the time?’, the
argument of the book moves in an elegant tra-
jectory from what the authors call ‘the gentle
slopes of ethnographic reporting’to the
lofty heights of general social theory.
Moving, as it were, from Levi’s (that most
iconic brand of denim jeans) to Lévi-Strauss
(that most philosophical of anthropologists),
Blue jeans is an engaging and highly
readable account that explores a largely taken-
for-granted aspect of global material culture to
launch a comprehensive re-examination of
some of the foundational building blocks of
modern social theory.
The first three chapters engage specifi-
cally with the ethnography of jeans wearing
in London. Under the rubrics of ‘Life’,‘Rela-
tionships’and ‘Fashion’, the authors describe
(1) how respondents talked about the changing
relationships they had to their jeans during
different stages of their lives, (2) the role denim
played among participants in mediating and
constraining social relationships between
couples, friends and generations and (3) how
informants used jeans to organise different
aspects of their lives, including the elaboration
of various personal systems relating to what
kinds of jeans were and were not considered
appropriate in particular social settings.
From this ethnography, Miller and
Woodward go on to develop a number of
interrelated responses to their original question,
why denim? Unpacking concepts of comfort
and the ordinary, they proceed to tease apart
the significance of blue jeans vis-à-vis migration,
globalisation and the emergence of what they
call ‘post-identity’aspirations.
252 REVIEWS
©2014 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Because so many participants mentioned
comfort or being comfortable as their prime
reason for wearing jeans, Chapter 4 excavates
the semantics and uses of the word –from
the physical attributes of denim as a soft, flex-
ible and low-maintenance fabric, to the social
aspects of jeans as being appropriate in a range
of settings, to the adaptability of jeans for
developing a personal style or ‘comfort-zone’.
The idea of a desire for comfort as an an-
imating force in modern life extends to the
counterintuitive finding that forms the basis
for discussion in Chapter 5. Namely, that jeans
were used not as a marker of being modern,
British, fashionable or anything else, but as a
means to become ordinary. Here the authors
make a fascinating argument for blue jeans as
a‘post-semiotic’garment. According to this
view, jeans have become so ubiquitous that
wearing them no longer signifies anything in
particular: they are just jeans, just ordinary.
Having asserted that wearing jeans is part
of a broader modern cultivation of the art of
being ordinary, the next chapters are devoted
to showing why this matters. Chapter 6 does
so in relation to the immigrant populations
represented in the North London streets
where the ethnography was carried out. While
this group shared the general aspiration toward
the ordinary found among respondents whose
ancestry was British, for those who were not
British in origin, this striving toward a post-
identity ordinariness was not something that
could be taken for granted. Rather, it was some-
thing they had to struggle to achieve, and wearing
blue jeans was a potent strategy in this regard.
The last part of the book climbs further
above the ethnographic material to ask how the-
ory in anthropology and sociology is challenged
by the findings from this study. The philosoph-
ical claims here concerning the normative in
anthropology (Chapter 7) and the routine in
sociology (Chapter 8) are stimulating in the best
sense of the word. They call on us to think the
contemporary in bold new ways.
Blue jeans should clearly be required
reading for those working in the disciplines
of clothing and fashion studies, but there is
also much to recommend for anyone who is
interested in carrying out, or simply reading,
contemporary ethnography. Indeed, what
Miller and Woodward achieve with this small
book is no small feat. They have made an
important but challenging topic (material
cultural studies) accessible to a very broad
readership. Though some might find them-
selves occasionally wanting more from the
discussion, the mode of presentation employed
here could be especially welcome, for instance,
as part of the required reading in a discussion
seminar on contemporary ethnography.
MATTHEW ROSEN
The New School for Social Research (USA)
Neofotistos, Vasiliki P. 2012. The risk of war:
everyday sociality in the Republic of Macedonia.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press. 205 pp. Hb.: $55.00. ISBN: 978-0-
8122-4399-4.
Neofotistos’work stands out in the scholar-
ship on Macedonia since independence by
presenting the post-socialist world from an
Albanian point of view. After Macedonia
survived the Yugoslav drama mostly unscathed,
a civil war around political and civil rights be-
tween Albanians and Macedonians threatened
peace in 2001. The question that Neofotistos
raises is, why was Macedonia able to avoid
becoming involved in the Yugoslav drama only
to have an ethnic-national conflict ten years
later? Neofotistos gives a succinct and compre-
hensible account of the events and the effects it
had on Macedonian/Albanian interactions in
Skopje during that time. In the first three chap-
ters Neofotistos manages a well-balanced
insight on what led to the conflict in Macedonia.
On 16 February 2001 in the village of
Tanuševic, Macedonian journalists were kid-
napped and told that Tanuševic had been liber-
ated and did not belong under Macedonian
jurisdiction. Further violent skirmishes took
place throughout 2001 between Albanian
fighters and the Macedonian army until a peace
was brokered and the Albanian fighters (NLA/
KLA) withdrew back to Kosovo. Neofotistos
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©2014 European Association of Social Anthropologists.