Daniel Miller is Reader in Anthropology at University College London.

Chapter 1 Introduction, D. Miller; Chapter 2 Inconsistent temporalities in a nation-space, Michael Rowlands; Chapter 3 Creating a culture of disillusionment, Caroline Humphrey; Chapter 4 Bureaucratic erasure, Bruce Kapferer; Chapter 5 Around a plantation, Jean-Pierre Warnier; Chapter 6 Learning to be local in Belize, Richard Wilk; Chapter 7 Global complexity and the simplicity of everyday life, Kajsa Ekholm-Friedman, Jonathan Friedman; Chapter 8 On soap opera, Veena Das; Chapter 9 The objects of soap opera, Lila Abu-Lughod; Chapter 10 Aboriginal art in a global context, Howard Morphy; Chapter 11 Traversing the global and the local, Karin Barber, Christopher Waterman;

Worlds Apart is concerned with one of the new futures of anthropology, namely the advances in technologies which r eate an imagination of new global and local forms. It also analyses studies of the consumption of these forms and attempts to go beyond the assumptions that consumption either localises or fails to effect global forms and images.
Several of the chapters are written by anthropologists who have specialised in material culture studies and who examine the new forms, especially television and mass commodities, as well as some new uses of older forms, such as the body. The book also considers the ways in which people are increasingly not the primary creators of these images but have become secondary consumers.