This volume, Daniel Miller notes in his introduction, represents the work of a particular cohort of his PhD students and associated visitors to the Anthropology Department at University College London. The authors, either supervised directly by Miller or as part of a discussion group run by him, have all contributed to this compilation under the notion of an anthropology of the individual. This essentially argues that such a viewpoint can stand apart from other disciplines concerned with individuals, such as psychology, and provide useful and unusual information about the creation of sociality by considering the issues surrounding the close-grained study of one person. It is indeed this level of private and personal detail about each participant across a variety of subject areas and broader theoretical concerns that makes this book engaging and interesting reading. While some of the authors have a firmer grip on the issues of ‘individual cosmologies’ and the production of an individual ‘aesthetic’, after the notion of habitus, that Miller argues is the importance of this project for material culture studies, the portraits all contain a wealth of knowledge and rich data that will make this book a useful secondary source for those working on the areas it touches on, both geographical and theoretical.

The work is overwhelmingly urban in character, yet varies from developed to developing economies such as with Heather Horst's work with a middle-class teenager in suburban America or Miller and Gabrielle Hosein's work in Trinidad. Closer to home Julie Botticello paints a fascinating portrait of the use of clothing as a social mediator amongst Yoruba women in London, while Ivana Bajić-Hajduković looks at the absence of material possessions for a displaced Serbian migrant who avoids mementoes or connections to his past until the death of his sister forces him to return home to his mother after a fifteen year absence.

The articles also deal with consumption and production more directly, as is characteristic of Miller's approach, through Magdalena Crăciun's consideration of the life of risk of a ‘fake brands’ merchant in an Istanbul bazaar and Bodil Birkebœk Oleson's portrait of a cloth-making community in Mali. In these chapters, some of the innovative methodologies in the creation of these ethnographic portraits emerge. Crăciun, particularly, practises her anthropology ‘from the corner of her eye’, while Oleson wrestles with Western notions of design ownership, copying and production in a society with a different notion of originality. Heather Horst's work, like her research, moves between the real and digital worlds and this too is reflected in her following of her participant's online and real home life in equal detail, particularly emphasizing the connections of the virtual to the real rather than considering the two as distinct spatialities.

This volume as a whole derives its strength from Miller's leadership, yet also somewhat fails to critique the applicability of the idea of an individual ‘aesthetic’ as being a window into the disjunctures of global consumer society, particularly in the case of certain chapters that feel slightly shoehorned into this idea. Furthermore, the abundance of typographical errors may lead some to question the quality of the publication. Yet, amongst these moving and deeply researched portraits there are some original and poignant young voices who will, no doubt, come to prominence in this field in the near future.