Miller's theory of shopping charts new territory as he turns the anthropologist's lens on significant elements of our own society. Miller received his doctorate in archeology and anthropology from the University of Cambridge. More daringly still, his research is an attempt to develop an ethnographic perspective on capitalism. The focus of his work is the production, circulation and consumption of modern commodities within the context of transnational business and the emergence of a global economy. His recent research has focused on the sweet drink industry in Trinidad and grocery shoppers in North London.
Interests lie in the cultural processes involved in producing and changing such social identities.
Yoram Bilu is an Israeli psychologist and anthropologist who has explored in deeply imaginative ways how spiritual belief and cultural experiences shape individuals and how people's beliefs in turn shape their culture. He has drawn upon his interests in psychology and anthropology to examine people's political and spiritual ideas and aspirations. He won the Martin De La Cruz Award for meritorious service in the field of traditional medicine from the Seventh International Congress of Traditional and Folk Medicine in 1993, and won the L. Bryce Boyer Award for the best paper in psychoanalytic anthropology from the American Anthropological Association in 1986. Among other subjects, Bilu has studied the dreams of Israeli and Arab children, discovering that children have so internalized the political conflicts that they are played out night after night in dreams of violent encounters. Dreams about cooperation and friendliness, he discovered, were rare.