ABSTRACT
Anthropology should have changed the world, yet the subject is almost invisible in the public sphere outside the academy. This is puzzling, since a wide range of urgent issues of great social importance are being raised by anthropologists in original and authoritative ways. In general, the technique of defamiliarization—rendering the familiar exotic—seems to have been more common in mid-twentieth-century anthropology than at present. One of the messages from anthropology is that nothing is quite what it seems. As Daniel Miller and others have demonstrated, fundamental aspects of human life can be illuminated through studies of modern consumption informed by anthropological perspectives. There has in fact been a substantial demand for similar self-exotizing exercises in Scandinavia, where tourist boards, the civil service and even private enterprises solicit the services of anthropologists who are charged with the task of telling them ‘what they are really like’.
