000 01811cam a2200217 4500500
005 20250121070421.0
041 _afre
042 _adc
100 1 0 _aMiller, Daniel
_eauthor
245 0 0 _aA Street and Its Shops in North London: Imagination and Customs
260 _c2005.
500 _a86
520 _aThe author studies the way we think about a street and its shops in cosmopolitan London. He prefers the “ordinary” to the “particular” and chooses as field study the most ordinary street possible with what he calls “radical empiricism” as paradigm. Contrary to expectation, only two small shops, the hairdresser’s and the hardware shop, are successful in creating a sense of the street, i.e., in turning it into a place of intense sociability. The other shops are on the decline. The working class does not identify themselves with places that they find too expensive. They prefer to shop in more geographically and socially remote supermarkets. The middle class does not regularly shop in small shops. They however defend them as corner shops for poorer classes. They prefer to go to the more select shops of posh shopping malls. There, they find a Victorian décor inspiring nostalgia on which they build their imagination. The author analyzes this imagination as a myth—in the anthropological sense—i.e., as a story able to resolve ideological contradictions. This story is also an urban aesthetics that must be studied to understand the “meaning of the town.”
690 _aimagination
690 _aLondon
690 _aempirism
690 _astreet
690 _ashops
786 0 _nEthnologie française | 35 | 1 | 2005-03-01 | p. 17-26 | 0046-2616
856 4 1 _uhttps://shs.cairn.info/journal-ethnologie-francaise-2005-1-page-17?lang=en&redirect-ssocas=7080
999 _c481005
_d481005