How should anthropology, and especially material culture studies, respond to phenomena that seem intended in their own right to create bridges between the most personal and the most global? We are not seeking to rehearse all the prior anthropological debates on global issues, which have ranged from much earlier concerns within economic anthropology such as formalism against substantivism, to more contemporary debates about globalisation per. Also, a major part of the explanation of its growth is that it connects intimacy and personalisation to ubiquity in a manner that is perhaps unique, even within the genre of clothing. Although there are many other global forms ranging from foods such as Coca-Cola, through to car brands, we will argue that denim is special, being as much a refusal, as an acceptance, of capitalist pressures such as fashion. This suggests that soon, at any given moment, more than half the world will be wearing this single textile. In preparing this paper we counted the proportion of persons wearing denim blue jeans out of the first hundred to pass by, on random streets in sites ranging from Istanbul, London, Rio, Manila, Seoul and San Francisco. This should complement more established approaches such as the ethnography of the local appropriation of global forms, or multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995).īut why of all things denim - blue jeans? Denim is clearly a global presence, it not only exists in every country in the world, but in many of these it has become the single most common form of everyday attire. In the conclusion we will call for an anthropology based, not on a single project or author, but a larger communal movement of academics that emulates the global nature of the object of enquiry. The term manifesto is also justified by the claim that global phenomenon require a new form of global anthropology. It is pitched against the established philosophical sense of ontology that assumes being always resides in depth, and that things of the surface, such as clothes, are intrinsically superficial, a concept of being that is by no means shared by all peoples (Miller 1995). Our manifesto is a call to make manifest the profound nature of that response. The term manifesto is justified by the evidence presented in this paper that denim is such a grounded analogue to philosophy one that is employed by populations to resolve major contradictions of living within the modern world and associated forms of anxiety. So, an anthropological manifesto will be one that makes manifest what otherwise is implicit in the practice of populations. By contrast, we propose a particularly anthropological field for the manifesto, based on anthropology's belief that philosophical insight can be grounded in the experiences of ordinary people as observed through ethnography. The word manifesto is generally acceptable with respect to either some critical political or social agenda, or alternatively a philosophical or art movement. To claim that denim is an appropriate subject for a manifesto may at first appear frivolous, almost a parody. Keywords: Denim, jeans, clothing, global, anxiety, anthropology Ultimately this can provide the basis for an anthropological engagement with global modernity. As a manifesto, this paper argues for a global academic response that engages with denim from the global commodity chain through to the specificity of local accounts of denim wearing. These suggest the need to understand the relationship between three observations: its global presence, the phenomenon of distressing and its relationship to anxiety in the selection of clothes. Ethnographies of blue jeans in Brazil and England are provided as examples. While there are historical narratives about the origins, history and spread of denim, these leave open the issue of how we make compatible the ethnographic study of specific regional appropriations of denim and its global presence in a manner that is distinctly anthropological. Using the phrase 'blindingly obvious' it considers the problems posed by objects that have become ubiquitous.

This paper considers the challenge to anthropology represented by a topic such as global denim.

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