Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-nuclear, Post-colonial World
Holly Barker with Marshall Islanders
2003 Wadsworth Publishing
Anthropology
This case study describes the role an applied anthropologist takes to help Marshallese communities understand the impact of radiation exposure on the environment and themselves, and addresses problems stemming from the U.S. nuclear weapons testing program conducted in the Marshall Islands from 1946-1958. The author demonstrates how the U.S. Government limits its responsibilities for dealing with the problems it created in the Marshall Islands. Through archival, life history, and ethnographic research, the author constructs a compelling history of the testing program from a Marshallese perspective. For more than five decades, the Marshallese have experienced the effects of the weapons testing program on their health and their environment. This book amplifies the voice of the Marshallese who share their knowledge about illnesses, premature deaths, and exile from their homelands. The author uses linguistic analysis to show how the Marshallese developed a unique radiation language to discuss problems related to their radiation exposure problems that never existed before the testing program. Drawing on her own experiences working with the Government of the Marshall Islands, the author emphasizes the role of an applied anthropologist in influencing policy, and empowering community leaders to seek meaningful remedies.
Keywords: Nuclear testing, Environmental Justice, Pacific Islands
Holly Barker with Marshall Islanders
2003 Wadsworth Publishing
Anthropology
This case study describes the role an applied anthropologist takes to help Marshallese communities understand the impact of radiation exposure on the environment and themselves, and addresses problems stemming from the U.S. nuclear weapons testing program conducted in the Marshall Islands from 1946-1958. The author demonstrates how the U.S. Government limits its responsibilities for dealing with the problems it created in the Marshall Islands. Through archival, life history, and ethnographic research, the author constructs a compelling history of the testing program from a Marshallese perspective. For more than five decades, the Marshallese have experienced the effects of the weapons testing program on their health and their environment. This book amplifies the voice of the Marshallese who share their knowledge about illnesses, premature deaths, and exile from their homelands. The author uses linguistic analysis to show how the Marshallese developed a unique radiation language to discuss problems related to their radiation exposure problems that never existed before the testing program. Drawing on her own experiences working with the Government of the Marshall Islands, the author emphasizes the role of an applied anthropologist in influencing policy, and empowering community leaders to seek meaningful remedies.
Keywords: Nuclear testing, Environmental Justice, Pacific Islands
Public Anthropology in a Borderless World
Sam Beck and Carl Maida
2015 Berghahn Books
Anthropology, Politics
Anthropologists have acted as experts and educators on the nature and life ways of people worldwide, working to understand the human condition in broad comparative perspectives. As a discipline, anthropology has been advocate — and even defender — of cultural integrity, authenticity, and autonomy of societies across the globe. Public anthropology today carries out the discipline’s original purpose, grounding theories in lived experience and placing empirical knowledge in deeper historical and comparative frameworks. This, then, is a vitally important kind of anthropology with the goal of improving the modern human condition by actively engaging with people to make changes through research, education, and political action.
Keywords: Social policies, Public Anthropology, Education
Sam Beck and Carl Maida
2015 Berghahn Books
Anthropology, Politics
Anthropologists have acted as experts and educators on the nature and life ways of people worldwide, working to understand the human condition in broad comparative perspectives. As a discipline, anthropology has been advocate — and even defender — of cultural integrity, authenticity, and autonomy of societies across the globe. Public anthropology today carries out the discipline’s original purpose, grounding theories in lived experience and placing empirical knowledge in deeper historical and comparative frameworks. This, then, is a vitally important kind of anthropology with the goal of improving the modern human condition by actively engaging with people to make changes through research, education, and political action.
Keywords: Social policies, Public Anthropology, Education
The Broken Fountain
Thomas Belmonte
1979 Columbia University Press
Anthropology, European Studies
As Ida Susser writes in reference to Belmonte's Broken Fountain, "good ethnographies have long lives." This classic of urban anthropology, one of the most acclaimed ethnographies of recent years, offers vivid, literary descriptions of Fontana del Re, an impoverished Neapolitan neighborhood. Belmonte documents the struggles of Neapolitans surrounded by crumbling buildings and economic insecurity. He details family dynamics as well as the working of Naples's informal economy, the day-to-day struggle for economic subsistence, and the intermittent begging and thieving of the young. Taking us from the bustling, vibrant, and gritty streets and alleyways of Naples to the kitchen tables of poor Neapolitan homes, Belmonte resists simplistic depictions of the poor. Instead, he presents subtle, compelling portraits and analyses that capture the emotional, social, and economic lives of his subjects. In addition to the continuing relevance of his insights into the effects of poverty, Belmonte's willingness to reflect on his own reactions and emotions while in the field has influenced a generation of scholars. In The Broken Fountain, he poignantly describes the experience of living alone in a strange urban environment and his interactions with the residents of Fontana del Re.
Keywords: Urban, Poverty, Naples, Italy
Thomas Belmonte
1979 Columbia University Press
Anthropology, European Studies
As Ida Susser writes in reference to Belmonte's Broken Fountain, "good ethnographies have long lives." This classic of urban anthropology, one of the most acclaimed ethnographies of recent years, offers vivid, literary descriptions of Fontana del Re, an impoverished Neapolitan neighborhood. Belmonte documents the struggles of Neapolitans surrounded by crumbling buildings and economic insecurity. He details family dynamics as well as the working of Naples's informal economy, the day-to-day struggle for economic subsistence, and the intermittent begging and thieving of the young. Taking us from the bustling, vibrant, and gritty streets and alleyways of Naples to the kitchen tables of poor Neapolitan homes, Belmonte resists simplistic depictions of the poor. Instead, he presents subtle, compelling portraits and analyses that capture the emotional, social, and economic lives of his subjects. In addition to the continuing relevance of his insights into the effects of poverty, Belmonte's willingness to reflect on his own reactions and emotions while in the field has influenced a generation of scholars. In The Broken Fountain, he poignantly describes the experience of living alone in a strange urban environment and his interactions with the residents of Fontana del Re.
Keywords: Urban, Poverty, Naples, Italy
Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine
Catherine Besteman
2016 Duke University Press: Global Insecurities Series
Anthropology
How do people whose entire way of life has been destroyed and who witnessed horrible abuses against loved ones construct a new future? How do people who have survived the ravages of war and displacement rebuild their lives in a new country when their world has totally changed? In Making Refuge Catherine Besteman follows the trajectory of Somali Bantus from their homes in Somalia before the onset in 1991 of Somalia’s civil war, to their displacement to Kenyan refugee camps, to their relocation in cities across the United States, to their settlement in the struggling former mill town of Lewiston, Maine. Tracking their experiences as "secondary migrants" who grapple with the struggles of xenophobia, neoliberalism, and grief, Besteman asks what humanitarianism feels like to those who are its objects and what happens when refugees move in next door. As Lewiston's refugees and locals negotiate coresidence and find that assimilation goes both ways, their story demonstrates the efforts of diverse people to find ways to live together and create community. Besteman’s account illuminates the contemporary debates about economic and moral responsibility, security, and community that immigration provokes.
Keywords: Immigration, Refugees, Displacement, Humanitarianism, Security, Neoliberalism, Somalia, United States
Catherine Besteman
2016 Duke University Press: Global Insecurities Series
Anthropology
How do people whose entire way of life has been destroyed and who witnessed horrible abuses against loved ones construct a new future? How do people who have survived the ravages of war and displacement rebuild their lives in a new country when their world has totally changed? In Making Refuge Catherine Besteman follows the trajectory of Somali Bantus from their homes in Somalia before the onset in 1991 of Somalia’s civil war, to their displacement to Kenyan refugee camps, to their relocation in cities across the United States, to their settlement in the struggling former mill town of Lewiston, Maine. Tracking their experiences as "secondary migrants" who grapple with the struggles of xenophobia, neoliberalism, and grief, Besteman asks what humanitarianism feels like to those who are its objects and what happens when refugees move in next door. As Lewiston's refugees and locals negotiate coresidence and find that assimilation goes both ways, their story demonstrates the efforts of diverse people to find ways to live together and create community. Besteman’s account illuminates the contemporary debates about economic and moral responsibility, security, and community that immigration provokes.
Keywords: Immigration, Refugees, Displacement, Humanitarianism, Security, Neoliberalism, Somalia, United States
Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
João Biehl
2005 University of California Press
Anthropology
Zones of social abandonment are emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities—places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die. This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita. Anthropologist João Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the “dictionary” she is compiling; and to trace the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form. As Biehl painstakingly relates Catarina’s words to a vanished world and elucidates her condition, we learn of subjectivities unmade and remade under economic pressures, pharmaceuticals as moral technologies, a public common sense that lets the unsound and unproductive die, and anthropology’s unique power to work through these juxtaposed fields. Vita’s methodological innovations, bold fieldwork, and rigorous social theory make it an essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought and ethics in the contemporary world.
Keywords: Social policies, Medical Anthropology, Homelessness, Brazil, Latin America
João Biehl
2005 University of California Press
Anthropology
Zones of social abandonment are emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities—places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die. This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita. Anthropologist João Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the “dictionary” she is compiling; and to trace the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form. As Biehl painstakingly relates Catarina’s words to a vanished world and elucidates her condition, we learn of subjectivities unmade and remade under economic pressures, pharmaceuticals as moral technologies, a public common sense that lets the unsound and unproductive die, and anthropology’s unique power to work through these juxtaposed fields. Vita’s methodological innovations, bold fieldwork, and rigorous social theory make it an essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought and ethics in the contemporary world.
Keywords: Social policies, Medical Anthropology, Homelessness, Brazil, Latin America
In Search of Respect
Philippe Bourgois
2002 Cambridge University Press
Anthropology
Philippe Bourgois's now-classic, ethnographic study of social marginalization in inner-city America, won critical acclaim after it was first published in 1995 and in 1997 was awarded the Margaret Mead Award. For the first time, an anthropologist had managed to gain the trust and long-term friendship of street-level drug dealers in one of the roughest ghetto neighborhoods in the United States - East Harlem. This new edition adds a prologue describing the major dynamics in America that have altered life on the streets of East Harlem in the six years since the first edition. Bourgois, in a new epilogue, brings up to date the stories of the people - Primo, Caesar, Luis, Tony, Candy - who readers come to know in this remarkable window onto the world of the inner-city drug trade.
Keywords: Drugs, Latinos, Violence, Urban Anthropology, New York City, United States
Philippe Bourgois
2002 Cambridge University Press
Anthropology
Philippe Bourgois's now-classic, ethnographic study of social marginalization in inner-city America, won critical acclaim after it was first published in 1995 and in 1997 was awarded the Margaret Mead Award. For the first time, an anthropologist had managed to gain the trust and long-term friendship of street-level drug dealers in one of the roughest ghetto neighborhoods in the United States - East Harlem. This new edition adds a prologue describing the major dynamics in America that have altered life on the streets of East Harlem in the six years since the first edition. Bourgois, in a new epilogue, brings up to date the stories of the people - Primo, Caesar, Luis, Tony, Candy - who readers come to know in this remarkable window onto the world of the inner-city drug trade.
Keywords: Drugs, Latinos, Violence, Urban Anthropology, New York City, United States
Righteous Dopefiend
Philippe Bourgois and Jeffrey Schonberg
2009 University of California Press
Anthropology
This powerful study immerses the reader in the world of homelessness and drug addiction in the contemporary United States. For over a decade Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg followed a social network of two dozen heroin injectors and crack smokers on the streets of San Francisco, accompanying them as they scrambled to generate income through burglary, panhandling, recycling, and day labor. Righteous Dopefiend interweaves stunning black-and-white photographs with vivid dialogue, detailed field notes, and critical theoretical analysis. Its gripping narrative develops a cast of characters around the themes of violence, race relations, sexuality, family trauma, embodied suffering, social inequality, and power relations. The result is a dispassionate chronicle of survival, loss, caring, and hope rooted in the addicts' determination to hang on for one more day and one more "fix" through a "moral economy of sharing" that precariously balances mutual solidarity and interpersonal betrayal.
Keywords: Homelessness, Drug Addiction, Critical Theory, Medical Anthropology, San Francisco, United States
Philippe Bourgois and Jeffrey Schonberg
2009 University of California Press
Anthropology
This powerful study immerses the reader in the world of homelessness and drug addiction in the contemporary United States. For over a decade Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg followed a social network of two dozen heroin injectors and crack smokers on the streets of San Francisco, accompanying them as they scrambled to generate income through burglary, panhandling, recycling, and day labor. Righteous Dopefiend interweaves stunning black-and-white photographs with vivid dialogue, detailed field notes, and critical theoretical analysis. Its gripping narrative develops a cast of characters around the themes of violence, race relations, sexuality, family trauma, embodied suffering, social inequality, and power relations. The result is a dispassionate chronicle of survival, loss, caring, and hope rooted in the addicts' determination to hang on for one more day and one more "fix" through a "moral economy of sharing" that precariously balances mutual solidarity and interpersonal betrayal.
Keywords: Homelessness, Drug Addiction, Critical Theory, Medical Anthropology, San Francisco, United States
Caring by the Hour: Women, Work, and Organizing at Duke Medical Center
Karen Brodkin-Sacks
1988 University of Illinois Press
Anthropology
Karen Sacks offers the first detailed account of the hospital industry's nonprofessional support staff---their roles in day-to-day health care delivery, and why they fought so tenaciously throughout the 1970s to unionize. This case study of the relationships between work life and unionization in Duke medical Center highlights women's activism in general and black women's leadership in particular. In addition to an analysis of the dynamics of women's activism, Caring by the Hour provides a comparative study of Duke Medical Center's treatment of both black and white female workers. Sacks links patterns of racial segregation in clerical jobs to the relationship between race, working conditions, and unequal opportunities for black and white women, and to their differing work cultures and patterns of public millitance. She also discusses recent changes in service, clerical, and professional work and their effects on white and black women, placing them in the context of national changes in health funding and policies.
Keywords: Unions, Labor, Medical Anthropology, Race, Gender, Health Care, United States
Karen Brodkin-Sacks
1988 University of Illinois Press
Anthropology
Karen Sacks offers the first detailed account of the hospital industry's nonprofessional support staff---their roles in day-to-day health care delivery, and why they fought so tenaciously throughout the 1970s to unionize. This case study of the relationships between work life and unionization in Duke medical Center highlights women's activism in general and black women's leadership in particular. In addition to an analysis of the dynamics of women's activism, Caring by the Hour provides a comparative study of Duke Medical Center's treatment of both black and white female workers. Sacks links patterns of racial segregation in clerical jobs to the relationship between race, working conditions, and unequal opportunities for black and white women, and to their differing work cultures and patterns of public millitance. She also discusses recent changes in service, clerical, and professional work and their effects on white and black women, placing them in the context of national changes in health funding and policies.
Keywords: Unions, Labor, Medical Anthropology, Race, Gender, Health Care, United States
My Troubles are Going to Have Trouble with Me: Everyday Trials and Triumphs of Women Worker
Karin Brodkin-Sacks and Dorothy Remy (Editors)
1984 Rutgers University Press
Anthropology
This collection emerged from papers given at converence proceedings. These include a 1979 symposium organized at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association and from a 1982 conference on "Research to Make a Better Living for Working Women." This book is part of Rutgers' Douglass Series on Women's Lives and the Meaning of Gender.
Keywords: Gender, Labor, Wage Equality, Women, Discrimination, United States
Karin Brodkin-Sacks and Dorothy Remy (Editors)
1984 Rutgers University Press
Anthropology
This collection emerged from papers given at converence proceedings. These include a 1979 symposium organized at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association and from a 1982 conference on "Research to Make a Better Living for Working Women." This book is part of Rutgers' Douglass Series on Women's Lives and the Meaning of Gender.
Keywords: Gender, Labor, Wage Equality, Women, Discrimination, United States
Standing in the Need: Culture, Comfort, and Coming Home after Katrina
Katherine E. Browne
2015 University of Texas Press, The Katrina Bookshelf
Anthropology
Standing in the Need presents an intimate account of an African American family’s ordeal after Hurricane Katrina. Before the storm struck, this family of one hundred fifty members lived in the bayou communities of St. Bernard Parish just outside New Orleans. Rooted there like the wild red iris of the coastal wetlands, the family had gathered for generations to cook and share homemade seafood meals, savor conversation, and refresh their interconnected lives.
In this lively narrative, Katherine Browne weaves together voices and experiences from eight years of post-Katrina research. Her story documents the heartbreaking struggles to remake life after everyone in the family faced ruin. Cast against a recovery landscape managed by outsiders, the efforts of family members to help themselves could get no traction; outsiders undermined any sense of their control over the process. In the end, the insights of the story offer hope. Written for a broad audience and supported by an array of photographs and graphics, Standing in the Need offers readers an inside view of life at its most vulnerable.
Keywords: Hurricane Katrina, natural disasters, narrative, United States South
Katherine E. Browne
2015 University of Texas Press, The Katrina Bookshelf
Anthropology
Standing in the Need presents an intimate account of an African American family’s ordeal after Hurricane Katrina. Before the storm struck, this family of one hundred fifty members lived in the bayou communities of St. Bernard Parish just outside New Orleans. Rooted there like the wild red iris of the coastal wetlands, the family had gathered for generations to cook and share homemade seafood meals, savor conversation, and refresh their interconnected lives.
In this lively narrative, Katherine Browne weaves together voices and experiences from eight years of post-Katrina research. Her story documents the heartbreaking struggles to remake life after everyone in the family faced ruin. Cast against a recovery landscape managed by outsiders, the efforts of family members to help themselves could get no traction; outsiders undermined any sense of their control over the process. In the end, the insights of the story offer hope. Written for a broad audience and supported by an array of photographs and graphics, Standing in the Need offers readers an inside view of life at its most vulnerable.
Keywords: Hurricane Katrina, natural disasters, narrative, United States South
Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism
Michael Burawawoy
1979 University of Chicago Press
Sociology
Since the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer the question, Why do workers not work harder? Michael Burawoy spent ten months as a machine operator in a Chicago factory trying to answer different but equally important questions: Why do workers work as hard as they do? Why do workers routinely consent to their own exploitation? Manufacturing Consent, the result of Burawoy's research, combines rich ethnographical description with an original Marxist theory of the capitalist labor process. Manufacturing Consentis unique among studies of this kind because Burawoy has been able to analyze his own experiences in relation to those of Donald Roy, who studied the same factory thirty years earlier. Burawoy traces the technical, political, and ideological changes in factory life to the transformations of the market relations of the plant (it is now part of a multinational corporation) and to broader movements, since World War II, in industrial relations.
Keywords: Labor, Marxism, Industry, Chicago, Illinois, United States
Michael Burawawoy
1979 University of Chicago Press
Sociology
Since the 1930s, industrial sociologists have tried to answer the question, Why do workers not work harder? Michael Burawoy spent ten months as a machine operator in a Chicago factory trying to answer different but equally important questions: Why do workers work as hard as they do? Why do workers routinely consent to their own exploitation? Manufacturing Consent, the result of Burawoy's research, combines rich ethnographical description with an original Marxist theory of the capitalist labor process. Manufacturing Consentis unique among studies of this kind because Burawoy has been able to analyze his own experiences in relation to those of Donald Roy, who studied the same factory thirty years earlier. Burawoy traces the technical, political, and ideological changes in factory life to the transformations of the market relations of the plant (it is now part of a multinational corporation) and to broader movements, since World War II, in industrial relations.
Keywords: Labor, Marxism, Industry, Chicago, Illinois, United States
Blessed Anastacia: Women, Race and Popular Christianity in Brazil
John Burdick
1998 Routledge
Anthropology
The weakness of Brazil's black consciousness movement is commonly attributed to the fragility of Afro-Brazilian ethnic identity. In a major account, John Burdick challenges this view by revealing the many-layered reality of popular black consciousness and identity in an arena that is usually overlooked: that of popular Christianity. Blessed Anastacia describes how popular Christianity confronts everyday racism and contributes to the formation of racial identity. The author concludes that if organizers of the black consciousness movement were to recognize the profound racial meaning inherent in this area of popular religiosity, they might be more successful in bridging the gap with its poor and working-class constituency.
Keywords: Afro-Brazilians, Religion, Race and Racism, Women, Social Movements, Brazil
John Burdick
1998 Routledge
Anthropology
The weakness of Brazil's black consciousness movement is commonly attributed to the fragility of Afro-Brazilian ethnic identity. In a major account, John Burdick challenges this view by revealing the many-layered reality of popular black consciousness and identity in an arena that is usually overlooked: that of popular Christianity. Blessed Anastacia describes how popular Christianity confronts everyday racism and contributes to the formation of racial identity. The author concludes that if organizers of the black consciousness movement were to recognize the profound racial meaning inherent in this area of popular religiosity, they might be more successful in bridging the gap with its poor and working-class constituency.
Keywords: Afro-Brazilians, Religion, Race and Racism, Women, Social Movements, Brazil
Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation
Steve Caton
2006 Hill and Wang
Anthropology
In 1979, Steven C. Caton went to a remote area of Yemen to do fieldwork on the famous oral poetry of its tribes. The recent hostage crisis in Iran made life perilous for a young American in the Middle East; worse, he was soon embroiled in a dangerous local conflict and tribal hostilities simmered for months.Yemen Chronicle is his extraordinary report both on events that ensued and on the many theoretical—let alone practical—difficulties of doing ethnography in such circumstances. Caton also offers a profound meditation on the political, cultural, and sexual components of modern Arab culture.
Keywords: War, Arab Culture, Prisoners, Middle East
Steve Caton
2006 Hill and Wang
Anthropology
In 1979, Steven C. Caton went to a remote area of Yemen to do fieldwork on the famous oral poetry of its tribes. The recent hostage crisis in Iran made life perilous for a young American in the Middle East; worse, he was soon embroiled in a dangerous local conflict and tribal hostilities simmered for months.Yemen Chronicle is his extraordinary report both on events that ensued and on the many theoretical—let alone practical—difficulties of doing ethnography in such circumstances. Caton also offers a profound meditation on the political, cultural, and sexual components of modern Arab culture.
Keywords: War, Arab Culture, Prisoners, Middle East
The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation
Leo R. Chavez
2008 Stanford University Press
Anthropology
From volunteers ready to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border to the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who have marched in support of immigrant rights, the United States has witnessed a surge of involvement in immigration activism. In The Latino Threat, Leo R. Chavez critically investigates the media stories about and recent experiences of immigrants to show how prejudices and stereotypes have been used to malign an entire immigrant population—and to define what it means to be an American. Pundits—and the media at large—nurture and perpetuate the notion that Latinos, particularly Mexicans, are an invading force bent on reconquering land once considered their own. Through a perceived refusal to learn English and an "out of control" birthrate, many say that Latinos are destroying the American way of life. But Chavez questions these assumptions and offers facts to counter the myth that Latinos are a threat to the security and prosperity of our nation. His breakdown of the "Latino threat" contests this myth's basic tenets, challenging such well-known authors as Samuel Huntington, Pat Buchanan, and Peter Brimelow. Chavez concludes that citizenship is not just about legal definitions, but about participation in society. Deeply resonant in today's atmosphere of exclusion, Chavez's insights offer an alternative and optimistic view of the vitality and future of our country.
Keywords: Media, Immigration, Activism, Latinos, Language, United States
Leo R. Chavez
2008 Stanford University Press
Anthropology
From volunteers ready to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border to the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who have marched in support of immigrant rights, the United States has witnessed a surge of involvement in immigration activism. In The Latino Threat, Leo R. Chavez critically investigates the media stories about and recent experiences of immigrants to show how prejudices and stereotypes have been used to malign an entire immigrant population—and to define what it means to be an American. Pundits—and the media at large—nurture and perpetuate the notion that Latinos, particularly Mexicans, are an invading force bent on reconquering land once considered their own. Through a perceived refusal to learn English and an "out of control" birthrate, many say that Latinos are destroying the American way of life. But Chavez questions these assumptions and offers facts to counter the myth that Latinos are a threat to the security and prosperity of our nation. His breakdown of the "Latino threat" contests this myth's basic tenets, challenging such well-known authors as Samuel Huntington, Pat Buchanan, and Peter Brimelow. Chavez concludes that citizenship is not just about legal definitions, but about participation in society. Deeply resonant in today's atmosphere of exclusion, Chavez's insights offer an alternative and optimistic view of the vitality and future of our country.
Keywords: Media, Immigration, Activism, Latinos, Language, United States
Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town
Melissa Checker
2005 New York University Press
Anthropology
Over the past two decades, environmental racism has become the rallying cry for many communities as they discover the contamination of toxic chemicals and industrial waste in their own backyards. Living next door to factories and industrial sites for years, the people in these communities often have record health problems and debilitating medical conditions. Melissa Checker tells the story of one such neighborhood, Hyde Park, in Augusta, Georgia, and the tenacious activism of its two hundred African American families. This community, at one time surrounded by nine polluting industries, is struggling to make their voices heard and their community safe again. Polluted Promises shows that even in the post-civil rights era, race and class are still key factors in determining the politics of pollution.
Keywords: Environmental Justice, Environmental Racism, Pollution, U.S. South, African Americans, Activism, United States
Melissa Checker
2005 New York University Press
Anthropology
Over the past two decades, environmental racism has become the rallying cry for many communities as they discover the contamination of toxic chemicals and industrial waste in their own backyards. Living next door to factories and industrial sites for years, the people in these communities often have record health problems and debilitating medical conditions. Melissa Checker tells the story of one such neighborhood, Hyde Park, in Augusta, Georgia, and the tenacious activism of its two hundred African American families. This community, at one time surrounded by nine polluting industries, is struggling to make their voices heard and their community safe again. Polluted Promises shows that even in the post-civil rights era, race and class are still key factors in determining the politics of pollution.
Keywords: Environmental Justice, Environmental Racism, Pollution, U.S. South, African Americans, Activism, United States
Feminist Activist Ethnography:Counterpoints to Neoliberalism in North America
Christa Craven and Dána-Ain Davis (Editors)
2013 Lexington Books
Anthropology
Writing in the wake of neoliberalism, where human rights and social justice have increasingly been subordinated to proliferating “consumer choices” and ideals of market justice, contributors to this collection argue that feminist ethnographers are in a key position to reassert the central feminist connections between theory, methods, and activism. Together, we suggest avenues for incorporating methodological innovations, collaborative analysis, and collective activism in our scholarly projects. What are the possibilities (and challenges) that exist for feminist ethnography 25 years after initial debates emerged in this field about reflexivity, objectivity, reductive individualism, and the social relevance of activist scholarship? How can feminist ethnography intensify efforts towards social justice in the current political and economic climate? This collection continues a crucial dialog about feminist activist ethnography in the 21st century—at the intersection of engaged feminist research and activism in the service of the organizations, people, communities, and feminist issues we study. Contributors: Mary K. Anglin; Khiara M. Bridges; Elizabeth Chin; Aimee Cox; Christa Craven Ph.D; Dána-Ain Davis Ph.D; Faye V. Harrison; Iris López; Michelle Marzullo; Scott Lauria Morgensen; Gina Pérez; Tabitha Steager; Beth A. Uzwiak and Jennifer R. Wies
Keywords: Feminism, Neoliberalism, Women, Social Justice, Reader
Christa Craven and Dána-Ain Davis (Editors)
2013 Lexington Books
Anthropology
Writing in the wake of neoliberalism, where human rights and social justice have increasingly been subordinated to proliferating “consumer choices” and ideals of market justice, contributors to this collection argue that feminist ethnographers are in a key position to reassert the central feminist connections between theory, methods, and activism. Together, we suggest avenues for incorporating methodological innovations, collaborative analysis, and collective activism in our scholarly projects. What are the possibilities (and challenges) that exist for feminist ethnography 25 years after initial debates emerged in this field about reflexivity, objectivity, reductive individualism, and the social relevance of activist scholarship? How can feminist ethnography intensify efforts towards social justice in the current political and economic climate? This collection continues a crucial dialog about feminist activist ethnography in the 21st century—at the intersection of engaged feminist research and activism in the service of the organizations, people, communities, and feminist issues we study. Contributors: Mary K. Anglin; Khiara M. Bridges; Elizabeth Chin; Aimee Cox; Christa Craven Ph.D; Dána-Ain Davis Ph.D; Faye V. Harrison; Iris López; Michelle Marzullo; Scott Lauria Morgensen; Gina Pérez; Tabitha Steager; Beth A. Uzwiak and Jennifer R. Wies
Keywords: Feminism, Neoliberalism, Women, Social Justice, Reader
The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail
Jason De León
2015 University of California Press: California Series in Public Anthropology
Anthropology
In his gripping and provocative debut, anthropologist Jason De León sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time—the human consequences of US immigration policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States.
Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De León uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of “Prevention through Deterrence,” the federal border enforcement policy that encourages migrants to cross in areas characterized by extreme environmental conditions and high risk of death. For two decades, this policy has failed to deter border crossers while successfully turning the rugged terrain of southern Arizona into a killing field.
In harrowing detail, De León chronicles the journeys of people who have made dozens of attempts to cross the border and uncovers the stories of the objects and bodies left behind in the desert.
The Land of Open Graves will spark debate and controversy.
Keywords: Migration, Violence, Borderlands, Latin American, Forensic Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnography
Jason De León
2015 University of California Press: California Series in Public Anthropology
Anthropology
In his gripping and provocative debut, anthropologist Jason De León sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time—the human consequences of US immigration policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States.
Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De León uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of “Prevention through Deterrence,” the federal border enforcement policy that encourages migrants to cross in areas characterized by extreme environmental conditions and high risk of death. For two decades, this policy has failed to deter border crossers while successfully turning the rugged terrain of southern Arizona into a killing field.
In harrowing detail, De León chronicles the journeys of people who have made dozens of attempts to cross the border and uncovers the stories of the objects and bodies left behind in the desert.
The Land of Open Graves will spark debate and controversy.
Keywords: Migration, Violence, Borderlands, Latin American, Forensic Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnography
Sidewalk
Mitch Duneier
2000 Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks
Sociology
An exceptional ethnography marked by clarity and candor, Sidewalk takes us into the socio-cultural environment of those who, though often seen as threatening or unseemly, work day after day on “the blocks” of one of New York’s most diverse neighborhoods. Sociologist Duneier, author of Slim’s Table, offers an accessible and compelling group portrait of several poor black men who make their livelihoods on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village selling secondhand goods, panhandling, and scavenging books and magazines. Duneier spent five years with these individuals, and in Sidewalk he argues that, contrary to the opinion of various city officials, they actually contribute significantly to the order and well-being of the Village. An important study of the heart and mind of the street, Sidewalk also features an insightful afterword by longtime book vendor Hakim Hasan. This fascinating study reveals today’s urban life in all its complexity: its vitality, its conflicts about class and race, and its surprising opportunities for empathy among strangers.Methods: Shows how ethnography works; includes a detailed methodological appendix and an afterword by research subject Hakim Hasan. Cultural anthropology: Sidewalk engages the rich terrain of recent developments regarding representation, writing, and authority; in the tradition of Elliot Liebow and Ulf Hannerz, it deals with age old problems of the social and cultural experience of inequality; this is a telling study of culture on the margins of American society.
Keywords: Street Life, Urban Ethnography, Informal Economy, African Americans, Race and Racism, New York City, United States
Mitch Duneier
2000 Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks
Sociology
An exceptional ethnography marked by clarity and candor, Sidewalk takes us into the socio-cultural environment of those who, though often seen as threatening or unseemly, work day after day on “the blocks” of one of New York’s most diverse neighborhoods. Sociologist Duneier, author of Slim’s Table, offers an accessible and compelling group portrait of several poor black men who make their livelihoods on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village selling secondhand goods, panhandling, and scavenging books and magazines. Duneier spent five years with these individuals, and in Sidewalk he argues that, contrary to the opinion of various city officials, they actually contribute significantly to the order and well-being of the Village. An important study of the heart and mind of the street, Sidewalk also features an insightful afterword by longtime book vendor Hakim Hasan. This fascinating study reveals today’s urban life in all its complexity: its vitality, its conflicts about class and race, and its surprising opportunities for empathy among strangers.Methods: Shows how ethnography works; includes a detailed methodological appendix and an afterword by research subject Hakim Hasan. Cultural anthropology: Sidewalk engages the rich terrain of recent developments regarding representation, writing, and authority; in the tradition of Elliot Liebow and Ulf Hannerz, it deals with age old problems of the social and cultural experience of inequality; this is a telling study of culture on the margins of American society.
Keywords: Street Life, Urban Ethnography, Informal Economy, African Americans, Race and Racism, New York City, United States
Class Acts: an Anthropology of Service Workers and their Union
Paul E. Durrenberger and Suzan Erem
2005 Paradigm Publishers
Anthropology
U.S. labor leaders are constantly developing new programs to revive the union movement. What happens when these plans collide with the daily lives of front-line union staff and members? This book examines the often conflicting interests of key players in the trenches of a national effort to bring back the U.S. labor movement. Brutally honest, funny, and never dull, this anthropological ethnography shows the daily struggles of union members today to bring about positive change and hold together their urban labor union in an era of globalization, outsourcing, and deindustrialization. The authors, a union activist and an anthropologist respectively, pair up to offer insider views of labor unions and of how anthropological fieldwork is done. Explaining, coaching, and warning Paul of hazards, Suzan, the communications director for the local union, provides inside views and details of day-to-day interactions. Paul, the anthropologist, provides outside analytical views that relate Suzan's experiences and his own observations to the wider view anthropology offers through the lenses of ethnography, holism, and comparativism. The result is a story of one dynamic union local, one anthropological study, and the lit fuse that connects them until the end.
Keywords: Labor, Labor Movement, United States
Paul E. Durrenberger and Suzan Erem
2005 Paradigm Publishers
Anthropology
U.S. labor leaders are constantly developing new programs to revive the union movement. What happens when these plans collide with the daily lives of front-line union staff and members? This book examines the often conflicting interests of key players in the trenches of a national effort to bring back the U.S. labor movement. Brutally honest, funny, and never dull, this anthropological ethnography shows the daily struggles of union members today to bring about positive change and hold together their urban labor union in an era of globalization, outsourcing, and deindustrialization. The authors, a union activist and an anthropologist respectively, pair up to offer insider views of labor unions and of how anthropological fieldwork is done. Explaining, coaching, and warning Paul of hazards, Suzan, the communications director for the local union, provides inside views and details of day-to-day interactions. Paul, the anthropologist, provides outside analytical views that relate Suzan's experiences and his own observations to the wider view anthropology offers through the lenses of ethnography, holism, and comparativism. The result is a story of one dynamic union local, one anthropological study, and the lit fuse that connects them until the end.
Keywords: Labor, Labor Movement, United States
Mothers United
Andrea Dyrness
2011 University of Minnesota Press
Anthropology
In Mothers United, Andrea Dyrness chronicles the experiences of five Latina immigrant mothers in Oakland, California—one of the most troubled urban school districts in the country—as they become informed and engaged advocates for their children’s education. A powerful, inspiring story about self-learning, consciousness-raising, and empowerment, Mothers United offers important lessons for school reform movements everywhere.
Keywords: Migration, Education, Latina, Women, California, United States
Andrea Dyrness
2011 University of Minnesota Press
Anthropology
In Mothers United, Andrea Dyrness chronicles the experiences of five Latina immigrant mothers in Oakland, California—one of the most troubled urban school districts in the country—as they become informed and engaged advocates for their children’s education. A powerful, inspiring story about self-learning, consciousness-raising, and empowerment, Mothers United offers important lessons for school reform movements everywhere.
Keywords: Migration, Education, Latina, Women, California, United States
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
Barbara Ehrenreich
2002 Holt Paperbacks
Journalism/Popular
Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again.
Keywords: Poverty, Labor, United States
Barbara Ehrenreich
2002 Holt Paperbacks
Journalism/Popular
Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again.
Keywords: Poverty, Labor, United States
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
Anne Fadiman
1998 Farrar, Staus, and Gioux
Popular
When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness aand healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe, while medical community marks a division between body and soul, and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former. Lia's doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness, qaug dab peg--the spirit catches you and you fall down--and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices.
Keywords: Immigration, Medical Anthropology, Illness
Anne Fadiman
1998 Farrar, Staus, and Gioux
Popular
When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness aand healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe, while medical community marks a division between body and soul, and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former. Lia's doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness, qaug dab peg--the spirit catches you and you fall down--and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices.
Keywords: Immigration, Medical Anthropology, Illness
Pathologies of Power
Paul Farmer
2004 University of California Press
Anthropology
Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life—and death—in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world’s poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other. Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer’s disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer’s urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world’s poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.
Keywords: Medical Anthropology, Human Rights, Structural Violence, Poverty
Paul Farmer
2004 University of California Press
Anthropology
Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life—and death—in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world’s poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other. Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer’s disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer’s urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world’s poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.
Keywords: Medical Anthropology, Human Rights, Structural Violence, Poverty
Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders
Kim Fortun
2001 University of Chicago Press
Anthropology
The 1984 explosion of the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India was undisputedly one of the world's worst industrial disasters. Some have argued that the resulting litigation provided an "innovative model" for dealing with the global distribution of technological risk; others consider the disaster a turning point in environmental legislation; still others argue that Bhopal is what globalization looks like on the ground. Kim Fortun explores these claims by focusing on the dynamics and paradoxes of advocacy in competing power domains. She moves from hospitals in India to meetings with lawyers, corporate executives, and environmental justice activists in the United States to show how the disaster and its effects remain with us. Spiraling outward from the victims' stories, the innovative narrative sheds light on the way advocacy works within a complex global system, calling into question conventional notions of responsibility and ethical conduct. Revealing the hopes and frustrations of advocacy, this moving work also counters the tendency to think of Bhopal as an isolated incident that "can't happen here."
Keywords: Environmental Justice, Advocacy, Globalization, India
Kim Fortun
2001 University of Chicago Press
Anthropology
The 1984 explosion of the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India was undisputedly one of the world's worst industrial disasters. Some have argued that the resulting litigation provided an "innovative model" for dealing with the global distribution of technological risk; others consider the disaster a turning point in environmental legislation; still others argue that Bhopal is what globalization looks like on the ground. Kim Fortun explores these claims by focusing on the dynamics and paradoxes of advocacy in competing power domains. She moves from hospitals in India to meetings with lawyers, corporate executives, and environmental justice activists in the United States to show how the disaster and its effects remain with us. Spiraling outward from the victims' stories, the innovative narrative sheds light on the way advocacy works within a complex global system, calling into question conventional notions of responsibility and ethical conduct. Revealing the hopes and frustrations of advocacy, this moving work also counters the tendency to think of Bhopal as an isolated incident that "can't happen here."
Keywords: Environmental Justice, Advocacy, Globalization, India
The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas
Lesley Gill
2004 Duke University Press
Anthropology
Located at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, the School of the Americas (SOA) is a U.S. Army center that has trained more than sixty thousand soldiers and police, mostly from Latin America, in counterinsurgency and combat-related skills since it was founded in 1946. So widely documented is the participation of the School’s graduates in torture, murder, and political repression throughout Latin America that in 2001 the School officially changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Lesley Gill goes behind the façade and presents a comprehensive portrait of the School of the Americas. Talking to a retired Colombian general accused by international human rights organizations of terrible crimes, sitting in on classes, accompanying SOA students and their families to an upscale local mall, listening to coca farmers in Colombia and Bolivia, conversing with anti-soa activists in the cramped office of the School of the Americas Watch—Gill exposes the School’s institutionalization of state-sponsored violence, the havoc it has wrought in Latin America, and the strategies used by activists seeking to curtail it. Based on her unprecedented level of access to the School of the Americas, Gill describes the School’s mission and training methods and reveals how its students, alumni, and officers perceive themselves in relation to the dirty wars that have raged across Latin America. Assessing the School’s role in U.S. empire-building, she shows how Latin America’s brightest and most ambitious military officers are indoctrinated into a stark good-versus-evil worldview, seduced by consumer society and the “American dream,” and enlisted as proxies in Washington’s war against drugs and “subversion.”
Keywords: U.S. Military, Multi-Sited Ethnography, Latin America
Lesley Gill
2004 Duke University Press
Anthropology
Located at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, the School of the Americas (SOA) is a U.S. Army center that has trained more than sixty thousand soldiers and police, mostly from Latin America, in counterinsurgency and combat-related skills since it was founded in 1946. So widely documented is the participation of the School’s graduates in torture, murder, and political repression throughout Latin America that in 2001 the School officially changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Lesley Gill goes behind the façade and presents a comprehensive portrait of the School of the Americas. Talking to a retired Colombian general accused by international human rights organizations of terrible crimes, sitting in on classes, accompanying SOA students and their families to an upscale local mall, listening to coca farmers in Colombia and Bolivia, conversing with anti-soa activists in the cramped office of the School of the Americas Watch—Gill exposes the School’s institutionalization of state-sponsored violence, the havoc it has wrought in Latin America, and the strategies used by activists seeking to curtail it. Based on her unprecedented level of access to the School of the Americas, Gill describes the School’s mission and training methods and reveals how its students, alumni, and officers perceive themselves in relation to the dirty wars that have raged across Latin America. Assessing the School’s role in U.S. empire-building, she shows how Latin America’s brightest and most ambitious military officers are indoctrinated into a stark good-versus-evil worldview, seduced by consumer society and the “American dream,” and enlisted as proxies in Washington’s war against drugs and “subversion.”
Keywords: U.S. Military, Multi-Sited Ethnography, Latin America
In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power, and Memory in Rajasthan
Ann Grodzins Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar
2002 Duke University Press
Anthropology
In the Time of Trees and Sorrows showcases peasants’ memories of everyday life in North India under royal rule and their musings on the contrast between the old days and the unprecedented shifts that a half century of Indian Independence has wrought. It is an oral history of the former Kingdom of Sawar in the modern state of Rajasthan as it was from the 1930s to the 1950s. Based on testimonies from the 1990s, this book stands as a polyvocal account of the radical political and environmental changes the region and its people have faced in the twentieth century. Not just the story of modernity from the perspective of a rural village, these interviews and author commentaries narrate this small rural community’s relatively sudden transformation from subjection to a local despot and to a remote colonial power to citizenship in a modern postcolonial democracy. Unlike other recent studies of Rajasthan, the current study gives voice exclusively to former subjects who endured the double oppression of colonial and regional rulers. Gold and Gujar thus place subjective subaltern experiences of daily routines, manifestations of power relations, and sweeping changes to the environment (after the fall of kings) that turned lush forests into a barren landscape on equal footing with historical “fact” and archival sources. Ambiguous, complex, and culturally laden as it is in Western thought, the concept of nature is queried in this ethnographic text. For persons in Sawar the environment is not only a means of sustenance, its deterioration is linked to human morality and to power, both royal and divine. The framing questions of this South Asian history revealed through memories are: what was it like in the time of kings and what happened to the trees? This book will interest specialists of South Asian history, anthropology, subaltern studies, and the environment.
Keywords: Colonialism, Multivocal Ethnography, Subaltern Studies, India
Ann Grodzins Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar
2002 Duke University Press
Anthropology
In the Time of Trees and Sorrows showcases peasants’ memories of everyday life in North India under royal rule and their musings on the contrast between the old days and the unprecedented shifts that a half century of Indian Independence has wrought. It is an oral history of the former Kingdom of Sawar in the modern state of Rajasthan as it was from the 1930s to the 1950s. Based on testimonies from the 1990s, this book stands as a polyvocal account of the radical political and environmental changes the region and its people have faced in the twentieth century. Not just the story of modernity from the perspective of a rural village, these interviews and author commentaries narrate this small rural community’s relatively sudden transformation from subjection to a local despot and to a remote colonial power to citizenship in a modern postcolonial democracy. Unlike other recent studies of Rajasthan, the current study gives voice exclusively to former subjects who endured the double oppression of colonial and regional rulers. Gold and Gujar thus place subjective subaltern experiences of daily routines, manifestations of power relations, and sweeping changes to the environment (after the fall of kings) that turned lush forests into a barren landscape on equal footing with historical “fact” and archival sources. Ambiguous, complex, and culturally laden as it is in Western thought, the concept of nature is queried in this ethnographic text. For persons in Sawar the environment is not only a means of sustenance, its deterioration is linked to human morality and to power, both royal and divine. The framing questions of this South Asian history revealed through memories are: what was it like in the time of kings and what happened to the trees? This book will interest specialists of South Asian history, anthropology, subaltern studies, and the environment.
Keywords: Colonialism, Multivocal Ethnography, Subaltern Studies, India
As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness
Walter Goldschmidt
1947 Allanheld, Osmun and Co. Publishers, Inc.
Anthropology
Goldschmidt did field work with the Hupa and Nomlaki groups in northern California in 1936-37, and his Ph.D. dissertation was based on a community study he carried out in farming towns in the San Joaquin Valley of California. This study was primarily concerned with the social impacts of industrialized agribusiness, and was the basis of his often-cited book, As You Sow, an example of what is known as Applied Anthropology.
Keywords: Agriculture, Applied Anthropology, Development, Agribusiness, US Aid, United States
Walter Goldschmidt
1947 Allanheld, Osmun and Co. Publishers, Inc.
Anthropology
Goldschmidt did field work with the Hupa and Nomlaki groups in northern California in 1936-37, and his Ph.D. dissertation was based on a community study he carried out in farming towns in the San Joaquin Valley of California. This study was primarily concerned with the social impacts of industrialized agribusiness, and was the basis of his often-cited book, As You Sow, an example of what is known as Applied Anthropology.
Keywords: Agriculture, Applied Anthropology, Development, Agribusiness, US Aid, United States
Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival in the Informal City
Daniel M. Goldstein
2016 Duke University Press: Global Insecurities Series
Anthropology
Many of Bolivia's poorest and most vulnerable citizens work as vendors in the Cancha mega-market in the city of Cochabamba, where they must navigate systems of informality and illegality in order to survive. In Owners of the Sidewalk Daniel M. Goldstein examines the ways these systems correlate in the marginal spaces of the Latin American city. Collaborating with the Cancha's legal and permanent stall vendors (fijos) and its illegal and itinerant street and sidewalk vendors (ambulantes), Goldstein shows how the state's deliberate neglect and criminalization of the Cancha's poor—a practice common to neoliberal modern cities—makes the poor exploitable, governable, and consigns them to an insecure existence. Goldstein's collaborative and engaged approach to ethnographic field research also opens up critical questions about what ethical scholarship entails.
Keywords: Latin America, Bolivia, Security, Informal Economy, Criminalization, Poverty, Neoliberalism
Daniel M. Goldstein
2016 Duke University Press: Global Insecurities Series
Anthropology
Many of Bolivia's poorest and most vulnerable citizens work as vendors in the Cancha mega-market in the city of Cochabamba, where they must navigate systems of informality and illegality in order to survive. In Owners of the Sidewalk Daniel M. Goldstein examines the ways these systems correlate in the marginal spaces of the Latin American city. Collaborating with the Cancha's legal and permanent stall vendors (fijos) and its illegal and itinerant street and sidewalk vendors (ambulantes), Goldstein shows how the state's deliberate neglect and criminalization of the Cancha's poor—a practice common to neoliberal modern cities—makes the poor exploitable, governable, and consigns them to an insecure existence. Goldstein's collaborative and engaged approach to ethnographic field research also opens up critical questions about what ethical scholarship entails.
Keywords: Latin America, Bolivia, Security, Informal Economy, Criminalization, Poverty, Neoliberalism
Becoming Legal: Immigration Law and Mixed Status Families
Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz
Forthcoming 2016 Oxford University Press
Anthropology
There are approximately eleven million undocumented people living in the United States, and most of them have U.S. citizen family members. There is a common perception that marriage to a U.S. citizen puts undocumented immigrants on a quick and easy path to U.S. citizenship. But for people who have entered the U.S. unlawfully and live here without papers, the line to legal status is neither short nor easy, even for those with U.S. citizen spouses. Becoming Legal: Immigration Law and Mixed Status Families follows mixed status couples down the long and bumpy road of immigration processing. It explores how they navigate every step along the way, from the decision to undertake legalization, to the immigration interview in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, to the effort to put together a case of "extreme hardship" so that the undocumented family member can return. Author Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz also discusses families' efforts to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of immigration processing-both for those who are successful and those who are not.
Becoming Legal provides rare insights into U.S. immigration processing and the ways in which immigration policies affect undocumented people, lawful immigrants, and U.S. citizens alike. It will also help students more fully understand central questions in U.S. immigration debates, such as: Why don't undocumented people wait their turn to enter the U.S. legally? Why don't they legalize their status when they have U.S. citizen relatives? And, what are the relationships between undocumented people and U.S. citizens in the current period?
Keywords: Immigration, Undocumented migrants, Family, Citizenship, United States
Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz
Forthcoming 2016 Oxford University Press
Anthropology
There are approximately eleven million undocumented people living in the United States, and most of them have U.S. citizen family members. There is a common perception that marriage to a U.S. citizen puts undocumented immigrants on a quick and easy path to U.S. citizenship. But for people who have entered the U.S. unlawfully and live here without papers, the line to legal status is neither short nor easy, even for those with U.S. citizen spouses. Becoming Legal: Immigration Law and Mixed Status Families follows mixed status couples down the long and bumpy road of immigration processing. It explores how they navigate every step along the way, from the decision to undertake legalization, to the immigration interview in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, to the effort to put together a case of "extreme hardship" so that the undocumented family member can return. Author Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz also discusses families' efforts to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of immigration processing-both for those who are successful and those who are not.
Becoming Legal provides rare insights into U.S. immigration processing and the ways in which immigration policies affect undocumented people, lawful immigrants, and U.S. citizens alike. It will also help students more fully understand central questions in U.S. immigration debates, such as: Why don't undocumented people wait their turn to enter the U.S. legally? Why don't they legalize their status when they have U.S. citizen relatives? And, what are the relationships between undocumented people and U.S. citizens in the current period?
Keywords: Immigration, Undocumented migrants, Family, Citizenship, United States
Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America
Roberto G. Gonzales
2015 University of California Press
Sociology / Immigration and Emigration
Over two million of the nation’s eleven million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood. Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures. In Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales introduces us to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, who had good grades and a strong network of community support that propelled him to college and DREAM Act organizing but still landed in a factory job a few short years after graduation, and the early-exiters, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations. This vivid ethnography explores why highly educated undocumented youth share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, despite the fact that higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America. Mining the results of an extraordinary twelve-year study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles, Lives in Limbo exposes the failures of a system that integrates children into K-12 schools but ultimately denies them the rewards of their labor.
Keywords: Immigration, Education, DREAMers, Childhood, United States
Roberto G. Gonzales
2015 University of California Press
Sociology / Immigration and Emigration
Over two million of the nation’s eleven million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood. Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures. In Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales introduces us to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, who had good grades and a strong network of community support that propelled him to college and DREAM Act organizing but still landed in a factory job a few short years after graduation, and the early-exiters, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations. This vivid ethnography explores why highly educated undocumented youth share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, despite the fact that higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America. Mining the results of an extraordinary twelve-year study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles, Lives in Limbo exposes the failures of a system that integrates children into K-12 schools but ultimately denies them the rewards of their labor.
Keywords: Immigration, Education, DREAMers, Childhood, United States
Countering Development: Indigenous Modernity and the Moral Imagination
David Gow
2008 Duke University Press
Anthropology/Development Studies
Cauca, located in southwestern Colombia and home to the largest indigenous population in the country, is renowned as a site of indigenous mobilization. In 1994, following a destructive earthquake, many families in Cauca were forced to leave their communities of origin and relocate to other areas within the province where the state provided them with land and housing. Noting that disasters offer communities the opportunity to remake themselves and their priorities, David D. Gow examines how three different communities established after the earthquake wrestled with conflicting visions of development. He shows how they each countered traditional notions of development by moving beyond a myopic obsession with poverty alleviation to demand that Colombia become more inclusive and treat all of its people as citizens with full rights and responsibilities. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted annually in Cauca from 1995 through 2002, Gow compares the development plans of the three communities, looking at both the planning processes and the plans themselves. In so doing, he demonstrates that there is no single indigenous approach to development and modernity. He describes differences in how each community defined and employed the concept of culture, how they connected a concern with culture to economic and political reconstruction, and how they sought to assert their own priorities while engaging with the existing development resources at their disposal. Ultimately, Gow argues that the moral vision advanced by the indigenous movement, combined with the growing importance attached to human rights, offers a fruitful way to think about development: less as a process of integration into a rigidly defined modernity than as a critical modernity based on a radical politics of inclusive citizenship.
Keywords: Alternative Development, Human Rights, Disasters, Indigenous Knowledge, Colombia, Latin America
David Gow
2008 Duke University Press
Anthropology/Development Studies
Cauca, located in southwestern Colombia and home to the largest indigenous population in the country, is renowned as a site of indigenous mobilization. In 1994, following a destructive earthquake, many families in Cauca were forced to leave their communities of origin and relocate to other areas within the province where the state provided them with land and housing. Noting that disasters offer communities the opportunity to remake themselves and their priorities, David D. Gow examines how three different communities established after the earthquake wrestled with conflicting visions of development. He shows how they each countered traditional notions of development by moving beyond a myopic obsession with poverty alleviation to demand that Colombia become more inclusive and treat all of its people as citizens with full rights and responsibilities. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted annually in Cauca from 1995 through 2002, Gow compares the development plans of the three communities, looking at both the planning processes and the plans themselves. In so doing, he demonstrates that there is no single indigenous approach to development and modernity. He describes differences in how each community defined and employed the concept of culture, how they connected a concern with culture to economic and political reconstruction, and how they sought to assert their own priorities while engaging with the existing development resources at their disposal. Ultimately, Gow argues that the moral vision advanced by the indigenous movement, combined with the growing importance attached to human rights, offers a fruitful way to think about development: less as a process of integration into a rigidly defined modernity than as a critical modernity based on a radical politics of inclusive citizenship.
Keywords: Alternative Development, Human Rights, Disasters, Indigenous Knowledge, Colombia, Latin America
Direct Action: An Ethnography
David Graeber
2009 AK Press
Anthropology
In the best tradition of participant-observation, anthropologist David Graeber undertakes the first detailed ethnographic study of the global justice movement. Starting from the assumption that, when dealing with possibilities of global transformation and emerging political forms, a disinterested, "objective" perspective is impossible, he writes as both scholar and activist. At the same time, his experiment in the application of ethnographic methods to important ongoing political events is a serious and unique contribution to the field of anthropology, as well as an inquiry into anthropology's political implications. The case study at the center of Direct Action is the organizing and events that led to the dramatic protest against the Summit of the Americas in Québec City in 2001. Written in a clear, accessible style (with a minimum of academic jargon), this study brings readers behind the scenes of a movement that has changed the terms of debate about world power relations. From informal conversations in coffee shops to large "spokescouncil" planning meetings and teargas-drenched street actions, Graeber paints a vivid and fascinating picture. Along the way, he addresses matters of deep interest to anthropologists: meeting structure and process, language, symbolism, representation, the specific rituals of activist culture, and much more.
Keywords: Activism, Global Justice, Activist Culture, Summit of the Americas, Transnational Networks
David Graeber
2009 AK Press
Anthropology
In the best tradition of participant-observation, anthropologist David Graeber undertakes the first detailed ethnographic study of the global justice movement. Starting from the assumption that, when dealing with possibilities of global transformation and emerging political forms, a disinterested, "objective" perspective is impossible, he writes as both scholar and activist. At the same time, his experiment in the application of ethnographic methods to important ongoing political events is a serious and unique contribution to the field of anthropology, as well as an inquiry into anthropology's political implications. The case study at the center of Direct Action is the organizing and events that led to the dramatic protest against the Summit of the Americas in Québec City in 2001. Written in a clear, accessible style (with a minimum of academic jargon), this study brings readers behind the scenes of a movement that has changed the terms of debate about world power relations. From informal conversations in coffee shops to large "spokescouncil" planning meetings and teargas-drenched street actions, Graeber paints a vivid and fascinating picture. Along the way, he addresses matters of deep interest to anthropologists: meeting structure and process, language, symbolism, representation, the specific rituals of activist culture, and much more.
Keywords: Activism, Global Justice, Activist Culture, Summit of the Americas, Transnational Networks
More than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa
Susan Greenbaum
2002 University Press of Florida
Anthropology
This engaging ethnography follows Cuban exiles from Jose Marti's revolution to the Jim Crow South in Tampa, Florida, as they shape an Afro-Cuban-American identity over a span of five generations. Unlike most studies of the Cuban exodus to the United States, which focus on the white, middle-class, conservative exiles from Castro's Cuba, More Than Black is peopled with Afro-Cubans of more modest means and more liberal ideology. Fifteen years of collaboration between the author and members of Tampa's century-old Marti-Maceo Society, a mutual-aid and Cuban independence group, yield a work that combines the intimacy of ethnography with the reach of oral and archival history. Its weave of rich historical and ethnographic materials re-creates and examines the developing community of black immigrants in Ybor City and West Tampa, the old cigar-making neighborhoods of the city. It is a story of unfolding consequences that begins when the black and white solidarity of emigrating Cubans comes up against Jim Crow racism and progresses through a painful renegotiation of allegiances and identities. Building on Marti's declaration that being Cuban was "more than white, more than black," this study views, from the vantage of a community unique in time and place, the joint effects of ethnicity and gender in shaping racial identities. Photographs of individuals, families, and events, both historical and contemporary, complement the highly readable text. "Among the many merits of this book is the fact that Greenbaum convincingly places the experience of this small community within the widest context. In so doing, she dexterously reveals the dialectical interplay among local, state, national, and international developments. It is local history written with the eyes of an eagle, which is how it should be written but seldom is. It is a remarkable achievement.""--Winston James, Columbia University
Keywords: Afro-Cubans, Historical Anthropology, Afro-Latino Identity, Archival Research, Tampa, United States
Susan Greenbaum
2002 University Press of Florida
Anthropology
This engaging ethnography follows Cuban exiles from Jose Marti's revolution to the Jim Crow South in Tampa, Florida, as they shape an Afro-Cuban-American identity over a span of five generations. Unlike most studies of the Cuban exodus to the United States, which focus on the white, middle-class, conservative exiles from Castro's Cuba, More Than Black is peopled with Afro-Cubans of more modest means and more liberal ideology. Fifteen years of collaboration between the author and members of Tampa's century-old Marti-Maceo Society, a mutual-aid and Cuban independence group, yield a work that combines the intimacy of ethnography with the reach of oral and archival history. Its weave of rich historical and ethnographic materials re-creates and examines the developing community of black immigrants in Ybor City and West Tampa, the old cigar-making neighborhoods of the city. It is a story of unfolding consequences that begins when the black and white solidarity of emigrating Cubans comes up against Jim Crow racism and progresses through a painful renegotiation of allegiances and identities. Building on Marti's declaration that being Cuban was "more than white, more than black," this study views, from the vantage of a community unique in time and place, the joint effects of ethnicity and gender in shaping racial identities. Photographs of individuals, families, and events, both historical and contemporary, complement the highly readable text. "Among the many merits of this book is the fact that Greenbaum convincingly places the experience of this small community within the widest context. In so doing, she dexterously reveals the dialectical interplay among local, state, national, and international developments. It is local history written with the eyes of an eagle, which is how it should be written but seldom is. It is a remarkable achievement.""--Winston James, Columbia University
Keywords: Afro-Cubans, Historical Anthropology, Afro-Latino Identity, Archival Research, Tampa, United States
Crossing Borders: Changing Social Identities in Southern Mexico
Kimberly M. Grimes
1998 University of Arizona Press
Anthropology
"Defining borders is a complex task, especially today as globalization accelerates at an unprecedented rate. We have entered a transnational age, one in which borders are more porous." So says Kimberly Grimes in Crossing Borders: Changing Social Identities in Southern Mexico, her investigation of migration to the United States from Putla de Guerrero, Oaxaca. Featuring testimonies of residents and migrants, Grimes allows local voices to describe the ways in which Putlecans find themselves negotiating among competing social values. The testaments of the Putlecans indicate that the changes occurring in their small town as a result of the circular migration to and from such immigrant enclaves as Atlantic City, New Jersey, are viewed with mixed emotions. Putlecans recognize the financial need to migrate north but they rue the increased consumerism, pollution, and trash that comes with the rising wealth. Men show off by driving their fancy cars with New Jersey tags around the tiny Mexican town, but influenced by Anglo culture, they also provide greater assistance in child care and housework. Women find the sexual and social freedoms of the United States liberating, but they still return home to baptize their babies. Grimes reminds us, however, that the Putlecans are not passive recipients of change but are actively embracing it, creating it, and mediating it. By reaching across the border to investigate migration, Grimes shows us that social and cultural change are not just the result of national and transnational influences, but are also locally negotiated phenomena.
Keywords: Migration, Transnational Migration, Multi-sited, Mexico, Gender, United States
Kimberly M. Grimes
1998 University of Arizona Press
Anthropology
"Defining borders is a complex task, especially today as globalization accelerates at an unprecedented rate. We have entered a transnational age, one in which borders are more porous." So says Kimberly Grimes in Crossing Borders: Changing Social Identities in Southern Mexico, her investigation of migration to the United States from Putla de Guerrero, Oaxaca. Featuring testimonies of residents and migrants, Grimes allows local voices to describe the ways in which Putlecans find themselves negotiating among competing social values. The testaments of the Putlecans indicate that the changes occurring in their small town as a result of the circular migration to and from such immigrant enclaves as Atlantic City, New Jersey, are viewed with mixed emotions. Putlecans recognize the financial need to migrate north but they rue the increased consumerism, pollution, and trash that comes with the rising wealth. Men show off by driving their fancy cars with New Jersey tags around the tiny Mexican town, but influenced by Anglo culture, they also provide greater assistance in child care and housework. Women find the sexual and social freedoms of the United States liberating, but they still return home to baptize their babies. Grimes reminds us, however, that the Putlecans are not passive recipients of change but are actively embracing it, creating it, and mediating it. By reaching across the border to investigate migration, Grimes shows us that social and cultural change are not just the result of national and transnational influences, but are also locally negotiated phenomena.
Keywords: Migration, Transnational Migration, Multi-sited, Mexico, Gender, United States
Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America
John Langston Gwaltney
1993 The New Press
Anthropology
In writing his Self-Portrait of Black America, anthropologist, folklorist, and humanist John Gwaltney went in search of "Core Black People"--the ordinary men and women who make up black America--and asked them to define their culture. Their responses, recorded in Drylongso, are to American oral history what blues and jazz are to American music. If the people in William H. Johnson's and Jacob Lawrence's paintings could talk, this is what they would say.
Keywords: African American Community Research, United States, Alternative Histories
John Langston Gwaltney
1993 The New Press
Anthropology
In writing his Self-Portrait of Black America, anthropologist, folklorist, and humanist John Gwaltney went in search of "Core Black People"--the ordinary men and women who make up black America--and asked them to define their culture. Their responses, recorded in Drylongso, are to American oral history what blues and jazz are to American music. If the people in William H. Johnson's and Jacob Lawrence's paintings could talk, this is what they would say.
Keywords: African American Community Research, United States, Alternative Histories
Más Que un Indio (More Than an Indian): Racial Ambivalence and Multiculturalism in Guatemala
Charles R. Hale
2006 SAR Press
Anthropology
Two decades ago, the phrase expressed a common-sense prescription for upward mobility in a racist society: to better themselves, Indians had to abandon their culture and identity. Ironically, today it captures the predicament of ladinos, members of Guatemala’s dominant culture. In the 1990s, Maya people organized in diverse ways to challenge racism and achieve basic rights. They achieved a broad recognition of their cultural rights during the same time that neoliberal economic reforms carried the day. The resulting “neoliberal multiculturalism” has opened important spaces for indigenous empowerment while recreating Guatemala’s racial hierarchy. The author examines this paradox through the eyes of provincial ladinos, who show growing respect for indigenous culture and support for equality while harboring deep anxieties about the prospect of Maya ascendancy. Their racial ambivalence embodies a desire to be free of racism without ceasing to benefit from ingrained racial privilege, epitomized by the belief that ladinos are “más que un indio.” This deeply researched and sensitively rendered study raises troubling questions about the contradictions of anti-racist politics and the limits of multiculturalism in Guatemala and, by implication, other countries in the midst of similar reform projects.
Charles R. Hale
2006 SAR Press
Anthropology
Two decades ago, the phrase expressed a common-sense prescription for upward mobility in a racist society: to better themselves, Indians had to abandon their culture and identity. Ironically, today it captures the predicament of ladinos, members of Guatemala’s dominant culture. In the 1990s, Maya people organized in diverse ways to challenge racism and achieve basic rights. They achieved a broad recognition of their cultural rights during the same time that neoliberal economic reforms carried the day. The resulting “neoliberal multiculturalism” has opened important spaces for indigenous empowerment while recreating Guatemala’s racial hierarchy. The author examines this paradox through the eyes of provincial ladinos, who show growing respect for indigenous culture and support for equality while harboring deep anxieties about the prospect of Maya ascendancy. Their racial ambivalence embodies a desire to be free of racism without ceasing to benefit from ingrained racial privilege, epitomized by the belief that ladinos are “más que un indio.” This deeply researched and sensitively rendered study raises troubling questions about the contradictions of anti-racist politics and the limits of multiculturalism in Guatemala and, by implication, other countries in the midst of similar reform projects.
Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship
Charles R. Hale (Editor)
2008 University of California Press
Anthropology
A product of the SSRC-MacArthur Program on Global Security and Cooperation, this volume maps the terrain on which political engagement and academic rigor meet. Scholars in many fields increasingly find themselves caught between the academy, with its demands for rigor and objectivity, and direct engagement in social activism. Some advocate on behalf of the communities they study; others incorporate the knowledge and leadership of their informants directly into the process of knowledge production. In this wide-ranging and multidisciplinary volume, leading scholar-activists analyze what ethical, political, and practical tensions arise in the course of such work. Contributors: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Edmund T. Gordon, Davydd Greenwood, Joy James, Peter Nien-chu Kiang, George Lipsitz, Samuel Martínez, Jennifer Bickham Mendez, Dani Nabudere, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Jemima Pierre, Laura Pulido, Shannon Speed, Shirley Suet-ling Tang, João Vargas
Keywords: Activism, Scholarship, Social Action, Multidisciplinary, Reader
Charles R. Hale (Editor)
2008 University of California Press
Anthropology
A product of the SSRC-MacArthur Program on Global Security and Cooperation, this volume maps the terrain on which political engagement and academic rigor meet. Scholars in many fields increasingly find themselves caught between the academy, with its demands for rigor and objectivity, and direct engagement in social activism. Some advocate on behalf of the communities they study; others incorporate the knowledge and leadership of their informants directly into the process of knowledge production. In this wide-ranging and multidisciplinary volume, leading scholar-activists analyze what ethical, political, and practical tensions arise in the course of such work. Contributors: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Edmund T. Gordon, Davydd Greenwood, Joy James, Peter Nien-chu Kiang, George Lipsitz, Samuel Martínez, Jennifer Bickham Mendez, Dani Nabudere, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Jemima Pierre, Laura Pulido, Shannon Speed, Shirley Suet-ling Tang, João Vargas
Keywords: Activism, Scholarship, Social Action, Multidisciplinary, Reader
Practicing Community: Class Culture and Power in an Urban Neighborhood
Rhoda Halperin
1998 University of Texas Press
Anthropology
Cincinnati's East End river community has been home to generations of working-class people. This racially mixed community has roots that reach back as far as seven generations. But the community is vulnerable. Developers bulldoze "raggedy" but affordable housing to build upscale condos, even as East Enders fight to preserve the community by participating in urban development planning controlled by powerful outsiders. This book portrays how East Enders practice the preservation of community. Drawing on more than six years of anthropological research and advocacy in the East End, Rhoda Halperin argues for redefining community not merely as a place, but as a set of culturally embedded and class-marked practices that give priority to caring for children and the elderly, procuring livelihood, and providing support for family, friends, and neighbors. These practices create the structures of community within the larger urban power structure. Halperin uses different genres to weave the voices of East Enders throughout the book. Poems and narratives offer poignant insights into the daily struggles against impersonal market forces that work against the struggle for livelihood. This firsthand account questions commonly held assumptions about working-class people. In a fresh way, it reveals the cultural construction of marginality, from the viewpoints of both "real East Enders" and the urban power structure.
Keywords: Gentrification, Urban Development, Community Preservation, Urban Ethnography, United States
Rhoda Halperin
1998 University of Texas Press
Anthropology
Cincinnati's East End river community has been home to generations of working-class people. This racially mixed community has roots that reach back as far as seven generations. But the community is vulnerable. Developers bulldoze "raggedy" but affordable housing to build upscale condos, even as East Enders fight to preserve the community by participating in urban development planning controlled by powerful outsiders. This book portrays how East Enders practice the preservation of community. Drawing on more than six years of anthropological research and advocacy in the East End, Rhoda Halperin argues for redefining community not merely as a place, but as a set of culturally embedded and class-marked practices that give priority to caring for children and the elderly, procuring livelihood, and providing support for family, friends, and neighbors. These practices create the structures of community within the larger urban power structure. Halperin uses different genres to weave the voices of East Enders throughout the book. Poems and narratives offer poignant insights into the daily struggles against impersonal market forces that work against the struggle for livelihood. This firsthand account questions commonly held assumptions about working-class people. In a fresh way, it reveals the cultural construction of marginality, from the viewpoints of both "real East Enders" and the urban power structure.
Keywords: Gentrification, Urban Development, Community Preservation, Urban Ethnography, United States
Driving after Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb
Rachel Heiman
2015 University of California Press
Anthropology
A paradoxical situation emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century: the dramatic upscaling of the suburban American dream even as the possibilities for achieving and maintaining it diminished. Having fled to the suburbs in search of affordable homes, open space, and better schools, city-raised parents found their modest homes eclipsed by McMansions, local schools and roads overburdened and underfunded, and their ability to keep up with the pressures of extravagant consumerism increasingly tenuous. How do class anxieties play out amid such disconcerting cultural, political, and economic changes? In this incisive ethnography set in a New Jersey suburb outside New York City, Rachel Heiman takes us into people’s homes; their community meetings, where they debate security gates and school redistricting; and even their cars, to offer an intimate view of the tensions and uncertainties of being middle class at that time.
With a gift for bringing to life the everyday workings of class in the lives of children, youth, and their parents, Heiman offers an illuminating look at the contemporary complexities of class rooted in racialized lives, hyperconsumption, and neoliberal citizenship. She argues convincingly that to understand our current economic situation we need to attend to the subtle but forceful formation of sensibilities, spaces, and habits that durably motivate people and shape their actions and outlooks. “Rugged entitlement” is Heiman’s name for the middle class’s sense of entitlement to a way of life that is increasingly untenable and that is accompanied by an anxious feeling that they must vigilantly pursue their own interests to maintain and further their class position. Driving after Class is a model of fine-grained ethnography that shows how families try to make sense of who they are and where they are going in a highly competitive and uncertain time.
Keywords: Class, Racialized Lives, Hyperconsumption, Neoliberal Citizenship, Engaged Methodology
Rachel Heiman
2015 University of California Press
Anthropology
A paradoxical situation emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century: the dramatic upscaling of the suburban American dream even as the possibilities for achieving and maintaining it diminished. Having fled to the suburbs in search of affordable homes, open space, and better schools, city-raised parents found their modest homes eclipsed by McMansions, local schools and roads overburdened and underfunded, and their ability to keep up with the pressures of extravagant consumerism increasingly tenuous. How do class anxieties play out amid such disconcerting cultural, political, and economic changes? In this incisive ethnography set in a New Jersey suburb outside New York City, Rachel Heiman takes us into people’s homes; their community meetings, where they debate security gates and school redistricting; and even their cars, to offer an intimate view of the tensions and uncertainties of being middle class at that time.
With a gift for bringing to life the everyday workings of class in the lives of children, youth, and their parents, Heiman offers an illuminating look at the contemporary complexities of class rooted in racialized lives, hyperconsumption, and neoliberal citizenship. She argues convincingly that to understand our current economic situation we need to attend to the subtle but forceful formation of sensibilities, spaces, and habits that durably motivate people and shape their actions and outlooks. “Rugged entitlement” is Heiman’s name for the middle class’s sense of entitlement to a way of life that is increasingly untenable and that is accompanied by an anxious feeling that they must vigilantly pursue their own interests to maintain and further their class position. Driving after Class is a model of fine-grained ethnography that shows how families try to make sense of who they are and where they are going in a highly competitive and uncertain time.
Keywords: Class, Racialized Lives, Hyperconsumption, Neoliberal Citizenship, Engaged Methodology
Youth Politics in Putin's Russia: Producing Patriots and Entrepreneurs
Julie Hemment
2015 Indiana University Press: New Anthropologies of Europe Series
Anthropology
Julie Hemment provides a fresh perspective on the controversial nationalist youth projects that have proliferated in Russia in the Putin era, examining them from the point of view of their participants and offering provocative insights into their origins and significance. The pro-Kremlin organization Nashi (“Ours”) and other state-run initiatives to mobilize Russian youth have been widely reviled in the West, seen as Soviet throwbacks and evidence of Russia’s authoritarian turn. By contrast, Hemment’s detailed ethnographic analysis finds an astute global awareness and a paradoxical kinship with the international democracy-promoting interventions of the 1990s. Drawing on Soviet political forms but responding to 21st-century disenchantments with the neoliberal state, these projects seek to produce not only patriots, but also volunteers, entrepreneurs, and activists.
Keywords: Ethnography, Nationalism, Social movements, Youth, Politics, Neoliberalism, Soviet Union, Russia
Julie Hemment
2015 Indiana University Press: New Anthropologies of Europe Series
Anthropology
Julie Hemment provides a fresh perspective on the controversial nationalist youth projects that have proliferated in Russia in the Putin era, examining them from the point of view of their participants and offering provocative insights into their origins and significance. The pro-Kremlin organization Nashi (“Ours”) and other state-run initiatives to mobilize Russian youth have been widely reviled in the West, seen as Soviet throwbacks and evidence of Russia’s authoritarian turn. By contrast, Hemment’s detailed ethnographic analysis finds an astute global awareness and a paradoxical kinship with the international democracy-promoting interventions of the 1990s. Drawing on Soviet political forms but responding to 21st-century disenchantments with the neoliberal state, these projects seek to produce not only patriots, but also volunteers, entrepreneurs, and activists.
Keywords: Ethnography, Nationalism, Social movements, Youth, Politics, Neoliberalism, Soviet Union, Russia
Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid and NGOs
Julie Hemment
2007 Indiana University Press
Anthropology
Julie Hemment’s engrossing study traces the development encounter through interactions between international foundations and Russian women’s groups during a decade of national collapse. Prohibited from organizing independently under state socialism, women’s groups became a focus of attention in the mid-1990s for foundations eager to promote participatory democracy, but the version of civil society that has emerged (the “third sector”) is far from what Russian activists envisioned and what donor agencies promised. Drawing on ethnographic methods and Participatory Action Research, Hemment tells the story of her introduction to and growing collaboration with members of the group Zhenskii Svet (Women’s Light) in the provincial city of Tver.
Keywords: NGOs, Women's Rights, Activism, International Aid, Participatory Action Research
Julie Hemment
2007 Indiana University Press
Anthropology
Julie Hemment’s engrossing study traces the development encounter through interactions between international foundations and Russian women’s groups during a decade of national collapse. Prohibited from organizing independently under state socialism, women’s groups became a focus of attention in the mid-1990s for foundations eager to promote participatory democracy, but the version of civil society that has emerged (the “third sector”) is far from what Russian activists envisioned and what donor agencies promised. Drawing on ethnographic methods and Participatory Action Research, Hemment tells the story of her introduction to and growing collaboration with members of the group Zhenskii Svet (Women’s Light) in the provincial city of Tver.
Keywords: NGOs, Women's Rights, Activism, International Aid, Participatory Action Research
Liquidated
Karen Ho
2009 Duke University Press
Anthropology
Financial collapses--whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market--are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In Liquidated, Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed. Through an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, Ho describes how a financially dominant but highly unstable market system is understood, justified, and producted through the restructuring of corporations and the larger economy. Ho, who worked as an investment banker herself, argues that bankers' approaches to financial markets and corporate America are inseparable from the structures and strategies of their workplaces. Her ethnographic analysis of those workplaces is filled with the voices of stressed first-year associates, overworked and alienated analysts, undergraduates eager to be hired, and seasoned managing directors. Recruited from elite universities as "the best and the brightest," investment bankers are socialized into a world of high risk and high reward. They are paid handsomely, with the understanding that they may be let go at any time. Their workplace culture and networks of privilege create the perception that job insecurity builds character, and employee liquidity results in smart, efficient business. Based on this culture of liquidity and compensation practices tied to profligate deal-making, Wall Street investment bankers reshape corporate America in their own image. Their mission is the creation of shareholder value, but Ho demonstrates that their practices and assumptions often produce crises instead. By connecting the values and actions of investment bankers to the construction of markets and the restructuring of U.S. corporations, Liquidated reveals the particular culture of Wall Street often obscured by triumphalist readings of capitalist globalization.
Keywords: Finance, Wall Street, Neoliberalism, Studying-up, New York, United States
Karen Ho
2009 Duke University Press
Anthropology
Financial collapses--whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market--are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In Liquidated, Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed. Through an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, Ho describes how a financially dominant but highly unstable market system is understood, justified, and producted through the restructuring of corporations and the larger economy. Ho, who worked as an investment banker herself, argues that bankers' approaches to financial markets and corporate America are inseparable from the structures and strategies of their workplaces. Her ethnographic analysis of those workplaces is filled with the voices of stressed first-year associates, overworked and alienated analysts, undergraduates eager to be hired, and seasoned managing directors. Recruited from elite universities as "the best and the brightest," investment bankers are socialized into a world of high risk and high reward. They are paid handsomely, with the understanding that they may be let go at any time. Their workplace culture and networks of privilege create the perception that job insecurity builds character, and employee liquidity results in smart, efficient business. Based on this culture of liquidity and compensation practices tied to profligate deal-making, Wall Street investment bankers reshape corporate America in their own image. Their mission is the creation of shareholder value, but Ho demonstrates that their practices and assumptions often produce crises instead. By connecting the values and actions of investment bankers to the construction of markets and the restructuring of U.S. corporations, Liquidated reveals the particular culture of Wall Street often obscured by triumphalist readings of capitalist globalization.
Keywords: Finance, Wall Street, Neoliberalism, Studying-up, New York, United States
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies
Seth Holmes
2013 University of California Press
Anthropology
This book is an ethnographic witness to the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants. Based on five years of research in the field (including berry-picking and traveling with migrants back and forth from Oaxaca up the West Coast), Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, uncovers how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes’ material is visceral and powerful—for instance, he trekked with his informants illegally through the desert border into Arizona, where they were apprehended and jailed by the Border Patrol. After he was released from jail (and his companions were deported back to Mexico), Holmes interviewed Border Patrol agents, local residents, and armed vigilantes in the borderlands. He lived with indigenous Mexican families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals, participated in healing rituals, and mourned at funerals for friends. The result is a "thick description" that conveys the full measure of struggle, suffering, and resilience of these farmworkers. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies weds the theoretical analysis of the anthropologist with the intimacy of the journalist to provide a compelling examination of structural and symbolic violence, medicalization, and the clinical gaze as they affect the experiences and perceptions of a vertical slice of indigenous Mexican migrant farmworkers, farm owners, doctors, and nurses. This reflexive, embodied anthropology deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which socially structured suffering comes to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care, especially through imputations of ethnic body difference. In the vehement debates on immigration reform and health reform, this book provides the necessary stories of real people and insights into our food system and health care system for us to move forward to fair policies and solutions.
Keywords: Migrants, Immigration, Health, Free Trade, Farmworkers, Border, United States, Mexico
Seth Holmes
2013 University of California Press
Anthropology
This book is an ethnographic witness to the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants. Based on five years of research in the field (including berry-picking and traveling with migrants back and forth from Oaxaca up the West Coast), Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, uncovers how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes’ material is visceral and powerful—for instance, he trekked with his informants illegally through the desert border into Arizona, where they were apprehended and jailed by the Border Patrol. After he was released from jail (and his companions were deported back to Mexico), Holmes interviewed Border Patrol agents, local residents, and armed vigilantes in the borderlands. He lived with indigenous Mexican families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals, participated in healing rituals, and mourned at funerals for friends. The result is a "thick description" that conveys the full measure of struggle, suffering, and resilience of these farmworkers. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies weds the theoretical analysis of the anthropologist with the intimacy of the journalist to provide a compelling examination of structural and symbolic violence, medicalization, and the clinical gaze as they affect the experiences and perceptions of a vertical slice of indigenous Mexican migrant farmworkers, farm owners, doctors, and nurses. This reflexive, embodied anthropology deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which socially structured suffering comes to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care, especially through imputations of ethnic body difference. In the vehement debates on immigration reform and health reform, this book provides the necessary stories of real people and insights into our food system and health care system for us to move forward to fair policies and solutions.
Keywords: Migrants, Immigration, Health, Free Trade, Farmworkers, Border, United States, Mexico
They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields: Illness, Injury, and Illegality among U.S. Farmworkers
Sarah Horton
Forthcoming 2016 University of California Press California Series in Public Anthropology
Anthropology
They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields takes the reader on an ethnographic tour of the melon and corn harvesting fields in California’s Central Valley to understand why farmworkers die at work each summer. Laden with captivating detail of farmworkers’ daily work and home lives, Horton examines how U.S. immigration policy and the historic exclusion of farmworkers from the promises of liberalism has made migrant farmworkers what she calls “exceptional workers.” She explores the deeply intertwined political, legal, and social factors that place Latino migrants at particular risk of illness and injury in the fields, as well as the patchwork of health care, disability, and Social Security policies that provide them little succor when they become sick or grow old. The book takes an in-depth look at the work risks faced by migrants at all stages of life: as teens, in their middle-age, and ultimately as elderly workers. By following the lives of a core group of farmworkers over nearly a decade, Horton provides a searing portrait of how their precarious immigration and work statuses culminate in preventable morbidity and premature death.
Keywords: Immigration, Farmworkers, Health care, Access, Morbidity, Labor, United States
Sarah Horton
Forthcoming 2016 University of California Press California Series in Public Anthropology
Anthropology
They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields takes the reader on an ethnographic tour of the melon and corn harvesting fields in California’s Central Valley to understand why farmworkers die at work each summer. Laden with captivating detail of farmworkers’ daily work and home lives, Horton examines how U.S. immigration policy and the historic exclusion of farmworkers from the promises of liberalism has made migrant farmworkers what she calls “exceptional workers.” She explores the deeply intertwined political, legal, and social factors that place Latino migrants at particular risk of illness and injury in the fields, as well as the patchwork of health care, disability, and Social Security policies that provide them little succor when they become sick or grow old. The book takes an in-depth look at the work risks faced by migrants at all stages of life: as teens, in their middle-age, and ultimately as elderly workers. By following the lives of a core group of farmworkers over nearly a decade, Horton provides a searing portrait of how their precarious immigration and work statuses culminate in preventable morbidity and premature death.
Keywords: Immigration, Farmworkers, Health care, Access, Morbidity, Labor, United States
Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity
John L. Jackson
2005 University of Chicago Press
Anthropology
New York's urban neighborhoods are full of young would-be emcees who aspire to "keep it real" and restaurants like Sylvia's famous soul food eatery that offer a taste of "authentic" black culture. In these and other venues, authenticity is considered the best way to distinguish the real from the phony, the genuine from the fake. But in Real Black, John L. Jackson Jr. proposes a new model for thinking about these issues—racial sincerity. Jackson argues that authenticity caricatures identity as something imposed on people, imprisoning them within stereotypes: an African American high school student who excels in the classroom, for instance, might be dismissed as "acting white." On the other hand, sincerity, as Jackson defines it, imagines authenticity as an incomplete measuring stick, an analytical model that attempts to deny people agency in their search for identity. Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in and around New York City, Jackson offers a kaleidoscope of subjects and stories that directly and indirectly address how race is negotiated in today's world—including tales of book-vending numerologists, urban conspiracy theorists, corrupt police officers, mixed-race neo-Nazis, and gospel choirs forbidden to catch the Holy Ghost. Jackson records and retells their interconnected sagas, all the while attempting to reconcile these stories with his own crisis of identity and authority as an anthropologist terrified by fieldwork. Finding ethnographic significance where mere mortals see only bricks and mortar, his invented alter ego Anthroman takes to the streets, showing how race is defined and debated, imposed and confounded every single day.
Keywords: Urban Ethnography, African American Identity, Racial Identity, Reflexive Ethnography, New York City, United States
John L. Jackson
2005 University of Chicago Press
Anthropology
New York's urban neighborhoods are full of young would-be emcees who aspire to "keep it real" and restaurants like Sylvia's famous soul food eatery that offer a taste of "authentic" black culture. In these and other venues, authenticity is considered the best way to distinguish the real from the phony, the genuine from the fake. But in Real Black, John L. Jackson Jr. proposes a new model for thinking about these issues—racial sincerity. Jackson argues that authenticity caricatures identity as something imposed on people, imprisoning them within stereotypes: an African American high school student who excels in the classroom, for instance, might be dismissed as "acting white." On the other hand, sincerity, as Jackson defines it, imagines authenticity as an incomplete measuring stick, an analytical model that attempts to deny people agency in their search for identity. Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in and around New York City, Jackson offers a kaleidoscope of subjects and stories that directly and indirectly address how race is negotiated in today's world—including tales of book-vending numerologists, urban conspiracy theorists, corrupt police officers, mixed-race neo-Nazis, and gospel choirs forbidden to catch the Holy Ghost. Jackson records and retells their interconnected sagas, all the while attempting to reconcile these stories with his own crisis of identity and authority as an anthropologist terrified by fieldwork. Finding ethnographic significance where mere mortals see only bricks and mortar, his invented alter ego Anthroman takes to the streets, showing how race is defined and debated, imposed and confounded every single day.
Keywords: Urban Ethnography, African American Identity, Racial Identity, Reflexive Ethnography, New York City, United States
Consequential Damages of Nuclear War - The Rongelap Report
Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly Barker
2008 Left Coast Press
Anthropology
The hydrogen test-bomb Bravo, dropped on the Marshall Islands in 1954, had enormous consequences for the Rongelap people. Anthropologists Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly Barker provide incontrovertible evidence of physical and financial damages to individuals and cultural and psycho-social damages to the community through use of declassified government documents, oral histories and ethnographic research, conducted with the Marshallese community within a unique collaborative framework. Their work helped produce a $1 billion award by the Nuclear Claims Tribunal and raises issues of bioethics, government secrecy, human rights, military testing, and academic activism. The report, reproduced here with accompanying materials, should be read by everyone concerned with the effects of nuclear war and is an essential text for courses in history, environmental studies, bioethics, human rights, and related subjects.
Keywords: Environmental Justice, Legal Anthropology, Nuclear Testing, Human Rights, Bioethics, Pacific Islands, United States
Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly Barker
2008 Left Coast Press
Anthropology
The hydrogen test-bomb Bravo, dropped on the Marshall Islands in 1954, had enormous consequences for the Rongelap people. Anthropologists Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly Barker provide incontrovertible evidence of physical and financial damages to individuals and cultural and psycho-social damages to the community through use of declassified government documents, oral histories and ethnographic research, conducted with the Marshallese community within a unique collaborative framework. Their work helped produce a $1 billion award by the Nuclear Claims Tribunal and raises issues of bioethics, government secrecy, human rights, military testing, and academic activism. The report, reproduced here with accompanying materials, should be read by everyone concerned with the effects of nuclear war and is an essential text for courses in history, environmental studies, bioethics, human rights, and related subjects.
Keywords: Environmental Justice, Legal Anthropology, Nuclear Testing, Human Rights, Bioethics, Pacific Islands, United States
Life and Death Matters (10 year follow up)
Barbara Rose Johnston
2011 Left Coast Press, Inc.
Anthropology
The first edition of Life and Death Matters was a breakthrough text, centralizing the experiences of those on the front lines of environmental crises and forging new paradigms for understanding how crisis emerge and how different groups of actors respond to them. This second edition, fully updated with both expanded and new chapters, once again provides a benchmark for the field and opens important pathways for further research. Authors reassess the state of scholarship and grassroots activism in a new century when social and environmental systems are being reconceptualised within post-9/11 security and biosecurity frameworks, when global warming and resource scarcity are not fears but realities, when global power and politics are being realigned, and when ecocide, ethnocide, and genocide are daily tragedies. This bold new edition of Life and Death Matters will be a widely used textbook and essential reading for students, scholars, and policy makers.
Keywords: Environmental Justice, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights
Barbara Rose Johnston
2011 Left Coast Press, Inc.
Anthropology
The first edition of Life and Death Matters was a breakthrough text, centralizing the experiences of those on the front lines of environmental crises and forging new paradigms for understanding how crisis emerge and how different groups of actors respond to them. This second edition, fully updated with both expanded and new chapters, once again provides a benchmark for the field and opens important pathways for further research. Authors reassess the state of scholarship and grassroots activism in a new century when social and environmental systems are being reconceptualised within post-9/11 security and biosecurity frameworks, when global warming and resource scarcity are not fears but realities, when global power and politics are being realigned, and when ecocide, ethnocide, and genocide are daily tragedies. This bold new edition of Life and Death Matters will be a widely used textbook and essential reading for students, scholars, and policy makers.
Keywords: Environmental Justice, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights
Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization
Jeffrey S. Juris
2008 Duke University Press
Anthropology
Since the first worldwide protests inspired by Peoples’ Global Action (PGA)—including the mobilization against the November 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle—anti–corporate globalization activists have staged direct action protests against multilateral institutions in cities such as Prague, Barcelona, Genoa, and Cancun. Barcelona is a critical node, as Catalan activists have played key roles in the more radical PGA network and the broader World Social Forum process. In 2001 and 2002, the anthropologist Jeffrey S. Juris participated in the Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance, one of the most influential anti–corporate globalization networks in Europe. Combining ethnographic research and activist political engagement, Juris took part in hundreds of meetings, gatherings, protests, and online discussions. Those experiences form the basis of Networking Futures, an innovative ethnography of transnational activist networking within the movements against corporate globalization. In an account full of activist voices and on-the-ground detail, Juris provides a history of anti–corporate globalization movements, an examination of their connections to local dynamics in Barcelona, and an analysis of movement-related politics, organizational forms, and decision-making. Depicting spectacular direct action protests in Barcelona and other cities, he describes how far-flung activist networks are embodied and how networking politics are performed. He further explores how activists have used e-mail lists, Web pages, and free software to organize actions, share information, coordinate at a distance, and stage “electronic civil disobedience.” Based on a powerful cultural logic, anti–corporate globalization networks have become models of and for emerging forms of radical, directly democratic politics. Activists are not only responding to growing poverty, inequality, and environmental devastation; they are also building social laboratories for the production of alternative values, discourses, and practices.
Keywords: Activism, Peoples' Global Action, Anti-Corporate Globalization Movement, Technological Activism
Jeffrey S. Juris
2008 Duke University Press
Anthropology
Since the first worldwide protests inspired by Peoples’ Global Action (PGA)—including the mobilization against the November 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle—anti–corporate globalization activists have staged direct action protests against multilateral institutions in cities such as Prague, Barcelona, Genoa, and Cancun. Barcelona is a critical node, as Catalan activists have played key roles in the more radical PGA network and the broader World Social Forum process. In 2001 and 2002, the anthropologist Jeffrey S. Juris participated in the Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance, one of the most influential anti–corporate globalization networks in Europe. Combining ethnographic research and activist political engagement, Juris took part in hundreds of meetings, gatherings, protests, and online discussions. Those experiences form the basis of Networking Futures, an innovative ethnography of transnational activist networking within the movements against corporate globalization. In an account full of activist voices and on-the-ground detail, Juris provides a history of anti–corporate globalization movements, an examination of their connections to local dynamics in Barcelona, and an analysis of movement-related politics, organizational forms, and decision-making. Depicting spectacular direct action protests in Barcelona and other cities, he describes how far-flung activist networks are embodied and how networking politics are performed. He further explores how activists have used e-mail lists, Web pages, and free software to organize actions, share information, coordinate at a distance, and stage “electronic civil disobedience.” Based on a powerful cultural logic, anti–corporate globalization networks have become models of and for emerging forms of radical, directly democratic politics. Activists are not only responding to growing poverty, inequality, and environmental devastation; they are also building social laboratories for the production of alternative values, discourses, and practices.
Keywords: Activism, Peoples' Global Action, Anti-Corporate Globalization Movement, Technological Activism
Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political
Jeffrey S. Juris and Alex Khasnabish (Editors)
2013 Duke University Press
Anthropology
Insurgent Encounters illuminates the dynamics of contemporary transnational social movements, including those advocating for women and indigenous groups, environmental justice, and alternative—cooperative rather than exploitative—forms of globalization. The contributors are politically engaged scholars working within the social movements they analyze. Their essays are both models of and arguments for activist ethnography. They demonstrate that such a methodology has the potential to reveal empirical issues and generate theoretical insights beyond the reach of traditional social-movement research methods. Activist ethnographers not only produce new understandings of contemporary forms of collective action, but also seek to contribute to struggles for social change. The editors suggest networks and spaces of encounter as the most useful conceptual rubrics for understanding shape-shifting social movements using digital and online technologies to produce innovative forms of political organization across local, regional, national, and transnational scales. A major rethinking of the practice and purpose of ethnography, Insurgent Encounters challenges dominant understandings of social transformation, political possibility, knowledge production, and the relation between intellectual labor and sociopolitical activism.Contributors: Giuseppe Caruso, Maribel Casas-Cortés, Janet Conway, Stéphane Couture, Vinci Daro, Manisha Desai, Sylvia Escárcega, David Hess, Jeffrey S. Juris, Alex Khasnabish, Lorenzo Mosca, Michal Osterweil, Geoffrey Pleyers, Dana E. Powell, Paul Routledge, M. K. Sterpka, Tish Stringer
Keywords: Activism, Social Movements, Globalization, Reader
Jeffrey S. Juris and Alex Khasnabish (Editors)
2013 Duke University Press
Anthropology
Insurgent Encounters illuminates the dynamics of contemporary transnational social movements, including those advocating for women and indigenous groups, environmental justice, and alternative—cooperative rather than exploitative—forms of globalization. The contributors are politically engaged scholars working within the social movements they analyze. Their essays are both models of and arguments for activist ethnography. They demonstrate that such a methodology has the potential to reveal empirical issues and generate theoretical insights beyond the reach of traditional social-movement research methods. Activist ethnographers not only produce new understandings of contemporary forms of collective action, but also seek to contribute to struggles for social change. The editors suggest networks and spaces of encounter as the most useful conceptual rubrics for understanding shape-shifting social movements using digital and online technologies to produce innovative forms of political organization across local, regional, national, and transnational scales. A major rethinking of the practice and purpose of ethnography, Insurgent Encounters challenges dominant understandings of social transformation, political possibility, knowledge production, and the relation between intellectual labor and sociopolitical activism.Contributors: Giuseppe Caruso, Maribel Casas-Cortés, Janet Conway, Stéphane Couture, Vinci Daro, Manisha Desai, Sylvia Escárcega, David Hess, Jeffrey S. Juris, Alex Khasnabish, Lorenzo Mosca, Michal Osterweil, Geoffrey Pleyers, Dana E. Powell, Paul Routledge, M. K. Sterpka, Tish Stringer
Keywords: Activism, Social Movements, Globalization, Reader
Lydia's Open Door: Inside Mexico's Most Modern Brothel
Pat Kelly
2008 University of California Press
Anthropology
In this groundbreaking ethnographic study, Patty Kelly examines the lives of the women who work in the Zona Galactica, a state-run brothel in Chiapas's capital city. By delving into lives that would otherwise go unremarked, Kelly documents the modernization of the sex industry during the neoliberal era in the city of Tuxtla Gutiérrez and illustrates how state-regulated sex became part of a broader effort by government officials to bring modernity to Chiapas, one of Mexico's poorest and most conflicted states. Kelly's innovative approach locates prostitution in a political-economic context by treating it as work. Most valuably, she conveys her analysis through vivid portraits of the lives of the sex workers themselves and shows how the women involved are neither victims nor heroines.
Keywords: Sex Industry, Political Economy, Women, Mexico
Pat Kelly
2008 University of California Press
Anthropology
In this groundbreaking ethnographic study, Patty Kelly examines the lives of the women who work in the Zona Galactica, a state-run brothel in Chiapas's capital city. By delving into lives that would otherwise go unremarked, Kelly documents the modernization of the sex industry during the neoliberal era in the city of Tuxtla Gutiérrez and illustrates how state-regulated sex became part of a broader effort by government officials to bring modernity to Chiapas, one of Mexico's poorest and most conflicted states. Kelly's innovative approach locates prostitution in a political-economic context by treating it as work. Most valuably, she conveys her analysis through vivid portraits of the lives of the sex workers themselves and shows how the women involved are neither victims nor heroines.
Keywords: Sex Industry, Political Economy, Women, Mexico
Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World
Tracy Kidder
2004 Random House
Popular
This compelling and inspiring book, now in a deluxe paperback edition, shows how one person can work wonders. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, Pulitzer Prize—winning author Tracy Kidder tells the true story of a gifted man who loves the world and has set out to do all he can to cure it. In medical school, Paul Farmer found his life’s calling: to cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. Kidder’s magnificent account takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication to the philosophy that “the only real nation is humanity.” At the heart of this book is the example of a life based on hope and on an understanding of the truth of the Haitian proverb “Beyond mountains there are mountains”–as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too. “Mountains Beyond Mountains unfolds with a force of gathering revelation,” says Annie Dillard, and Jonathan Harr notes, “[Paul Farmer] wants to change the world. Certainly this luminous and powerful book will change the way you see it.”
Keywords: Medical Anthropology, Popular Literature, Paul Farmer, Biography
Tracy Kidder
2004 Random House
Popular
This compelling and inspiring book, now in a deluxe paperback edition, shows how one person can work wonders. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, Pulitzer Prize—winning author Tracy Kidder tells the true story of a gifted man who loves the world and has set out to do all he can to cure it. In medical school, Paul Farmer found his life’s calling: to cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. Kidder’s magnificent account takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication to the philosophy that “the only real nation is humanity.” At the heart of this book is the example of a life based on hope and on an understanding of the truth of the Haitian proverb “Beyond mountains there are mountains”–as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too. “Mountains Beyond Mountains unfolds with a force of gathering revelation,” says Annie Dillard, and Jonathan Harr notes, “[Paul Farmer] wants to change the world. Certainly this luminous and powerful book will change the way you see it.”
Keywords: Medical Anthropology, Popular Literature, Paul Farmer, Biography
Tobacco Town Futures: Global Encounters in Rural Kentucky
Ann Kingsolver
2011 Waveland Press
Anthropology
Situated between the foothills of Appalachia to the east and bluegrass country to the west, Nicholas County has been home to small tobacco farms in rural Kentucky for the past 200 years. But now, in the midst of tremendous economic changes generated by the movement of both textile jobs and tobacco production to other countries, residents of Nicholas County face an uncertain future. Based on twenty-five years of research, Kingsolver’s longitudinal ethnography of Nicholas County, her home community, synthesizes geographical, historical, economic, and political processes that have shaped lifeways and worldviews. She documents the perspectives of farmers, factory workers, politicians, those pursuing new niches in the labor market, and middle school students in search of “alternative futures.” Countering stereotypes, Kingsolver emphasizes the skills and agency of rural residents and demonstrates how people in widely dispersed and seemingly isolated communities in the world are connected through capitalist logic and practice, thereby illuminating globalization’s far-reaching effects.
Keywords: Longitudinal Ethnography, Labor, Globalization, Tobacco, United States
Ann Kingsolver
2011 Waveland Press
Anthropology
Situated between the foothills of Appalachia to the east and bluegrass country to the west, Nicholas County has been home to small tobacco farms in rural Kentucky for the past 200 years. But now, in the midst of tremendous economic changes generated by the movement of both textile jobs and tobacco production to other countries, residents of Nicholas County face an uncertain future. Based on twenty-five years of research, Kingsolver’s longitudinal ethnography of Nicholas County, her home community, synthesizes geographical, historical, economic, and political processes that have shaped lifeways and worldviews. She documents the perspectives of farmers, factory workers, politicians, those pursuing new niches in the labor market, and middle school students in search of “alternative futures.” Countering stereotypes, Kingsolver emphasizes the skills and agency of rural residents and demonstrates how people in widely dispersed and seemingly isolated communities in the world are connected through capitalist logic and practice, thereby illuminating globalization’s far-reaching effects.
Keywords: Longitudinal Ethnography, Labor, Globalization, Tobacco, United States
Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and their Critics
Stuart Kirsch
University of California Press
Anthropology
Corporations are among the most powerful institutions of our time, but they are also responsible for a wide range of harmful social and environmental impacts. Consequently, political movements and nongovernmental organizations increasingly contest the risks that corporations pose to people and nature. Mining Capitalism examines the strategies through which corporations manage their relationships with these critics and adversaries. By focusing on the conflict over the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea, Stuart Kirsch tells the story of a slow-moving environmental disaster and the international network of indigenous peoples, advocacy groups, and lawyers that sought to protect local rivers and rain forests. Along the way, he analyzes how corporations promote their interests by manipulating science and invoking the discourses of sustainability and social responsibility. Based on two decades of anthropological research, this book is comparative in scope, showing readers how similar dynamics operate in other industries around the world.
Keywords: Activist Anthropology, Indigenous Advocacy, Policy, Political Economy
Stuart Kirsch
University of California Press
Anthropology
Corporations are among the most powerful institutions of our time, but they are also responsible for a wide range of harmful social and environmental impacts. Consequently, political movements and nongovernmental organizations increasingly contest the risks that corporations pose to people and nature. Mining Capitalism examines the strategies through which corporations manage their relationships with these critics and adversaries. By focusing on the conflict over the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea, Stuart Kirsch tells the story of a slow-moving environmental disaster and the international network of indigenous peoples, advocacy groups, and lawyers that sought to protect local rivers and rain forests. Along the way, he analyzes how corporations promote their interests by manipulating science and invoking the discourses of sustainability and social responsibility. Based on two decades of anthropological research, this book is comparative in scope, showing readers how similar dynamics operate in other industries around the world.
Keywords: Activist Anthropology, Indigenous Advocacy, Policy, Political Economy
Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea
Stuart Kirsch
2006 Stanford University Press
Anthropology
While ethnography ordinarily privileges anthropological interpretations, this book attempts the reciprocal process of describing indigenous modes of analysis. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with the Yonggom people of New Guinea, the author examines how indigenous analysis organizes local knowledge and provides a framework for interpreting events, from first contact and colonial rule to contemporary interactions with a multinational mining company and the Indonesian state. This book highlights Yonggom participation in two political movements: an international campaign against the Ok Tedi mine, which is responsible for extensive deforestation and environmental problems, and the opposition to Indonesian control over West Papua, including Yonggom experiences as political refugees in Papua New Guinea. The author challenges a prevailing homogenization in current representations of indigenous peoples, showing how Yonggom modes of analysis specifically have shaped these political movements.
Keywords: Indigenous Analysis, Collaborative Methods, Environmental Justice, New Guinea
Stuart Kirsch
2006 Stanford University Press
Anthropology
While ethnography ordinarily privileges anthropological interpretations, this book attempts the reciprocal process of describing indigenous modes of analysis. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with the Yonggom people of New Guinea, the author examines how indigenous analysis organizes local knowledge and provides a framework for interpreting events, from first contact and colonial rule to contemporary interactions with a multinational mining company and the Indonesian state. This book highlights Yonggom participation in two political movements: an international campaign against the Ok Tedi mine, which is responsible for extensive deforestation and environmental problems, and the opposition to Indonesian control over West Papua, including Yonggom experiences as political refugees in Papua New Guinea. The author challenges a prevailing homogenization in current representations of indigenous peoples, showing how Yonggom modes of analysis specifically have shaped these political movements.
Keywords: Indigenous Analysis, Collaborative Methods, Environmental Justice, New Guinea
The New Chinatown
Peter Kwong
1996 Hill and Wang; MacMillan
Anthropology, Asian American Studies, Urban Studies
Newspapers today are filled with stories of corruption and strife in America's Chinatowns, reversing the popular view of Chinese Americans as a model minority of law-abiding, hard-working people whose diligent children end up in high-tech jobs. In The New Chinatown, Peter Kwong goes beyond the headlines in a compelling and detailed account of the political and cultural isolation of Chinese-American communities. This new edition offers a revised and updated text as well as a new chapter on Chinatown in the 1990s.
Keywords: Asian Americans, Chinese, United States, Minorities, Alternative Histories
Peter Kwong
1996 Hill and Wang; MacMillan
Anthropology, Asian American Studies, Urban Studies
Newspapers today are filled with stories of corruption and strife in America's Chinatowns, reversing the popular view of Chinese Americans as a model minority of law-abiding, hard-working people whose diligent children end up in high-tech jobs. In The New Chinatown, Peter Kwong goes beyond the headlines in a compelling and detailed account of the political and cultural isolation of Chinese-American communities. This new edition offers a revised and updated text as well as a new chapter on Chinatown in the 1990s.
Keywords: Asian Americans, Chinese, United States, Minorities, Alternative Histories
Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor
Peter Kwong
1999 The New Press
Asian American Studies
Hailed by the Philadelphia Inquirer as "a must-read," Forbidden Workers tells for the first time the full story of recent Chinese immigration to this country. Widely praised from the Wall Street Journal to Asian Week, the book uses the Chinese experience to shed light on broader issues of immigration from countries around the world. Author Peter Kwong has interviewed countless immigrant workers, activists, Chinatown powerbrokers, and "snakeheads" (smugglers who bring immigrants to the United States) and has traveled to China to talk with families of immigrants. The result is an unprecedented look at an invisible community within American society -- and at a billion-dollar industry whose commodity is workers who labor under conditions approaching modern slavery.
Keywords: Immigration, Chinese, United States
Peter Kwong
1999 The New Press
Asian American Studies
Hailed by the Philadelphia Inquirer as "a must-read," Forbidden Workers tells for the first time the full story of recent Chinese immigration to this country. Widely praised from the Wall Street Journal to Asian Week, the book uses the Chinese experience to shed light on broader issues of immigration from countries around the world. Author Peter Kwong has interviewed countless immigrant workers, activists, Chinatown powerbrokers, and "snakeheads" (smugglers who bring immigrants to the United States) and has traveled to China to talk with families of immigrants. The result is an unprecedented look at an invisible community within American society -- and at a billion-dollar industry whose commodity is workers who labor under conditions approaching modern slavery.
Keywords: Immigration, Chinese, United States
The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography
Luke Eric Lassiter
2005 Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Anthropology
The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography presents a historical, theoretical, and practice-oriented road map for this shift from incidental collaboration to a more conscious and explicit collaborative strategy. Luke Eric Lassiter charts the history of collaborative ethnography from its earliest implementation to its contemporary emergence in fields such as feminism, humanistic anthropology, and critical ethnography. On this historical and theoretical base, Lassiter outlines concrete steps for achieving a more deliberate and overt collaborative practice throughout the processes of fieldwork and writing. As a participatory action situated in the ethical commitments between ethnographers and consultants and focused on the co-construction of texts, collaborative ethnography, argues Lassiter, is among the most powerful ways to press ethnographic fieldwork and writing into the service of an applied and public scholarship.
Keywords: Collaborative Ethnography, Research Ethnics, Collaborative Writing
Luke Eric Lassiter
2005 Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Anthropology
The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography presents a historical, theoretical, and practice-oriented road map for this shift from incidental collaboration to a more conscious and explicit collaborative strategy. Luke Eric Lassiter charts the history of collaborative ethnography from its earliest implementation to its contemporary emergence in fields such as feminism, humanistic anthropology, and critical ethnography. On this historical and theoretical base, Lassiter outlines concrete steps for achieving a more deliberate and overt collaborative practice throughout the processes of fieldwork and writing. As a participatory action situated in the ethical commitments between ethnographers and consultants and focused on the co-construction of texts, collaborative ethnography, argues Lassiter, is among the most powerful ways to press ethnographic fieldwork and writing into the service of an applied and public scholarship.
Keywords: Collaborative Ethnography, Research Ethnics, Collaborative Writing
Collaborative Anthropologies (vols. 1-2 & vol. 3-5)
Luke Eric Lassiter and Samuel R. Cook
2013 Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
Anthropology
Collaborative Anthropologies is a forum for dialogue with a special focus on the complex collaborations between and among researchers and research participants/interlocutors. It features essays that are descriptive as well as analytical, from all subfields of anthropology and closely related disciplines, and that present a diversity of perspectives on collaborative research.
Keywords: Collaborative Methods
Luke Eric Lassiter and Samuel R. Cook
2013 Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
Anthropology
Collaborative Anthropologies is a forum for dialogue with a special focus on the complex collaborations between and among researchers and research participants/interlocutors. It features essays that are descriptive as well as analytical, from all subfields of anthropology and closely related disciplines, and that present a diversity of perspectives on collaborative research.
Keywords: Collaborative Methods
The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie's African American Community
Luke Eric Lassiter, Hurley Goodall, Elizabeth Campbell, and Michelle Natasya Johnson
2004 AltaMira Press
Anthropology, Writing, Sociology, African American Studies
Prompted by the overt omission of Muncie's black community from the famous community study by Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, the authors initiated this project to reveal the unrecorded historical and contemporary life of Middletown, a well-known pseudonym for the Midwestern city of Muncie, Indiana. As a collaboration of community and campus, this book recounts the early efforts of Hurley Goodall to develop a community history and archive that told the story of the African American community, and rectify the representation of small town America as exclusively white. The authors designed and implemented a collaborative ethnographic field project that involved intensive interviews, research, and writing between community organizations, local experts, ethnographers, and teams of college students. It may be purchased with a companion DVD, Middletown Redux, which recounts the making of the Other Side of Middletown, illuminating the development of this rewarding ethnography out of joint fieldwork, and the strong ties formed as a result between the local communities.The Other Side of Middletown project is sponsored by the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry in Muncie, Indiana. Middletown Redux is a twenty-six-minute informative and compelling film illustrates the process of creating a rich ethnography out of fieldwork and the rewards of collaborating with local communities. Middletown Redux is directed by James Miles and produced by the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry, Ball State University.
Keywords: Race, Middle America, African American Community Research, University-Community Collaborations, Indiana, United States
Luke Eric Lassiter, Hurley Goodall, Elizabeth Campbell, and Michelle Natasya Johnson
2004 AltaMira Press
Anthropology, Writing, Sociology, African American Studies
Prompted by the overt omission of Muncie's black community from the famous community study by Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, the authors initiated this project to reveal the unrecorded historical and contemporary life of Middletown, a well-known pseudonym for the Midwestern city of Muncie, Indiana. As a collaboration of community and campus, this book recounts the early efforts of Hurley Goodall to develop a community history and archive that told the story of the African American community, and rectify the representation of small town America as exclusively white. The authors designed and implemented a collaborative ethnographic field project that involved intensive interviews, research, and writing between community organizations, local experts, ethnographers, and teams of college students. It may be purchased with a companion DVD, Middletown Redux, which recounts the making of the Other Side of Middletown, illuminating the development of this rewarding ethnography out of joint fieldwork, and the strong ties formed as a result between the local communities.The Other Side of Middletown project is sponsored by the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry in Muncie, Indiana. Middletown Redux is a twenty-six-minute informative and compelling film illustrates the process of creating a rich ethnography out of fieldwork and the rewards of collaborating with local communities. Middletown Redux is directed by James Miles and produced by the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry, Ball State University.
Keywords: Race, Middle America, African American Community Research, University-Community Collaborations, Indiana, United States
Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women
Elliott Liebow
1995 Penguin; Free Press
Anthropology, Sociology
Liebow (Tally's Corner) here succeeds in demolishing the anonymity of the homeless. Skillfully blending a social scientist's objectivity with humanitarian concern, he observes women who live in a variety of shelters near Washington, D.C.--how they interact with one another, family and shelter staff; pass their days; and struggle to retain their dignity in the face of rejection by society. Liebow maintains that homelessness is a Catch-22, with few ways out; that homeless women are remarkably supportive of one another; that shelter workers are often dedicated, but also scared and autocratic in spite of their best intentions; that the men in these women's lives seldom offer help; and that homeless mothers are propelled by ties, however flimsy, to their children. Liebow's probing and morally honest report reveals hard truths about the humanity and inhumanity of us all.
Keywords: Homelessness, Housing, Women, Washington DC, United States
Elliott Liebow
1995 Penguin; Free Press
Anthropology, Sociology
Liebow (Tally's Corner) here succeeds in demolishing the anonymity of the homeless. Skillfully blending a social scientist's objectivity with humanitarian concern, he observes women who live in a variety of shelters near Washington, D.C.--how they interact with one another, family and shelter staff; pass their days; and struggle to retain their dignity in the face of rejection by society. Liebow maintains that homelessness is a Catch-22, with few ways out; that homeless women are remarkably supportive of one another; that shelter workers are often dedicated, but also scared and autocratic in spite of their best intentions; that the men in these women's lives seldom offer help; and that homeless mothers are propelled by ties, however flimsy, to their children. Liebow's probing and morally honest report reveals hard truths about the humanity and inhumanity of us all.
Keywords: Homelessness, Housing, Women, Washington DC, United States
Inequality, Poverty and Neoliberal Governance: Activist Ethnography in the Homeless Industry
Vincent Lyon-Callo
2008 University of Toronto Press
Anthropology
Why did the rate of homelessness remain at significant levels while the US economy was supposedly booming and hundreds of millions of dollars were spent in the homeless sheltering industry? Drawing upon five years of ethnographic fieldwork in a homeless shelter in Northampton, Massachusetts, Lyon-Callo argues that homelessness must be understood within the context of increasing neoliberal policies, practices, and discourses. As advocates, activists, policy makers, and homeless people focused attention on market-based and individualized practices of reform and governance, collective efforts that challenged an economy dependent on low wage jobs, declining housing affordability, and the dismantling of the social safety net were marginalized and ignored. Homelessness continued, despite, and partly due to, the limitations of the neoliberal approach. Combining the rich detail of an ethnographic study with the systemic examination of political economic studies, this book offers a view of homelessness and inequality that is rarely explored elsewhere. Chapters include discussion of the medicalization of homelessness, the difficulty of finding paid employment given broader political economic conditions, how shelter staff are trained to manage homeless people, how statistics are used to produce ideas of homeless people as deviants, and how funding concerns affect possibilities for resistance. Key to the study is an activist approach that raises the possibilities and problems associated with a publicly engaged anthropology.
Keywords: Homelessness, Neoliberalism, Advocacy, Medical Anthropology, Activist Anthropology, United States
Vincent Lyon-Callo
2008 University of Toronto Press
Anthropology
Why did the rate of homelessness remain at significant levels while the US economy was supposedly booming and hundreds of millions of dollars were spent in the homeless sheltering industry? Drawing upon five years of ethnographic fieldwork in a homeless shelter in Northampton, Massachusetts, Lyon-Callo argues that homelessness must be understood within the context of increasing neoliberal policies, practices, and discourses. As advocates, activists, policy makers, and homeless people focused attention on market-based and individualized practices of reform and governance, collective efforts that challenged an economy dependent on low wage jobs, declining housing affordability, and the dismantling of the social safety net were marginalized and ignored. Homelessness continued, despite, and partly due to, the limitations of the neoliberal approach. Combining the rich detail of an ethnographic study with the systemic examination of political economic studies, this book offers a view of homelessness and inequality that is rarely explored elsewhere. Chapters include discussion of the medicalization of homelessness, the difficulty of finding paid employment given broader political economic conditions, how shelter staff are trained to manage homeless people, how statistics are used to produce ideas of homeless people as deviants, and how funding concerns affect possibilities for resistance. Key to the study is an activist approach that raises the possibilities and problems associated with a publicly engaged anthropology.
Keywords: Homelessness, Neoliberalism, Advocacy, Medical Anthropology, Activist Anthropology, United States
Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood
Jay MacLeod
2008 Westview Press
Anthropology, Sociology, Urban Studies
Jay MacLeod brought us to the Clarendon Heights public housing development and introduced us to Jinx and Mokey and their teenage friends—the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers—in 1987 with the first edition of Ain’t No Makin’ It. The dreams of one peer group and the defeatism of the other moved readers, challenged ethnic stereotypes, and suggested how poverty is perpetuated. Eight years later MacLeod returned to Clarendon Heights, and the 1995 revision revealed how the young men struggled in the labor market and crime-ridden underground economy. This third edition chronicles the lives of the Brothers and Hallway Hangers into middle age. Having renewed relationships with the men, MacLeod allows them to speak for themselves in thirteen new interviews that are by turns heartbreaking and uplifting. Sociologists Katherine McClelland and David Karen analyze these stories in a concluding chapter, ensuring that Ain’t No Makin’ It remains an admired and invaluable testament to how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next.
Keywords: Inequality, Poverty, Urban, Youth, United States
Jay MacLeod
2008 Westview Press
Anthropology, Sociology, Urban Studies
Jay MacLeod brought us to the Clarendon Heights public housing development and introduced us to Jinx and Mokey and their teenage friends—the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers—in 1987 with the first edition of Ain’t No Makin’ It. The dreams of one peer group and the defeatism of the other moved readers, challenged ethnic stereotypes, and suggested how poverty is perpetuated. Eight years later MacLeod returned to Clarendon Heights, and the 1995 revision revealed how the young men struggled in the labor market and crime-ridden underground economy. This third edition chronicles the lives of the Brothers and Hallway Hangers into middle age. Having renewed relationships with the men, MacLeod allows them to speak for themselves in thirteen new interviews that are by turns heartbreaking and uplifting. Sociologists Katherine McClelland and David Karen analyze these stories in a concluding chapter, ensuring that Ain’t No Makin’ It remains an admired and invaluable testament to how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next.
Keywords: Inequality, Poverty, Urban, Youth, United States
American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins
Sarah Mahler
1995 Princeton University Press
Anthropology, Sociology, Politics
American Dreaming chronicles in rich detail the struggles of immigrants who have fled troubled homelands in search of a better life in the United States, only to be marginalized by the society that they hoped would embrace them. Sarah Mahler draws from her experiences living among undocumented Salvadoran and South American immigrants in a Long Island suburb of Manhattan. In moving interviews they describe their disillusionment with life in the United States but blame themselves individually or as a whole for their lack of economic success and not the greater society. As she explores the reasons behind this outlook, the author argues that marginalization fosters antagonism within ethnic groups while undermining the ethnic solidarity emphasized by many scholars of immigration. Mahler's investigation leads to conditions that often bar immigrants from success and that they cannot control, such as residential segregation, job exploitation, language and legal barriers, prejudice and outright hostility from their suburban neighbors. Some immigrants earn surplus income by using private cars as taxis, subletting space in apartments to lower rent burdens, and filling out legal forms and applications--in essence generating institutions largely parallel to those of the mainstream society whereby only a small group of entrepreneurs can profit. By exacting a price for what used to be acts of reciprocal good will in the homeland, these entrepreneurs leave people who had expected to be exploited by "Americans" feeling victimized by their own.
Keywords: Immigration, Racism, Legal Barriers, New York, United States
Sarah Mahler
1995 Princeton University Press
Anthropology, Sociology, Politics
American Dreaming chronicles in rich detail the struggles of immigrants who have fled troubled homelands in search of a better life in the United States, only to be marginalized by the society that they hoped would embrace them. Sarah Mahler draws from her experiences living among undocumented Salvadoran and South American immigrants in a Long Island suburb of Manhattan. In moving interviews they describe their disillusionment with life in the United States but blame themselves individually or as a whole for their lack of economic success and not the greater society. As she explores the reasons behind this outlook, the author argues that marginalization fosters antagonism within ethnic groups while undermining the ethnic solidarity emphasized by many scholars of immigration. Mahler's investigation leads to conditions that often bar immigrants from success and that they cannot control, such as residential segregation, job exploitation, language and legal barriers, prejudice and outright hostility from their suburban neighbors. Some immigrants earn surplus income by using private cars as taxis, subletting space in apartments to lower rent burdens, and filling out legal forms and applications--in essence generating institutions largely parallel to those of the mainstream society whereby only a small group of entrepreneurs can profit. By exacting a price for what used to be acts of reciprocal good will in the homeland, these entrepreneurs leave people who had expected to be exploited by "Americans" feeling victimized by their own.
Keywords: Immigration, Racism, Legal Barriers, New York, United States
The Executioner's Song
Norman Mailer
1998 Grand Central Publishing of Hachette Book Group
Urban Policy
Arguably the greatest book from America's most heroically ambitious writer, THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG follows the short, blighted life of Gary Gilmore who became famous after he robbed two men in 1976 and killed them in cold blood. After being tried and convicted, he immediately insisted on being executed for his crime. To do so, he fought a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death. And that fight for the right to die is what made him famous. Mailer tells not only Gilmore's story, but those of the men and women caught in the web of his life and drawn into his procession toward the firing squad. All with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscape and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest source of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement-impossible to put down, impossible to forget.
Keywords: Death Penalty, Criminal, Jail, Incarceration, Crime, Violence, United States
Norman Mailer
1998 Grand Central Publishing of Hachette Book Group
Urban Policy
Arguably the greatest book from America's most heroically ambitious writer, THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG follows the short, blighted life of Gary Gilmore who became famous after he robbed two men in 1976 and killed them in cold blood. After being tried and convicted, he immediately insisted on being executed for his crime. To do so, he fought a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death. And that fight for the right to die is what made him famous. Mailer tells not only Gilmore's story, but those of the men and women caught in the web of his life and drawn into his procession toward the firing squad. All with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscape and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest source of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement-impossible to put down, impossible to forget.
Keywords: Death Penalty, Criminal, Jail, Incarceration, Crime, Violence, United States
Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope
Beatriz Manz
2004 University of California Press
Anthropology
Paradise in Ashes is a deeply engaged and moving account of the violence and repression that defined the murderous Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s. In this compelling book, Beatriz Manz—an anthropologist who spent over two decades studying the Mayan highlands and remote rain forests of Guatemala—tells the story of the village of Santa María Tzejá, near the border with Mexico. Manz writes eloquently about Guatemala's tortured history and shows how the story of this village—its birth, destruction, and rebirth—embodies the forces and conflicts that define the country today. Drawing on interviews with peasants, community leaders, guerrillas, and paramilitary forces, Manz creates a richly detailed political portrait of Santa María Tzejá, where highland Maya peasants seeking land settled in the 1970s. Manz describes these villagers' plight as their isolated, lush, but deceptive paradise became one of the centers of the war convulsing the entire country. After their village was viciously sacked in 1982, desperate survivors fled into the surrounding rain forest and eventually to Mexico, and some even further, to the United States, while others stayed behind and fell into the military's hands. With great insight and compassion, Manz follows their flight and eventual return to Santa María Tzejá, where they sought to rebuild their village and their lives.
Keywords: War, Violence, Displacement, Guatemala, Latin America
Beatriz Manz
2004 University of California Press
Anthropology
Paradise in Ashes is a deeply engaged and moving account of the violence and repression that defined the murderous Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s. In this compelling book, Beatriz Manz—an anthropologist who spent over two decades studying the Mayan highlands and remote rain forests of Guatemala—tells the story of the village of Santa María Tzejá, near the border with Mexico. Manz writes eloquently about Guatemala's tortured history and shows how the story of this village—its birth, destruction, and rebirth—embodies the forces and conflicts that define the country today. Drawing on interviews with peasants, community leaders, guerrillas, and paramilitary forces, Manz creates a richly detailed political portrait of Santa María Tzejá, where highland Maya peasants seeking land settled in the 1970s. Manz describes these villagers' plight as their isolated, lush, but deceptive paradise became one of the centers of the war convulsing the entire country. After their village was viciously sacked in 1982, desperate survivors fled into the surrounding rain forest and eventually to Mexico, and some even further, to the United States, while others stayed behind and fell into the military's hands. With great insight and compassion, Manz follows their flight and eventual return to Santa María Tzejá, where they sought to rebuild their village and their lives.
Keywords: War, Violence, Displacement, Guatemala, Latin America
Combating Mountaintop Removal: New Directions in the Fight against Big Coal
Bryan T. McNeil
2011 University of Illinois Press
Anthropology
Drawing on powerful personal testimonies of the hazards of mountaintop removal in southern West Virginia, Combating Mountaintop Removal critically examines the fierce conflicts over this violent and increasingly prevalent form of strip mining. Bryan T. McNeil documents the changing relationships among the coal industry, communities, environment, and economy from the perspective of local grassroots activist organizations and their broader networks. Focusing on Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW), an organization composed of individuals who have personal ties to the coal industry in the region, the study reveals a turn away from once-strong traditional labor unions and the emergence of community-based activist organizations. By framing social and moral arguments in terms of the environment, these innovative hybrid movements take advantage of environmentalism's higher profile in contemporary politics. In investigating the local effects of globalization and global economics, McNeil tracks the profound reimagining of social and personal ideas such as identity, history, and landscape and considers their roles in organizing an agenda for progressive community activism.
Keywords: Environmentalism, Industry, Coal, Energy, Labor Unions, Politics, Community Action, West Virginia, United States
Bryan T. McNeil
2011 University of Illinois Press
Anthropology
Drawing on powerful personal testimonies of the hazards of mountaintop removal in southern West Virginia, Combating Mountaintop Removal critically examines the fierce conflicts over this violent and increasingly prevalent form of strip mining. Bryan T. McNeil documents the changing relationships among the coal industry, communities, environment, and economy from the perspective of local grassroots activist organizations and their broader networks. Focusing on Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW), an organization composed of individuals who have personal ties to the coal industry in the region, the study reveals a turn away from once-strong traditional labor unions and the emergence of community-based activist organizations. By framing social and moral arguments in terms of the environment, these innovative hybrid movements take advantage of environmentalism's higher profile in contemporary politics. In investigating the local effects of globalization and global economics, McNeil tracks the profound reimagining of social and personal ideas such as identity, history, and landscape and considers their roles in organizing an agenda for progressive community activism.
Keywords: Environmentalism, Industry, Coal, Energy, Labor Unions, Politics, Community Action, West Virginia, United States
Meeting God at the Boundaries: Cross-cultural/Cross-racial Clergy Appointments
Lucia Ann McSpadden
2003 United Methodist Church, General Board Of Higher Education And Ministries
Anthropology/ Philosophy/ Religious Studies
This text offers a penetrating analysis of the struggles as well as the joys and opportunities experienced by persons engaged in cross-cultural/cross-racial ministry in the United Methodist Church. Soon after the book was published, it became apparent that a volume was needed that would offer the various individuals and groups involved in this ministry hands-on, practical understanding, skills, and competencies for serving in cross-cultural/cross-racial ministry. Meeting God at the Boundaries: A Manual for Church Leaders fills that need. It provides succinct summaries of the basic concepts and competencies in cross-cultural/cross-racial understanding and communication. It then offers practical exercises and tools for equipping key leaders and groups involved in this ministry--clergy, their spouses, and families; staff-parish relations committees; district superintendents and bishops--to carry out this ministry effectively and faithfully. Lucia Ann McSpadden is coordinator of international student support at Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, California. With Ph.D. degrees in both cross-cultural education and anthropology, McSpadden has a wealth of experience in cross-cultural and cross-racial ministry in the United States and around the world.
Keywords: Race, Religion, Church, United States
Lucia Ann McSpadden
2003 United Methodist Church, General Board Of Higher Education And Ministries
Anthropology/ Philosophy/ Religious Studies
This text offers a penetrating analysis of the struggles as well as the joys and opportunities experienced by persons engaged in cross-cultural/cross-racial ministry in the United Methodist Church. Soon after the book was published, it became apparent that a volume was needed that would offer the various individuals and groups involved in this ministry hands-on, practical understanding, skills, and competencies for serving in cross-cultural/cross-racial ministry. Meeting God at the Boundaries: A Manual for Church Leaders fills that need. It provides succinct summaries of the basic concepts and competencies in cross-cultural/cross-racial understanding and communication. It then offers practical exercises and tools for equipping key leaders and groups involved in this ministry--clergy, their spouses, and families; staff-parish relations committees; district superintendents and bishops--to carry out this ministry effectively and faithfully. Lucia Ann McSpadden is coordinator of international student support at Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, California. With Ph.D. degrees in both cross-cultural education and anthropology, McSpadden has a wealth of experience in cross-cultural and cross-racial ministry in the United States and around the world.
Keywords: Race, Religion, Church, United States
Number Our Days: A Triumph of Continuity and Culture Among Jewish Old People in an Urban Ghetto
Barbara Myerhoff
1980 Touchstone
Anthropology
When noted anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff received a grant to explore the process of aging, she decided to study some elderly Jews from Venice, California, rather than to report on a more exotic people. The story of the rituals and lives of these remarkable old people is, as Bel Kaufman said, "one of those rare books that leave the reader somehow changed." Here Dr. Myerhoff records the stories of a culture that seems to give people the strength to face daily problems -- poverty, neglect, loneliness, poor health, inadequate housing and physical danger. The tale is a poignant one, funny and often wise, with implications for all of us about the importance of ritual, the agonies of aging, and the indomitable human spirit.
Keywords: Ritual, Aging, Poverty, Jewish Community, United States
Barbara Myerhoff
1980 Touchstone
Anthropology
When noted anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff received a grant to explore the process of aging, she decided to study some elderly Jews from Venice, California, rather than to report on a more exotic people. The story of the rituals and lives of these remarkable old people is, as Bel Kaufman said, "one of those rare books that leave the reader somehow changed." Here Dr. Myerhoff records the stories of a culture that seems to give people the strength to face daily problems -- poverty, neglect, loneliness, poor health, inadequate housing and physical danger. The tale is a poignant one, funny and often wise, with implications for all of us about the importance of ritual, the agonies of aging, and the indomitable human spirit.
Keywords: Ritual, Aging, Poverty, Jewish Community, United States
The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town
Jennifer Najera
2015 University of Texas Press
Anthropology / Latina/o Studies
Throughout much of the twentieth century, Mexican Americans experienced segregation in many areas of public life, but the structure of Mexican segregation differed from the strict racial divides of the Jim Crow South. Factors such as higher socioeconomic status, lighter skin color, and Anglo cultural fluency allowed some Mexican Americans to gain limited access to the Anglo power structure. Paradoxically, however, this partial assimilation made full desegregation more difficult for the rest of the Mexican American community, which continued to experience informal segregation long after federal and state laws officially ended the practice.
In this historical ethnography, Jennifer R. Nájera offers a layered rendering and analysis of Mexican segregation in a South Texas community in the first half of the twentieth century. Using oral histories and local archives, she brings to life Mexican origin peoples’ experiences with segregation. Through their stories and supporting documentary evidence, Nájera shows how the ambiguous racial status of Mexican origin people allowed some of them to be exceptions to the rule of Anglo racial dominance. She demonstrates that while such exceptionality might suggest the permeability of the color line, in fact the selective and limited incorporation of Mexicans into Anglo society actually reinforced segregation by creating an illusion that the community had been integrated and no further changes were needed. Nájera also reveals how the actions of everyday people ultimate
Keywords: Historical ethnography, oral history, race, segregation, Mexican Americans, North America, United States
Jennifer Najera
2015 University of Texas Press
Anthropology / Latina/o Studies
Throughout much of the twentieth century, Mexican Americans experienced segregation in many areas of public life, but the structure of Mexican segregation differed from the strict racial divides of the Jim Crow South. Factors such as higher socioeconomic status, lighter skin color, and Anglo cultural fluency allowed some Mexican Americans to gain limited access to the Anglo power structure. Paradoxically, however, this partial assimilation made full desegregation more difficult for the rest of the Mexican American community, which continued to experience informal segregation long after federal and state laws officially ended the practice.
In this historical ethnography, Jennifer R. Nájera offers a layered rendering and analysis of Mexican segregation in a South Texas community in the first half of the twentieth century. Using oral histories and local archives, she brings to life Mexican origin peoples’ experiences with segregation. Through their stories and supporting documentary evidence, Nájera shows how the ambiguous racial status of Mexican origin people allowed some of them to be exceptions to the rule of Anglo racial dominance. She demonstrates that while such exceptionality might suggest the permeability of the color line, in fact the selective and limited incorporation of Mexicans into Anglo society actually reinforced segregation by creating an illusion that the community had been integrated and no further changes were needed. Nájera also reveals how the actions of everyday people ultimate
Keywords: Historical ethnography, oral history, race, segregation, Mexican Americans, North America, United States
No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City
Katherine Newman
2000 Random House
Anthropology, Sociology
In No Shame in My Game, Harvard anthropologist Katherine Newman gives voice to a population for whom work, family, and self-esteem are top priorities despite all the factors that make earning a living next to impossible — minimum wage, lack of child care and health care, and a desperate shortage of even low-paying jobs. By intimately following the lives of nearly 300 inner-city workers and job seekers for two years in Harlem, Newman explores a side of poverty often ignored by media and politicians — the working poor. These workers persevere in a country that, more than any other, measures self-worth through employment but deems "hamburger flipping" jobs unworthy. The working poor find dignity in earning a paycheck and shunning the welfare system, arguing that even low-paying jobs give order to their lives. No Shame in My Game shows us a misrepresented segment of today's society, and is sure to spark dialogue over the issues surrounding poverty, working, and welfare.
Keywords: Poverty, Inner Cities, Urban, Working Poor, United States
Katherine Newman
2000 Random House
Anthropology, Sociology
In No Shame in My Game, Harvard anthropologist Katherine Newman gives voice to a population for whom work, family, and self-esteem are top priorities despite all the factors that make earning a living next to impossible — minimum wage, lack of child care and health care, and a desperate shortage of even low-paying jobs. By intimately following the lives of nearly 300 inner-city workers and job seekers for two years in Harlem, Newman explores a side of poverty often ignored by media and politicians — the working poor. These workers persevere in a country that, more than any other, measures self-worth through employment but deems "hamburger flipping" jobs unworthy. The working poor find dignity in earning a paycheck and shunning the welfare system, arguing that even low-paying jobs give order to their lives. No Shame in My Game shows us a misrepresented segment of today's society, and is sure to spark dialogue over the issues surrounding poverty, working, and welfare.
Keywords: Poverty, Inner Cities, Urban, Working Poor, United States
Police in the Hallways
Kathleen Nolan
2011 University of Minnesota Press
Education
Through in-depth interviews, Kathleen Nolan offers a rich account of daily life at a Bronx high school where police patrol the hallways and security and discipline fall under the jurisdiction of the NYPD. With compassion and clear-eyed analysis, Nolan sounds a warning about this alarming convergence of prison and school cultures and the negative impact that it has.
Keywords: Racial Profiling, Education, Urban, New York City, United States
Kathleen Nolan
2011 University of Minnesota Press
Education
Through in-depth interviews, Kathleen Nolan offers a rich account of daily life at a Bronx high school where police patrol the hallways and security and discipline fall under the jurisdiction of the NYPD. With compassion and clear-eyed analysis, Nolan sounds a warning about this alarming convergence of prison and school cultures and the negative impact that it has.
Keywords: Racial Profiling, Education, Urban, New York City, United States
Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World
Carolyn Nordstrom
2007 University of California Press
Anthropology
Carolyn Nordstrom explores the pathways of global crime in this stunning work of anthropology that has the power to change the way we think about the world. To write this book, she spent three years traveling to hot spots in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States investigating the dynamics of illegal trade around the world—from blood diamonds and arms to pharmaceuticals, exotica, and staples like food and oil. Global Outlaws peels away the layers of a vast economy that extends from a war orphan in Angola selling Marlboros on the street to powerful transnational networks reaching across continents and oceans. Nordstrom's extraordinary fieldwork includes interviews with scores of informants, including the smugglers, victims, power elite, and profiteers who populate these economic war zones. Her compelling investigation, showing that the sum total of extra-legal activities represents a significant part of the world's economy, provides a new framework for understanding twenty-first-century economics and economic power. Global Outlaws powerfully reveals the illusions and realities of security in all areas of transport and trade and illuminates many of the difficult ethical problems these extra-legal activities pose.
Keywords: Global Crime, Multi-sited Ethnography, Illegal Trade, Transnational Networks
Carolyn Nordstrom
2007 University of California Press
Anthropology
Carolyn Nordstrom explores the pathways of global crime in this stunning work of anthropology that has the power to change the way we think about the world. To write this book, she spent three years traveling to hot spots in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States investigating the dynamics of illegal trade around the world—from blood diamonds and arms to pharmaceuticals, exotica, and staples like food and oil. Global Outlaws peels away the layers of a vast economy that extends from a war orphan in Angola selling Marlboros on the street to powerful transnational networks reaching across continents and oceans. Nordstrom's extraordinary fieldwork includes interviews with scores of informants, including the smugglers, victims, power elite, and profiteers who populate these economic war zones. Her compelling investigation, showing that the sum total of extra-legal activities represents a significant part of the world's economy, provides a new framework for understanding twenty-first-century economics and economic power. Global Outlaws powerfully reveals the illusions and realities of security in all areas of transport and trade and illuminates many of the difficult ethical problems these extra-legal activities pose.
Keywords: Global Crime, Multi-sited Ethnography, Illegal Trade, Transnational Networks
Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil
Keisha-Khan Perry
2013 University of Minnesota Press
Anthropology and Africana Studies
Black Women against the Land Grab makes a unique and overdue contribution to our understanding of social movements in Brazil. In a bold intervention from the tendency to ignore women's participation in struggles for land rights and access to basic resources, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry paints women as categorical leaders in resisting "development" plans that amount to expelling poor, black communities from their historical homes. Her long-term involvement with the Gamboa de Baixo community in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and unabashed advocacy for their cause, results in an electrifying ethnography that showcases the wry humor and perceptive analysis of grassroots community activists.
Keywords: Land Rights, Black Women, Race, African Diaspora, Brazil
Keisha-Khan Perry
2013 University of Minnesota Press
Anthropology and Africana Studies
Black Women against the Land Grab makes a unique and overdue contribution to our understanding of social movements in Brazil. In a bold intervention from the tendency to ignore women's participation in struggles for land rights and access to basic resources, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry paints women as categorical leaders in resisting "development" plans that amount to expelling poor, black communities from their historical homes. Her long-term involvement with the Gamboa de Baixo community in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and unabashed advocacy for their cause, results in an electrifying ethnography that showcases the wry humor and perceptive analysis of grassroots community activists.
Keywords: Land Rights, Black Women, Race, African Diaspora, Brazil
Bridging Scholarship and Activism: Reflections from the Frontlines of Collaborative Research
Edited by Bernd Reiter and Ulrich Oslender
2015 Michigan State University Press
Anthropology, Political Science, Geography, Sociology, Communications
This timely book brings together activist scholars from a number of disciplines (political science, geography, sociology, anthropology, communications) to provide new insights into a growing trend in publicly engaged research and scholarship. Bridging Scholarship and Activism creatively redefines what constitutes activism without limiting it to a narrow range of practices. Acknowledging that the current conjuncture of neoliberal globalization has created constraints on as well as possibilities for activist scholarly engagement, the book goes on to argue that racism and its intersections with gender and class oppression are salient forces to be interrogated and confronted in the predicaments and struggles activist scholarship targets. The book’s ultimate goal is to create a decolonized and democratized forum in which activist scholars from the Global South converse and cross-fertilize ideas and projects with their counterparts from the U.S. and other North Atlantic metropolitan-based academy. The co-editors and contributors attempt to decenter hegemonic knowledge and to create some of the necessary (if not sufficient) conditions for a more pluriversal (rather than orthodox "universal") context for producing enabling knowledge, without the naiveté and romanticism that has characterized earlier projects in critical and radical social science.
Keywords: Activism, Interdisciplinary, Neoliberal Globalization
Edited by Bernd Reiter and Ulrich Oslender
2015 Michigan State University Press
Anthropology, Political Science, Geography, Sociology, Communications
This timely book brings together activist scholars from a number of disciplines (political science, geography, sociology, anthropology, communications) to provide new insights into a growing trend in publicly engaged research and scholarship. Bridging Scholarship and Activism creatively redefines what constitutes activism without limiting it to a narrow range of practices. Acknowledging that the current conjuncture of neoliberal globalization has created constraints on as well as possibilities for activist scholarly engagement, the book goes on to argue that racism and its intersections with gender and class oppression are salient forces to be interrogated and confronted in the predicaments and struggles activist scholarship targets. The book’s ultimate goal is to create a decolonized and democratized forum in which activist scholars from the Global South converse and cross-fertilize ideas and projects with their counterparts from the U.S. and other North Atlantic metropolitan-based academy. The co-editors and contributors attempt to decenter hegemonic knowledge and to create some of the necessary (if not sufficient) conditions for a more pluriversal (rather than orthodox "universal") context for producing enabling knowledge, without the naiveté and romanticism that has characterized earlier projects in critical and radical social science.
Keywords: Activism, Interdisciplinary, Neoliberal Globalization
Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys
Victor Rios
2011 New York University Press
Sociology
Victor Rios grew up in the ghetto of Oakland, California in the 1980s and 90s. A former gang member and juvenile delinquent, Rios managed to escape the bleak outcome of many of his friends and earned a PhD at Berkeley and returned to his hometown to study how inner city young Latino and African American boys develop their sense of self in the midst of crime and intense policing. Punished examines the difficult lives of these young men, who now face punitive policies in their schools, communities, and a world where they are constantly policed and stigmatized. Rios followed a group of forty delinquent Black and Latino boys for three years. These boys found themselves in a vicious cycle, caught in a spiral of punishment and incarceration as they were harassed, profiled, watched, and disciplined at young ages, even before they had committed any crimes, eventually leading many of them to fulfill the destiny expected of them. But beyond a fatalistic account of these marginalized young men, Rios finds that the very system that criminalizes them and limits their opportunities, sparks resistance and a raised consciousness that motivates some to transform their lives and become productive citizens. Ultimately, he argues that by understanding the lives of the young men who are criminalized and pipelined through the criminal justice system, we can begin to develop empathic solutions which support these young men in their development and to eliminate the culture of punishment that has become an overbearing part of their everyday lives.
Keywords: Racial Profiling, Minority Youth, Criminal Justice, Culture of Punishment
Victor Rios
2011 New York University Press
Sociology
Victor Rios grew up in the ghetto of Oakland, California in the 1980s and 90s. A former gang member and juvenile delinquent, Rios managed to escape the bleak outcome of many of his friends and earned a PhD at Berkeley and returned to his hometown to study how inner city young Latino and African American boys develop their sense of self in the midst of crime and intense policing. Punished examines the difficult lives of these young men, who now face punitive policies in their schools, communities, and a world where they are constantly policed and stigmatized. Rios followed a group of forty delinquent Black and Latino boys for three years. These boys found themselves in a vicious cycle, caught in a spiral of punishment and incarceration as they were harassed, profiled, watched, and disciplined at young ages, even before they had committed any crimes, eventually leading many of them to fulfill the destiny expected of them. But beyond a fatalistic account of these marginalized young men, Rios finds that the very system that criminalizes them and limits their opportunities, sparks resistance and a raised consciousness that motivates some to transform their lives and become productive citizens. Ultimately, he argues that by understanding the lives of the young men who are criminalized and pipelined through the criminal justice system, we can begin to develop empathic solutions which support these young men in their development and to eliminate the culture of punishment that has become an overbearing part of their everyday lives.
Keywords: Racial Profiling, Minority Youth, Criminal Justice, Culture of Punishment
Buried Secrets: Truth & Human Rights in Guatemala
Victoria Sanford
2004 Palgrave Macmillan
Anthropology, Latin American Studies
Between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, Guatemala was torn by mass terror and extreme violence in a genocidal campaign against the Maya, which becameknown as "La Violencia." More than 600 massacres occurred, one and a half million people were displaced, and more than 200,000 civilians were murdered, most of them Maya. Buried Secrets brings these chilling statistics to life as it chronicles the journey of Maya survivors seeking truth, justice, and community healing, and demonstrates that the Guatemalan army carried out a systematic and intentional genocide against the Maya. The book is based on exhaustive research, including more than 400 testimonies from massacre survivors, interviews with members of the forensic team, human rights leaders, high-ranking military officers, guerrilla combatants, and government officials. Buried Secrets traces truth-telling and political change from isolated Maya villages to national political events, and provides a unique look into the experiences of Maya survivors as they struggle to rebuild their communities and lives.
Keywords: Violence, Genocide, Human Rights, Maya, Guatemala
Victoria Sanford
2004 Palgrave Macmillan
Anthropology, Latin American Studies
Between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, Guatemala was torn by mass terror and extreme violence in a genocidal campaign against the Maya, which becameknown as "La Violencia." More than 600 massacres occurred, one and a half million people were displaced, and more than 200,000 civilians were murdered, most of them Maya. Buried Secrets brings these chilling statistics to life as it chronicles the journey of Maya survivors seeking truth, justice, and community healing, and demonstrates that the Guatemalan army carried out a systematic and intentional genocide against the Maya. The book is based on exhaustive research, including more than 400 testimonies from massacre survivors, interviews with members of the forensic team, human rights leaders, high-ranking military officers, guerrilla combatants, and government officials. Buried Secrets traces truth-telling and political change from isolated Maya villages to national political events, and provides a unique look into the experiences of Maya survivors as they struggle to rebuild their communities and lives.
Keywords: Violence, Genocide, Human Rights, Maya, Guatemala
Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy, and Activism
Victoria Sanford and Asale Angel-Ajani (Editors)
2006 Rutgers University Press
Anthropology
Anthropology has long been associated with an ethos of “engagement.” Can research findings be authentic and objective? Are anthropologists able to use their data to aid the participants of their study, and is that aid always welcome? In Engaged Observer,Victoria Sanford and Asale Angel-Ajani bring together an international array of scholars who have been embedded in some of the most conflict-ridden and dangerous zones in the world to reflect on the role and responsibility of anthropological inquiry. They explore issues of truth and objectivity, the role of the academic, the politics of memory, and the impact of race, gender, and social position on the research process. Through ethnographic case studies, they offer models for conducting engaged research and illustrate the contradictions and challenges of doing so. Contributors: Asale Angel-Ajani, Victoria Sanford, Phillippe Bourgois, Irina Carlota Silber, R. Aida Hernandez Castillo, Dr. Monique Skidmore, Shannon Speed, Dana-Ain Davis, Michael Bosia, Roberta Culbertson, John Collins, Aldo Civico, Kay Warren
Keywords: Conflict Zones, Theory, Academic Role, Global
Victoria Sanford and Asale Angel-Ajani (Editors)
2006 Rutgers University Press
Anthropology
Anthropology has long been associated with an ethos of “engagement.” Can research findings be authentic and objective? Are anthropologists able to use their data to aid the participants of their study, and is that aid always welcome? In Engaged Observer,Victoria Sanford and Asale Angel-Ajani bring together an international array of scholars who have been embedded in some of the most conflict-ridden and dangerous zones in the world to reflect on the role and responsibility of anthropological inquiry. They explore issues of truth and objectivity, the role of the academic, the politics of memory, and the impact of race, gender, and social position on the research process. Through ethnographic case studies, they offer models for conducting engaged research and illustrate the contradictions and challenges of doing so. Contributors: Asale Angel-Ajani, Victoria Sanford, Phillippe Bourgois, Irina Carlota Silber, R. Aida Hernandez Castillo, Dr. Monique Skidmore, Shannon Speed, Dana-Ain Davis, Michael Bosia, Roberta Culbertson, John Collins, Aldo Civico, Kay Warren
Keywords: Conflict Zones, Theory, Academic Role, Global
The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City
Roger Sanjek
1998 Cornell University Press
Anthropology
Before the next century is out, Americans of African, Asian, and Latin American ancestry will outnumber those of European origin. In the Elmhurst-Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York City, the transition occurred during the 1970s, and the area's two-decade experience of multiracial diversity offers us an early look at the future of urban America. The result of more than a dozen years' work, this remarkable book immerses us in Elmhurst-Corona's social and political life from the 1960s through the 1990s. First settled in 1652, Elmhurst-Corona by 1960 housed a mix of Germans, Irish, Italians, and other "white ethnics." In 1990 this population made up less than a fifth of its residents; Latin American and Asian immigrants and African Americans comprised the majority. The Future of Us All focuses on the combined impact of racial change, immigrant settlement, governmental decentralization, and assaults on local quality of life which stemmed from the city's 1975 fiscal crisis and the policies of its last three mayors. The book examines the ways in which residents—in everyday interactions, block and tenant associations, houses of worship, small business coalitions, civic rituals, incidents of ethnic and racial hostility, and political struggles against overdevelopment, for more schools, and for youth programs—have forged and tested alliances across lines of race, ethnicity, and language. From the telling local details of daily life to the larger economic and regional frameworks, this account of a neighborhood's transformation illuminates the issues that American communities will be grappling with in the coming decades.
Keywords: Race, Urban Anthropology, Immigrants, Neighborhood Life, New York City, United States
Roger Sanjek
1998 Cornell University Press
Anthropology
Before the next century is out, Americans of African, Asian, and Latin American ancestry will outnumber those of European origin. In the Elmhurst-Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York City, the transition occurred during the 1970s, and the area's two-decade experience of multiracial diversity offers us an early look at the future of urban America. The result of more than a dozen years' work, this remarkable book immerses us in Elmhurst-Corona's social and political life from the 1960s through the 1990s. First settled in 1652, Elmhurst-Corona by 1960 housed a mix of Germans, Irish, Italians, and other "white ethnics." In 1990 this population made up less than a fifth of its residents; Latin American and Asian immigrants and African Americans comprised the majority. The Future of Us All focuses on the combined impact of racial change, immigrant settlement, governmental decentralization, and assaults on local quality of life which stemmed from the city's 1975 fiscal crisis and the policies of its last three mayors. The book examines the ways in which residents—in everyday interactions, block and tenant associations, houses of worship, small business coalitions, civic rituals, incidents of ethnic and racial hostility, and political struggles against overdevelopment, for more schools, and for youth programs—have forged and tested alliances across lines of race, ethnicity, and language. From the telling local details of daily life to the larger economic and regional frameworks, this account of a neighborhood's transformation illuminates the issues that American communities will be grappling with in the coming decades.
Keywords: Race, Urban Anthropology, Immigrants, Neighborhood Life, New York City, United States
Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
1993 University of California Press
Anthropology
When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centers on the lives of the women and children of a hillside "favela". Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, the author follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage. It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing - and controversial - is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live. The author also wrote "Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland."
Keywords: Everyday Violence, Poverty, Family, Motherhood
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
1993 University of California Press
Anthropology
When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centers on the lives of the women and children of a hillside "favela". Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, the author follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage. It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing - and controversial - is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live. The author also wrote "Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland."
Keywords: Everyday Violence, Poverty, Family, Motherhood
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Eric Schlosser
2005 Harper Perennial Press
Popular
Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled American cultural imperialism abroad. That's a lengthy list of charges, but Eric Schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning. Schlosser's myth-shattering survey stretches from California's subdivisions, where the business was born, to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike, where many of fast food's flavors are concocted. Along the way, he unearths a trove of fascinating, unsettling truths -- from the unholy alliance between fast food and Hollywood to the seismic changes the industry has wrought in food production, popular culture, and even real estate.
Keywords: Nutrition, Poverty, Cultural Imperialism, Popular Culture, Food Industry, United States
Eric Schlosser
2005 Harper Perennial Press
Popular
Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled American cultural imperialism abroad. That's a lengthy list of charges, but Eric Schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning. Schlosser's myth-shattering survey stretches from California's subdivisions, where the business was born, to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike, where many of fast food's flavors are concocted. Along the way, he unearths a trove of fascinating, unsettling truths -- from the unholy alliance between fast food and Hollywood to the seismic changes the industry has wrought in food production, popular culture, and even real estate.
Keywords: Nutrition, Poverty, Cultural Imperialism, Popular Culture, Food Industry, United States
Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs
Mark Schuller
2012 Rutgers University Press
Anthropology
After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, over half of U.S. households donated to thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in that country. Yet we continue to hear stories of misery from Haiti. Why have NGOs failed at their mission?
Set in Haiti during the 2004 coup and aftermath and enhanced by research conducted after the 2010 earthquake, Killing with Kindness analyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient NGOs and their relationships with local communities. Written like a detective story, the book offers rich enthnographic comparisons of two Haitian women’s NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention, one with public funding (including USAID), the other with private European NGO partners. Mark Schuller looks at participation and autonomy, analyzing donor policies that inhibit these goals. He focuses on NGOs’ roles as intermediaries in “gluing” the contemporary world system together and shows how power works within the aid system as these intermediaries impose interpretations of unclear mandates down the chain—a process Schuller calls “trickle-down imperialism.”
Keywords: Disaster, International Aid, Autonomy, NGOs, Haiti
Mark Schuller
2012 Rutgers University Press
Anthropology
After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, over half of U.S. households donated to thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in that country. Yet we continue to hear stories of misery from Haiti. Why have NGOs failed at their mission?
Set in Haiti during the 2004 coup and aftermath and enhanced by research conducted after the 2010 earthquake, Killing with Kindness analyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient NGOs and their relationships with local communities. Written like a detective story, the book offers rich enthnographic comparisons of two Haitian women’s NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention, one with public funding (including USAID), the other with private European NGO partners. Mark Schuller looks at participation and autonomy, analyzing donor policies that inhibit these goals. He focuses on NGOs’ roles as intermediaries in “gluing” the contemporary world system together and shows how power works within the aid system as these intermediaries impose interpretations of unclear mandates down the chain—a process Schuller calls “trickle-down imperialism.”
Keywords: Disaster, International Aid, Autonomy, NGOs, Haiti
Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti
Mark Schuller
2016 Rutgers University Press
Anthropology
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti was one of the deadliest disasters in modern history, sparking an international aid response—with pledges and donations of $16 billion—that was exceedingly generous. But now, five years later, that generous aid has clearly failed. In Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti, anthropologist Mark Schuller captures the voices of those involved in the earthquake aid response, and they paint a sharp, unflattering view of the humanitarian enterprise.
Schuller led an independent study of eight displaced-persons camps in Haiti, compiling more than 150 interviews ranging from Haitian front-line workers and camp directors to foreign humanitarians and many displaced Haitian people. The result is an insightful account of why the multi-billion-dollar aid response not only did little to help but also did much harm, triggering a range of unintended consequences, rupturing Haitian social and cultural institutions, and actually increasing violence, especially against women. The book shows how Haitian people were removed from any real decision-making, replaced by a top-down, NGO-dominated system of humanitarian aid, led by an army of often young, inexperienced foreign workers. Ignorant of Haitian culture, these aid workers unwittingly enacted policies that triggered a range of negative results. Haitian interviewees also note that the NGOs “planted the flag,” and often tended to “just do something,” always with an eye to the “photo op” (in no small part due to the competition over funding). Worse yet, they blindly supported the eviction of displaced people from the camps, forcing earthquake victims to relocate in vast shantytowns that were hotbeds of violence.
Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti concludes with suggestions to help improve humanitarian aid in the future, perhaps most notably, that aid workers listen to—and respect the culture of—the victims of catastrophe.
Keywords: Humanitarian aid, Disaster, Displaced Persons, NGOs, Haiti
Mark Schuller
2016 Rutgers University Press
Anthropology
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti was one of the deadliest disasters in modern history, sparking an international aid response—with pledges and donations of $16 billion—that was exceedingly generous. But now, five years later, that generous aid has clearly failed. In Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti, anthropologist Mark Schuller captures the voices of those involved in the earthquake aid response, and they paint a sharp, unflattering view of the humanitarian enterprise.
Schuller led an independent study of eight displaced-persons camps in Haiti, compiling more than 150 interviews ranging from Haitian front-line workers and camp directors to foreign humanitarians and many displaced Haitian people. The result is an insightful account of why the multi-billion-dollar aid response not only did little to help but also did much harm, triggering a range of unintended consequences, rupturing Haitian social and cultural institutions, and actually increasing violence, especially against women. The book shows how Haitian people were removed from any real decision-making, replaced by a top-down, NGO-dominated system of humanitarian aid, led by an army of often young, inexperienced foreign workers. Ignorant of Haitian culture, these aid workers unwittingly enacted policies that triggered a range of negative results. Haitian interviewees also note that the NGOs “planted the flag,” and often tended to “just do something,” always with an eye to the “photo op” (in no small part due to the competition over funding). Worse yet, they blindly supported the eviction of displaced people from the camps, forcing earthquake victims to relocate in vast shantytowns that were hotbeds of violence.
Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti concludes with suggestions to help improve humanitarian aid in the future, perhaps most notably, that aid workers listen to—and respect the culture of—the victims of catastrophe.
Keywords: Humanitarian aid, Disaster, Displaced Persons, NGOs, Haiti
King Kong on 4th Street: Families and the Violence of Poverty on the Lower East Side
Jagna Sharff
1997 Westview Press
Sociology
In King Kong on 4th Street, Jagna Sharff chronicles an ethnographic team's involvement over a span of fifteen years with the people of a poor, largely Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York City. Anchoring her observations in field notes, she recounts the joys, fears, and disappointments of daily life as well as the drama of large events. Arson, the murder of a popular local teenager, the mobbing of a grocery store as an act of retribution for his death — all are projected onto a canvas of shifting local and national policies toward poor people and neighborhoods.Sharff provides new insights into gender and family roles, how adaptations to available resources from the welfare state may shape the membership of households, and how children may be trained for specific adult roles that will advance the family's well-being. She also reveals how the underground economy, particularly the commerce in drugs whose profits are realized outside of the neighborhood, undermines neighborhood-wide solidarity and sends people scrambling against one another for jobs in the quasi-licit and illicit sector.Following the lives of a number of families into the next generation, Sharff's ethnographic team documents how external political decisions that change the war on poverty into a war on the poor affected them. Paramilitary sweeps of the neighborhood, in tandem with gentrification and declining social services, produce severe dislocations and relocation to homeless shelters, welfare hotels, and prisons. But the reality described is not all grim.The book's vivid style shows that life is more than grim reality. People get real pleasure from raising children and taking part in the human drama around them. Kinfolk, real and fictive, keep each other afloat and reconnected to new neighborhoods and opportunities, including that of upward mobility through religious conversion. Adults and children achieve satisfaction and a measure of security through grit, wit, and acts of heroism and solidarity.
Keywords: Urban, Poverty, Drugs, Community, Puerto Rico, New York City, United States
Jagna Sharff
1997 Westview Press
Sociology
In King Kong on 4th Street, Jagna Sharff chronicles an ethnographic team's involvement over a span of fifteen years with the people of a poor, largely Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York City. Anchoring her observations in field notes, she recounts the joys, fears, and disappointments of daily life as well as the drama of large events. Arson, the murder of a popular local teenager, the mobbing of a grocery store as an act of retribution for his death — all are projected onto a canvas of shifting local and national policies toward poor people and neighborhoods.Sharff provides new insights into gender and family roles, how adaptations to available resources from the welfare state may shape the membership of households, and how children may be trained for specific adult roles that will advance the family's well-being. She also reveals how the underground economy, particularly the commerce in drugs whose profits are realized outside of the neighborhood, undermines neighborhood-wide solidarity and sends people scrambling against one another for jobs in the quasi-licit and illicit sector.Following the lives of a number of families into the next generation, Sharff's ethnographic team documents how external political decisions that change the war on poverty into a war on the poor affected them. Paramilitary sweeps of the neighborhood, in tandem with gentrification and declining social services, produce severe dislocations and relocation to homeless shelters, welfare hotels, and prisons. But the reality described is not all grim.The book's vivid style shows that life is more than grim reality. People get real pleasure from raising children and taking part in the human drama around them. Kinfolk, real and fictive, keep each other afloat and reconnected to new neighborhoods and opportunities, including that of upward mobility through religious conversion. Adults and children achieve satisfaction and a measure of security through grit, wit, and acts of heroism and solidarity.
Keywords: Urban, Poverty, Drugs, Community, Puerto Rico, New York City, United States
Voyages: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs
Cathy Small
1997 Cornell University Press
Anthropology
In Voyages, Cathy A. Small offers a view of the changes in migration, globalization, and ethnographic fieldwork over three decades. The second edition adds fresh descriptions and narratives in three new chapters based on two more visits to Tonga and California in 2010. The author (whose role after thirty years of fieldwork is both ethnographer and family member) reintroduces the reader to four sisters in the same family—two who migrated to the United States and two who remained in Tonga—and reveals what has unfolded in their lives in the fifteen years since the first edition was written. The second edition concludes with new reflections on how immigration and globalization have affected family, economy, tradition, political life, identity, and the practice of anthropology.
Keywords: Migration, Globalization, Family, United States, Pacific Islands
Cathy Small
1997 Cornell University Press
Anthropology
In Voyages, Cathy A. Small offers a view of the changes in migration, globalization, and ethnographic fieldwork over three decades. The second edition adds fresh descriptions and narratives in three new chapters based on two more visits to Tonga and California in 2010. The author (whose role after thirty years of fieldwork is both ethnographer and family member) reintroduces the reader to four sisters in the same family—two who migrated to the United States and two who remained in Tonga—and reveals what has unfolded in their lives in the fifteen years since the first edition was written. The second edition concludes with new reflections on how immigration and globalization have affected family, economy, tradition, political life, identity, and the practice of anthropology.
Keywords: Migration, Globalization, Family, United States, Pacific Islands
Rights in Rebellion: Indigenous Struggle and Human Rights in Chiapas
Shannon Speed
2007 Stanford University Press
Anthropology
Rights in Rebellion examines the global discourse of human rights and its influence on the local culture, identity, and forms of resistance. Through a multi-sited ethnography of various groups in the indigenous communities of Chiapas, Mexico—from paramilitaries to a Zapatista community, an indigenous human rights organization, and the Zapatista Good Governance Councils—the book explores how different groups actively engage with the discourse of rights, adapting it to their own individual subjectivities and goals, and develop new forms of resistance to the neoliberal model and its particular configurations of power. Far from being a traditional community study, this book instead follows the discourse of human rights and indigenous rights through their various manifestations. The author offers a compelling argument for the importance of a critical engagement between the anthropologist and her “subjects,” passionately making the case for activist research and demonstrating how such an engagement will fortify and enliven academic research.
Keywords: Neoliberalism, Human Rights, Multi-Sited Ethnography, Indigenous Rights, Activist Research, Mexico, Latin America
Shannon Speed
2007 Stanford University Press
Anthropology
Rights in Rebellion examines the global discourse of human rights and its influence on the local culture, identity, and forms of resistance. Through a multi-sited ethnography of various groups in the indigenous communities of Chiapas, Mexico—from paramilitaries to a Zapatista community, an indigenous human rights organization, and the Zapatista Good Governance Councils—the book explores how different groups actively engage with the discourse of rights, adapting it to their own individual subjectivities and goals, and develop new forms of resistance to the neoliberal model and its particular configurations of power. Far from being a traditional community study, this book instead follows the discourse of human rights and indigenous rights through their various manifestations. The author offers a compelling argument for the importance of a critical engagement between the anthropologist and her “subjects,” passionately making the case for activist research and demonstrating how such an engagement will fortify and enliven academic research.
Keywords: Neoliberalism, Human Rights, Multi-Sited Ethnography, Indigenous Rights, Activist Research, Mexico, Latin America
All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community
Carol Stack
1997 Harper and Row; Basic Books
Sociology, African American Studies
All Our Kin is the chronicle of a young white woman's sojourn into The Flats, an African-American ghetto community, to study the support system family and friends form when coping with poverty. Eschewing the traditional method of entry into the community used by anthropologists — through authority figures and community leaders — she approached the families herself by way of an acquaintance from school, becoming one of the first sociologists to explore the black kinship network from the inside. The result was a landmark study that debunked the misconception that poor families were unstable and disorganized. On the contrary, her study showed that families in The Flats adapted to their poverty conditions by forming large, resilient, lifelong support networks based on friendship and family that were very powerful, highly structured and surprisingly complex. Universally considered the best analysis of family and kinship in a ghetto black community ever published, All Our Kin is also an indictment of a social system that reinforces welfare dependency and chronic unemployment.
Keywords: Antiracist, Poverty, African American Community Research, Welfare, United States
Carol Stack
1997 Harper and Row; Basic Books
Sociology, African American Studies
All Our Kin is the chronicle of a young white woman's sojourn into The Flats, an African-American ghetto community, to study the support system family and friends form when coping with poverty. Eschewing the traditional method of entry into the community used by anthropologists — through authority figures and community leaders — she approached the families herself by way of an acquaintance from school, becoming one of the first sociologists to explore the black kinship network from the inside. The result was a landmark study that debunked the misconception that poor families were unstable and disorganized. On the contrary, her study showed that families in The Flats adapted to their poverty conditions by forming large, resilient, lifelong support networks based on friendship and family that were very powerful, highly structured and surprisingly complex. Universally considered the best analysis of family and kinship in a ghetto black community ever published, All Our Kin is also an indictment of a social system that reinforces welfare dependency and chronic unemployment.
Keywords: Antiracist, Poverty, African American Community Research, Welfare, United States
Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South
Angela Stuesse
2016 University of California Press, California Series in Public Anthropology
Anthropology, Latin American Studies
How has Latino immigration transformed the South? In what ways is the presence of these newcomers complicating efforts to organize for workplace justice? Scratching Out a Living takes readers deep into Mississippi’s chicken processing plants and communities, where large numbers of Latin American migrants were recruited in the mid-1990s to labor alongside an established African American workforce in some of the most dangerous and lowest-paid jobs in the country. As America’s voracious appetite for chicken has grown, so has the industry’s reliance on immigrant workers, whose structural position makes them particularly vulnerable to exploitation.
Based on the author’s six years of collaboration with a local workers’ center, this book explores how Black, white, and new Latino Mississippians have lived and understood these transformations. Activist anthropologist Angela Stuesse argues that people’s racial identifications and relationships to the poultry industry prove vital to their interpretations of the changes they are experiencing. Illuminating connections between the area’s long history of racial inequality, the industry’s growth and drive to lower labor costs, immigrants’ contested place in contemporary social relations, and workers’ prospects for political mobilization, Scratching Out a Living paints a compelling ethnographic portrait of neoliberal globalization and calls for organizing strategies that bring diverse working communities together in mutual construction of a more just future.
Keywords: Globalization, labor, race, immigration, activist scholarship, United States South
Angela Stuesse
2016 University of California Press, California Series in Public Anthropology
Anthropology, Latin American Studies
How has Latino immigration transformed the South? In what ways is the presence of these newcomers complicating efforts to organize for workplace justice? Scratching Out a Living takes readers deep into Mississippi’s chicken processing plants and communities, where large numbers of Latin American migrants were recruited in the mid-1990s to labor alongside an established African American workforce in some of the most dangerous and lowest-paid jobs in the country. As America’s voracious appetite for chicken has grown, so has the industry’s reliance on immigrant workers, whose structural position makes them particularly vulnerable to exploitation.
Based on the author’s six years of collaboration with a local workers’ center, this book explores how Black, white, and new Latino Mississippians have lived and understood these transformations. Activist anthropologist Angela Stuesse argues that people’s racial identifications and relationships to the poultry industry prove vital to their interpretations of the changes they are experiencing. Illuminating connections between the area’s long history of racial inequality, the industry’s growth and drive to lower labor costs, immigrants’ contested place in contemporary social relations, and workers’ prospects for political mobilization, Scratching Out a Living paints a compelling ethnographic portrait of neoliberal globalization and calls for organizing strategies that bring diverse working communities together in mutual construction of a more just future.
Keywords: Globalization, labor, race, immigration, activist scholarship, United States South
Norman Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood
Ida Susser
1982/2012 Oxford University Press
Anthropology, Urban Studies
Norman Street is the first serious examination of a scenario that appears likely to be played out again and again as federal budget policies result in reduced services for urban areas across the country. Based on a three-year study conducted in Brooklyn's Greenpoint/Williamsburg section, the book is an in-depth, detailed description of life in a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood during New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975-78. Now updated with a new introduction to address the changes and events of the thirty years since the book's original publication, its lessons continue to demonstrate the impact of political and economic changes on everyday lives. Relating local events to national policy, Susser deals directly with issues and problems that face industrial cities nationwide: ethnic and race relations are analyzed within the context of community organization and local politics; the impact of landlord/tenant relations, housing discrimination, and red-lining are examined; and the effects on the urban poor of gentrification are documented. Since neighborhood issues are often of primary concern to women, much of the book concerns the role of women as community organizers and their integration of this role with domestic responsibilities.
Keywords: Race, Poverty, Economics, Politics, Housing, Organizing, Brooklyn, New York, United States
Ida Susser
1982/2012 Oxford University Press
Anthropology, Urban Studies
Norman Street is the first serious examination of a scenario that appears likely to be played out again and again as federal budget policies result in reduced services for urban areas across the country. Based on a three-year study conducted in Brooklyn's Greenpoint/Williamsburg section, the book is an in-depth, detailed description of life in a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood during New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975-78. Now updated with a new introduction to address the changes and events of the thirty years since the book's original publication, its lessons continue to demonstrate the impact of political and economic changes on everyday lives. Relating local events to national policy, Susser deals directly with issues and problems that face industrial cities nationwide: ethnic and race relations are analyzed within the context of community organization and local politics; the impact of landlord/tenant relations, housing discrimination, and red-lining are examined; and the effects on the urban poor of gentrification are documented. Since neighborhood issues are often of primary concern to women, much of the book concerns the role of women as community organizers and their integration of this role with domestic responsibilities.
Keywords: Race, Poverty, Economics, Politics, Housing, Organizing, Brooklyn, New York, United States
Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto
Eric Tang
2015 Temple University Press
American Studies, Asian American Studies, Immigration Studies
After surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide, followed by years of confinement to international refugee camps, as many as 10,000 Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the Bronx during the 1980s and ‘90s. Unsettledchronicles the unfinished odyssey of Bronx Cambodians, closely following one woman and her family for several years as they survive yet resist their literal insertion into concentrated Bronx poverty.
Eric Tang tells the harrowing and inspiring stories of these refugees to make sense of how and why the displaced migrants have been resettled in the “hyperghetto.” He argues that refuge is never found, that rescue discourses mask a more profound urban reality characterized by racialized geographic enclosure, economic displacement and unrelenting poverty, and the criminalization of daily life.
Unsettled views the hyperghetto as a site of extreme isolation, punishment, and confinement. The refugees remain captives in late-capitalist urban America. Tang ultimately asks: What does it mean for these Cambodians to resettle into this distinct time and space of slavery’s afterlife?
Keywords: Migration, refugees, poverty, urban studies, United States, displacement, citizenship
Eric Tang
2015 Temple University Press
American Studies, Asian American Studies, Immigration Studies
After surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide, followed by years of confinement to international refugee camps, as many as 10,000 Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the Bronx during the 1980s and ‘90s. Unsettledchronicles the unfinished odyssey of Bronx Cambodians, closely following one woman and her family for several years as they survive yet resist their literal insertion into concentrated Bronx poverty.
Eric Tang tells the harrowing and inspiring stories of these refugees to make sense of how and why the displaced migrants have been resettled in the “hyperghetto.” He argues that refuge is never found, that rescue discourses mask a more profound urban reality characterized by racialized geographic enclosure, economic displacement and unrelenting poverty, and the criminalization of daily life.
Unsettled views the hyperghetto as a site of extreme isolation, punishment, and confinement. The refugees remain captives in late-capitalist urban America. Tang ultimately asks: What does it mean for these Cambodians to resettle into this distinct time and space of slavery’s afterlife?
Keywords: Migration, refugees, poverty, urban studies, United States, displacement, citizenship
Reclaiming Basque: Language, Nation, and Cultural Activism
Jacqueline Urla
2012 University of Nevada Press
Anthropology, Linguistics
Basque language, Euskara, is one of Europe’s most ancient tongues and a vital part of today’s lively Basque culture. Reclaiming Basque examines the ideology, methods, and discourse of the Basque-language revitalization movement over the course of the past century and the way this effort has unfolded alongside the simultaneous Basque nationalist struggle for autonomy. Jacqueline Urla employs extensive long-term fieldwork and close examination of a vast range of documents to uncover the strategies that have been used to preserve and revive Basque and the various controversies that have arisen among language advocates. Reclaiming Basque offers a new perspective on language activism as a dynamic and evolving social movement. It addresses the complex issue of what it means to speak Basque in the contemporary Basque Country, as well as the roles of minority languages, language policies, and cultural identity in a globalized world.
Keywords: Activist Anthropology, PAR, Linguistics, Language Activism, Policies
Jacqueline Urla
2012 University of Nevada Press
Anthropology, Linguistics
Basque language, Euskara, is one of Europe’s most ancient tongues and a vital part of today’s lively Basque culture. Reclaiming Basque examines the ideology, methods, and discourse of the Basque-language revitalization movement over the course of the past century and the way this effort has unfolded alongside the simultaneous Basque nationalist struggle for autonomy. Jacqueline Urla employs extensive long-term fieldwork and close examination of a vast range of documents to uncover the strategies that have been used to preserve and revive Basque and the various controversies that have arisen among language advocates. Reclaiming Basque offers a new perspective on language activism as a dynamic and evolving social movement. It addresses the complex issue of what it means to speak Basque in the contemporary Basque Country, as well as the roles of minority languages, language policies, and cultural identity in a globalized world.
Keywords: Activist Anthropology, PAR, Linguistics, Language Activism, Policies
Island of Shame: The Secret History of Military Base on Diego Garcia
David Vine
2011 Princeton University Press
Anthropology
The American military base on the island of Diego Garcia is one of the most strategically important and secretive U.S. military installations outside the United States. Located near the remote center of the Indian Ocean and accessible only by military transport, the little-known base has been instrumental in American military operations from the Cold War to the war on terror and may house a top-secret CIA prison where terror suspects are interrogated and tortured. But Diego Garcia harbors another dirty secret, one that has been kept from most of the world--until now. Island of Shame is the first major book to reveal the shocking truth of how the United States conspired with Britain to forcibly expel Diego Garcia's indigenous people--the Chagossians--and deport them to slums in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where most live in dire poverty to this day. Drawing on interviews with Washington insiders, military strategists, and exiled islanders, as well as hundreds of declassified documents, David Vine exposes the secret history of Diego Garcia. He chronicles the Chagossians' dramatic, unfolding story as they struggle to survive in exile and fight to return to their homeland. Tracing U.S. foreign policy from the Cold War to the war on terror, Vine shows how the United States has forged a new and pervasive kind of empire that is quietly dominating the planet with hundreds of overseas military bases. Island of Shame is an unforgettable exposé of the human costs of empire and a must-read for anyone concerned about U.S. foreign policy and its consequences. The author will donate all royalties from the sale of this book to the Chagossians.
Keywords: U.S. Military, Foreign Policy, Exile, Empire, Legal Anthropology, Activism, United States
David Vine
2011 Princeton University Press
Anthropology
The American military base on the island of Diego Garcia is one of the most strategically important and secretive U.S. military installations outside the United States. Located near the remote center of the Indian Ocean and accessible only by military transport, the little-known base has been instrumental in American military operations from the Cold War to the war on terror and may house a top-secret CIA prison where terror suspects are interrogated and tortured. But Diego Garcia harbors another dirty secret, one that has been kept from most of the world--until now. Island of Shame is the first major book to reveal the shocking truth of how the United States conspired with Britain to forcibly expel Diego Garcia's indigenous people--the Chagossians--and deport them to slums in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where most live in dire poverty to this day. Drawing on interviews with Washington insiders, military strategists, and exiled islanders, as well as hundreds of declassified documents, David Vine exposes the secret history of Diego Garcia. He chronicles the Chagossians' dramatic, unfolding story as they struggle to survive in exile and fight to return to their homeland. Tracing U.S. foreign policy from the Cold War to the war on terror, Vine shows how the United States has forged a new and pervasive kind of empire that is quietly dominating the planet with hundreds of overseas military bases. Island of Shame is an unforgettable exposé of the human costs of empire and a must-read for anyone concerned about U.S. foreign policy and its consequences. The author will donate all royalties from the sale of this book to the Chagossians.
Keywords: U.S. Military, Foreign Policy, Exile, Empire, Legal Anthropology, Activism, United States
Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing
Alisse Waterston and Maria D. Vesperi (Editors)
2009 Wiley-Blackwell
Anthropology
First of its kind volume in anthropology in which prominent anthropologists and 3 respected professionals outside the discipline follow the tradition of the “writers on writing” genre to reflect on all aspects of the writing process. The contributors are high-profile anthropologists and assume a strong presence outside of the field, often in popular culture. The collection's format is unique: short essays, revealing and straightforward in content and writing style.
Keywords: Writing, Reflective Ethnography, Interdisciplinary
Alisse Waterston and Maria D. Vesperi (Editors)
2009 Wiley-Blackwell
Anthropology
First of its kind volume in anthropology in which prominent anthropologists and 3 respected professionals outside the discipline follow the tradition of the “writers on writing” genre to reflect on all aspects of the writing process. The contributors are high-profile anthropologists and assume a strong presence outside of the field, often in popular culture. The collection's format is unique: short essays, revealing and straightforward in content and writing style.
Keywords: Writing, Reflective Ethnography, Interdisciplinary
An Anthropology of War: Views from the Frontline
Alisse Waterston (Editor)
2008 Berghahn Books
Anthropology
“It is sobering, but also provocative to look at war from the viewpoint of anthropologists, especially those who have had the unique experience of being in zones of war. These essays bring special insights, but also a passion missing in the usual journalistic accounts or scholarly reflections. The writers in this volume not only enlarge our perspective but move us emotionally - a rare and admirable combination.” -- Howard Zinn. As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, power, lethal force, and injustice continue to explode violently into war, and the prospects for lasting peace look even bleaker. The horrors of modern warfare - the death, dehumanization, and destruction of social and material infrastructures - have done little to bring an end to armed conflict. In this volume, leading chroniclers of war provide thoughtful and powerful essays that reflect on their ethnographic work at the frontlines. The contributors recount not only what they have seen and heard in war zones but also what is being read, studied, analyzed and remembered in such diverse locations as Colombia and Guatemala, Israel and Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Haiti. In detailed reports from the field, they reflect on the important issue of “accountability” and offer explanations to discern causes, patterns, and practices of war. Through this unique lens, the contributors provide the insight and analysis needed for a deeper understanding of one of the greatest issues of our times. Contributors: Avram Bornstein, Paul E. Farmer, R. Brian Ferguson, Lesley Gill, Beatriz Manz, Carolyn Nordstrom, Stephen Reyna, Jose N. Vasquez Alisse Waterston is Professor of Anthropology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Her work focuses on the human consequences of structural and systemic violence and inequality. Her publications include Love, Sorrow and Rage: Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence, and Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing, co-edited with Maria D. Vesperi.
Keywords: War, Research Ethics, Reflexivity
Alisse Waterston (Editor)
2008 Berghahn Books
Anthropology
“It is sobering, but also provocative to look at war from the viewpoint of anthropologists, especially those who have had the unique experience of being in zones of war. These essays bring special insights, but also a passion missing in the usual journalistic accounts or scholarly reflections. The writers in this volume not only enlarge our perspective but move us emotionally - a rare and admirable combination.” -- Howard Zinn. As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, power, lethal force, and injustice continue to explode violently into war, and the prospects for lasting peace look even bleaker. The horrors of modern warfare - the death, dehumanization, and destruction of social and material infrastructures - have done little to bring an end to armed conflict. In this volume, leading chroniclers of war provide thoughtful and powerful essays that reflect on their ethnographic work at the frontlines. The contributors recount not only what they have seen and heard in war zones but also what is being read, studied, analyzed and remembered in such diverse locations as Colombia and Guatemala, Israel and Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Haiti. In detailed reports from the field, they reflect on the important issue of “accountability” and offer explanations to discern causes, patterns, and practices of war. Through this unique lens, the contributors provide the insight and analysis needed for a deeper understanding of one of the greatest issues of our times. Contributors: Avram Bornstein, Paul E. Farmer, R. Brian Ferguson, Lesley Gill, Beatriz Manz, Carolyn Nordstrom, Stephen Reyna, Jose N. Vasquez Alisse Waterston is Professor of Anthropology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Her work focuses on the human consequences of structural and systemic violence and inequality. Her publications include Love, Sorrow and Rage: Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence, and Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing, co-edited with Maria D. Vesperi.
Keywords: War, Research Ethics, Reflexivity
My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory and the Violence of a Century
Alisse Waterson
2013 Routledge
Anthropology, Sociology
“My father was born into war,” begins this remarkable saga in Alisse Waterston’s intimate ethnography, a story that is also twentieth century social history. This is an anthropologist’s vivid account of her father’s journey across continents, countries, cultures, languages, generations—and wars. It is a daughter’s moving portrait of a charming, funny, wounded, and difficult man, his relationships with those he loved, and his most sacred of beliefs. And it is a scholar’s reflection on the dramatic forces of history, the experience of exile and immigration, the legacies of culture, and the enduring power of memory. “This is perhaps the most honest project I’ve done in anthropology in terms of ‘knowing’ my subject and ‘representing’ my subject matter. I used rich and multiple sources—a passport, a letter, old tapes and new, books, memories. I worked with what remained—pulling apart, rearranging, preserving, even tearing in some places—to tell a story and a history that are at once separate and together. ” – Alisse Waterston
Keywords: Violence, Migration, Ethnicity, Family, History, Memory, War
Alisse Waterson
2013 Routledge
Anthropology, Sociology
“My father was born into war,” begins this remarkable saga in Alisse Waterston’s intimate ethnography, a story that is also twentieth century social history. This is an anthropologist’s vivid account of her father’s journey across continents, countries, cultures, languages, generations—and wars. It is a daughter’s moving portrait of a charming, funny, wounded, and difficult man, his relationships with those he loved, and his most sacred of beliefs. And it is a scholar’s reflection on the dramatic forces of history, the experience of exile and immigration, the legacies of culture, and the enduring power of memory. “This is perhaps the most honest project I’ve done in anthropology in terms of ‘knowing’ my subject and ‘representing’ my subject matter. I used rich and multiple sources—a passport, a letter, old tapes and new, books, memories. I worked with what remained—pulling apart, rearranging, preserving, even tearing in some places—to tell a story and a history that are at once separate and together. ” – Alisse Waterston
Keywords: Violence, Migration, Ethnicity, Family, History, Memory, War
Traveling Light: On the Road with America’s Poor
Kath Weston
2008 Beacon Press
Anthropology
How far can you get on two tacos, one Dr. Pepper, and a little bit of conversation? What happens when you're broke and you need to get to a new job, an ailing parent, a powwow, college, or a funeral on the other side of the country? And after decades of globalization, what kind of America will you glimpse through the window on your way? For five years, Kath Weston rode the bus to find out. Weston's route takes her through northeastern cities buried under layoffs, an immigration raid in the Southwest, an antiwar rally in the capitol, and the path traced by Hurricane Katrina. Like any road story, this one has characters that linger in the imagination: the trucker who has to give up his rig to have an operation; the teenager who can turn any Hollywood movie into a rap song; the homeless veteran who dreams of running his own shrimp boat; the sketch artist who breathes life into African American history; the single mother scrambling for loose change. But Traveling Light is not just another book about people stuck in poverty. Rather, it's a book about how people move through poverty and their insights into the sweeping economic changes that affect us all. The bus is a place where unexpected generosity coexists with pickup lines and scams, where civic debates thrive and injustice finds some of its most acute analysts. Hard-working people rub shoulders with others who rap, sketch, and story new worlds into being. Folded into these poignant narratives are headlines, studies, and statistics that track the intensification of poverty and inequality as the United States enters the twenty-first-century. If sharp-eyed observations and down-to-earth critique-of the health care system, imperialism, the state of the environment, or corporate downsizing-are what you're looking for, Weston suggests the bus is the place to find it. The result is a moving meditation on living poor in the world's wealthiest nation.
Keywords: Poverty, Globalization, Urban Anthropology, Public Space
Kath Weston
2008 Beacon Press
Anthropology
How far can you get on two tacos, one Dr. Pepper, and a little bit of conversation? What happens when you're broke and you need to get to a new job, an ailing parent, a powwow, college, or a funeral on the other side of the country? And after decades of globalization, what kind of America will you glimpse through the window on your way? For five years, Kath Weston rode the bus to find out. Weston's route takes her through northeastern cities buried under layoffs, an immigration raid in the Southwest, an antiwar rally in the capitol, and the path traced by Hurricane Katrina. Like any road story, this one has characters that linger in the imagination: the trucker who has to give up his rig to have an operation; the teenager who can turn any Hollywood movie into a rap song; the homeless veteran who dreams of running his own shrimp boat; the sketch artist who breathes life into African American history; the single mother scrambling for loose change. But Traveling Light is not just another book about people stuck in poverty. Rather, it's a book about how people move through poverty and their insights into the sweeping economic changes that affect us all. The bus is a place where unexpected generosity coexists with pickup lines and scams, where civic debates thrive and injustice finds some of its most acute analysts. Hard-working people rub shoulders with others who rap, sketch, and story new worlds into being. Folded into these poignant narratives are headlines, studies, and statistics that track the intensification of poverty and inequality as the United States enters the twenty-first-century. If sharp-eyed observations and down-to-earth critique-of the health care system, imperialism, the state of the environment, or corporate downsizing-are what you're looking for, Weston suggests the bus is the place to find it. The result is a moving meditation on living poor in the world's wealthiest nation.
Keywords: Poverty, Globalization, Urban Anthropology, Public Space
Upscaling Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington, DC
Brett Williams
1988 Cornell University Press
Anthropology, Urban Studies
Anthropologist Williams, a former resident of ``Elm Valley,'' in Washington, D.C., traces the evolution of the community from the 1950s, when it sheltered mostly black families new home and shop owners with shared mores through the influx of refugees from other cultures, affluent white home buyers, and outside investors. An uneasy, segmented community structure has replaced the earlier rich, cohesive relationships. Williams places the transformation of Elm Valley in national perspective and considers the extent to which a group's attitudes and beliefs about another are shaped by media images.
Keywords: Gentrification, Housing, Washington DC, United States
Brett Williams
1988 Cornell University Press
Anthropology, Urban Studies
Anthropologist Williams, a former resident of ``Elm Valley,'' in Washington, D.C., traces the evolution of the community from the 1950s, when it sheltered mostly black families new home and shop owners with shared mores through the influx of refugees from other cultures, affluent white home buyers, and outside investors. An uneasy, segmented community structure has replaced the earlier rich, cohesive relationships. Williams places the transformation of Elm Valley in national perspective and considers the extent to which a group's attitudes and beliefs about another are shaped by media images.
Keywords: Gentrification, Housing, Washington DC, United States
Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador
Elena Zilberg
2011 Duke University Press
Anthropology
Space of Detention is a powerful ethnographic account and spatial analysis of the “transnational gang crisis” between the United States and El Salvador. Elana Zilberg seeks to understand how this phenomenon became an issue of central concern for national and regional security, and how La Mara Salvatrucha, a gang founded by Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles, came to symbolize the “gang crime–terrorism continuum.” She follows Salvadoran immigrants raised in Los Angeles, who identify as—or are alleged to be—gang members and who are deported back to El Salvador after their incarceration in the United States. Analyzing zero-tolerance gang-abatement strategies in both countries, Zilberg shows that these measures help to produce the very transnational violence and undocumented migration that they are intended to suppress. She argues that the contemporary fixation with Latino immigrant and Salvadoran street gangs, while in part a product of media hype, must also be understood in relation to the longer history of U.S. involvement in Central America, the processes of neoliberalism and globalization, and the intersection of immigration, criminal, and antiterrorist law. These forces combine to produce what Zilberg terms “neoliberal securityscapes.”
Keywords: Gangs, Transnational Networks, Neoliberal Globalization, Security, Central America, United States
Elena Zilberg
2011 Duke University Press
Anthropology
Space of Detention is a powerful ethnographic account and spatial analysis of the “transnational gang crisis” between the United States and El Salvador. Elana Zilberg seeks to understand how this phenomenon became an issue of central concern for national and regional security, and how La Mara Salvatrucha, a gang founded by Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles, came to symbolize the “gang crime–terrorism continuum.” She follows Salvadoran immigrants raised in Los Angeles, who identify as—or are alleged to be—gang members and who are deported back to El Salvador after their incarceration in the United States. Analyzing zero-tolerance gang-abatement strategies in both countries, Zilberg shows that these measures help to produce the very transnational violence and undocumented migration that they are intended to suppress. She argues that the contemporary fixation with Latino immigrant and Salvadoran street gangs, while in part a product of media hype, must also be understood in relation to the longer history of U.S. involvement in Central America, the processes of neoliberalism and globalization, and the intersection of immigration, criminal, and antiterrorist law. These forces combine to produce what Zilberg terms “neoliberal securityscapes.”
Keywords: Gangs, Transnational Networks, Neoliberal Globalization, Security, Central America, United States
Disclaimer: All book descriptions were copied from publishers' or other book review sites.
Top banner photo by Akbar Nemati (Iran): (Back Light, January 2009) [Usage allowed through SXC.hu]
Top banner photo by Akbar Nemati (Iran): (Back Light, January 2009) [Usage allowed through SXC.hu]