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Urban poverty, along with all of its poignant manifestations, is moving from city centers to working-class and industrial suburbs in contemporary America, and nowhere is this more evident than in East St. Louis, Illinois. Once a thriving manufacturing and transportation center, East St. Louis is now known for its unemployment, crime, and collapsing infrastructure. This book takes us into the lives of East St. Louis's predominantly African American residents to find out what has happened since industry abandoned the city, and jobs, quality schools, and city services disappeared, leaving people isolated and imperiled. It introduces men who search for meaning and opportunity in dead-end jobs, women who often take on caretaking responsibilities until well into old age, and parents who have the impossible task of protecting their children in this dangerous, and literally toxic, environment. Illustrated with historical and contemporary photographs showing how the city has changed over time, the book, full of stories of courage and fortitude, offers a vision of the transformed circumstances of life in one American suburb.

This investigation of slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America contributes to our understanding of the aboriginal cultures of this area, and shows that Northwest Coast servitude, relatively neglected by researchers in the past, fits an appropriate cross-cultural definition of slavery. Arguing that slaves and slavery were central to these hunting-fishing-gathering societies, the book points out how important slaves were to the Northwest Coast economies for their labor and for their value as major items of exchange. Slavery also played a major role in more famous and frequently analyzed Northwest Coast cultural forms such as the potlatch and the spectacular art style and ritual systems of elite groups. The book includes detailed chapters on who owned slaves and the relations between masters and slaves; how slaves were procured; transactions in slaves; the nature, use, and value of slave labor; and the role of slaves in rituals. In addition to analyzing all the available data, ethnographic and historic, on slavery in traditional Northwest Coast cultures, it compares the status of Northwest Coast slaves with that of war captives in other parts of traditional Native North America.

What do archaeological excavations in Annapolis, Maryland, reveal about daily life in the city's history? Considering artifacts such as ceramics, spirit bundles, printer's type, and landscapes, this study illuminates the lives of the city's residents—walking, seeing, reading, talking, eating, and living together in freedom and in oppression for more than three hundred years. Interpreting the results of one of the most innovative projects in American archaeology, the book speaks powerfully to the struggle for liberty among African Americans and the poor.

More than most of us, this book's author needed to come to terms with the moral complexities of the atomic bomb: Her parents worked on its development during World War II and were profoundly changed by that experience. After they died, unanswered questions sent their daughter on a search for understanding. This chronicle is the story of that quest. It takes the author, and us, on a journey into the minds, memories, and emotions of the bomb builders. Scientists Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Joseph Rotblat, Herbert York, Philip Morrison, and Robert Wilson, and philosopher David Hawkins responded to the author's personal approach in a way that dramatically expands their previously published statements. This prompted these men to recall their lives vividly and to reexamine their own decisions, debating within themselves the complex issues raised by the bomb. The author herself, seeking to comprehend the widely differing ways in which individual scientists made choices about the bomb and made sense of their work, deeply reconsiders those questions of commitment and conscience her parents faced. In personal vignettes that complement the interviews, this book captures other remembrances of the bomb through commemorative events and chance encounters with people who were “there.” The concluding chapter reframes the crucial moral questions in terms that show the questions themselves to be the abiding legacy we all share.

Over the last three decades, migration from Mexico to the United States has moved beyond the borderlands to diverse communities across the country, with the most striking transformations in American suburbs and small towns. This study explores the challenges encountered by Mexican families as they endeavor to find their place in the U.S. by focusing on Kennett Square, a small farming village in Pennsylvania known as the “Mushroom Capital of the World.” In an account based on extensive fieldwork among Mexican migrants and their American neighbors, this book explores the issues of belonging and displacement, central concerns for residents in communities that have become new destinations for Mexican settlement. It also completes the circle of migration by following migrant families as they return to their hometown in Mexico, providing an illuminating perspective of the tenuous lives of Mexicans residing in, but not fully part of, two worlds.

When Spanish explorers and missionaries came onto Southern California's shores in 1769, they encountered the large towns and villages of the Chumash, a people who at that time were among the most advanced hunter-gatherer societies in the world. The Spanish were entertained and fed at lavish feasts hosted by chiefs who ruled over the settlements and who participated in extensive social and economic networks. In this modern synthesis of data from the Chumash heartland, this book weaves together multiple sources of evidence to re-create the rich tapestry of Chumash society. Drawing from archaeology, historical documents, ethnography, and ecology, it describes daily life in the large mainland towns, focusing on Chumash culture, household organization, politics, economy, warfare, and more.

The white wedding does more than mark a life passage. It marries two of the most sacred tenets of American culture: romantic love and excessive consumption. For anyone who has ever wondered about the meanings behind a white dress, a diamond ring, rice, and traditions such as cake cutting, bouquet tossing, and honeymooning, this book offers a look at the historical, social, and psychological strains that come together to make the lavish wedding the most important cultural ritual in contemporary consumer culture. With an emphasis on North American society, it shows how the elaborate wedding means far more than a mere triumph for the bridal industry. Through interviews, media accounts, and wide-ranging research and analysis, the book exposes the wedding's reflection—or reproduction—of fundamental aspects of popular consumer culture: its link with romantic love, its promise of magical transformation, its engendering of memories, and its legitimization of consumption as an expression of perfection. As meaningful as any prospective bride might wish, the lavish wedding emerges here as a lens that at once reveals, magnifies, and reveres some of the dearest wishes and darkest impulses at the heart of our culture.

Images of diamonds appear everywhere in American culture. And everyone who has a diamond has a story to tell about it. Our stories about diamonds not only reveal what we do with these tiny stones, but also suggest how we create value, meaning, and identity through our interactions with material culture in general. Things become meaningful through our interactions with them, but how do people go about making meaning? What can we learn from an ethnography about the production of identity, creation of kinship, and use of diamonds in understanding selves and social relationships? By what means do people positioned within a globalized political-economy and a compelling universe of advertising interact locally with these tiny polished rocks? This book draws on 12 months of fieldwork with diamond consumers in New York City as well as an analysis of the iconic De Beers campaign that promised romance, status, and glamour to anyone who bought a diamond to show that this thematic pool is just one resource among many that diamond owners draw upon to engage with their own stones. It highlights the important roles that memory, context, and circumstance also play in shaping how people interpret and then use objects in making personal worlds. It shows that besides operating as subjects in an ad-burdened universe, consumers are highly creative, idiosyncratic, and theatrical agents.

How do you tell the difference between a “good kid” and a “potential thug”? This book considers the ways in which children are increasingly viewed as dangerous and yet, simultaneously, as endangered and in need of protection by the state. It draws on three years of ethnographic research in Oakland, California, one of the nation's most racially diverse cities, to examine how debates over the nature and needs of young people have fundamentally reshaped politics, transforming ideas of citizenship and the state in contemporary America. As parents and neighborhood activists have worked to save and discipline young people, they have often inadvertently reinforced privatized models of childhood and urban space, clearing the streets of children, who are encouraged to stay at home or in supervised after-school programs. Youth activists protest these attempts, demanding a right to the city and expanded rights of citizenship. This book pays careful attention to the intricate connections between fears of other people's kids and fears for our own kids in order to explore the complex racial, class, and gender divides in contemporary American cities.

Downed by Friendly Fire examines the ubiquity of violence and the need to rehabilitate its prevailing physical classification, especially as it relates to gender. The book seeks to change the meaning of violence by redefining it to include intended, nonphysical harm cloaked in the presumed banality of normality. Specifically, it looks at the social practices that dehumanize or are exploitative—either emotionally or physically—, which compels individuals to endure shame, humiliation, starvation, exclusion, marginalization, health disparities poverty, etc. This is done through the framework of the unmasking of female aggression, bullying, and competition that are evoked by the structural violence embedded in the racialized and gendered social order.

Ancestral Pueblo farmersexpanded into the deep, productive, well-watered soils of the central Mesa Verde region of southwestern Colorado around AD 600, and within two centuries built some of the largest villages known up to that time in the American Southwest. But only one hundred years later, those villages were empty, and most of the people had gone. This cycle repeated itself, though with many more people, from the mid-AD 1000s until1280, when Pueblo farmers left the entire northern Southwestpermanently. Our interdisciplinary team examines how climate change, population size, conflict, resource depression, and changing social and ceremonial organization contribute to explaining these dramatic shifts. Our conclusions depend in part on comparing the output from a series of agent-based models with the precisely dated archaeological record from this area. People visiting or living inthe Southwest, archaeologists working in Neolithic societies anywhere in the world, and researchers applying modeling techniques to understanding how human societies shape and are shaped by the environments we inhabit will read this book with interest.

Since the 1950s, anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz has been at the forefront of efforts to integrate the disciplines of anthropology and history. Author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and other groundbreaking works, he was one of the first scholars to anticipate and critique “globalization studies.” However, a strong tradition of epistemologically sophisticated and theoretically informed empiricism of the sort advanced by Mintz has yet to become a cornerstone of contemporary anthropological scholarship. This collection of essays by leading anthropologists and historians serves as an intervention that rests on Mintz's rigorously historicist ethnographic work, which has long predicted the methodological crisis in anthropology today. This book binds on Mintzean interdisciplinarity to provide productive ways to theorize the everyday life of local groups and communities, nation-states, and regions and the interconnections among them. Consisting of theoretical and case studies of Latin America, North America, the Caribbean, and Papua New Guinea, this book demonstrates how Mintzean perspectives advance our understanding of the relationship among empirical approaches, the uses of ethnographic and historical data and theory-building, and the study of these from both local and global vantage points.

Is travel inherently beneficial to human character? Does it automatically educate and enlighten while also promoting tolerance, peace, and understanding? This book identifies and overcomes common obstacles to ethical sightseeing. Through its unique combination of personal observation and in-depth scholarship, it ventures into specific tourist destinations and attractions: “picturesque” rural and natural landscapes, “hip” urban scenes, historic locations of tragic events, Disney theme parks, beaches, and travel poster ideals. The book shows how strategies intended to attract tourists carry unintended consequences when they migrate to other domains of life and reappear as “staged authenticity.” Demonstrating each act of sightseeing as an ethical test, it shows how tourists can realize the productive potential of their travel desires, penetrate the collective unconscious, and gain character, insight, and connection to the world.

By 2008, total fair trade purchases in the developed world reached nearly $3 billion, a five-fold increase in four years. Consumers pay a “fair price” for fair trade items, which are meant to generate greater earnings for family farmers, cover the costs of production, and support socially just and environmentally sound practices. Yet constrained by existing markets and the entities that dominate them, Fair trade often delivers material improvements for producers that are much more modest than the profound social transformations the movement claims to support. There has been scant real-world assessment of fair trade's effectiveness. Drawing upon fine-grained anthropological studies of a variety of regions and commodity systems including Darjeeling tea, coffee, crafts, and cut flowers, this book represents the first work to use ethnographic case studies to assess whether the fair trade movement is actually achieving its goals.

The American frontier, a potent symbol since Europeans first stepped ashore on North America, serves as the touchstone for this book's analysis of the narrating of history. The book explores the traditions through which historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary critics have understood the story of America's origin and the way those understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing conceptions of history. The American West was once the frontier space where migrating Europe collided with Native America, where the historical civilizations of the Old World met the nonhistorical wilds of the New. It was not only the cultural combat zone where American democracy was forged but also the ragged edge of History itself, where historical and nonhistorical defied and defined each other. The book maintains that the idea of a collision between people with and without history still dominates public memory. But this collision, it believes, resounds even more powerfully in the historical imagination, which creates conflicts between narration and knowledge, and carries them into the language used to describe the American frontier.

This ethnography examines the gendered nature of today's large corporate law firms. Although increasing numbers of women have become lawyers in the past decade, this book discovers that the double standards and sexist attitudes of legal bureaucracies are a continuing problem for women lawyers and paralegals. Working as a paralegal, ethnographic research was carried out in two law offices, its depiction of the legal world is quite unlike the glamorized version seen on television. The book portrays the dilemma that female attorneys face: A woman using tough, aggressive tactics—the ideal combative litigator—is often regarded as brash or even obnoxious by her male colleagues, yet any lack of toughness would mark her as ineffective. Women paralegals also face a double bind in corporate law firms. While lawyers depend on paralegals for important work, they also expect these women—for most paralegals are women—to nurture them and affirm their superior status in the office hierarchy. Paralegals who mother their bosses experience increasing personal exploitation, while those who do not face criticism and professional sanction. Male paralegals, the book finds, do not encounter the same difficulties that female paralegals do. The book argues that this gendered division of labor benefits men politically, economically, and personally. However, it finds that women lawyers and paralegals develop creative strategies for resisting and disrupting the male-dominated status quo.

“Baby safe haven” laws, which allow a parent to relinquish a newborn baby legally and anonymously at a specified institutional location—such as a hospital or fire station—were established in every state between 1999 and 2009. Promoted during a time of heated public debate over policies on abortion, sex education, teen pregnancy, adoption, welfare, immigrant reproduction, and child abuse, safe haven laws were passed by the majority of states with little contest. These laws were thought to offer a solution to the consequences of unwanted pregnancy: mothers would no longer be burdened with children they could not care for, and newborn babies would no longer be abandoned in dumpsters. Yet while these laws are well meaning, they ignore the real problem: some women lack key social and economic supports that mothers need to raise children. Safe haven laws do little to help disadvantaged women. Instead, advocates of safe haven laws target teenagers, women of color, and poor women with safe haven information and see relinquishing custody of their newborns as an act of maternal love. Disadvantaged women are preemptively judged as “bad” mothers whose babies would be better off without them. This book argues that the labeling of certain kinds of women as potential “bad” mothers who should consider anonymously giving up their newborns for adoption into a “loving” home should best be understood as an issue of reproductive justice.

This book, based on a two-year study of former prisoners of the U.S. government's detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, reveals in graphic detail the cumulative effect of the Bush administration's “war on terror.” Scrupulously researched and devoid of rhetoric, it deepens the story of post-9/11 America and the nation's descent into the netherworld of prisoner abuse. Researchers interviewed more than 60 former Guantánamo detainees in nine countries, as well as key government officials, military experts, former guards, interrogators, lawyers for detainees, and other camp personnel. We hear directly from former detainees as they describe the events surrounding their capture, their years of incarceration, and the myriad difficulties preventing many from resuming a normal life upon returning home. Prepared jointly by researchers with the Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley, and the International Human Rights Law Clinic, University of California, Berkeley School of Law, in partnership with the Center for Constitutional Rights, the book contributes to the debate surrounding the U.S.'s commitment to international law during war time.

This book explores the brave new world of social relations as they have evolved on the Internet. It examines how men and women negotiate their gender roles on an online forum the book calls BlueSky. The result is an analysis of the emerging social phenomenon of Internet-mediated communication and a study of the social and cultural effects of a medium that allows participants to assume identities of their own choosing. Despite the common assumption that the personas these men and women craft for themselves bear little resemblance to reality, the book discovers that the habitués of BlueSky stick surprisingly close to the facts of their actual lives and personalities.

Harlem is one of the most famous neighborhoods in the world—a historic symbol of both black cultural achievement and of the rigid boundaries separating the rich from the poor. But as this book shows us, it is far more culturally and economically diverse than its caricature suggests: through extensive fieldwork and interviews, the author reveals a variety of social networks and class stratifications, and explores how African Americans interpret and perform different class identities in their everyday behavior.