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The author of this book asks us to prepare for the inevitable. Our society is going to die. What are you going to do about it? But the author also wants us to know that there's still reason for hope. In an immersive and mesmerizing discussion, this book considers what makes societies (throughout history) collapse. It points us to the historical examples of the Byzantine empire, the collapse of Somalia, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism, the rise of drug cartels in Latin America, and the French Revolution, to explain how societal decline has common features and themes. While unveiling the past, the message to us about the present is searing. Through an assessment of past and current societies, the book offers us a new way of looking at societal growth and decline. With a broad panorama of bloody stories, unexpected historical riches, crime waves, corruption, and disasters, the reader is shown that although our society will, inevitably, die at some point, there's still a lot we can do to make it better and live a little longer. This inventive approach to an “end-of-the-world” scenario should be a warning. We're not there yet. The book concludes with a strategy of preserving and rebuilding so that we don't have to give a eulogy anytime soon.

When United Airlines Flight 93, the fourth plane hijacked in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the gash it left in the ground became a national site of mourning. The flight's forty passengers became a media obsession, and countless books, movies, and articles told the tale of their heroic fight to band together and sacrifice their lives to stop Flight 93 from becoming a weapon of terror. This book argues that by memorializing these individuals as patriots, we have woven them into the much larger story of our nation—about what it means to be truly American. The book examines the symbolic impact and role of the Flight 93 disaster in the nation's collective consciousness, delving into the spontaneous memorialization efforts that blossomed in Shanksville immediately after news of the crash spread; the ad-hoc sites honoring the victims that in time emerged; and the creation of an official, permanent crash monument in Shanksville like those built for past American wars. The book also analyzes the cultural narratives that evolved in films and in books around the events on the day of the crash and the lives and deaths of its “angel patriot” passengers, uncovering how these representations of the event reflect the myth of the authentic American nation—one that Americans believed was gravely threatened in the 9/11 attacks. The book unveils how, in the wake of 9/11, America mourned much more than the loss of life.

This book explores the convergence of different notions of Asia through the meeting between Rabindranath Tagore and the Japanese art historian and curator Okakura Tenshin in Calcutta in 1902. Set against a panoramic background, it draws on the intersections of the late Meiji period in Japan and the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, weaves through an intricate tapestry of ideas relating to pan-Asianism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and friendship, and positions the early modernist tensions of the period within-and against-the spectre of a unified Asia that concealed considerable political differences. In addition to countering the imperialist subtext of Okakura's The Ideals of the East and The Awakening of the East against Tagore's radical critique of Nationalism, it inflects the dominant tropes of postcolonial theory by highlighting the subtleties of beauty and the interstices of homosociality and love. Spanning geographical boundaries, across the cities of Tokyo, Boston, and Calcutta, the book offers new insights into the ways in which the Orient travelled within and beyond Asia, stimulated by emergent modes of vernacular cosmopolitanism.

When people cross the footbridge to Lewis Island in the Delaware River at Lambertville, NJ, they’re in a “whole ‘nother world”: wild and civilized, stable atop changing water and earth. Here lies the last commercial haul seine fishery on the non-tidal Delaware, where Lewis family members have netted since 1888 and have long monitored the fluctuating shad population. The island also serves as a spiritual, recreational, and community site for local and regional visitors, whom the Lewis family welcomes because of their forebear’s “mandate to share the island.” Visitors feel almost immediately that this place is special, but the why is elusive. Folklorist Charlie Groth explains Lewis Island’s unassuming cultural magic by developing the concept of “narrative stewardship,” a practice by which people take care of communal resources (in this case, river, shad, tradition, and community itself) through sharing stories. Anchored in over two decades of field research, this accessible ethnography interweaves the author’s observations as a crew member, stories from various tellers, interviews, history, and cultural theory. Beginning with thick description, the work explores four broad story types—Big Stories, character anecdotes, microlegends, and everyday storying. Groth traces how narratives intertwine with each other and with the physical environment to create sense of place, while participants in various roles navigate belonging. Ultimately, she posits the idea that in an era when telectronics have changed material conditions profoundly and quickly, echoing the way the industrial revolution led to anomie, narrative stewardship embedded in everyday life helps sustain culture and community.

Answer the Call explores the daily, psychic journeys Indian call center agents undergo as they virtually migrate between India and the U.S. The new time-space relations generated by this virtual contact create conditions for these workers to undergo a global “migration” from India and to America, even as their bodies remain bounded within the national homeland. This temporal arrangement displaces them from the daily rhythms of Indian life, generating a sense of loss, longing, and nostalgia for “India.” Further, while agents experience a sense of distance from India, they also experience a movement toward “America.” Agents’ accounts suggest a feeling of living between worlds, yet their movement is decoupled from physical migration. Call center agents migrate not through space, but through time. While virtual migration has no geographically distant point of arrival, the experience of moving between India and America is not merely imagined. Something is happening to agents’ sense of place and time, and yet this something falls somewhere, as agents explain, in-between: between India and America, migrating and remaining within the homeland, diasporic subject and Indian citizen; between experience and imagination; between class mobility and consumption; between here and there, then and now, past and future, tradition and modernity. Call center agents live and work between these multiple cracks of material culture. Our detailed investigation of their stories unpacks the dense cultural lives agents live as they dwell in the potentiality of virtual migration that affords them spatio-temporal, class, and citizenship mobility.

Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) is widely considered the most influential British anthropologist of the twentieth century, known to generations of students for his seminal works on South Sudanese ethnography Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (OUP 1937) and The Nuer (OUP 1940). In these works, now classics in the anthropological literature, Evans-Pritchard broke new ground on questions of rationality, social accountability, kinship, social and political organization, and religion, as well as influentially moving the discipline in Britain away from the natural sciences and towards history. Yet despite much discussion about his theoretical contributions to anthropology, no study has yet explored his fieldwork in detail in order to get a better understanding of its historical contexts, local circumstances or the social encounters out of which it emerged. This book then is just such an exploration, of Evans-Pritchard the fieldworker through the lens of his fieldwork photography. Through an engagement with his photographic archive, and by thinking with it alongside his written ethnographies and other unpublished evidence, the book offers a new insight into the way in which Evans-Pritchard’s theoretical contributions to the discipline were shaped by his fieldwork and the numerous local people in Africa with whom he collaborated. By writing history through field photographs we move back towards the fieldwork experiences, exploring the vivid traces, lived realities and local presences at the heart of the social encounter that formed the basis of Evans-Pritchard’s anthropology.

This book is about the creative work of chefs at elite restaurants in New York City and San Francisco. Based on interviews with chefs and observation of their work in restaurant kitchens, the book examines how and why chefs make choices about the dishes they put on their menus, and how they develop a culinary style. To answer the questions, the book analyzes chefs’ career paths, culinary classifications and categories, how chefs develop their culinary styles and reflectively manage their authorship, cognitive patterns and work processes involved in creating food, and status constraints. Elite chefs face competing pressures to create a distinctive and original culinary style, and conform to tradition as they navigate market forces to run a profitable business. They must make choices, and these limit their autonomy over time, because they constrain the dishes and career moves they can make in the future. Chefs occupy positions in a culinary field through their culinary styles, status, and social networks, and make choices about their food and career moves from such positions. In more general terms, the logic of creation of cultural products is embedded in the positions individuals occupy in a field. This book is about the process of creation, and complements an organizational analysis of the world of high cuisine with a phenomenological examination of chefs’ work. It uses the case study of high cuisine to analyze, more generally, how people in creative occupations navigate a context rife with uncertainty, high pressures, and contradicting forces.

This book is about the Hundred Years War of food business, how a mid-nineteenth century American invention, baking powder, replaced yeast as a leavening agent and created a culinary revolution as profound as the use of yeast thousands of years ago. Before government regulation, the force controlling the market was not a visible or invisible hand, but advertising sleight of hand. Four companies—Rumford, Royal, Calumet, and Clabber Girl—fought advertising, trade, legislative, scientific, and judicial wars with proprietary cookbooks, lawsuits, trade cards, and bribes. In the process, they altered or created cake, cupcakes, cookies, biscuits, pancakes, quick breads, waffles, doughnuts, and other foods, and forged a distinct American culinary identity. This new American chemical leavening shortcut also changed the breadstuffs of Native Americans and every immigrant group and was a force for assimilation. The wars continued in spite of scandals exposed by muckraking journalists and investigation by President Theodore Roosevelt, through WWI, the 1920s, the Depression, and WWII in every state, territory, and kitchen in the United States until standardization finally occurred at the end of the twentieth century. Now, global businesses such as McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken depend on baking powder for their baked goods, and baking powder is in home and commercial kitchens around the world.

Why do some music styles gain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches? This book explores this question and reveals the attributes that together explain the growth of twentieth-century American popular music. Drawing on a vast array of examples from sixty musical styles—ranging from rap and bluegrass to death metal and South Texas polka, and including several created outside the United States—the book uncovers the shared grammar that allows us to understand the cultural language and evolution of popular music. The book discovers four dominant forms—avant-garde, scene-based, industry-based, and traditionalist—and two dominant trajectories that describe how American pop music genres develop. Outside the United States there exists a fifth form: the government-purposed genre, which the book examines in the music of China, Serbia, Nigeria, and Chile. Offering a rare analysis of how music communities operate, the book looks at the shared obstacles and opportunities creative people face and reveals the ways in which people collaborate around ideas, artworks, individuals, and organizations that support their work.

How toxic are the products we consume on a daily basis? Whether it’s triclosan in toothpaste, formaldehyde in baby shampoo, endocrine disruptors in water bottles, or pesticides on strawberries, consumers are increasingly concerned about the chemicals in their food and personal care products. Norah MacKendrick chronicles these concerns, showing how individuals attempt to avoid exposure to toxics in the aisles of the grocery store using a practice she calls “precautionary consumption.” Through an innovative analysis of the history of environmental regulation in the United States, the advocacy work of environmental health groups, the expansion of the corporate health food chain Whole Foods Market, and the words of a diverse group of mothers, MacKendrick ponders why the problem of toxics in the retail landscape has been left to individual shoppers—and to mothers in particular. She reveals how precautionary consumption is a costly and time-intensive practice, one that is connected to cultural ideas of femininity and good motherhood, but is also most available to upper- and middle-class households. Better Safe than Sorry powerfully argues that precautionary consumption places a large and unfair burden of labor on women, and does little to advance environmental justice.

At a time when the bulwarks of the music industry are collapsing, what does it mean to be a successful musician and artist? How might contemporary musicians sustain their artistic communities? Based on interviews with over seventy-five popular-music professionals in Nashville, this book looks at artist activists—those visionaries who create inclusive artist communities in today's individualistic and entrepreneurial art world. Using Nashville as a model, the book develops a theory of artist activism—the ways that artist peers strengthen and build diverse artist communities. The book discusses how genre-diversifying artist activists have arisen throughout the late twentieth-century musician migration to Nashville, a city that boasts the highest concentration of music jobs in the United States. Music City is now home to diverse recording artists—including Jack White, El Movimiento, the Black Keys, and Paramore. The book identifies three types of artist activists: the artist-producer who produces and distributes his or her own and others' work while mentoring early-career artists, the social entrepreneur who maintains social spaces for artist networking, and arts trade union reformers who are revamping collective bargaining and union functions. Throughout, the book examines enterprising musicians both known and less recognized. It links individual and collective actions taken by artist activists to their orientations toward success, audience, and risk and to their original inspirations for embarking on music careers. The book offers a new model of artistic success based on innovating creative institutions to benefit the society at large.

This book analyses how racism and anti-racism influences Black British middle class cultural consumption. In doing so, this book challenges the dominant understanding of British middle class identity and culture as being ‘beyond race’. Paying attention to the relationship between cultural capital and cultural repertoires, this book puts forward the idea that there are three black middle-class identity modes: strategic assimilation, class-minded, and ethnoracial autonomous. People towards each of these identity modes use specific cultural repertoires to organise their cultural consumption. Those towards strategic assimilation draw on repertoires of code-switching and cultural equity, consuming traditional middle class culture to maintain an equality with the white middle-class in levels of cultural capital. Ethnoracial autonomous individuals draw on repertoires of browning and Afro-centrism, self-selecting out of traditional middle- class cultural pursuits they decode as ‘Eurocentric’, while showing a preference for cultural forms that uplift black diasporic histories and cultures. Lastly, those towards the class-minded identity mode draw on repertoires of post-racialism and de-racialisation. Such individuals polarise between ‘Black’ and middle class cultural forms, display an unequivocal preference for the latter, and lambast other black people who avoid middle-class culture as being culturally myopic or culturally uncultivated. This book will appeal to sociology students, researchers, and academics working on race and class, critical race theory, and cultural sociology, among other social science disciplines.

Black Radio is a window into the most famous radio show you never heard of. The Tom Joyner Morning Show is a quarter-century-old syndicated black morning radio show reaching more than eight million adult, largely working-class listeners. It offers progressive political talk, soul music, humor, advice, philanthropy, and celebrity gossip. But the TJMS is not just an adult “old-school music” radio show: it is an on-air organizer, fusing progressive politics and aesthetics. It focuses on specific political issues affecting and enraging African Americans. Black Radio analyzes the TJMS’s rise in the Clinton era, and its coverage of key events—9/11, Hurricane Katrina, President Obama’s elections and terms, the murders of unarmed black Americans and the rise of Black Lives Matter, and the shocking 2016 Donald Trump electoral triumph. It showcases the varied, contentious, and blackly humorous voices of anchors, guests, and audience members. Finally, it investigates the new synergistic set of cross-medium ties and political connections now affecting print, broadcast, and online politics in anti-racist directions. Despite the dismal present, this new multiracial progressive public sphere has extraordinary potential for shaping future American politics. Black Radio, then, is more than the project of making the invisible visible, bringing to light a major counterpublic phenomenon unjustly ignored for reasons of color, class, generation, and medium. It tunes us in to an alternative understanding of the black public sphere in the digital age. Like the show itself, Black Radio is politically progressive, music-drenched, angry, and blisteringly funny.

National governments around the world are turning to branding consultants, public relations advisers, and strategic communications experts to help them “brand” their jurisdiction. Using the tools, techniques, and expertise of commercial branding is believed to help nations articulate a more coherent and cohesive identity, attract foreign capital, and maintain citizen loyalty. In short, the goal of nation branding is to make the nation matter in a world where borders and boundaries appear increasingly obsolete. But what actually happens to the nation when it is reconceived as a brand? How does nation branding change the terms of politics and culture in a globalized world? Through case studies in twelve countries and in-depth interviews with nation-branding experts and their national clients, Melissa Aronczyk argues that the social, political, and cultural discourses constitutive of the nation have been harnessed in new and problematic ways, with far-reaching consequences for both our concept of the nation and our ideals of national citizenship. Branding the Nation challenges the received wisdom about the power of brands to change the world, and offers a critical perspective on these new ways of conceiving value and identity in the globalized twenty-first century.

The emergence of a visible, commodified leisure culture in the form of cafés, targeted at and appropriated by, young adults from the middle classes, is a striking phenomenon in the transformation of urban life in India since economic liberalization in 1991. Café Culture in Pune is an ethnographic snapshot, taken in 2008, tracing the effects of globalization from the perspective of young middle class urbanites in post-liberalization Pune, India. Documenting with meticulous detail their lifeworld, from clothing to hanging out, friendship, dating, education, and marriage, it captures new forms of socializing, consumption, self-improvement and relationship-management. These practices set the young generation apart–the first to grow up with mass-consumerism – as a group in historical time, in relation to other lifeworlds in India, to ‘western’ versions and as a rounded life world in itself. The study considers two questions: How do free global market economy and ‘globalization’ change the way people see themselves and the world? And to what extent might Indian practices modify the practices of ‘western’ individualism implicit in Indian modernity? The young café culture crowd in its practices was domesticating ‘the global’ while transcending ‘the local’. They were negotiating to follow their hearts, while preserving strong family bonds and inter-generational dependencies. They were thus modifying what it meant to be middle class Indians in our contemporary globalized world. The Indian middle class was reinventing India as a global player in a post-Cold war world by constructing a narrative of pivotal change.

Channelling Cultures: Television Studies from India is a seminal collection of essays on regional, national and global itineraries of Indian television in the twenty-first century. At a time when the television landscape in India is undergoing a second wave of change with compulsory digitization, new interactivity and convergence, unforeseen forms of televisual publicness and renewed debates on self-censorship, media ethics and the code of content, the essays in the volume seek to provoke a fresh understanding of television as a crucial player in Indian culture and politics. Featuring work by leading experts in the field, it locates the study of television within the myriad histories of the nation as well as various trajectories in global culture and politics. With a special focus on the genres of news, reality TV and soap opera, it addresses issues such as postcoloniality, citizenship, democracy, development, globalization, consumerism, liveness, affect, and gender. The volume demonstrates that Indian television provides an indispensable context for interrogating and critically engaging with the standard assumptions of television studies and more broadly global media studies.

For the past several decades, the United States has witnessed a profound transformation in what Americans do with the guns they own. While hunting used to dominate American gun culture, now the top reason for owning a gun is protection, and today, there are over eleven million concealed carry licensees. Why are millions of Americans—disproportionately American men—choosing to carry guns as part of their everyday lives? And what are the effects of gun carry on contemporary notions of citizenship, governance, and crime? This book examines these questions. Focusing on southeastern Michigan, particularly Metro Detroit, as a window into broader processes of socioeconomic decline in the United States, the book analyzes how men use guns to navigate contexts of social insecurity and how men’s use of guns is shaped by socio-legal structures supported by the National Rifle Association (NRA). The book draws on in-depth interviews with gun carriers and NRA-certified instructors and ethnography at firearms classes, activist events, and shooting ranges; and online gun forums. The author also obtained a concealed-pistol license, carried a gun on a regular basis, and became certified as an NRA instructor.

In City of Islands, Dr. Tammy L. Brown uses the life stories of Caribbean intellectuals as “windows” into the dynamic history of immigration in New York and the long battle for racial equality in modern America. This is an important book because it is the first interdisciplinary, book-length study of how specific Caribbean intellectuals—Ethelred Brown, Richard B. Moore, Pearl Primus, Shirley Chisholm, and Paule Marshall, used the written, spoken and performed word in the cause of racial equality in the United States and in the Caribbean throughout the entire twentieth century. In the discipline of History, Caribbean immigrants living in the United States is surprisingly understudied. We have only four book-length historical accounts, and they only cover Caribbean contributions to the tradition of black political radicalism during the first half of the twentieth century. In contrast, City of Islands includes original analysis of sermons, speeches, poetry, short stories, novels, and choreography, to provide insights into each individual’s personality and intellectual style of self-presentation.

How do real individuals live together in real societies in the real world? What binds societies together and how can these social orders be structured in a fair way? This book addresses this central paradox of modern life. Feelings for others—the solidarity that is ignored or underplayed by theories of power or self-interest—are at the heart of this novel inquiry into the meeting place between normative theories of what we think we should do and empirical studies of who we actually are. The book demonstrates that solidarity creates inclusive and exclusive social structures, and shows how they can be repaired. It is not perfect, it is not absolute, and the horrors which occur in its lapses have been seen all too frequently in the forms of discrimination, genocide, and war. Despite its worldly flaws and contradictions, however, solidarity and the project of civil society remain our best hope—the antidote to every divisive institution, every unfair distribution, and every abusive and dominating hierarchy. A grand and sweeping statement, the book is a major contribution to our thinking about the real but ideal world in which we all reside.

This book examines how and why people use the concept of coming out as a certain kind of person to resist stigma and collectively mobilize for social change. It examines how the concept of coming out has taken on different meanings as people adopt it for varying purposes—across time, space, and social context. Most other books about coming out—whether fiction, academic, or memoir—focus on the experience of gay men and lesbians in the United States. This is the first book to examine how a variety of people and groups use the concept of coming out in new and creative ways to resist stigma and mobilize for social change. It examines how the use of coming out among American lesbians, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+) people has shifted over time. It also examines how four diverse US social movements—including the fat acceptance movement, undocumented immigrant youth movement, the plural-marriage family movement among Mormon fundamentalist polygamists, and the #MeToo movement—have employed the concept of coming out to advance their cause. Doing so sheds light on these particular struggles for social recognition, while illuminating broader questions regarding social change, cultural meaning, and collective mobilization.