Search Results

This ethnography examines songwriters Bill and Gloria Gaithers’ Homecoming video and concert series. The Homecomings re-present the “southern gospel” subgenre of gospel music—a musical style popular among white evangelical Christians in the American South and Midwest. The book explores how the Gaithers negotiate the tension between preservation and modification of community norms as they seek simultaneously to maintain and expand their audience, and to initiate and respond to ideological shifts within their fan base’s culture. Using data he collected from his immersion in the Homecoming catalogue, his attendance of numerous concerts and tapings, and his extensive conversations with Homecoming fans and the Gaithers themselves, Harper reveals the Homecomings to be a crucible of American religious, racial, sexual and regional identity formation.

Walking through nearly any grocery store, contemporary American consumers are bound to encounter organic food. At any of the myriad of farmers’ markets that have sprung up in cities and small communities across the United States, shoppers can expect to see claims about the provenance and farming practices employed to grow everything from prized heirloom tomatoes to seemingly mundane heads of garlic. But behind the scenes, critical scholarship has shown that organic farming increasingly resembles the industrial food system organic pioneers set out to challenge. Faced with the pressures of the modern agricultural economy many farmers have conventionalized, intensifying how they farm in the face of tremendous competition and cost. Beyond the organic labels, emblazoned on products at the supermarket and the glistening bushel baskets arrayed in market stalls, are farmers, many of whom are trying to do their best to achieve sustainability in today’s food system. This book offers a glimpse into this world, through an ethnography of a small New England farm and the people who work in its fields. It sheds light on how small-scale farmers navigate the difficult terrain between ideals of sustainability and the economic realities of contemporary farming. Using new theories of economic sociology, this book moves beyond the current debates about the conventionalization of organic agriculture. Instead, it takes a relational approach to organic practices—investigating the complex ways market pressures, moral and emotional attachments, privilege, and personal relationships intersect to shape the everyday experiences of agriculture for today’s organic farmers and their consumers.

How do fishers extend their bodies and senses to work beneath the surface of the sea in places they cannot see, have never been, and could not survive in? And at what risk? This book explores how fishers make the sea productive through their labour, using technologies ranging from wooden boats to digital GPS plotters to extend their senses and range of effective work, in the process creating familiar places in a seemingly hostile environment. It shows how the lives of fishers are deeply affected by capitalist commodity relations. Drawing on years of participant observation at sea in the west of Scotland, the author worked on a Nephrops prawn trawler, lived on a boat in harbours and voyaged along the coast. The book makes a unique contribution to understanding human-environment relations, examining the places fishers create and name at sea, as well as fishers’ technologies and navigation practices. Combining anthropology, phenomenology and political economy, the ethnography offers new approaches for analyses of human-environment relations and technologies in a Marxist framework. It also contributes to the social studies of fisheries through an analysis of how deeply fishing practices and social relations are shaped by political economy.

This book demonstrates how a city is constituted in the productive tension between making and realising, between directing activity and allowing for its emergence. It presents nine ethnographic accounts across Manchester UK, including residential neighbourhoods, cultural events, public spaces, the council, areas of urban regeneration and the airport. The authors examine the dynamics of power for those developing the city, experiencing such interventions and the spaces in-between. These perspectives trace the multiple dynamics of a vibrant post-industrial city, showing how people’s decisions and actions co-produce the city and give it shape. The ethnographic accounts focus on issues including self-policing (Smith), loss and de-industrialisation (Lewis), disenfranchised football fans, (Poulton), sexuality and public space (Atkins), nurturing an emergent city (Symons), defining the commons in public spaces (Lang), conflicting futures thinking (Pieri) networked urban governance (Knox), and how airport design shapes behaviour (O’Doherty). Their specificity provides grounded contexts for identifying ideological patterns and structural processes. They demonstrate the potential of ethnographies to beyond the particular. In doing so, the contributors complicate the dominant narrative of Manchester’s renaissance as an entrepreneurial city. The Afterword argues that even though a city’s future may be planned, it does not materialise as the perfect representation of its blueprint drawings, strategies or vision documents. Instead it is realised through the accumulative efforts of all those who live and work in the city. Researchers of cities can undertake a similar distributed analysis, attending to the unexpected insights that emerge through an open and discursive ethnographic process.

With the unprecedented number of foreign-born population, South Korea has tried to reinvent itself as a multicultural society, but the intense multiculturalism efforts have focused exclusively on marriage immigrants. At the advent and height of South Korea’s eschewed multiculturalism, Elusive Belonging takes the readers to everyday lives of marriage immigrants in rural Korea where the projected image of a developed Korea which lured marriage immigrants and the gloomy reality of rural lives clashed. The intimate ethnographic account pays attention to emotional entanglements among Filipina wives, South Korean husbands, in-laws, and multicultural agents, with particular focus on such emotions as love, intimacy, anxiety, gratitude, and derision, which shape marriage immigrants’ fragmented citizenship and elusive sense of belonging to their new country. This investigation of the politics of belonging illuminates how marriage immigrants explore to mold a new identity in their new home, Korea.

Performing Englishness looks in detail at the growth in popularity and profile of the English folk arts in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Based on original research within English folk culture, it is the only ethnographic study of its kind. By closely scrutinising various facets of this folk resurgence – discursive, musical and visual – the authors explore how it speaks to a broader explosion of interest in the subject of English national and cultural identity. How does contemporary English folk music and dance relate to ideas about England and Englishness? What kinds of English identities are expressed through the works of musicians like Seth Lakeman or Bellowhead? How does morris dancing contribute to ongoing political debates around multiculturalism, globalisation, and the devolution of the British nations? And how does the English folk scene reconcile a new-found commercial success with anti-capitalist roots? In their quest for answers to these and other questions, the authors combine the approaches of British cultural studies and ethnomusicology, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with central figures of the resurgence and close analysis of key musical and dance texts. Their presentation of the English case contributes to debates about English identity and calls for a rethinking of concepts such as revival, indigeneity and tradition.

Essays follow rapidly proliferating and resource-intensive Indian urbanism in everyday environments. Case studies on nature conservation in cities, urban housing and slum development, waste management, urban planning, and contestations over the quality of air, water, and sanitation in Delhi and Mumbai illuminate urban ecology per-spectives throughout the twentieth century. The collection highlights how struggles over the environment and one's quality of life in urban centers are increasingly framed in terms of their future place in a landscape of global sustainability. The text brings historical particularity and ethnographic nuance to questions of urban ecology and offers novel insight into theoretical and practical debates on urbanism and sustainability.

This is an ethnographic account of English football fans who travel home and away with their team, based upon sixteen years’ participant observation. The author identifies a distinct sub-culture of supporter – the ‘carnival fan’ – who dominated the travelling support of the three clubs observed - Manchester United, Blackpool and the England national team. This accessible account follows these groups home and abroad, describing their interpretations, motivations and behaviour and challenging a number of the myths about ‘hooliganism’ and crowd control. An Ethnography of English Football Fans identifies the primary motivation of these fan groups to be the creation of a carnival – a period of transgression from the norms of everyday life based upon congregating in groups, alcohol consumption, humour and tomfoolery, and expressions of identity. In achieving these aims, the fan groups were frequently brought into conflict with the football authorities, police and ‘hooligan’ groups and this account includes explanations of some of the most serious instances of crowd disorder involving English fans in the last two decades. The book also looks at issues such as attitudes to gender, sexuality and race, and the impact of technology upon football fandom.

In The 9/11 Generation, Sunaina Marr Maira uses extensive ethnography to understand the meaning of political subjecthood and mobilization for Arab, South Asian, and Afghan American youth. Maira explores how young people from communities targeted in the War on Terror engage with the “political,” forging coalitions based on new racial and ethnic categories, even while they are under constant scrutiny and surveillance, and organizing around notions of civil rights and human rights. The 9/11 Generation explores the possibilities and pitfalls of rights-based organizing at a moment when the vocabulary of rights and democracy has been used to justify imperial interventions, such as the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maira further reconsiders political solidarity in cross-racial and interfaith alliances at a time when U.S. nationalism is understood as not just multicultural but also post-racial. Throughout, she weaves stories of post-9/11 youth activism through key debates about neoliberal democracy, the “radicalization” of Muslim youth, gender, and humanitarianism.

When natural gas drilling moves into an urban or a suburban neighborhood, a two-hundred-foot-high drill appears on the other side of a back yard fence and diesel trucks clog a quiet two-lane residential street. Children seem to be having more than the usual number of nosebleeds. There are so many local cases of cancer that the elementary school starts a cancer support group. In this book, Jessica Smartt Gullion examines what happens when natural gas extraction by means of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” takes place not on wide-open rural land but in a densely populated area with homes, schools, hospitals, parks, and businesses. Gullion focuses on fracking in the Barnett Shale, the natural-gas–rich geological formation under the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. She gives voice to the residents—for the most part educated, middle class, and politically conservative—who became reluctant anti-drilling activists in response to perceived environmental and health threats posed by fracking. Gullion offers an overview of oil and gas development and describes the fossil-fuel culture of Texas, the process of fracking, related health concerns, and regulatory issues (including the notorious “Halliburton loophole”). She chronicles the experiences of community activists as they fight to be heard and to get the facts about the safety of fracking. Touted as a greener alternative and a means to reduce dependence on foreign oil, natural gas development is an important part of American energy policy. Yet, as this book shows, it comes at a cost to the local communities who bear the health and environmental burdens.

How can we best empower people living in the most economically disadvantaged areas of the world to improve their lives in ways that matter to them? This book investigates work of the NGO Tostan as a working model of human development. The study is grounded in the ethnographic study of the actual change that happened in one West African village. The result is a powerful mix of theory and practice that questions existing approaches to development and that speaks to both development scholars and practitioners. Divided into three parts, the book firstly assesses why top-down approaches to education and development are unhelpful and offers a theoretical understanding of what constitutes helpful development. Part two examines Tostan's community-based participatory approach as an example of a helpful development intervention, and offers qualitative evidence of its effectiveness. Part three builds a model of how community-led development works, why it is helpful, and what practitioners can do to help people at the grassroots level lead their own human development.

May I Help You? is Deepak Singh’s insightful and thought-provoking account of disillusionment when, as an educated upper-class Indian, he moves with his American wife to the United States and discovers that America doesn’t care if he has an MBA from India or had worked for the BBC. Like many immigrants before him, Singh discovers that in America employers only trust him with a minimum wage job as a clerk, but his disappointment and embarrassment soon give way to shock when he realizes that in this world of low-wage work he is joined not merely by other immigrants, but by many Americans, a whole swath of the citizenry who goes unacknowledged and unassisted in their struggles to make a living wage. In sincere and straightforward prose, Singh takes the reader along on his journey full of dismay and compassion when the expectations he had of the United States, built around interactions in India with well-educated, affluent expatriates, collide with the reality of a coworker who must skip lunch until payday and the customers who buy in anticipation of a paycheck.

What are the cultural politics of making place? How do we reconcile the heritage landscapes we encounter in our work with their sociopolitical and historical contexts? What avenues are there to grapple with and present contemporary concerns? Critical Theory and the Anthropology of Heritage Landscapes examines landscapes as heritage and shows how these are engaged in a field of power. It argues that to not locate the political contexts of heritage work has consequences. Research experiences in Indigenous and descendant heritage landscapes in Alaska, Mongolia, and Western Australia serve as touchstones to show how heritage landscapes are enmeshed in political and environmental struggles: climate change, oil spills, environmental degradation, political instability, identity politics, and resource extraction. Drawing on the emergent field of critical heritage theory and using the metaphor of the resource frontier, Critical Theory and the Anthropology of Heritage Landscapes shows how these “new heritage landscapes” are also increasingly imbricated in development and extractive projects. Heritage experts, private and extractive interests, government representatives, and descendant groups negotiate and broker, promote and contest, and create value and meaning. In the process, changes in heritage legislation and corporate heritage strategies create significant changes that, in some cases, have reframed Indigenous lands and heritage as resources.

Based on a nine years of ethnographic research, the authors examine multiple inequalities that underscore youth violence. They feature the experiences of inner city as well as rural girls and boys in Hawai‘i who face racism, sexism, poverty, and political neglect in the context of two hundred years of American colonial control in the Pacific. The authors highlight how legacies injustice endure as challenges in the present, prompting teens to fight for dignity and the chance to thrive in America – a nation that the youth described as inherently “jacked up” and “unjust.” While the story begins with the youth battling multiple contingencies, it ends on a hopeful note, as we see many of the teens overcome numerous hardships, often with the help of steadfast, caring adults.

Caught Up follows the lives of 50 Latina girls in “El Valle” Juvenile Detention Center and “Legacy” community school located 40 miles outside of Los Angeles, CA. Their path through these two institutions reveals the accelerated fusion of California schools and institutions of confinement. For example, the connection between both of these sites is a concerted effort between Legacy Community School and El Valle administrators to provide young people with wraparound services. These well-intentioned services are designed to provide youth with support at home, at school and in the actual detention center. However, I argue that wraparound services more closely resemble a phenomenon that I call wraparound incarceration, where students cannot escape the surveillance of formal detention despite leaving the actual detention center. For young people in Legacy school, returning to El Valle became an unavoidable consequence of wraparound services.

Through an analysis of Brazil’s changing politics of inequality, development, and race, Constellations of Inequality demonstrates the value of ethnography to illuminate the relationships between inequality and consciousness at multiple scales—local, national and global. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Alcântara, Maranhão, the book analyzes the conflicts surrounding Brazil’s spaceport—a high-technology project of global transcendence located in one of Brazil’s poorest regions. The spaceport was built in the 1980s in a region principally populated by the descendants of those once enslaved on local cotton plantations, inaugurating a land conflict that continues today. Announced by Brazil’s military government as part of a project to make Brazil a world technomilitary power, the spaceport has been beset by internal and external problems, and is today populated by two Brazilian space programs (one military and the other neoliberal) that differ in their projects to confront global political and economic inequalities. Another project at the site is concerned not with international inequalities, but Brazil’s internal inequalities of class and race. Mobilizing as escaped-slave descendants (quilombolas), villagers and their allies have organized to resist the expansion of the spaceport and to win the villagers rights of wellbeing and citizenship that have long been denied to them. The spaceport thus stands at the center of competing projects of social and material transformation, different utopias, each aimed at redressing inequality, though on very different scales, and in very different ways.

The absurdity of bureaucracy offers an ethnographic portrayal of an attempt to make and implement evidence-based policy set in the Danish labour market system in 2009. It departs from the author’s puzzlement that the civil servants she met during her research would maintain a double stance towards their work; they were convinced they were in the process of constantly improving the welfare system while at the same time they found the outcome of their decisions and the system they constructed in the process deeply absurd. The main protagonist of the book is the randomized controlled trial Active – Back Sooner which was a central component of the Danish Government’s Action Plan on Sickness Benefit meant to reduce to the cost of sickness benefit and to secure the ‘active labour force’. It is the continuous planning and disintegration of this effort and the myriad of decisions made in relation to it that is the primary object of empirical portraiture and theoretical discussion. Based on 12 months of participant observation and ethnographic interviewing in the Danish Ministry of Employment and one of the implementing municipalities the book documents how rejected reasons and alleyways of action return to haunt the decision-makers (be they caseworkers, the government administration, or politicians) creating an absurd world of contradictions and dilemmas. The book documents how ‘going wrong’ is built into the very nature of decision-making and suggests that the analysis of absurdity is central to any understanding of how policy develops and how implementation works.

Departing from common treatment of female genital cutting as an African problem to be debated within Western moral and critical publics, this book examines how Ghanaians problematize and materialize cutting as an African concern in which Western reason and governmentality have been implicated since colonialism. It examines the genealogies of activist and governmental efforts to end cutting (including feminist, public health, and legal interventions and cultural reforms) and the forms of rule, subjectivity, and positioning they produce. It attends to the social concerns and ethical dilemmas of women and men who have been most engaged in and affected by them. Ghanaian opposition to NGOs does not take the shape in the continuation of the practice, as they accommodate NGO platforms, but critique what they leave unaddressed. They question extractive governance that takes without giving and disidentify with the legal rationality of sovereign violence that punishes without caring. They desire governance based on ethics of relationality and mutual responsibility. This ethnography challenges and reinvigorates anthropological and feminist theories about neoliberal punitive rationality and feminist love of law, efficacy and unintended consequences of NGO interventions, minimalist biopolitics of saving lives, and postcolonial abandonment in the postcolonial world. It also charts a path for working against the analytical and political common sense by cultivating sensibilities on the basis of disidentification and immanent critique.

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, this book examines uses ethnography to show how U.S. immigration and labor policies have made migrant farmworkers “exceptional workers.” It explores the deeply intertwined political, legal, and social factors that place Latino migrants at particular risk of illness and injury in the fields, and that saddle them with a higher burden of chronic disease at home. It examines 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 the life-course: 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, this book provides a searing portrait of how their precarious immigration and work statuses get under their skin, culminating in preventable morbidity and premature death.