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The most wasteful people in world history know the least about what becomes of their waste. Waste Away reveals how North Americans have been shaped by their preferred means of disposal: sanitary landfill. Based on the author’s fieldwork as a common laborer at a large, transnational landfill on the outskirts of Detroit, Michigan, the book argues that waste management constitutes a social relationship whereby our most treasured possessions and places are made to last because the transient materials they shed are removed and sent elsewhere. Ethnography conducted with waste workers shows how they conceal and contain other people’s wastes, all while negotiating the filth of their occupation, holding on to middle-class dreams for their children, and occasionally scavenging worthwhile stuff from the trash to toy and tinker with. Waste Away also traces the circumstances that led one midwestern community to host two landfills and made Michigan a leading importer of foreign waste at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Focusing on local activists opposed to the transnational waste trade with Canada, the book’s ethnography analyzes their attempts to politicize and expose the treatment of waste—removing it so it is out of sight—that many take for granted as a necessity and presumed right. Documenting these different ways of relating to the management of North American rubbish, Waste Away demonstrates the unexpected importance that landfilling has for us all.

This book outlines a new approach to studying variability and cumulative change in human technology, a definitive research theme spanning archaeology and anthropology. The central argument is that human material culture is best understood as an expression of social tradition, with each artifact the outcome of a distinctive operational sequence, and with specific choices made at each stage in its production. The main focus is on exploring how different traditions of material culture are propagated through social learning, the factors that promote coherent lineages of tradition to form, and the extent to which these cultural lineages exhibit congruence with one another and with language history. Drawing on the application of cultural-transmission theory to empirical research, chapters develop a descent with modification perspective on the technology of northern hunter-gatherers. Case studies are set in northwestern Siberia, the Pacific northwest coast, and Northern California, and together, they generate crosscultural insights into the evolution of material-culture traditions at different social and spatial scales. Overall, the approach presented in this book promises new ways of exploring some of the primary factors that generate human cultural diversity, both in the deeper past and through to the present.

The Life of Cheese is an anthropological study of American artisan cheese and the people who make it. Telling the stories of individual cheesemakers, the book explores how craftwork has become a new source of cultural and economic value within American landscapes of production and consumption. Heather Paxson’s innovative study shows how dairy farmers and artisans inhabit a world in which their colleagues and collaborators are, at various times, plants, animals, microorganisms, family members, employees, and customers. Cheese is alive with meaning, but it is also alive with the activity of organisms large and small. Many cheesemakers love the contingency of their craft and marvel at the unpredictability of transforming milk into cheese. That variability is a quality also valued by consumers, though it is what safety regulators fear. As “unfinished” commodities, living products whose qualities are not fully settled, handmade cheeses embody a mix of new and old ideas about taste and value. Artisan cheese thus offers a unique object through which to rethink the politics of food, land, and labor.

This is a detailed ethnographic study of a therapeutic prison unit in Canada for the treatment of sexual offenders. Utilizing extensive interviews and participant observation over an eighteen-month period of field work, the author takes the reader into the depths of what prison inmates commonly refer to as the “hound pound.” The book provides a glimpse into the lives and treatment experiences of one of society’s most hated groups. It brings together a variety of theoretical perspectives from psychological and medical anthropology, narrative theory, and cognitive science to capture the nature of sexual offender treatment, from the moment inmates arrive at the treatment facility to the day they are released. The book explores the implications of an outside world that balks at any notion that sexual offenders can somehow be treated and rendered harmless. The author argues that the aggressive and confrontational nature of the prison’s treatment approach is counterproductive to the goal of what he calls “habilitation”—the creation of pro-social and moral individuals rendered safe for our communities.

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.

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.

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.

This book take us to the working-class heart of America, bringing to life—through shoe leather reporting, memoir, vivid stories, stunning photographs, and thoughtful analysis—the deepening crises of poverty and homelessness. The story begins in 1980, when the authors joined forces to cover the America being ignored by the mainstream media—people living on the margins and losing their jobs as a result of deindustrialization. Since then, the authors have traveled more than half a million miles to investigate the state of the working class. This book follows the lives of several families over the thirty-year span to present an intimate and devastating portrait of workers going jobless. This study—begun in the trickle-down Reagan years and culminating with the recent banking catastrophe—puts a human face on today's grim economic numbers. It also illuminates the courage and resolve with which the next generation faces the future.

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.

This book explores the emergence of new end-of-life rituals in America that celebrate the dying and reinvent the roles of family and community at the deathbed. The author of this book contrasts her father's passing in the 1980s, governed by the structures of institutionalized death, with her mother's death some two decades later. The book's moving account of her mother's dying at home vividly portrays a ceremonial farewell known as a living wake, showing how it closed the gap between social and biological death while opening the door for family and friends to reminisce with her mother. The book also investigates a variety of solutions–living funerals, oral ethical wills, and home funerals–that revise the impending death scenario. Integrating the profoundly personal with the objectively historical, this book calls for an “end of life revolution” to change the way of death in America.