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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book takes the reader inside a Rhode Island juvenile prison to explore broader questions of how poor, disenfranchised young men come to terms with masculinity and identity. The author, who worked with inmates to produce a newspaper, writes about the young men he came to know, and in the process extends theories of masculinity, crime, and social reproduction into a provocative new paradigm. The book suggests that young men's participation in crime constitutes a game through which they achieve “outsider masculinity.” Once in prison, these same youths are forced to reconcile their criminal practices with a new game and new “insider masculinity” enforced by guards and administrators.

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.

This book addresses a central problem in anthropological archaeology—the emergence of “archaic states,” whose distinctive feature was divine kingship—taking as its focus the Hawaiian archipelago, commonly regarded as the archetype of a complex chiefdom. Integrating anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, traditional history, and theory, and drawing on significant contributions from four decades of research, it argues that Hawaiian polities had become states before the time of Captain Cook's voyage (1778–1779). The status of most archaic states is inferred from the archaeological record, but the book shows that because Hawai'i's kingdoms were established relatively recently, they could be observed and recorded by Cook and other European voyagers. The book contributes to the literature of precontact Hawai'i and illuminates Hawai'i's importance in the global theory and literature about divine kingship, archaic states, and sociopolitical evolution.

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 ethnographic study animates the racial politics that underlie genomic research into type 2 diabetes, one of the most widespread chronic diseases and one which affects ethnic groups disproportionately. The book follows blood donations from “Mexican American” donors to laboratories that are searching out genetic contributions to diabetes. Its analysis lays bare the politics and ethics of the research process, addressing the implicit contradiction of undertaking genetic research that reinscribes race's importance even as it is being demonstrated to have little scientific validity. In placing DNA sampling, processing, data set sharing, and carefully crafted science into a broader social context, the book underscores the implications of geneticizing disease while illuminating the significance of type 2 diabetes research in American life.

This book examines the lives of five topless dancers in the economically devastated “rust belt” of upstate New York. With insight and empathy, the book shows how these women negotiate their lives as parents, employees, and family members while working in a profession widely regarded as incompatible with motherhood and fidelity. Neither disparaging nor romanticizing the book's subjects, this text investigates the complicated dynamic of performance, resilience, economic need, and emotional vulnerability that comprises the life of a stripper. An accessibly written text that uses academic theories and methods to make sense of feminized labor, this book shows that sex work is part of the learned process by which some women come to believe that their self-esteem, material worth, and possibilities for life improvement are invested in their bodies.

New Philadelphia, Illinois, was founded in 1836 by Frank McWorter, a Kentucky slave who purchased his own freedom and then acquired land on the prairie for establishing a new—and integrated—community. McWorter sold property to other freed slaves and to whites, and used the proceeds to buy his family out of slavery. The town population reached 160, but declined when the railroad bypassed it. By 1940, New Philadelphia had virtually disappeared from the landscape. This book resurrects McWorter's great achievement of self-determinism, independence, and the will to exist, describing a cooperative effort by two universities, the state museum, the New Philadelphia Association, and numerous descendants to explore the history and archaeology of this unusual multi-racial community.