Transatlantic Parallaxes

Anthropological inquiry developed around the study of the exotic. Now that we live in a world that seems increasingly familiar, putatively marked by a spreading sameness, anthropology must re-envision itself. The emergence of diverse national traditions in the discipline offers one intriguing path. This volume, the product of a novel encounter of American anthropologists of France and French anthropologists of the United States, explores the possibilities of that path through an experiment in the reciprocal production of knowledge. Simultaneously native subjects, foreign experts, and colleagues, these scholars offer novel insights into each other’s societies, juxtaposing glimpses of ourselves and a familiar “others” to productively unsettle and enrich our understanding of both.

French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu’s relevance for studies of spatiality and mobility has received less attention than other aspects of his work. Here, Deborah Reed-Danahay argues that the concept of social space, central to Bourdieu’s ideas, addresses the structured inequalities that prevail in spatial choices and practices. She provides an ethnographically informed interpretation of social space that demonstrates its potential for new directions in studies of mobility, immobility, and emplacement. This book traces the links between habitus and social space across the span of Bourdieu’s writings, and places his work in dialogue with historical and contemporary approaches to mobility.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, France underwent a particularly turbulent period during which urban riots in 2005 and labor protests in 2006 galvanized people across the country and brought the question of youth unemployment among its poorer, multiethnic outer cities into the national spotlight. Drawing on more than a year of ethnographic field research in the housing projects of the French city of Limoges, Yearning to Labor chronicles the everyday struggles of a group of young people as they confront unemployment at more than triple the national rate—and the crushing despair it engenders. Against the background of this ethnographic context, John P. Murphy illuminates how the global spread of neoliberal ideologies and practices is experienced firsthand by contemporary urban youths in the process of constructing their identities. An original investigation of the social ties that produce this community, Yearning to Labor explores the ways these young men and women respond to the challenges of economic liberalization, deindustrialization, and social exclusion. At its heart, Yearning to Labor asks if the French republican model of social integration, assimilation, and equality before the law remains viable in a context marked by severe economic exclusion in communities of ethnic and religious diversity. Yearning to Labor is both an ethnographic account of a certain group of French youths as they navigate a suffocating job market and an analysis of the mechanisms underlying the shifting economic inequalities at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Lives in Music analyses interwoven patterns of mobility, change, and power in music and dance practices. It challenges some commonly accepted conceptual tools that are ubiquitous in anthropology today, including cultural hybridity, transnational networks, and globalization. Based on seven “itineraries” that are the result of extensive ethnographic long-term field research efforts, the processes of geographic and social mobility, transformation, and power relative to music and dance practices are explored in different parts of the world. Seven writers provide life stories constructed through ethnographic techniques and life histories and supported by a deep knowledge of local customs.

Turning the attention to the temporal as well as the more familiar spatial dimensions of mobility, this volume focuses on the momentum for and temporal composition of mobility, the rate at which people enact or deploy their movements as well as the conditions under which these moves are being marshalled, represented and contested. This is an anthropological exploration of temporality as a form of action, a process of actively modulating or responding to how people are moving rather than the more usual focus in mobility studies on where they are heading.

Based on novel ethnographic research conducted in New York City, this book explores through the lens of intersectionality how gender impacts men’s experiences of full-time fatherhood, as well as how sexuality, race, class, faith, and so on result in unequal access to choices and opportunities as parents. Chapters analyze how perspectives on caregiving are complicated by varying cultural, gendered, and racialized stereotypes and representations that pull different fathers toward or push them away from particular models of fatherhood in an urban context. Additionally, the author interrogates how societal conceptions of men’s bodies also play a role in how men understand their experiences of fatherhood. This book will be of interest to scholars and students studying gender, masculinity, and fatherhood.

This book provides an original account of Emerson's creative debts to the British and European Romantics, including Coleridge and Carlyle, firmly locating them in his New England context. Moreover this book analyses and explains the way that his thought shapes his unique prose style in which idea and word become united in an epistemology of form.