Urban Tribes

In his early thirties, Ethan Watters began to realize that none of his friends were following the paths of their parents. Instead of settling down in couples and starting families, they lived and vacationed in groups, worked together at businesses they'd started, and met every week for dinner. As he started to document this phenomenon, he encountered countless other "tribes," in cities all over the U.S. Watters explores why tribe members have embraced this structure and what kind of affection and stability they find there, and contends that the conventional wisdom painting Generation X as isolated, selfish slackers may hide an unexpected, much warmer picture.

Young urban Natives share their diverse stories, examining stereotypes and illustrating how Native culture and values can survive--and enrich--city life.

The subject of Urban Tribes is a portion of the urgent topic of the transnational movement of people in the era of globalization. A dilemma faced on many continents, it reveals the potential crisis in political, economic, and cultural arenas. From this wider subject, we focus in on cultural issues in the new community that has been created typically in the big city where inevitable impacts are compounded. We question whether "hybridity" is a sufficient description of the profound and ever-present opposition between remaining faithful to tradition and adapting to the circumstances of the enveloping milieu. Nowadays, the definition of "Tribe" already applies to a wider group, defined by ethnicity, national origin, language, art work subjects etc. Section one, Urban Caravan- focusing on world caravans, which is the term used for Honduran refugees, but applies more generally to all those who choose to leave their hometown looking for a better life on both the spirit and material levels. In this section, will include the art of various ethnic New York international immigrant artists. Selected artists including outstanding young talents in Taiwan, Taiwanese- American artists, and various artists of other ethnicities. This program is a multi-disciplinary project that will span different ethnic groups and tribes. Section II. Urban Reverence - a dialogue between the city motion and the conflicts and harmonies of modern indigenous peoples. The art work in this section will identify those elements from indigenous ritual and ceremony that might place an integral and holistic concern for nature at the center of environmental consideration.

Whether people want to play games and download music, engage in social networking and professional collaboration, or view pornography and incite terror, the Internet provides myriad opportunities for people who share common interests to find each other. The contributors to this book argue that these self-selected online groups are best understood as tribes, with many of the same ramifications, both positive and negative, that tribalism has in the non-cyber world. In Electronic Tribes, the authors of sixteen competitively selected essays provide an up-to-the-minute look at the social uses and occasional abuses of online communication in the new media era. They explore many current Internet subcultures, including MySpace.com, craftster.org, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, music downloading, white supremacist and other counterculture groups, and Nigerian e-mail scams. Their research raises compelling questions and some remarkable answers about the real-life social consequences of participating in electronic tribes. Collectively, the contributors to this book capture a profound shift in the way people connect, as communities formed by geographical proximity are giving way to communities—both online and offline—formed around ideas.

How could an urban American Indian tribe, having survived relentless earlier governmental attempts to declare its culture extinct, be once again on the verge of extinction? The Tigua of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo dwell in the outskirts of El Paso, Texas, where the infamous Jack Abramoff was in the news for helping to close their highly successful casino. This casino had created jobs and funded health care for the tribe, and now the Tigua are once more taking action to preserve their economy, membership, and culture. This highly publicised casino story is set against the remarkably rich history of the Tigua, including earlier attempts by national and state governments to steal the tribe's land and destroy its legal status. Anthropologist S. K. Adam explores how questions of identity can be linked to cultural survival: Had the Tigua somehow survived 300 years of persecution and urban encroachment, or, as alleged by the government, were they really just Mexicanised Indians acting fraudulently? Adam examines how terms such as indigeneity, identity, authenticity, culture change, and perseverance are understood and defined by the US government. He analyses how issues of power, law, discourse, genocide, and self-determination affect the relationship between the United States and its indigenous populations, past and present.

Burning Man is the premier countercultural event of modern times, growing over 25 years from a strange San Francisco beach party into an experimental city of 50,000 colorful souls in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, which burns brightly for a week before dissolving into dusty memories and changed lives. Longtime newspaper journalist Steven T. Jones embedded himself in this blossoming culture starting in 2004, a dispiriting year for American politics but the beginning of Burning Man’s renaissance, when it exploded outward in unexpected ways. The result is the most in-depth book ever written on this intriguing social phenomenon – The Tribes of Burning Man: How An Experimental City in the Desert is Shaping the New American Counterculture – which is being released in January, 2011 by CCC Publishing. From covering the Borg2 artists’ rebellion to learning how to make large-scale fire sculptures with the Flaming Lotus Girls, from helping Opulent Temple showcase the world’s best DJs to cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina with Burners Without Borders, from regularly interviewing event founder Larry Harvey to covering Barack Obama’s nominating convention speech, Jones gives readers an inside, meticulously reported look at a time when Burning Man hit its zenith just as the country hit its nadir. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world have made the dusty pilgrimage to Black Rock City to take part in this experiment in participatory art, commerce-free culture, and bacchanalian celebration—and many say their lives were fundamentally changed by this truly unique experience.

A comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century. Raymond Williams is a towering presence in cultural studies, most importantly as the founder of the approach that has come to be known as "cultural materialism." Yet Williams' method was always open-ended and fluid, and this volume collects together his most significant work from over a twenty-year period in which he wrestled with the concepts of materialism and culture and their interrelationship. Aside from his more directly theoretical texts, however, case-studies of theatrical naturalism, the Bloomsbury group, advertising, science fiction, and the Welsh novel are also included as illustrations of the method at work. Finally, Williams' identity as an active socialist, rather than simply an academic, is captured by two unambiguously political pieces on the past, present and future of Marxism.