What are the politics of place at play in installation ethnography? How has collaboration and experimental ethnography pushed new conceptions of place?
Why is the idea of local so effective for collective action? How do individuals, embedded in communities of practice, make and remake their senses of place? How might modes of temporality intersect with place?
In relation to questions of cultural production and place: In a complex field of knowledge production, who do you trust? What cultural forms — specialized language, key symbols, and narratives — do you use as clues to target your trust? Where does status come into play? What kinds of cultural capital generate status in place-centered movements?
“We late moderns are said to struggle to maintain meaningful place attachments and places themselves struggle to be distinctive” (1).
“What is clear is that a diverse set of social actors in late modern America are making place vital to their cultural existence. Place is being positioned as central to the construction of selves and communities. Emotionally felt and morally loaded meaning is being attributed to place. Place is being used as a symbol of, a resource in, and a starting point for resistance to expansive and powerful macrosystems. Place is consistently treated as a contested social space: as redeemable, as the locus of power, as something to rally around, but something endangered and under threat. In short, there are high stakes involved with place, in which political, social, personal, ecological, economic, and ethical gains are up for grabs” (3).
“To conclude, I will not suggest but say: this essay is a promise. Through ethnographies of place, anthropologists of late modern America will uncover Low’s “systems of exclusion,” see Feld and Basso’s fusions of “locality to life-world” at work, and come to terms with the political, economic, and ethical possibilities that people invest in their places” (10).
The author uses the convergence between his work on emerging evangelical movements and agri-culinary movements to consider “place” as a central topic of a comparative ethnography of late modernity. He is also utilizing the concept of place to point to some valuable angles for future ethnographic research.
The author uses ethnographic examples to discuss these convergences between emerging evangelicals and food activists through the analytical categories of cultural critique, value of authenticity, and the race-class entanglements in relation to place. The author argues that three future categories that hold analytical promise for ethnographic research are: senses of place, temporality, and cultural production.
That place is a promising concept for future studies of late modernity in the United States.
North American Dialogue (NAD) is the peer-reviewed publication of the Society for the Anthropology of North America. They publish research that fosters dialogue about North America and its far-reaching effects. NAD is a forum for North Americanist scholars, activists, and practitioners to disclose findings, raise issues, describe fieldwork, and offer political and theoretical analyses in a timely fashion.
James Bielo is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Miami University. His ethnographic work focuses on the contemporary United States, specializing in Linguistic Anthropology, Ethnographic Methods, Anthropological Theory and the Anthropology of Global Christianity.
Bielo, James S. 2013. “Promises of Place: A Future of U.S. Comparative Ethnography.” North American Dialogue, 16 (1): 1-11. doi:10.1111/nad.12000