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“Perhaps,” wrote Ralph Ellison more than seventy years ago, “the zoot suit contains profound political meaning; perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the Lindy-hop conceals clues to great potential power.” As Ellison noted then, many of our most mundane cultural forms are larger and more important than they appear, taking on great significance and an unexpected depth of meaning. What he saw in the power of the Lindy Hop—the dance that Life magazine once billed as “America's True National Folk Dance”—would spread from black America to make a lasting impression on white America and offer us a truly compelling means of understanding our culture. But with what hidden implications? This book offers an embedded and embodied ethnography that situates dance within a larger Chicago landscape of segregated social practices. Delving into two Chicago dance worlds—the Lindy and Steppin'—it uses a combination of participant-observation and interviews to bring to the surface the racial tension that surrounds white use of black cultural forms. Focusing on new forms of appropriation in an era of multiculturalism, the author underscores the institutionalization of racial disparities and offers insights into the intersection of race and culture in America.

Whether it is used as an icebreaker in conversation or as the subject of serious inquiry, “the weather” is one of the few subjects that everyone talks about. And though we recognize the faces that bring us the weather on television, how government meteorologists and forecasters go about their jobs is rarely scrutinized. Given recent weather-related disasters, it is time we find out more. This book offers an inside look at how meteorologists and forecasters predict the weather. Based on field observation and interviews at the Storm Prediction Center in Oklahoma, the National Weather Service in Washington, D.C., and a handful of midwestern outlets, the book finds a supremely hard-working, insular clique of professionals who often refer to themselves as a “band of brothers.” In this book, we learn their lingo, how they “read” weather conditions, how forecasts are written, and, of course, how those messages are conveyed to the public. Weather forecasts, the book shows, are often shaped as much by social and cultural factors inside local offices as they are by approaching cumulus clouds. By opening up this world to us, the book offers a glimpse of a crucial profession.

When middle-class residents fled American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, government services and investment capital left too. Countless urban neighborhoods thus entered phases of precipitous decline, prompting the creation of community-based organizations (CBOs) that sought to bring direly needed resources back to the inner city. Today there are tens of thousands of these CBOs—private nonprofit groups that work diligently within tight budgets to give assistance and opportunity to our most vulnerable citizens by providing services such as housing, child care, and legal aid. Through ethnographic fieldwork at eight CBOs in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick, the author of this book discovered that the complex and contentious relationships these groups form with larger economic and political institutions outside the neighborhood have a huge and unexamined impact on the lives of the poor. Most studies of urban poverty focus on individuals or families, but this book widens the lens, examining the organizations whose actions and decisions collectively drive urban life.

This study contributes to the sociology of knowledge and the history of the human sciences by tracing the complex social action processes through which knowledge is produced about a major classical author, George Herbert Mead. The case raises acute questions regarding how authoritative knowledge comes to be produced about an intellectual and about the social nature of knowledge production in academic scholarship. Instead of treating Mead’s problematic reputation as a separate topic of study from his own intellectual biography, the analysis reconceptualizes both as essentially knowledge production processes with empirical connections in identifiable social actions. Substantive chapters utilize archival and primary document research to examine the centrality of Mead’s public speaking and engagement with the social problems of territorial Hawaii, the variety of representations Mead’s students made of his courses and his students’ influences on him, the problematic process of constructing posthumous volumes attributed to Mead, the mobilization of controversial claims about him by former students on the basis of their sense of his approval and collaboration, the development of patterns of published reference to Mead along lines of social connection and in response to local institutional transformations, and the reconstruction of domains of Mead’s research that have been neglected in dominant accounts of his philosophy. The study provides a novel, productive approach to knowledge making in scholarship, which focus on empirical social action processes as they connect and change over time instead of any single set of documents, concepts, mechanisms, or individuals.

This book represents a new approach to the study of punishment by explaining the causes and consequences of the prison boom from the perspective of the rural, southern towns most directly affected by prison building. Prison placement is often oversimplified as a dubious choice for rural community leaders: a way to secure jobs that may stigmatize their communities. By relocating from Chicago, Illinois to Forrest City, Arkansas I uncovered the challenges facing a community that pursued and secured a prison facility. Some rural leaders see attracting a prison as a way to achieve order in a changing world that seems to be beyond their control. This manuscript shows how collective memory and a shared sense of community are also vital in differentiating the instrumental purposes of a prison (jobs) from its symbolism. In Forrest City, racial violence and stigma marred the collective memory of towns leaders and shared meaning of community. Given the legacy of shame associated with prisons, the need to overcome stigma plays an important role in building a prison. Rural towns want to build prisons not simply for economic wellbeing, but also to protect and improve their reputations by managing ghetto stigma. Prison demand is nuanced, multifaceted, and depends on context. By unraveling why leaders in Forrest City secured placement of the Forrest City Federal Correctional Facility, we can begin to understand the social, political, and economic shifts that drove to United States—“the land of the free”—to triple prison construction in just over thirty years.

During the Progressive Era, a rehabilitative agenda took hold of American juvenile justice, materializing as a citizen-and-state-building project and mirroring the unequal racial politics of American democracy itself. Alongside this liberal “manufactory of citizens” a parallel structure was enacted: a Jim Crow juvenile justice system that endured across the nation for most of the twentieth century. This book examines the origins and organization of this separate and unequal juvenile justice system. The book explores how generations of “black child-savers” mobilized to challenge the threat to black youth and community interests and how this struggle grew aligned with a wider civil rights movement, eventually forcing the formal integration of American juvenile justice. This book reveals nearly a century of struggle to build a more democratic model of juvenile justice—an effort that succeeded in part, but ultimately failed to deliver black youth and community to liberal rehabilitative ideals.

What is the role of the senses in how we understand the world? Cognitive sociology has long addressed the way we perceive or imagine boundaries in our ordinary lives, but this book pushes this question further still. How, it asks, did we come to blind ourselves to sex sameness? Drawing on more than sixty interviews with two decidedly different populations—the blind and the transgendered—it answers provocative questions about the relationships between sex differences, biology, and visual perception. Both groups speak from unique perspectives that magnify the social construction of dominant visual conceptions of sex, allowing the author to examine the visual construction of the sexed body and highlighting the processes of social perception underlying our everyday experience of male and female bodies. The result is a notable contribution to the sociologies of gender, culture, and cognition that will revolutionize the way we think about sex.

This book provides a history of the American natural and health foods industry and its leadership in the social movement oriented to spreading a natural foods way of life. The natural foods case is used to consider the broader question of what possibilities open up and what limits emerge when private enterprise is involved in movements advocating for broad-based social and cultural change. Beginning with the first American natural foods advocates in the early nineteenth century, and continuing to the early twenty-first century, this history shows how the leadership of the natural foods industry was central to transforming natural foods consumption from a culturally marginal activity associated with religious minorities, immigrants, the elderly, and the infirm, to a hip lifestyle associated with the young, the fit, and the affluent. In the process, industry helped lead the natural foods movement away from an emphasis on asceticism and simple living, and towards a valuation of indulgence and material comforts. The book argues that instead of acting as a singularly eradicalizing force, the natural and health foods industry reinforced the natural foods movement's often radical rejection of medical expertise. The natural foods case demonstrates that business interests promote a flexible approach to cultural meanings and symbols, which undermines cultural authority and catalyzes cultural change.

The reach of the Catholic Church is arguably greater than that of any other religion, extending across diverse political, ethnic, class, and cultural boundaries. But what is it about Catholicism that resonates so profoundly with followers who live under disparate conditions? What is it, for instance, that binds parishioners in America with those in Mexico? For the author of this book, what unites Catholics is a sense of being Catholic—a social imagination that motivates them to promote justice and build a better world. In this book, he gives readers a feeling for what it means to be Catholic and put one's faith into action. Tracing the practices of a group of parishioners in Oakland, California, and another in Guadalajara, Mexico, the author reveals parallels—and contrasts—in the ways these ordinary Catholics receive and act on a church doctrine that emphasizes social justice. Whether they are building a supermarket for the low-income elderly or waging protests to promote school reform, these parishioners provide important insights into the construction of the Catholic social imagination. Throughout, the author also offers important new cultural and sociological interpretations of Catholic doctrine on issues such as poverty, civil and human rights, political participation, and the natural law.

Politicians, citizens, and police agencies have long embraced community policing, hoping to reduce crime and disorder by strengthening the ties between urban residents and the officers entrusted with their protection. That strategy seems to make sense, but this book reveals the reasons why it rarely, if ever, works. Drawing on data collected in diverse Seattle neighborhoods from interviews with residents, observation of police officers, and attendance at community-police meetings, this book identifies the many obstacles that make effective collaboration between city dwellers and the police so unlikely to succeed. At the same time, the book shows that residents' pragmatic ideas about the role of community differ dramatically from those held by social theorists. The book provides a critical perspective not only on the future of community policing, but on the nature of state-society relations as well.