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Humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) present themselves as servants of the most longstanding and universal human values. And yet, the idea that NGOs like Médecins sans Frontières, International Rescue Committee, or Oxfam should provide humanitarian relief is relatively new and—when proposed in the mid-nineteenth century—was surprisingly controversial. Above the Fray examines the origins of the political and organizational culture that provides humanitarian NGOs today with extraordinary influence in international politics. Drawing on archival research, the book traces its origins to a mid-nineteenth-century Geneva-based orthodox Calvinist movement. The book shows that the founding members of the Red Cross—essential figures for the emergence of the humanitarian sector—were convinced by their Calvinist faith that the only way relief could come to the victims of armed conflict was through an international volunteer program that would be free of state interests. These early activists were the first to advocate the establishment of volunteer relief societies in all state capitals, and they were the ones to propose the 1864 Geneva Convention, which has become the ethical standards for humane conduct on the battlefield. The analysis follows the remarkable international spread of humanitarian ideas over the second half of the nineteenth century, and shows how the Red Cross project struck a chord in numerous quarters for different reasons—national, professional, religious, and others—and popularized the notion of organized humanitarian volunteer societies. The book highlights the imprint of mid-nineteenth-century Calvinism that contemporary humanitarian relief organizations and policies continue to bear.

“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.

On January 6, 2002 the Boston Globe published a reports on the Catholic Church cover up of sexual abuse by priests. The banner headline told a tragic story that would, in its basic plot, be repeated with disturbing regularity over the course of the next decade. As a result of these revelations many Catholics would leave the Church; many would remain staunchly faithful. Some Catholics would decide to keep their faith, but also to change the Church. Based on years of ethnographic research, Ewick and Steinberg studied one group of such Catholics—a chapter of Voice of the Faithful. In standing up to the Church, their project parallels that of many change seekers whose efforts face obstacles by the economic and cultural resources and organizational power they seek to change. In the case of the Church crisis, expectations of obedience, deference to hierarchy, and presumption of ecclesiastic immunity collided with individual conscience, liberty and democracy. Caught between their loyalty to the Church and their sense of justice, these Catholics reimagined the Church and their role in it. Over more than a decade they engaged in an ongoing process of collective identity through which they reimagined their place within the institutional order and the meaning of being faithful Catholics. Theirs is an all-too-familiar story about identities under stress and their reconfiguration as collective challengers; about institutional betrayal and the restoration of trust; and, about commitment and the meaning of justice.

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.

The U.S. Southeast has become a harbinger of twenty-first-century immigrant integration and race relations. Its unique characteristics of rapid demographic change, an explosion of anti-immigrant policies, cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and large African American population, have made the region a dynamic indicator of how race and race relations are changing throughout the country. For immigrant newcomers, like in generations past, how they will come to identify themselves, and are situated in the U.S. racial hierarchy, is an ongoing process of great interest to scholars and policymakers alike. Drawing from 12 months of ethnographic research, 86 interviews, and inductive analysis of three local newspapers, The Browning of the New South demonstrates how the marginalization and racialization of Latinos compels them to self-identify as racial minorities and to develop positive social and political ties with blacks. Specifically, this book shows that within a context of minimal economic competition, Latinos’ new racial identity arises from two related processes: a political backlash against Latino immigration that results in downward mobility and what I call ‘reverse incorporation,' and through on-the-ground relations with native-born community members, whose attitudes and practices shape newcomers’ ideas about race. By highlighting the role of context in shaping intergroup relationships, these findings undermine pervasive assumptions of black-brown conflict and unpacks the social processes that produce intergroup solidarity and political action.

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.

For a generation, an intense debate has been waged over the expanding number of people who are diagnosed with a mental disorder and treated with prescription drugs such as Prozac and Adderall. One side, the psychiatric, sees progress. People suffering from mental illness are finally getting the treatment they need. The other side challenges the psychiatric perspective and the medicalization and treatment of common personality traits and forms of distress as mental disorders. Neither side has much to say about how people themselves explain their suffering and or envision a resolution. Chemically Imbalanced, based on interviews, explores this sense-making among people dealing with experiences of loss, disappointment, and underachievement. At the heart of distress is a gap between experience and valued standards and ideals of selfhood, and confusion over why things are not going as they should. People are in a predicament, and the book explores how many take up diagnostic categories, biological explanations, and pharmaceuticals as social objects and narratives to make sense of their situation and ameliorate it. These efforts reveal that a quiet but profound revolution in consciousness is underway. Ways of conceiving of suffering in terms of the mind, interpersonal experience, and social circumstances are being replaced with a thin and mechanistic language of the body/brain. The appeal of this “neurobiological imaginary,” the book argues, is not its explanatory power but in what it promises people they can be in our fluid and depthless culture. Despite the vaunted freedom, the imaginary has troubling and entrapping consequences.

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.

Civic Gifts traces how practices of reciprocity and organized mass benevolence—that is, philanthropy—have contributed to the development of novel forms of national solidarity and impressive governing capacities in the United States, contributing even to a famously anti-statist political culture. Sociologist Elisabeth Clemens paints a picture of the US, whether as nation or as state, as a puzzle. How, she asks, did a sense of shared nationhood develop despite the linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences among the settlers? How did a global power emerge from an often anti-statist political culture? How did some version of this collective identity come to be articulated with organized governance? With Civic Gifts, Clemens reveals that an important piece of the answer to these questions can be found in the unexpected political uses of philanthropy and the power of gifts to mobilize communities and to create solidarity among strangers.

Scientific breakthroughs have led us to a point where soon we will be able to make specific choices about the genetic makeup of our offspring. In fact, this reality has arrived—and it is only a matter of time before the technology becomes widespread. Much like past arguments about stem-cell research, the coming debate over these reproductive genetic technologies (RGTs) will be both political and, for many people, religious. In order to understand how the debate will play out in the United States, this book presents an in-depth study of the claims made about RGTs by religious people from across the political spectrum. Some of the opinions this book documents are familiar, but others—such as the idea that certain genetic conditions produce a “meaningful suffering” that is, ultimately, desirable—provide a fascinating glimpse of religious reactions to cutting-edge science. Not surprisingly, the book discovers that for many people opinion on the issue closely relates to their feelings about abortion, but it also finds a shared moral language that offers a way around the unproductive polarization of the abortion debate and other culture-war concerns.

Since Roe v. Wade, abortion has continued to be a divisive political issue in the United States. In contrast, it has remained primarily a medical issue in Britain and Canada despite the countries’ shared heritage. This book looks beyond simplistic cultural or religious explanations to find out why abortion politics and policies differ so dramatically in these otherwise similar countries. It argues that political institutions are the key. In the United States, federalism, judicial review, and a private healthcare system contributed to the public definition of abortion as an individual right rather than a medical necessity. Meanwhile, the book explains, the porous structure of American political parties gave pro-choice and pro-life groups the opportunity to move the issue onto the political agenda.

Emotions permeate all aspects of protest, just as they do all human action. Most scholars acknowledge this, but have done little to incorporate feelings into their explanations. This book systematically shows how dozens of emotions help, hinder, direct, and generate social movements. They are not simply bad nor simply good; they are normal.

Wild parties, late nights, and lots of sex, drugs, and alcohol. Many assume these are the things that define an American teenager's first year after high school. But the reality is really quite different. As this book reports, teenagers generally manage the increased responsibilities of everyday life immediately after graduation effectively. But, like many good things, this comes at a cost. Tracking the daily lives of fifty young people making the transition to life after high school, the book reveals how teens settle into manageable patterns of substance use and sexual activity; how they meet the requirements of postsecondary education; and how they cope with new financial expectations. Most of them, we learn, handle the changes well because they make a priority of everyday life. But the book finds that teens also stow away their identities—religious, racial, political, or otherwise—during this period in exchange for acceptance into mainstream culture. This results in the absence of a long-range purpose for their lives and imposes limits on their desire to understand national politics and global issues, sometimes even affecting the ability to reconstruct their lives when tragedies occur.

American white-collar job seekers engage in the “chemistry game,” a set of job search practices premised on the idea that getting hired requires more than presenting one’s skills; it requires presenting oneself––the person behind the skills––and establishing interpersonal fit. The focus on chemistry is not inherent to white-collar job searching in advanced economies. Israeli workers looking for similar jobs under similar economic conditions engage in a very different “specs game,” which focuses on presenting one’s skills and credentials and requires masking the person behind the skills. These job-search games are the products of different labor market institutions, and they generate different unemployment experiences. Unemployed American white-collar workers are vulnerable to highly personalized forms of self-blame and often end up feeling deeply flawed, while unemployed Israeli workers often report feeling dehumanized and invisible. Losing at the chemistry game produces self-blame; losing at the specs game produces system-blame. American blue-collar job seekers engage in yet another distinct job search game, focused on displaying their diligence, which generates a distinct unemployment experience. Stepping back, the book shows that understanding the experience of unemployment requires looking beyond global economic forces or national cultures and closely examining the specific institutions that structure the day-to-day activities and strategies of job searching. At a broader level, this book develops a theory of the mechanisms that link the objective structures and subjective experiences.