Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America

Melissa Checker, Maggie Fishman

Columbia University Press, Feb 25, 2004 - Social Science - 280 pages

Activism is alive and well in the United States, according to Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman. It exists on large and small scales and thrives in unexpected places. Finding activism in backyards, art classes, and urban areas branded as "ghettos," these anthropologists explore the many routes people take to work toward social change.

Ten absorbing studies present activist groups across the country—from transgender activists in New York City, to South Asian teenagers in Silicon Valley, to evangelical Christians and Palestinian Americans. Each one examines a social change effort as it unfolds on the ground. Through their anthropological approach these portraits of American society suggest the inherent possibilities in identity-based organizing and offer crucial in-depth perspectives on such hotly debated topics as multiculturalism and the culture wars, the environment, racism, public education, Native American rights, and the Christian right.

Moving far beyond the walls of academia, the contributors address the complex issues that arise when researchers have stakes in the subjects they study. Scholars can play multiple roles in the activist struggles they recount, and these essays illustrate how ethnographic research itself can become a tool for activism.

Contents

• Introduction: 1
• DaytoDay Dilemmas in the Construction of a Pluralistic US Environmental Movement: 27
• Arts Education as Cultural Activism: 51
• Indian Gaming and American Indian Activism: 71
• Violence Anthropological Ethics and the Category Transgender: 89
• 5 We Shall Overcome? Changing Politics and Changing Sexuality in the ExGay Movement: 111
• Servant Evangelism and the Spiritual Injuries of Class: 136
• Contesting Cultural Diversity in Crown Heights: 159
• 8 FOBby or Tight? Multicultural Day and Other Struggles at Two Silicon Valley High Schools: 184
• 9 Gathering Roots and Making History in the Korean Adoptee Community: 208
• Palestinianness and the Politics of Solidarity: 231

About the author

Melissa Checker is assistant professor of applied anthropology at the University of Memphis. Her research on environmental justice activism is the subject of an upcoming ethnography and several articles. She has been involved as an activist in the environmental justice movement. In her own discipline she endeavors to bring anthropological voices into public policy.



Maggie Fishman is completing her doctoral dissertation on the contemporary arts education movement in New York City in the department of anthropology at New York University. She works evaluating arts-in-education programs in New York City public schools and has been active there in various causes, including the creation of a neighborhood school whose curriculum incorporates the tools of ethnography.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America
• Authors: Melissa Checker, Maggie Fishman
• Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2004
• ISBN: 0231502427, 9780231502429
• Length: 280 pages
• Subjects: Political Science / American Government / State; Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social; Social Science / Sociology / General