Lowrider
Los Angeles, 2005. (The photo is not from the book referred to in the text to the right.)
Photo: Martin Høyem
Lowrider Space
We take a special interest in scientific works on outlaw aesthetics here at American Ethnography Quasimonthly. And we also love us some writing on car customization. Thus, when we heard about Ben Chappell’s Lowrider Space, a new publication from the University of Texas Press, we perked up: any academic hep cat who takes a look at lowriders is cool, calm, and a solid wig as far as we’re concerned.
Lowrider Space draws on Chappell’s participant observation fieldwork among car clubs in Austin, Texas. He describes how the lowrider culture creates a social space for its participants, and he points to the value of this space for a group of people who – because of their social status in the society they live in – are often denied access to other spaces.
It’s a cool piece of research, and we’re stoked to share with you an excerpt from the book. Here’s “Regulating Lowrider Space.”
Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg spent over a decade doing fieldwork with two dozen homeless heroin and crack addicts on the streets of San Francisco, and produced an extraordinary wellcrafted documentation of this dystopian side of American society.
Their book, Righteous Dopefiend, is an ethnographic tour de force, and we’re stoked to bring you an excerpt.
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Photo: George Eaton Simpson, 1937.
From National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution [93-14-1051]
We spilled our best premium rum on the ground. And then, with fire in our heart, we played the bongos till our fingers bled. Offerings, you should know, to Papa Legba – the gatekeeper, the facilitator of communication, the one who greases speech and understanding. A lot of rum and drum went down. But this is what we do for our readers! Ah, yes, this is what we do. Because later, when we dived into the archives, what didn’t we find? A long-forgotten 1940 article by George Eaton Simpson, sociologist and anthropologist, describing a voodoo ceremony in Northern Haiti. And the only reason we found this thing down there in them dusty shelves was all that spilling of rum. And the drumming. And the bleeding a bit. Now we offer the article to you, dear reader. It’s your turn to spill rum. It’s your turn to drum. And then, later, perhaps you’ll read: The vodun service in Northern Haiti.
“American Ethnography is a stranger in a 1972 Riviera, sunburst yellow banged up and dirty, raving coffee madness cruising Main Street of the quiet desert town at 15 miles an hour …”
Today we’re digging Moanin’ by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.
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Abstract Leanings
Stripping, social class, and the strange carnalities of research
