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.”
Portraits from a country where “90% of the population is Catholic and 100% of the population is Vodou,” Phyllis Galembo’s book Vodou: Visions and Voices of Haiti reveal what she herself calls “the hidden vitality of the Haitian Vodou tradition.”
From a depraved and desperate Montreal underworld, here’s a pitiless and darkly comic exposé of a dope hungry intellectual who educates himself in the art of hustling access to the contents of pharmacy cabinets.
Anthropologist Michael Agar tries to describe what he calls, in an email to American Ethnography, “that first seductive dance with the drug, the song of the opiate siren, the early high times before biology takes over biography.” We have an excerpt from his book Dope Double Agent: The Naked Emperor on Drugs.
“A good thing about Polaroids,” artist and photographer Jack Butler says, “is that you take the picture and it’s ready right away, so you can use the photo to initiate a conversation with your subjects.”
Sociologist Danielle Egan worked as a striptease dancer and wrote about it. Here is an excerpt from her book Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love.
What else?
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Photo: Martin Hoyem. Photo in book: Robert Frank.
Photographer Robert Frank’s The Americans was first published in Paris in 1958, and was recently re-published by Steidl and the National Gallery of Art.
Frank “sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film,” wrote Jack Kerouac in the introduction to the first American edition in 1959. He continued: “To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.”
American Ethnography got our hands on a copy of the Steidl re-issue, and we give you This, Upon Reading The Americans.
“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 A Love Supreme by John Coltrane.
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The Haitian Vodou tradition
Graduate School
Hot Rod Kulture Culture
