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.”
Anthropologist, educator, writer and dance critic Judith Lynne Hanna has been an expert court witness in cases related to freedom of speech and exotic dance in the United States, and in Ethnography Challenges False Mythology she analyzes how localities try to regulate striptease clubs out of business.
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.
We have put together a gallery with some of photographer Patricio Crooker’s images from the Bolivian Lucha Libre scene. Yes, you read that correctly … Bolivian Lucha Libre!
In G-Strings and Sympathy anthropologist Katherine Frank writes about the “regulars” in the clubs she worked in as a stripper. We have a chapter from her book for you: Searching for Escape.
Set in 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. We’re proud we’ve been allowed to share with our readers Paul Knobloch’s real gone piece of fictional autoethnography.
What else?
Have you got some good stuff you think American Ethnography Quasimonthly should cover? Please send us an email and tell us about it!
“It is my wish to book with you for a group of 10 students coming from Germany, as they are preparing for their contracted proposal to perfume within your region.”
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California’s long-standing association with odd-ball spirituality is a brilliant topic for a study. And since it is far from automatic that a brilliant topic results in a brilliant book, it’s a delight to see that writer Erik Davis and photographer Michael Rauner have succeeded so well in their undertaking.
“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 Live at Club Mozambique by Lonnie Smith.
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Wrestling Cholitas of Bolivia
“It’s Different From Anywhere Else”
