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.”
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.
Anthropologist Heather Levi apprenticed with a retired luchador (wrestler) in Mexico City. She also observed live lucha libre events and interviewed wrestlers, referees, officials, promoters, and reporters, and gathered her insights in a beautiful work of ethnography, The World of Lucha Libre.
Here is an excerpt from Levi’s book.
We got our hands on a copy of the Steidl 2008 re-issue of Robert Frank’s classic photo portrait of post-war USA, and we give you This, Upon Reading The Americans.
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.
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.”
What else?
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Engraving by José Guadalupe Posada
Mexican engraver José Guadalupe Posada was largely forgotten by the end of his life, and died in poverty. He was, however, soon to be quoted as a crucial inspiration for the muralist movement in his country, and as his work continued to grew in importance, his images became touchstones of national identity for Mexicans everywhere.
We’ve dug out some of our favorite Posada prints, and from those we offer a gallery we’ve called Posada’s Calaveras: From the A. Vanegas Arroyo broadsides.
“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 Changes Two by Charles Mingus.
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“It’s Different From Anywhere Else”
Robert Frank’s The Americans
