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.”
Writer Erik Davis and photographer Michael Rauner has made a brilliant investigaton of Californian odd-ball spirituality.
Photographer Juliana Beasley worked eight years as a professional nude dancer, using her camera to document the clubs she worked in, her co-workers, and the customers. Here are some of her photos.
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.
Sociologist Danielle Egan worked as a striptease dancer and wrote about it in her book Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love. Here is an excerpt from the book.
Anthropologist Johan Pottier once wrote that food is “the most powerful instrument for expressing and shaping interactions between humans.” Recently we came across the work of Penny De Los Santos, who says she explores and celebrates culture, history and community through the lens of food. Here’s a gallery of De Los Santos’ work.
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!
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Photo: Jack Butler
“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.”
Butler has photographed the hot rod culture of Southern California since 2003 using a Polaroid loaded pinhole camera. We have put together a gallery with selections from this unique documentation project. Click here to check it out.
“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 Exile On Main Street by The Rolling Stones.
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California’s Spiritual Landscape
Photo gallery: Lapdancer
Stripping, social class, and the strange carnalities of research
