Life In America: Identity And Everyday Experience

Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience is a fascinating collection of readings that explores how people negotiate identity in the United States today.

• Brings together readings that provide a thoroughly engaging and fascinating look at central issues of identity and what it means to be American.
• Explores the tension between identity and identification to help readers begin to understand how people creatively confront the perks and perils of identity in the United States.
• Offers a look at a wide range of subjects including: violence and video games, queer pilgrimages to San Francisco, Filipina critiques of "sleeping around," and the significance of "lowriders" in Hispano/Chicano culture.

Lee D. Baker is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African & African American Studies at Duke University. He is author of From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (1998). He is president elect of the Society for the Anthropology of North America.

Introduction: Identity and Everyday Life in America.

Part I: Conditions of Identity, Violence, and Technologies.

Part II: Church, Family, and the Dynamics Post-Civil Rights Movement.

Part III: Consumption, Class, and Traditions of Negotiation and Investment.

Part IV: The Politics and Perils of Assimilation.

Part V: More Than Consumption: Experiencing Gender, Class, and Race.

Part VI: Policing Blackness, Authenticity, and the Soul Patrol.

Part VII: Privilege, Power, and Anxiety of the Norm.

Part VIII: Language, History, and Specificity.

Index