Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists

Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists by Christian Zlolniski is an ethnography of Mexican immigrants in the Silicon Valley region of California. Dr. Zlolniski focuses on people living in a low-income neighborhood known as Santech. He starts off with discussion of his field methods and a general discussion about Mexican immigration to California. This lays a framework for the rest of the book, which will be about the lives of the Santech residents. Some of the topics covered (as stated by the chapter headings) are the sub-contracting of janitors in high-tech companies; the informal economy; family structure; and community politics. Names of individuals and of companies have been altered for the book.

I took Dr. Zlolniski's course last semester on the Anthropology of Migration, and this book was one of our assigned reading materials. It's written in very accessible language, though, so anyone should be able to pick this up and have no trouble reading; besides, there are graphs and tables included that make the data presented a little easier to look at. There are also some photos and a map, which is something I always love to see in a book.

From the Ganges to the Hudson

From the Ganges to the Hudson: Indian Immigrant Families in New York City by Johanna Lessinger is a part of the New Immigrants Series, and one of the books I had to read this past Spring for my Anthropology of Migration class. As with the other from the series that I've read, Changes and Conflicts, this book is rather short (only 159 pages), but also both interesting and informative. Through Lessinger, we can get an insight into the experience of immigrants to the U.S. (specifically, of course, to New York City) from India - both the first generation immigrants (those who were born in India and immigrated as adults) and the 1.5 and second generation immigrants as well (respectively, those who were born in India but immigrated as children, and children who were born in the US to first generation immigrants). The communities they create here are rich with their native culture, and there is not so much a loss of native language as was widely the case with immigrants from Europe in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.

Wombs and Alien Spirits

Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan by anthropologist Janice Boddy is a book with a mostly self-explanatory title (I say "mostly" because it is not, in fact, about aliens). I chose this book as my other alternate reading selection for a course in Anthropological Theory, but don't let that frighten you away! I promise you the book is not dry, as the name of that class would suggest.

This ethnography, based on about two years of fieldwork, takes us to a village Boddy calls "Hofriyat" (names of individuals and the name of the village have been changed) in northern Sudan. Although the people in this part of the country speak Arabic and are largely Muslim, the people in this (and other) villages also maintain a strong belief and indulgence in a very specific form of spirit possession - these spirits are known as zār.

Coming of Age in Samoa

When my professor for Anthropological Theory passed out a list of books to choose from for an essay we had to write, I snatched up Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa the moment I saw it listed as an option; I'd been wanting to read it almost since I started becoming seriously interested in studying anthropology. Really, I don't think an introductory level class exists that does not bring up Mead and the controversy surrounding this book. So what's it about, and why is it so controversial?

Coming of Age in Samoa is an ethnography Mead wrote after her first fieldwork in the village of Taū in American Samoa (conducted in the 1920s). People in the United States tended to assume that with adolescence comes unavoidable awkwardness, angst, and a possible myriad of other grievances. Mead (supported by Our Father of American Anthropology, Franz Boas) believed that this is not necessarily universal - that the problems we associate with this stage of life is culturally created by demands and expectations placed on adolescents by our society. She therefore set out to compare the experience of adolescents in a rather different culture than our own, to determine whether they were very different or not. She used traditional ethnographic research methods of participant observation and conducting interviews, which she supplemented with surveys and questionnaires.