Nina Eliasoph - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Nina Eliasoph

Disgusted by political institutions, many activists around the world are rejecting normal politic... more Disgusted by political institutions, many activists around the world are rejecting normal politics in favor of hands-on, tangible local action. This looks similar all over the world, including in the two countries on which the paper focuses, Russia and the United States. Is it? Scholars and activists alike compare one society's activism to another; this paper suggests ways of asking useful questions in cross-national ethnographic research. Controlling the variables of cultural, political/legal, social, and spatial conditions is impossible. With so many "out of control variables", can comparison make any sense? Activists have varied "styles" (Lichterman & Eliasoph, 2014) of coordinating local activism in any country. Each style encounters different frictions, depending on a nation's specific cultural, political, social, and spatial conditions. Local, interest-based, grassroots activism is a typical American "style", and is also venerated in Ameri...

Contexts

Nina Eliasoph considers three new volumes and what they say about academics’ disdain for and dism... more Nina Eliasoph considers three new volumes and what they say about academics’ disdain for and dismissal of the problems of less educated, lower-income Americans.

Social Problems, Nov 1, 1999

... The problem with this metaphor is the assumption that inner beliefs or ideas are all that rea... more ... The problem with this metaphor is the assumption that inner beliefs or ideas are all that really matter. But people are always "doing things with words" that go beyond the words' straightforward meaning. Surely the fact that something is a joke matters to the joker. ...

Theor Soc, 1990

... In fact, the ability to avoid less straightforward, more allusive displays is the measure of ... more ... In fact, the ability to avoid less straightforward, more allusive displays is the measure of a good interviewer. One exception to the depth interviewers&#x27; usual pattern is Arlie Hoch-schild&#x27;s work on gender ideology. ... Truthfully, I live in a shack in South City. ...

Contemp Sociol, 2006

ABSTRACT American Jewish History 92.2 (2004) 256-258 In the interest of probing the hidden dynami... more ABSTRACT American Jewish History 92.2 (2004) 256-258 In the interest of probing the hidden dynamic of class in American culture, Sherry Ortner, the eminent anthropologist best-known for her studies of the Sherpa of Nepal, turned her attention to what was for her an unlikely source, her own high school peers. New Jersey Dreaming records her explorations of what went into the making of the Weequahic High School Class of '58 (C58) and what the class made of itself. Despite her primary focus on the complex workings of class and its manifestations in family, school, and work, Ortner is no determinist; she allows that a combination of social background and individual agency, in tandem with historically specific movements, pushed and pulled class members in ways which allowed them to "make" their own futures. Ortner's social geography of Weequahic, a neighborhood in Newark, N.J., made famous by WHS's most notable alum, Philip Roth, probes the many ways in which class "drag" or boost intersect with race, gender, and ethnicity to determine patterns of choice and success in high school, college, and postgraduate life. Based on "loose interviews" with one hundred out of the 304 original class members in eighty cities, the study weaves together field notes, statistical tables, and theoretical discussions about class, culture, identity politics, race relations, and social movements. The result is an ambitious argument about individual, social, and historical change. Because C58 was so heavily Jewish (83 percent), it is tempting to label Ortner's findings as a study of Jewish upward mobility. But Ortner links the destinies of WHS's non-Jewish students (11 percent "other" ethnicities and 6 percent African Americans) to their place in the high school and their interactions with Jewish peers. In fact, despite "pernicious" academic tracking, the "middle-classing" project extended throughout the school and included working-class students, even though most of the academic-tracked students were from the business and professional or middle classes, and almost all of them (91 percent) were Jewish. Ortner shows that, notwithstanding the seeming homogeneity of this population, many non-Jews, both African Americans and whites, were college-bound, while a significant number of Jews were not on the college track. Ortner has a mixed opinion of whether the high valuation of education was a Jewish cultural legacy. She acknowledges that Jewishness must be seen as a source of "cultural capital" because it was so esteemed by parents, creating "stereotypes" of achievement which (she speculates) led guidance counselors to place Jewish students on the college track in greater numbers than testing might have warranted (150). On the other hand, Ortner insists that the value which her Jewish classmates' parents placed on learning was not rooted in "some eternal 'Jewish culture'" but was historically specific, influenced by the increasing assimilation of Jews in postwar society and the decline of antisemitism (150). Ortner thus has it both ways, simultaneously proclaiming the relevance of Jewish identity as cultural capital while minimizing Jewishness as a unique variant. While Ortner shows that Jewish culture and religion were not homogeneous, Jews were set apart from their neighbors. The predominantly Jewish nature of Weequahic made the community a "kind of mini-Zionist movement . . . where it was OK to be Jewish and where Jews were not threatened" (56); neighborhood homogeneity was so naturalized that "younger children often literally did not know there were any other kinds of people in the world but Jews" (57). Ortner seems ambivalent as to whether such "Jewish hegemony" created undesirable results: only a very small number of non-Jewish whites and African Americans complained to her about prejudice, and many reported making friends across ethnicity and class, suggesting a small victory for the "integrationist strategy." Yet, a sense of "active social exclusion and/or social inferiority" among non-Jews exerted a negative effect (75). Despite its overwhelming Jewishness, Ortner insists that Weequahic was a "representative" high school, especially because of the inner workings of adolescent school life, exhibited in social categories like popular kids, cheerleaders/twirlers, jocks, hoods, and sluts, even if...

The Communication Review, 1999

How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life, 1998

Dilemmas of the New Public Participation, 2015

... critiques on field notes, multiple drafts, or papers that I wrote while puz-zling my way thro... more ... critiques on field notes, multiple drafts, or papers that I wrote while puz-zling my way through the book, including Daniel Cefaï, Paul Dekker, Mike Edwards, Andreas Glaeser, Lynne Haney, Ron Jacobs, Michèle Lamont, Caroline Lee, Patricia Paperman, Isaac Reed, Michael ...

Voluntas International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, Jul 16, 2009

Research on civic associations blurs an important distinction between the unfunded, informal, ong... more Research on civic associations blurs an important distinction between the unfunded, informal, ongoing associations that theorists like de Tocqueville described versus current participatory democracy projects that are funded by the state and large nongovernmental organizations, are open to all, and are usually short-term. Based on a long-term ethnography of youth programs in the United States, this paper shows that entities like these, which participants and researchers alike often called ''volunteer'' or ''civic'' groups, operate very differently from traditional civic groups. The ethnography systematically details prevalent tensions that actors face when they try to cultivate the civic spirit in these increasingly typical organizations.