Middle-class Life Research Articles

A Success Worse Than Failure

A Success Worse Than Failure Minh-Ha T. Pham (bio) I already had failure on my mind when Timothy Yu’s blog post “Has Asian American Studies Failed?” appeared on my Facebook news feed. That was around the same time I bought and began reading J. Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure after listening to a podcast of Halberstam on The Critical Lede. To paraphrase Halberstam, failure is a counterintuitive mode of knowing and doing that refuses the normalizing models of success that often have the effect of disciplining us into heterosexist capitalist structures of knowledge, feelings, and ideas about the world and ourselves. Understood in this way, failure potentially offers a unique set of rewards including “escape [from] the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development,” the preservation of “some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood,” and an “opportunity to . . . poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life” in which promises of happiness and success function paradoxically as implicit threats of personal misery and failure.3 Reading beyond Yu’s blog post title, I soon realized that I had misread failure. Yes, I had failed at “failure.” Yu’s “failure” is a diagnosis of the state of Asian American studies rather than a narrative of Asian Americanist practices. Still, I think my initial misreading of Yu’s title may not be all bad. It might be one of those times in which, in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s words, “the accidental becomes essential.”4 This unintentional misreading, I suggest, begins a long overdue discussion about failure that reaches beyond evaluation toward a more speculative and suggestive inquiry about Asian Americans’ historically fraught relationship to “failure” and “success.” As readers of this journal are no doubt aware, Asians in the United States have long been perceived as failures. In the imperializing logic of nineteenth-century Orientalism, it was the “failure” of Asian cultural and political structures to survive or thrive in the modern age that served as a rationale for the legacy of informal and institutionalized discrimination and exclusion brought to bear on all Asian groups in complex and uneven ways. Such Oriental failures gave rise to an array of other failures: Asians’ failure to assimilate, their failure to learn English, and their failure to achieve the trappings of white American middle-class life including a nuclear family. By the mid-twentieth century, of course, the general perception of Asian Americans had dramatically shifted. Splashy media stories hailed Asian Americans not as failures but as quintessential American success stories. Well-known articles published in 1966 trumpeted Japanese Americans as “better than any other group in our society, including native-born whites” (New York Times Magazine)5 and Chinese Americans as “a model of self-respect and achievement” (US News & World [End Page 330] Report).6 Asian Americans’ putative family values, work ethic, and thriftiness were cited as explanations for their success. By the 1980s, the Asian American model minority stereotype, or what Fortune magazine called “America’s Super Minority,”7 was well established in the popular discourse about U.S. race relations. It served as a liberal alibi for the unequal distribution of resources, opportunities, and political power among whites and nonwhites and, in the process, pitted Asian Americans against other racialized minorities. Thus, even “Asian American success” is a kind of failure—what Frank Wu aptly describes as “a race relations failure.”8 The success/failure apparatus of Asian difference operates differently for different Asian ethnic groups. The “success story” of South Asian Americans, for example, is articulated through the construction of the model minority as ideal worker. Vijay Prashad explains in Karma of Brown Folk that the desi model worker stereotype is a double-edged sword that is wielded against South Asian Americans who, as a racial “solution” to a labor problem, must accept that “we are only wanted here for our labor and not . . . our lives” and against African Americans who are blamed for their “inability to rise of their own volition.”9 For Southeast Asian Americans, “success” is bound up with the trauma and disillusionment of the failures of the wars in Southeast Asia and their identity as war’s “losers...

Li Zhang, In Search of Paradise. Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis

Li Zhang, In Search of Paradise. Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis

The Poco Field: An American Story of Place (review)

Reviewed by: The Poco Field: An American Story of Place Mark S. Myers The Poco Field: An American Story of Place. By Talmage A. Stanley. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. pp. xx, 232.) In his work, The Poco Field: An American Story of Place, Talmage Stanley masterfully weaves issues of identity with the personal story of his grandparents, C. T. and Aldah Apperson. Stanley begins his work with the observation that the idea of “place” is the result of interaction between three concepts: the natural environment, the built environment, and human culture and history. The idea of community and sense of place that is common in Appalachian identity is the result of the interaction of these three complex ideas. By evaluating the lives of his grandparents in both Keystone, West Virginia, and Newbern, Virginia, as well as their efforts to create a middle-class life for their family, Stanley is not only able to place the story of Appalachia within the context of the American story of consumerism, but to also create a framework for change and the building of stronger communities. A primary focus of Stanley’s work is the effort of his grandparents to achieve a middle-class standard of living. To depict this effort, Stanley uses the Keystone neighborhood of Westfield. Westfield was the “white” neighborhood [End Page 95] of the town, which contained the white school and church. In this area, native whites and immigrants lived in close proximity, implying that there was true diversity in Westfield. However, Stanley notes that the middle-class and elite white community of Keystone owned these homes. In other words, Westfield defined not only the values of the middle class of Keystone, and by extension the rest of the Central Appalachian coalfields, but it also depicted the rigid segregation between the different populations in the region. Stanley believes that there is more to the story of Westfield, however. He says that “owing its existence to the emergence of the Poco field as part of the American economic engine and a way of life defined in terms of industrial profit and consumer goods, Westfield is also a way of thinking and speaking with particularity about larger systems and structures of values, forces, ideas, understandings, and choices” (55). In other words, the idea of Westfield is a manifestation of American middle-class values about place, as well as a definition of the limits of middle-class desires in the Poco field. Stanley’s grandparents realized these limits, and eventually left the coalfields for Newbern in the late 1940s. Stanley also does an excellent job of connecting the Westfield concept to the modern history of McDowell County. Despite a significant production of coal and the desire for a middle-class, consumerist standard of living, McDowell County remains mired in endemic poverty and the many problems that result from economic catastrophe. Using the examples of the efforts of the Big Creek People in Action to improve their community in Caretta, the failure of the First National Bank of Keystone, the devastating floods of 2001 and 2002, and the failure of the McDowell County school system, Stanley discusses the true detachment between the values of Westfield and what he calls a citizenship of place. As Stanley notes, “a citizenship of place that moves against and across the old Westfield boundaries understands place as a dynamic, ongoing social reality expressed in all aspects of daily life. This citizenship knows that we need each other on a deep and significant level” (187). Using extensive primary sources, as well as an excellent amount of the relevant literature, Stanley has produced an important contribution to the field of Appalachian studies. His work requires scholars and students of the region to think of the modern history of Appalachia in a sophisticated and interdisciplinary way. How this notion of place will impact our history or our view of the region is an important question for scholars to consider as the region moves into the post-coal era. [End Page 96] Mark S. Myers The Indiana Academy–Ball State University Copyright © 2012 West Virginia University Press

Lives and Wives: Understanding African Nationalism in South Africa through a Biographical Approach1

AbstractThe essay poses the question, ‘What can a biographical approach tell us about the nature of early African nationalism in South Africa?’ After briefly tracing the conditions under which African nationalist organisations emerged in South Africa, it focuses on two elements of the social makeup of the nationalist movement, class and gender. It argues that the term ‘elite’ to define the class which assumed leadership of the African National Congress can be misleading in its connotations. On the latter, it argues strongly that our understanding has been stunted by stereotypes, and that a biographical approach can assist in appreciating the complexities of African middle class life, the gendered nature of nationalist politics and the intellectual role that women played in the early years of the nationalist movement in South Africa.

Broke: how debt bankrupts the middle class

About 1.5 million households filed bankruptcy in the last year, making bankruptcy as common as college graduation and divorce. The recession has pushed more and more families into financial collapse-with unemployment, declines in retirement wealth, and falling house values destabilizing the American middle class. Broke explores the consequences of this unprecedented growth in consumer debt and shows how excessive borrowing undermines the prosperity of middle class America. While the recession that began in mid-2007 has widened the scope of the financial pain caused by overindebtedness, the problem predated that large-scale economic meltdown. And by all indicators, consumer debt will be a defining feature of middle-class families for years to come. The staples of middle-class life-going to college, buying a house, starting a small business-carry with them more financial risk than ever before, requiring more borrowing and new riskier forms of borrowing. This book reveals the people behind the statistics, looking closely at how people get to the point of serious financial distress, the hardships of dealing with overwhelming debt, and the difficulty of righting one's financial life. In telling the stories of financial failures, this book exposes an all-too-real part of middle-class life that is often lost in the success stories that dominate the American economic narrative.Authored by experts in several disciplines, including economics, law, political science, psychology, and sociology, Broke presents analyses from an original, proprietary data set of unprecedented scope and detail, the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project. Topics include class status, home ownership, educational attainment, impacts of self-employment, gender differences, economic security, and the emotional costs of bankruptcy. The book makes judicious use of illustrations to present key findings and concludes with a discussion of the implications of the data for contemporary policy debates.

Vladimir Janković,Confronting the Climate: British Airs and the Making of Environmental Medicine

In this short but fascinating book, Vladimir Janković explores the origins of both environmental medicine and the British preoccupation with climate. His narrative is well stocked with vivid portraits of the eighteenth-century medical practitioners and others whose ideas about exposure to unhealthy airs—both inside and outside the home—first saw, Janković argues, the emergence of modern ‘environmental risk’ issues in Britain. Medical interest in such ‘hazards’ grew at a time when levels of comfort among the middle classes were fast-increasing, causing fears that the ‘well-to-do’ were undermining their health through lack of exercise and over-indulgence in luxuries, as well as their ‘artificial modes of life’. The rise of comfort and convenience, Janković notes, led to complaints of ‘unwellness’ and discomfort reaching ‘epidemic proportions’ as pampered individuals became ‘delicate’ and vulnerable to a variety of ailments. The book is organised in five chapters, each of which deals with a different health issue to examine the complex interconnections between the medical invention of atmospheric risk and changing middle-class life in Britain. In Chapter 1, ‘Exposed and Vulnerable’, Janković sets out the key eighteenth-century theories regarding climate, health and society, with an emphasis on the influential French and Scottish schools of research that legitimated and helped to shape growing ‘cultures of delicacy’. He also discusses how the concept of ‘exposure’ was a major component of early environmental medicine.

Urban Development, Private Property, and Public Activism in ChinaIn Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. By Li Zhang. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010.

The most tangible sign of the changes in Chinese urban economy and society over the past decades has been in urban development and housing. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the typical cityscape was one of endless expanses of drab 7-story concrete apartment blocks in danwei (socialist work unit) compounds, as well as, in the downtown districts, older neighborhoods of dilapidated homes in the traditional architecture. Most peoples’ homes were owned by the state and assigned by their work units. By the 1990s, private ownership of homes became possible, and the private real estate market began to take off. Many were able to purchase their flats at rock-bottom prices from their work units, while others became buyers in the private market; in the space of a few years, a middle class of homeowners was suddenly created. By the early twentyfirst century, the property market had become one of the main arenas for many of the dreams, fantasies, conflicts, and tensions of postreform Chinese society: urban landscapes were transformed to a degree never achieved even at the height of revolutionary social engineering, with both older neighborhoods and danwei compounds being demolished to make way for new commercial and residential developments in increasingly sophisticated modern architectural styles; real estate developers became powerful members of the rising business class; a property market boom became the target of runaway speculation and repeated government efforts to “cool the bubble” and rein in prices, as incidents of conflict, protests, and even violence became ever more frequent, owing to forced relocations, illegal land expropriations, insufficient compensation, or simply the skyrocketing property prices that made the new dream (and social expectation) of home ownership increasingly impossible to attain for ordinary Chinese. How have these profound transformations affected the daily lives, dreams, and social tensions of urban Chinese? Li Zhang’s In Search of Paradise is an anthropological exploration of this question, through 15 months of fieldwork among middle class property owners in Kunming, conducted from 2000 to 2007. The book opens a fascinating window into contemporary Chinese society and culture through the prism of home development and ownership with its discussion ranging from

In Search of Paradise: Middle‐Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. Li Zhang. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2010. 248 pp.

Student AnthropologistVolume 3, Issue 1 p. 101-104 Book ReviewOpen Access In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. Li Zhang. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2010. 248 pp. Non Arkaraprasertkul, Non Arkaraprasertkul Harvard UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Non Arkaraprasertkul, Non Arkaraprasertkul Harvard UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 March 2020 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.sda2.20120301.0009AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat References 1Arkaraprasertkul, Non 2012 Moral Global Storytelling: Reflections on Place and Space in Shanghai's Urban Neighborhoods. Storytelling, Self, Society 8(3): 167– 179. 2Herzfeld, Michael 2001 Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Cociety. Malden: Blackwell. 3Skinner, G. William 1964 Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China: Part I. The Journal of Asian Studies 24(1): 3– 43. 4Skinner, G. William 1965a Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China: Part II. The Journal of Asian Studies 24(2): 195– 228. 5Skinner, G. William 1965b Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China: Part III. The Journal of Asian Studies 24(3): 363– 399. 6Zhang, Li 2001 Strangers in the city: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China's Floating Population. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 7 Li Zhang, and Aihwa Ong, eds. 2008 Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 8Castells, Manuel 1983 The city and the grassroots : a cross-cultural theory of urban social movements. Volume [ 2]. Berkeley: University of California Press. 9Harvey, David 1973 Social justice and the city. London,: Edward Arnold. 10Harvey, David 2003 The new imperialism. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press. 11Lefebvre, Henri, and Donald Nicholson-Smith 1991 The production of space. Oxford: Blackwell. 12Peng, Ruijue 1986 Towards a new housing approach : analysis of settlement environment and housing policy in Shanghai, China, Dept. of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 13Wang, Ya Ping 1992 Private sector housing in urban China since 1949: The case of Xian. Housing Studies 7(2): 119– 137. 14Wang, Ya Ping, and Alan Murie 1999 Commercial Housing Development in Urban China. Urban Studies 36(9): 1475– 1494. 15Wu, Fulong 2001 China's recent urban development in the process of land and housing marketisation and economic globalisation. Habitat International 25(3): 273– 289. Volume3, Issue12012Pages 101-104 ReferencesRelatedInformation

In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis

In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis

O'Neill's “Damned Unconventional” Play from the Prohibition Years: “Anna Christie”

O'Neill's “Damned Unconventional” Play from the Prohibition Years: <i>“Anna Christie”</i>

Rehabilitation, Risk, and the Carceral Mother: Subjectivity and Parenting Classes in Prisons

Parenting education classes are ubiquitous in the correctional system, particularly for female inmates. This approach to reforming women embodies a maternal subjectivity far removed from the poverty-stricken, criminalized, largely Native Hawai‘ian population in Hawaii’s prisons. Neoliberal governance views poor parenting as the reason for crime, poverty, and a host of social ills. Parenting classes, while well meant and popular among female inmates, foster a reality grounded in notions of middle-class family life. Prisons and other disciplinary systems (such as child welfare) target women’s maternal concerns in order to manage risk, both among female inmates and, potentially, among their children through parenting education. Using data from 240 prison case files and 25 in-depth interviews of mothers on parole supervision, this study finds that the white, middle-class notions embodied by the parenting class are largely at odds with the lived experience of parenting women who are incarcerated.

In Search of Paradise: Middle‐Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis – By Li Zhang. Marginalization in Urban China: Comparative Perspectives – Edited by Fulong Wu and Chris Webster

The article reviews the books In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis, by Li Zhang and Marginalization in Urban China: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Fulong Wu and Chris Webster.

Britain Finds Andy Hardy: British Cinema Audiences and The American Way of Life in The Second World War

The years 1942 and 1943 saw great concern, on both sides of the Atlantic, about Anglo-American understanding. Almost one million American servicemen were to arrive on British shores by the end of 1...

Indonesian youth looking towards the future

Selected survey data on future aspirations and expectations from 3565 young Indonesians are presented in this study. Muslim-majority Indonesia is an Asian economic success story. The economy has seen solid growth, leading to an expansion of the private sector. The upward credentialling of the labour market and the rapid growth of the middle class have resulted. Accordingly, the transition to adulthood for working-class and lower middle-class youth has been extended by the necessity to complete schooling and tertiary training before work can be obtained and marriage can occur. Marriage and children still signify adulthood for both sexes. Career preference favoured the professions, especially for girls, despite tight competition for university places. While indicating upwardly mobile aspirations to middle-class life, respondents also demonstrated strong commitment to religious faith and normative family formation in the future. High expectations were tempered by realism though. When asked about obstacles to life dreams, most named material challenges such as family finances. Respondents from more privileged backgrounds were more likely to think non-material factors such as their own laziness would constitute an obstacle, while those lower on the socio-economic scale often indicated they did not have much chance of realising their life dreams due to material and structural constraints.

Impressionist children: childhood, family, and modern identity in French art

Images of children and families abound in the works of the French Impressionists, from Claude Monet's portraits of his young sons to Mary Cassatt's endearing images of mother and child. In Impressionist Children, Greg M. Thomas offers new perspectives on some of the most famous paintings in art history, explaining how they reflect the dominant social, cultural, and political aspects of Parisian middle-class life in the late 1800s. Drawing on letters, children's books, tourist guidebooks, and 19th-century texts on child development, parenting, and education, Thomas skillfully demonstrates how childhood became a crucial theme for its embodiment of adult ideas about childhood, the family, sexuality, work and leisure, national culture, and, above all, the formation and reproduction of bourgeois identity. He discusses paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures by Impressionist artists and investigates the influence of popular visual culture-fashion, toys, studio photography, and illustrations in books, magazines, and park guides-on the Impressionists' conceptualization of childhood and family relations.

The Pleasures and Anxieties of Being in the Middle: Emerging Middle-Class Identities in Urban South India

AbstractRecent economic changes in India have coincided with a dramatic change in the concept of a ‘middle class’ in the south Indian city of Madurai. Whereas previous sets of class identities were overwhelmingly dichotomous (for example, the rich and the poor, or the ‘big people’ and ‘those who have nothing’), the middle class has now become a highly elaborated component of local class structures and identities. It is also a contested category; moreover, its indigenous boundaries differ from those most often used by scholars, marketers, or policy-makers. Drawing from research over the past decade, this paper examines local definitions of ‘middleness’ and the moralized meanings ascribed to it. Whilst being ‘in the middle’ is a source of pride and pleasure, connoting both achievement and enhanced self-control, it is simultaneously a source of great tension, bringing anxiety over the critical and damaging scrutiny of onlookers. For each positive aspect of a middle-class identity that emphasizes security and stability, there is a negative ramification or consequence that highlights the precariousness and potential instability of middle-class life. In exploring each of these aspects, I pay attention to the explicitly performative features of class identities. I conclude by considering the epistemological and experiential insights we gain into the construction of emergent class categories by focusing on self-ascribed identities and their performance.

"If you are an egalitarian, why do you send your children to private school?"

The question that inspired this essay might seem to be a concern only for a small number of well-to-do families who can afford the high cost of private education. And many of these people see themselves as middle class rather than "rich," but this is precisely the myopia that the world of elite schools reinforces. a Families who earn more than three times the median household income ($50,300) can only think of themselves as struggling members of the middle class when they have almost no real exposure to the lives of the actual middle class, let alone the poor. When you spend time at an inner-city public school you find out that the Christmas break may be spent working at the family store rather than skiing. Nevertheless, I think that the theoretical issues raised by private schooling are relevant for broader issues of educational policy. The principles expressed in private decisions should inform public deliberation, but the extent of our obligations and our ability to fulfill them will be different. To modify a famous example from moral theory, if your mother and an important stranger are both caught in a fire, it is fine to prioritize the private over the public good and save your mother first, but having demonstrated that you think death by burning is a terrible thing, you should support funding for the fire department or fire safety regulations. In other words, the principles that inform your decision in one sphere should also be used to reflect on your obligations in the other. The egalitarian who believes that the purpose of public education is to promote democratic character through exposure to difference should, if possible, select a diverse public school for his child. Similarly, the egalitarian-liberal who endorses a system of detached public schools should select a somewhat unheimlich (and therefore autonomy-promoting) school. We may legitimately prioritize our children's well-being over the public good, but we must define well-being in the same way as we do when we are thinking about what is good for others.

"They Congregate...in Towns and Suburbs": The Shape of Middle-Class Life in John Claudius Loudon's The Suburban Gardener

"They Congregate...in Towns and Suburbs":The Shape of Middle-Class Life in John Claudius Loudon's The Suburban Gardener Sarah Bilston (bio) It happens, in the progress of civilisation, and the changes that society is continually undergoing, that, at a certain stage, mankind arrive at a similar point to that from which they set out, only in a more improved and refined form; and as, in a rude state, they congregated together in encampments or in villages, for mutual protection and security, so, in a refined state, they congregate together in towns and suburbs, for business and refined enjoyment. —John Claudius Loudon, The Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion (1838), 10.1 For many Victorians, suburbia seemed a physical manifestation of middle-class values. Suburban areas were, from the first, shaped to separate housing from spaces of commerce and industry. Judith Flanders notes that in the early Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston "the leases ... were clear: no retail premises were permitted, nor was professional work to be undertaken in these houses" (xxiii).2 Over time, the physical separation of home and work life reinforced the emerging ideology of the sanctified home, so that by the end of the century, "suburban streets laid out in rows of domestic housing, whether small working-class developments or more spacious villas with gardens, were manifestations of the traditional middle-class belief in home and family" (Hapgood 8).3 Yet the first generations of suburban observers did not necessarily regard the distinctive, newly terraced streets as shaped by and catering to an ideology of family seclusion.4 John Claudius Loudon is a notable example of a writer with a very different perspective on Suburban areas. Loudon has long been viewed as yet another advocate for reserved domesticity and the sanctified home, as a writer obsessed with maintaining both class and gender hierarchies through the concrete boundaries of walls and hedges.5 Yet the 1838 edition of The Suburban Gardener, Loudon's important early articulation of suburban living, is more complex, for it situates the family home in a landscape whose shape Loudon presents as a sign of modernity and advance. Loudon argues that whereas once people "congregated together in encampments or in villages, for mutual protection and security," the defensive circle of the English [End Page 144] village is no longer necessary; protection and security can take a back seat to the modern middle-class pursuits of business and pleasure (10). The straight rows of suburbia are thus, for Loudon, a vibrant manifestation of England's move away from its rural past. Moreover, the author repeatedly argues that the suburban landscape allows residents to connect with one another and thereby benefit from the opportunities of modernity. He celebrates the public communal spaces in suburban areas, the possibilities for forming friendships with neighbours, and the vistas of an industrial landscape just beyond the suburban periphery. Above all, Loudon presents the garden as a space shaped by both the demands and opportunities of modern life: he admires the walls surrounding gardens not just because they keep out unwelcome eyes, but also because they make the space more manageable for the evening gardener returned home from work. With walls in place, a brand-new spade, and Loudon's book in hand, a suburban gardener (either male or female) may enjoy the delights of self-directed enterprise as a contrast to professional life—not to mention an older agrarian existence, where land cultivation was about food production as opposed to aesthetics. Loudon's admiration for industry and advancement seems all the more striking when the 1838 edition of the text is laid beside The Villa Gardener (1850), the posthumously released version of The Suburban Gardener. As we shall see, this later work, edited by Loudon's wife, Jane, erases expressions of admiration for the industrial landscape and celebrations of suburban community. Paying attention to this deleted material indicates how suburbia's promise was revised in the light of shifting cultural attitudes to the home, the family, and the middle class. The Rise of Suburbia and the Decline of the Rural Loudon's responses to the country and the cities in the 1830s are best understood in the light of broad...

Reply to Comments

We are delighted our rejoinder to Satzewich and Shaffir (2009) on racial profiling has elicited such vigorous and insightful response. The contributions of scholars from Australia, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States provide an international focus to the commentaries included in this issue which is bound to be of great interest to readers of the journal. In this reply, we will focus on some of the major points made by the contributors, all of whom, with one exception, have ignored the usual said, she said form of what often passes for intellectual debate and have instead concentrated on adding important points of view to this debate. John Crank aptly and simply summarizes the current dialogue as raising the question of whether underlying racism is a prerequisite for racial profiling or whether profiling is a cultural characteristic of policing organizations. Although neither the debate nor the commentaries definitively answer this question, is clearly recognized as an important issue in the study of racial profiling. Janet Chan points to the critical issue of the role of police subculture in fostering racial profiling and agrees aspects of police work and its do support stereotypical opinions about the criminality of some ethnic groups. She reminds us, however, culture is not, in itself, always static (76). Thus, changing political and social conditions may influence police subculture and lead to significant changes in the ability of police officers to negotiate their work. Organizational changes and new regulations and initiatives may be able to influence police so does not tolerate or permit racial prejudice, but nevertheless, Chan concludes that cognitive bias and stereotyping is a feature of police cultural knowledge is not easily changed given the nature of police work as currently structured (77). Crank also notes the concepts of racism, culture, justice, and so on are difficult to define and that, therefore, social scientists have difficulty in establishing a consensus around them. Both papers under review deal with racism and culture; yet the debate is unlikely to be resolved. Ingeniously, Crank, instead, turns his attention to policy implications. Specifically, he questions whether neighbourhoods with high crime rates should receive high levels of policing and, particularly, of police enforcement. He asks what police should do in areas of high crime are also characterized by high levels of poverty and substantial numbers of minority residents. He notes that, if police behaviour is problematic, then the effort to change behaviour becomes a policy issue. Crank also comments the poor minority, especially African Americans, do not choose to live in poverty or deal in gang violence, and they desire the same middle-class life styles and opportunities as middle-class people do. Should there be more policing in such areas if leads to community-based racial profiling and what role should social scientists play in deciding such policies. He cites research to show social scientists can provide cultural analysis as well as contribute to and participate directly in community-directed action by identifying needs, helping implement changes, and generally helping communities to achieve their desired goals. Crank's emphasis on the policy implications of the debates on racial profiling brings another and very important dimension to the study of this phenomenon. Jobard and Levy's intriguing research, conducted in Paris, France, employed a sophisticated methodology included placing observers at various high-traffic locations to track all police stops. They found the police over-stopped and searched minorities (89). Although is difficult to disentangle variables such as youth and dress, it is risky to deny stops and searches have a racial component (91). Their research, like many of the high-profile studies conducted in Canada, created a media sensation. …

Analysis of Semiotic in the Comic Strips Benny &amp; Mice Serial 'Lagak Jakarta 100 Character Coloring Jakarta' as Urban Society Phenomenon

Many people acknowledged that cartoon as a symbolic part of art illustration has been exist since hundred years ago which is, able to give a special social phenomenon characteristic. It means that in creative process of cartoonists pursue to create a contextual meaning within Jakarta local society culture. Benny Rachmadi (Benny) and Muhammad Misrad (Mi-Ce) who represented a figure from cartoonist, which both of them have deeper analysis, until people think and call it as anthropology (par excellent). This research does have goals to create the symbolized meaning exits in their comic. The serial comic strip of “Lagak Jakarta 100 Character Coloring Jakarta,” used to explore social phenomenon of Jakarta urban society problems, especially for Jakarta people, which have interaction with Jakarta’s middle class life style.