Overview

Winner of the 2014 John Collier Jr. Award. Winner of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize. Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century cross-cuts the ranks of important books on social history, consumerism, contemporary culture, the meaning of material culture, domestic architecture, and household ethnoarchaeology. It is a distant cousin of Material World and Hungry Planet in content and style, but represents a blend of rigorous science and photography that these books can claim. Using archaeological approaches to human material culture, this volume offers unprecedented access to the middle-class American home through the kaleidoscopic lens of no-limits photography and many kinds of never-before acquired data about how people actually live their lives at home. Based on a rigorous, nine-year project at UCLA, this book has appeal not only to scientists but also to all people who share intense curiosity about what goes on at home in their neighborhoods. Many who read the book will see their own lives mirrored in these pages and can reflect on how other people cope with their mountains of possessions and other daily challenges. Readers abroad will be equally fascinated by the contrasts between their own kinds of materialism and the typical American experience. The book will interest a range of designers, builders, and architects as well as scholars and students who research various facets of U.S. and global consumerism, cultural history, and economic history.

Full Product Details

9781938770128

Table of Contents

Reviews

This is a remarkable, good-natured, and absorbing product of a long-term collaborative research project by a team of UCLA senior scholars and their students from anthropology and archaeology, with the aid of a master photographer, of the everyday lived-in spaces of a select number of households in southern California. . . . Highly recommended. --Choice An unflinching view of the American family, with all its stresses and joys on display. It's full of intriguing data. --The New York Times A meticulous, systematic documentation by a cross-disciplinary team...a visual ethnography of middle-class American households. --The Washington Post

Author Information

Jeanne E. Arnold is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Anthony P. Graesch is assistant professor of anthropology at Connecticut College. Photographer Enzo Ragazzini resides in the Tuscany region of Italy and his work has been featured at exhibitions throughout Europe and North America.Elinor Ochs is UCLA Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Applied Linguistics and served as director of the UCLA Sloan Center on Everyday Lives of Families.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available