Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper contrasts the orientations and attitudes of the female partners of work-devoted men in two countries: the US and Norway. I present findings based on in-depth interviews with both members of twenty professional couples in the two countries. Two patterns corresponding to the two countries are identified: an American pattern in which the women adopt a more deferential stance about their partner's engrossment in his work and a Norwegian pattern in which the women make claims on their partners' time and attention. Complementary patterns are also identified with respect to the male partners themselves. The American men express an intransigence with respect to their work investment which contrasts with the more accommodationist stance of the Norwegian men.

Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Abstract: Civil religion is a social mechanism that encompasses deep developments within society. It is an ideological meta-structure that consists of religious components such as symbols, myths, and rituals, that legitimate social and political order. In western societies, especially in the United States, observations of recent decades reveal a rivalry developing between conservative civil religions and new, mostly liberal, ones. The Israeli case of an emerging contemporary civil religion indicates a deep social transformation of basic political attitudes. Given additional necessary geopolitical conditions, in due time this shift of civil religions might prove to be precisely the social alteration that may enable a fulfillment of a true peace process. This research has poked into a variety of first hand sources in order to locate the evidence of the emergence of an Israeli peace affiliated civil religion. Alongside with screening numerous sources such as parliamentary acts, educational administrative state orders and customary social rituals, several in-depth interviews have been held with Israeli youngsters of a varied profile. The research reveals that dating back from the nineties a minor ideological stream within Zionism has prevailed. It is maintained that the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin has institutionalized a construction for this ideological stream to become a leading civil religion – swaying aside the conservative one. The importance of these findings lies within the capacity of such a deep social change to be a major factor for promoting peace. Stretching a little beyond the local context, this study sets a methodological framework for an inquiry of conditions for conciliation within societies in conflict.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The Western Outlook kept African American readers living in San Francisco and other California communities connected and informed for more than three decades. Yet scholars of the black press have overlooked the weekly publication, founded September 1, 1894, and its editors, John Lincoln Derrick and Joseph Smallwood Francis. This qualitative study seeks to correct this omission by contributing to the growing body of work related to the black press and its editors and adding considerable new information about two journalists and their long-lived newspaper to the scant scholarship on the press in the West. All surviving issues—eighty-one newspapers in all—were examined critically for this initial study. Extant copies of The Western Outlook offer important insight into the themes that were discussed, the editor’s business strategies, the community and its members, and the newspaper’s role as “A Journal Devoted to the Interests of the Negro on the Pacific Coast and the Betterment of His Condition.”

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Buildings often act as public symbols; or people often act as if they do. Architectural structures, the objects that make up a city’s built environment, can become public symbols when people endow them with meaning and value as a means for making sense of the world they live in, once lived in, or hope to build. When those symbols are threatened, the culture of that city is endangered. The debate concerning the future of Fenway Park, home to the Boston Red Sox and the oldest active professional ballpark, is also about the city’s past and its present. Based on in-depth interviews and primary and secondary archival data, I found that the various proposals that ranged from renovating to removing Fenway Park were motivated by a similar interest in presenting Boston’s "authentic" identity. I contend that public debates about the preservation, renovation, or demolition of public places (and public symbols) can provide important clues about the ways people attempt to maintain, reconstruct, or deconstruct their culture.

Supporting Publications:
Supporting Document

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Throughout history, new embodied practices emerged from the old, and
by reflecting contemporary discourse and material conditions, they
consolidated social movements. As the twentieth century closed there
were few more successful organizers, Christian or otherwise, than the
Promise Keepers. With over two million men attending their
conferences and rallies in one year, they constituted the latest in a
series of religious movements that prospered by refiguring a
Pentecostal Hermeneutics of the body within late twentieth century
practices and discourse. When men filled football stadiums dancing
to hip-hop, crying and hugging each other, each responded physically
to a collective sense of immanence and their bodies became the focal
point for a creative process of selective borrowing and revoicing of
therapeutic, Charismatic, and even feminist tools for constituting
subject positions, all joined closely to a story of biblical
continuity and authority.

Far from simply forming another branch of the Christian Right, the
Promise Keepers developed a ritual of syncretic embodied practice
that directly challenged dominant conceptions of masculinity and
epistemology in 1990s. Critics described the Promise Keepers as merely a renovation and revival of male dominance, when in fact, their turn to
patriarchy simultaneously animated resistant forms of masculinity.
Further, by situating certitude in somatic experience, the Promise
Keepers offered a response to the alienation of the late capitalist
male. In this manner, they effectively redefined embodied religious
ritual as modern and middle class in opposition to hegemonic
narratives of Pentecostal atavism and poverty. Thus, the Promise Keepers, formed in Colorado 1991 and reaching its peak in 1997, was a response to, at least, feminism, in that it invoked a gentle masculinity and in that it reframed woman in place of God as a locus of repentance in Christian theology, but it was also a response to the alienation of the post-fordist male who was facing cultural and economic insecurity post-NAFTA, and, finally, the movement was a response to the consolidation of the New Right’s hold on suburbia—-all phenomena of concern for men in the 1990s. This essay provides an ethno-history of lived religion formed around the work of R. Marie Griffith, Pierre Bourdieu and David Hall in an interdisciplinary effort to trace the ways a particular historical conjuncture nourished, for a moment, the translation of a hybrid religious philosophy into a powerfully embodied practice and a highly effective organizing tool. The Promise Keepers exemplify a specific case study of the ways social movements build power. They re-voiced Pentecostal body strategies in terms that appealed to the "middle class" identification of the growing conservative movement. In this sense, an ethnography of the Promise Keepers can explore one set of cultural practices that undergirded the transition of the US working class from its self-identification with liberalism and the Democrats to a sense of themselves as middle class and Republican.