The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It / Edition 1

by Hugh Gusterson, Catherine Besteman, Barbara Ehrenreich

Overview

Americans are feeling insecure. They are retreating to gated communities in record numbers, fearing for their jobs and their 401(k)s, nervous about their health insurance and their debt levels, worrying about terrorist attacks and immigrants. In this innovative volume, editors Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman gather essays from nineteen leading ethnographers to create a unique portrait of an anxious country and to furnish valuable insights into the nation's possible future. With an incisive foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, the contributors draw on their deep knowledge of different facets of American life to map the impact of the new economy, the “war on terror,” the “war on drugs,” racial resentments, a fraying safety net, undocumented immigration, a health care system in crisis, and much more. In laying out a range of views on the forces that unsettle us, The Insecure American demonstrates the singular power of an anthropological perspective for grasping the impact of corporate profit on democratic life, charting the links between policy and vulnerability, and envisioning alternatives to life as an insecure American.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520259713
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/24/2009
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Hugh Gusterson is Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University. He is the author of Nuclear Rites and coeditor (with Besteman) of Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong, both from UC Press. Catherine Besteman is Professor of Anthropology at Colby College and the author of Transforming Capetown (UC Press).

Table of Contents

Foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich

Acknowledgments
Introduction Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson

Part One Fortress America

1. A nation of Gated Communities
Setha M. Low

2.Warmaking as the AmericanWay of life
Catherine Lutz

3. Republic of fear: The rise of Punitive Governance in America
Roger N. Lancaster

Part Two The New Economy

4. Neoliberalism, or The Bureaucratization of the World
David Graeber

5.The Age of Wal-Mart
Jane L. Collins

6. Deindustrializing Chicago: A Daughter’s story
Christine J.Walley

7. Racism, risk, and the new Color of Dirty Jobs
Lee D. Baker

Part Three Insecurity as a Profit Center

8. Normal Insecurities, Healthy Insecurities
Joseph Dumit

9. Cultivating Insecurity: How Marketers Are Commercializing Childhood
Juliet B. Schor

Part Four The Most Vulnerable

10. Uneasy street
T.M. Luhrmann

11. Body and soul: Profits from Poverty
BrettWilliams

12. Useless suffering: The War on Homeless Drug Addicts
Philippe Bourgois

13.Walling out Immigrants
Peter Kwong

Part Five Insecurity and Terror

14. Compounding Insecurity:What the neocon Core reveals about America today
Janine R.Wedel

15. Deploying law as aWeapon in America’sWar on terror
Susan F. Hirsch

Part Six Insecurities of Body and Spirit

16. Death and Dying in Anxious America
Nancy Scheper-Hughes

17. Get religion
Susan Harding

Notes
List of Contributors
Index

What People are Saying About This

“Highly recommended.”

Choice

“Highly recommended.”

Editorial Reviews

In a new book, The Insecure American, editors Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson write that fear ‘has fueled a growing fortress mentality among the American public and the government . . . The obsessive focus on securitizing the landscape means turning American neighborhoods, schools, transportation centers, shopping malls, public spaces, and government buildings into fortresses surrounded by walls and monitored by surveillance systems.’

Boston Globe

“Highly recommended.

Choice - A. C. Moblety

"Highly recommended."--Choice

From the Publisher