Journal for the anthropology of North America最新文献

This essay draws on ethnographic research I conducted in “clubhouse” spaces in two community mental health clinics serving economically disadvantaged people of color and immigrants in Seattle. Drawing on my informants’ experiences in the Pioneer Square neighborhood—an enclave associated with the “homeless mentally ill”—and in mental health clinics, I track the displacement and containment of a “right to the city” for impoverished people. I track the notion of the homeless mentally ill as a figure of postwar psychiatric discourse through its history in Seattle, arguing that postwar American psychiatry and community mental health recoded poverty as a question of madness, transforming the material needs and the rights of citizenship of the poor into questions of “character reform” and therapeutic services. I suggest that the imagination of Pioneer Square and the deprivation my informants experienced in mental health clinics is not a side effect of clinical “mismanagement” but rather part of an ongoing practice of what Ann Stoler calls “ruination,” ritualized indignities embedded in the paternalistic separation of the material and the therapeutic in postwar American psychiatry. Ultimately I address questions of poverty, home, and rights to space in Seattle.

This article describes an archeological ethnographic study of the history and social context of the Virginia State Penitentiary, where burials excavated in the 1990s still remain in limbo: unpublished, unmemorialized, and unmourned. The penitentiary (1804–1991) was a feared site of solitary confinement, carceral labor, and capital punishment. Fieldwork conducted in advance of the penitentiary’s demolition recorded solitary confinement cells within the eighteenth-century foundations, but also discovered a substantial burial ground within the prison walls. The collection includes the remains of over 200 people, many of whom were black prisoners who died between 1878 and 1884. Unfortunately, archeological analysis and publication were never completed. This article presents a new public engagement process to identify fresh possibilities for the sites and the individuals represented in this collection. Based on over thirty semistructured interviews conducted in 2015 and data from over 230 respondents to the 2018 Richmond Penitentiary Survey, we discuss how the penitentiary remains resonate or fails to resonate with Richmond residents, even as the city’s broader history of archeological neglect is becoming better understood. We discuss how archival research and emerging models for archeological restorative justice may provide new avenues for addressing this urban archeological erasure in a major Southern metropolis.

Indianapolis, Indiana, once had a rich range of African American music and performance spaces in the city’s segregated near-Westside, but postwar urban renewal, construction of a university campus, and interstate displacement erased almost all of those venues by the 1970s. In the early twenty-first century, the city and developers have championed new construction, and many of those projects celebrate jazz history as the heart of the near-Westside’s heritage. However, the rhetorical valorization of selectively interpreted African American jazz history aspires to rationalize a half-century of erasures of African American place. Rather than acknowledging the breadth of African American expressive culture in Indianapolis’ near-Westside, the city’s imagination of jazz essentializes African American expressive culture to serve contemporary economic development and paint jazz as a unifying mechanism across color lines.

This short essay is an introduction to a thematic collection of three articles on urban erasures. This essay provides an overview of the articles and situates the collection at the intersection of critical heritage studies, contemporary archaeology, and collaborative community-based research.

The value of historic preservation is defined by an appreciation for old buildings as contributing to the sense of place of communities, both large and small. A recent national effort to develop a “preservation for people,” however, suggests that the inherent good of preservation is being challenged and rethought. This article considers this self-assessment a retrenchment aimed at ensuring the preservation of the preservation field. Looking specifically at the urban and suburban landscape of Essex County, New Jersey, since the passing of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1965, I examine how preservation has developed a tradition of serving only those that can support its agenda. I then turn to show how those neglected by the preservation field in the county nevertheless practice preservation on their own terms, developing the foundations of what I call “a people’s preservation.” This counternarrative produces a different frame for preservation, showing how it can serve not a generic people but specific communities whose self-determination can be the real focus of preservation practice.

This photograph examines the erasure of prisons from the urban landscape. The false or blind windows symbolize an important point of reflection for understanding the process of community making that surrounds incarceration.