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The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty

  • Book
  • © 2023

Overview

Editors:
  1. Matthew Rosen

    1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ohio University, Athens, USA

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  • Contributes to expanding the archive of known reading practices
  • Helps make the field of reader studies more ethnographic, more international, and more interdisciplinary
  • Features an afterword from Jonathan Boyarin, the editor of The Ethnography of Reading

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology (PSLA)

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Table of contents (14 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xii
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  2. Introduction: The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty

    • Matthew Rosen
    Pages 1-16

  3. Reading as Self-making: Using Mobile Ethnography to Examine the Contemporary Literate Practices of Middle-Class Adolescent Girls in Singapore

    • Chin Ee Loh
    Pages 17-41

  4. A Language-and-Materiality Approach to Reading: Reinvigorating Thirty-Year-Old Questions

    • Britt Halvorson, Ingie Hovland
    Pages 43-52

  5. Reading Context: On the Ethnography of Translation and Commentary

    • Andrew Brandel
    Pages 53-68

  6. A Labor Theory of Reading: Physical Hardship, Intensive Repetition, and the Value Regime of the Dujing Movement in Contemporary China

    • Yukun Zeng
    Pages 69-88

  7. Reading Foucault at Dusk: Politics of Philosophy in Neoliberal South Korea

    • Shinjung Nam
    Pages 89-108

  8. Brazilian Black Activists’ Anthropophagous Manifesto: Reclaiming Blackness in Afro-Brazilian History and Culture

    • Antonio J. Bacelar da Silva
    Pages 109-123

  9. Cultivating Socialist Selves: Reading Trotsky Under the Specter of Capitalist Realism

    • Ahmed Kanna
    Pages 125-147

  10. Together and Apart: Shared Reading as an Embodied and Intersubjective Ritual of Resonance

    • Charlotte Ettrup Christiansen, Anne Line Dalsgård
    Pages 149-170

  11. Reading for Sharing

    • Cicilie Fagerlid
    Pages 171-194

  12. From Literary Field to Instagram Feed: Ethnographies of Reading in Delhi

    • Rashmi Sadana
    Pages 195-205

  13. Miracles of the Street

    • Matthew Rosen
    Pages 207-224

  14. The Ongoing Work of New York City Graffiti Writers During the Covid-19 Epoch

    • Amina Tawasil
    Pages 225-250

  15. Afterword: The Ethnographer of Reading, Pushing Seventy

    • Jonathan Boyarin
    Pages 251-257

  16. Back Matter

    Pages 259-278
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Keywords

About this book

This edited volume examines what the classic text The Ethnography of Reading (Boyarin ed., 1993), and the diverse ethnographies of reading it helped inspire, can offer contemporary scholars interested in understanding the place of reading in social life. The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty brings together new research and critical reflections from an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars who have kept their ears tuned to the voices in and around the texts they encountered and constructed in the process of bringing the ethnography of reading into the twenty-first century. Rather than operating from universalist assumptions about how people interact with and make meaning from written texts, each of the present contributors draw in one way or another on the theoretical, methodological, and creative legacies of The Ethnography of Reading. Under the broad umbrella of ethnographic reader studies, they collectively explore new relations between texts, social imagination, and social action.

Reviews

“This book is a valuable contribution to the field. It is likely to focus and reinvigorate anthropological approaches to reading in a way that complements the well-established and growing field of histories of reading in mainly European contexts. It is very well situated theoretically and makes reference to most of the significant work in the emerging field of ethnography of reading.”

—Karin Barber, DBE, FBA, Emeritus Professor of African Cultural Anthropology, University of Birmingham, UK

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ohio University, Athens, USA

    Matthew Rosen

About the editor

Matthew Rosen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Ohio University, USA. His earlier publications concern media practices and public culture in postcolonial and postsocialist cities. He is the author most recently of Tirana Modern: Biblio-Ethnography on the Margins of Europe (2022).

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty

  • Editors: Matthew Rosen

  • Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38226-0

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-38225-3Published: 24 November 2023

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-38228-4Due: 25 December 2023

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-38226-0Published: 23 November 2023

  • Series ISSN: 2946-4218

  • Series E-ISSN: 2946-4226

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XII, 278

  • Number of Illustrations: 19 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: Anthropology, Ethnography, Social Anthropology

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