front cover of The Uncaring, Intricate World
The Uncaring, Intricate World
A Field Diary, Zambezi Valley, 1984-1985
Pamela Reynolds
Duke University Press, 2019
In the 1950s the colonial British government in Northern and Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia and Zimbabwe) began construction on a large hydroelectric dam that created Lake Kariba and dislocated nearly 60,000 indigenous residents. Three decades later, Pamela Reynolds began fieldwork with the Tonga people to study the lasting effects of the dispossession of their land on their lives. In The Uncaring, Intricate World Reynolds shares her field diary, in which she records her efforts to study children and their labor and, by doing so, exposes the character of everyday life. More than a memoir, her diary captures the range of pleasures, difficulties, frustrations, contradictions, and grappling with ethical questions that all anthropologists experience in the field. The Uncaring, Intricate World concludes with afterwords by Jane I. Guyer and Julie Livingston, who critically reflect on its context, its meaning for today, and relevance to conducting anthropological work.
[more]

front cover of Upon the Altar of Work
Upon the Altar of Work
Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism
Betsy Wood
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Rooted in the crisis over slavery, disagreements about child labor broke down along sectional lines between the North and South. For decades after emancipation, the child labor issue shaped how Northerners and Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work, freedom, the market, and the state.

Betsy Wood examines the evolution of ideas about child labor and the on-the-ground politics of the issue against the backdrop of broad developments related to slavery and emancipation, industrial capitalism, moral and social reform, and American politics and religion. Wood explains how the decades-long battle over child labor created enduring political and ideological divisions within capitalist society that divided the gatekeepers of modernity from the cultural warriors who opposed them. Tracing the ideological origins and the politics of the child labor battle over the course of eighty years, this book tells the story of how child labor debates bequeathed an enduring legacy of sectionalist conflict to modern American capitalist society.

[more]

front cover of Uprooted Children
Uprooted Children
The Early Life of Migrant Farm Workers
Robert Coles
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970
Uprooted Children is a study of migrant farm children in Florida and the eastern seaboard. It describes how black, white, and Mexican-American children of migrant families grow up in rural America under conditions of extreme hardship and how they come to terms with the world and themselves. In preparation for this book, Dr. Coles spent years among migrants, drawing his research through interviews and every day life.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter