BiblioVault - Books about Social Lives

Dangerous Fun

The Social Lives of Big Wave Surfers

Ugo Corte

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A thrilling ethnography of big wave surfing in Hawaii that explores the sociology of fun.

Straight from the beaches of Hawaii comes an exciting new ethnography of a community of big-wave surfers. Oahu’s Waimea Bay attracts the world’s best big wave surfers—men and women who come to test their physical strength, courage, style, knowledge of the water, and love of the ocean. Sociologist Ugo Corte sees their fun as the outcome of social interaction within a community. Both as participant and observer, he examines how mentors, novices, and peers interact to create episodes of collective fun in a dangerous setting; how they push one another’s limits, nourish a lifestyle, advance the sport and, in some cases, make a living based on their passion for the sport.

In Dangerous Fun, Corte traces how surfers earn and maintain a reputation within the field, and how, as innovations are introduced, and as they progress, establish themselves and age, they modify their strategies for maximizing performance and limiting chances of failure.

Corte argues that fun is a social phenomenon, a pathway to solidarity rooted in the delight in actualizing the self within a social world. It is a form of group cohesion achieved through shared participation in risky interactions with uncertain outcomes. Ultimately, Corte provides an understanding of collective effervescence, emotional energy, and the interaction rituals leading to fateful moments—moments of decision that, once made, transform one’s self-concept irrevocably.

[more]

The Social Lives of Figurines

Recontextualizing the Third-Millennium-BC Terracotta Figurines from Harappa

Sharri R. Clark

Harvard University Press, 2016

The largest category of representational art recovered from many ancient Indus sites is terracotta figurines. In this lavishly illustrated book, Sharri R. Clark examines and recontextualizes a rich and diverse corpus of hundreds of figurines from the urban site of Harappa to reveal new information about Indus ideology and society.

[more]

The Social Lives of Forests

Past, Present, and Future of Woodland Resurgence

Edited by Susanna B. Hecht, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Christine Padoch

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Forests are in decline, and the threats these outposts of nature face—including deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation—are the result of human culture. Or are they? This volume calls these assumptions into question, revealing forests’ past, present, and future conditions to be the joint products of a host of natural and cultural forces. Moreover, in many cases the coalescence of these forces—from local ecologies to competing knowledge systems—has masked a significant contemporary trend of woodland resurgence, even in the forests of the tropics.

Focusing on the history and current use of woodlands from India to the Amazon, The Social Lives of Forests attempts to build a coherent view of forests sited at the nexus of nature, culture, and development. With chapters covering the effects of human activities on succession patterns in now-protected Costa Rican forests; the intersection of gender and knowledge in African shea nut tree markets; and even the unexpectedly rich urban woodlands of Chicago, this book explores forests as places of significant human action, with complex institutions, ecologies, and economies that have transformed these landscapes in the past and continue to shape them today. From rain forests to timber farms, the face of forests—how we define, understand, and maintain them—is changing.

[more]