Through ethnographic research, sociologists and anthropologists explore the interaction of America's newcomers with established residents in six cities. Their analysis highlights the importance of class and power as immigrants interact in the workplace, at home, at school, and in community organizations.

Situated Lives brings together the most important recent feminist and critical research that situates gender in relationship to the historical and material circumstances where gender, race, class and sexual orientation intersect and shape everyday interaction. Contributors include: Barbara Babcock, Jean Comaroff, Sarah Franklin, Faye Ginsburg, Matthew Gutmann, Faye V. Harrison, Louise Lamphere, Ellen Lewin, Jos DEGREES'e Lim DEGREES'on, Iris Lopez, Emily Martin, Mary Moran, Kirin Narayan, Aihwa Ong, Devon G. Pe DEGREES na, Beatriz Pesquera, Helena Ragon DEGREES'e, Rayna Rapp, Judith...

Sixteen women anthropologists analyze the place of women in human societies, treating as problematic certain questions and observations that in the past have been ignored or taken for granted, and consulting the anthropological record for data and theoretical perspectives that will help us to understand and change the quality of women's lives. The first three essays address the question of human sexual asymmetry. Recognizing that men's and women's spheres are typically distinguished and that anthropologists have often slighted the powers and values associated with the woman's world, these...

This lively account of a pioneering anthropologist's experiences with a Navajo family grew out of the author's desire to learn to weave as a way of participating in Navajo culture rather than observing it from the outside. In 1930, when Gladys Reichard came to stay with the family of Red-Point, a well-known Navajo singer, it was unusual for an anthropologist to live with a family and become intimately connected with women's activities. First published in 1934 for a popular audience, Spider Woman is valued today not just for its information on Navajo culture but as an early example of the kind...

Louise Lamphere met Eva Price in 1965 in Sheep Springs, New Mexico, on the eastern side of the Navajo Reservation, while Lamphere was doing fieldwork for her dissertation in social anthropology at Harvard University. Over the next forty years, Lamphere developed a strong friendship with Price that expanded to include Eva's daughter, Caroline Cadman, and granddaughter, Valerie Darwin. to her children and grandchildren, Lamphere saw an opportunity to pursue her own interest in writing a book on Navajo women that would encompass their transformative experiences through the twentieth century....

Documents and dramatizes the changing face of the American workplace, transformed in the 1980s by immigrant workers in all sectors. This collection of ethnographies aims to capture the stench of meatpacking plants, the clatter of sewing machines, the sweat of construction sites, and the strain of management-employee relations.

Compares the experiences of Mexican-American and white mothers employed in apparel and electronics factories in Albuquerque and illuminates the ways in which individual women manage the competing demands of two roles. The authors show how these mothers without the economic resources of professional