Lord I'm Coming Home : Everyday Aesthetics in Tidewater North Carolina / John Forrest.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Forrest, John, 1951- author.

Contributor:

Blincoe, Deborah.

en Book Program, funder.

Series:

Anthropology of contemporary issues.

The Anthropology of Contemporary Issues

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethnology--North Carolina.

Ethnology.

Aesthetics--Social aspects--North Carolina.

Aesthetics.

North Carolina--Social life and customs.

North Carolina.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (59 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cornell University Press 2018

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Biography/History:

John Forrest is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York College at Purchase. He holds an M.A. degree in Theology from Oxford University, as well as an M.A. degree in Folklore and a Ph.D. degree in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Summary:

Lord I'm Coming Home focuses on a small, white, rural fishing community on the southern reaches of the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina. By means of a new kind of anthropological fieldwork, John Forrest seeks to document the entire aesthetic experience of a group of people, showing the aesthetic to be an "everyday experience and not some rarefied and pure behavior reserved for an artistic elite. "The opening chapter of the book is a vivid fictional narrative of a typical day in "Tidewater," presented from the perspective of one fisherman. In the following two chapters the author sets forth the philosophical and anthropological foundations of his book, paying particular attention to problems of defining "aesthetic," to methodological concerns, and to the natural landscape of his field site. Reviewing his own experience as both participant and observer, he then describes in scrupulous detail the aesthetic forms in four areas of Tidewater life: home, work, church, and leisure. People use these forms, Forrest shows, to establish personal and group identities, facilitate certain kinds of interactions while inhibiting others, and cue appropriate behavior. His concluding chapter deals with the different life cycles of men and women, insider-outsider relations, secular and sacred domains, the image and metaphor of "home," and the essential role that aesthetics plays in these spheres. The first ethnography to evoke the full aesthetic life of a community, Lord I'm Coming Home will be important reading not only for anthropologists but also for scholars and students in the fields of American studies, art, folklore, and sociology.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

1. The Fishing Day

2. The Aesthetic Realm

3. The Field Site

4. Aesthetics at Home

5. Aesthetics at Work

6. Aesthetics of the Church

7. Aesthetics of Leisure

8. Synthesis

Appendix A: Outlines of Selected Sermons

Appendix B: Tale of Wallace Tyler, Version #2

References

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This eBook is made available Open Access. Unless otherwise specified in the content, the work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/open-access-policy

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Sep 2018)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781501727849

1501727842

9781501726293

1501726293

OCLC:

1028956270