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List of contents
1. What Is Middle America and Riverfront?: Our Expectations and Reality. 2. Which Church Do You Go To?: Finding a Place to Live. 3. In Old Days Things Were Different: Ways of Growing Up. 4. The North Side is Polish Territory: Mobility, Stability and Ethnicity. 5. This is Our Way of Doing Things: Ethnic Manifestations and Identity. 6. Your Baby Will Be Half Polish: Changing Relationships with Riverfrontans. 7. Don''''t Spoil Your Baby: Educating a Novice Mother. 8. Share! And be Independent: Socialization and Social Management at a Child and Senior Center. 9. Boys Became Independent: Hard Work and Caring Among Men. 10. Epilogue: Our Hometown. 11. References Cited.
Summary
LIFE IN RIVERFRONT is a unique case study that offers a fresh approach to ethnography because it looks at American culture as seen through the eyes of Japanese anthropologists. Every cultural anthropology student is introduced to papers on the �Nacirema,� a very foreign culture with many daily rituals and a fanaticism for cleanliness, especially as they prepare themselves for work in the morning. In truth, the �nacirema� is American (spelled backwards), and the lessons learned from seeing one�s own culture through the eyes of a �stranger� illuminate the notion of ethnocentrism in a powerful way. While a major task of anthropology is to make the strange familiar and the exotic or enigmatic understandable, another task is to make the familiar strange so that one can see one�s own culture in a new light. This case study accomplishes this and more.
