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.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!