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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.
Traditional quilts serve many purposes over the course of a useful
life. Beginning as a beautiful bed covering, a quilt may later
function as a ground cover at picnics until years of wear relegate
it to someone's ragbag for scrap uses. Observing this life cycle
led authors John Forrest and Deborah Blincoe to the idea that
quilts, like living things, have a natural history that can be
studied scientifically. They explore that natural history through
an examination of the taxonomy, morphology, behavior, and ecology
of quilts in their native environment--the homes of humans who
make, use, keep, and bestow them. The taxonomy proposed by Forrest
and Blincoe is rooted in the mechanics of replicating quilts so
that it can be used to understand evolutionary and genetic
relationships between quilt types. The morphology section
anatomizes normal and abnormal physical features of quilts, while
the section on conception and birth in the life cycle discusses how
the underlying processes of replication intersect with
environmental factors to produce tangible objects. This methodology
is applicable to many kinds of crafts and will be of wide interest
to students of folklore, anthropology, and art history. Case
studies of traditional quilts and their makers in the Catskills and
Appalachia add a warm, human dimension to the book.
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