1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910272352703321

Autore

Forrest John <1951->

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, NY : , : Cornell University Press, , [2018]

©1988

ISBN

1-5017-2784-2

1-5017-2629-3

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (59 pages)

Collana

The Anthropology of Contemporary Issues

Altri autori (Persone)

BlincoeDeborah

Disciplina

301.09756

Soggetti

Ethnology - North Carolina

Aesthetics - Social aspects - North Carolina

North Carolina Social life and customs

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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

Sommario/riassunto

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.