Introduction: Locating Personhood and Place in the Commodity Landscape

• Published in: City & society Vol. 22; no. 2; pp. 207 - 210
• Main Author: HOEY, BRIAN A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Malden, USA Blackwell Publishing Inc 01.12.2010
• Subjects: Capitalism; Females; Lifestyle; Markets; Migration; Negotiation; Neoliberalism; Personhood; Public Space
• ISSN: 0893-0465; 1548-744X
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-744X.2010.01039.x

In exploring subjects from historic home restoration to lifestyle migration, and to the commemorative performance of Wall Street women, these three articles suggest fresh ways of dealing conceptually and practically with the mutually implicating impact of profound structural and cultural changes felt by people and absorbed by places where they live, work, and search for meaning in a world where human actions are increasingly characterized as marketplace exchanges. The collection comprises an ethnographically rich and theoretically intricate engagement with questions of personhood, place, and the complicated, often conflicted negotiations between belonging and difference as well as the local and the global, The articles speak to the complex processes through which market forces variable insinuate and express themselves in social relations, systems of meaning, personhood, versions of history and future possibilities in both intimate and public spaces of everyday life., Through a close reading of lived experience from the concrete canyons of Wall Street to the suburbs and exurbas of America, they illuminate projects of person- and place-making that variably embrace or resist, acquiesce to or challenge the logic and practice of neoliberal capitalism while illustrating the meaning and power of culturally informed personal and collective narrative.