Full Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Wherever we turn, we see diverse things scaled for us, from cities to economies, from history to love. We know scale by many names and through many familiar antinomies: local and global,micro and macroevents to name a few. Even the most critical among us often proceed with our analysis as if such scales were the ready-made platforms of social life, rather than asking how, why, and to what effect are scalar distinctions forged in the first place. How do scalar distinctions help actors and analysts alike make sense of and navigate their social worlds? What do these distinctions reveal and what do they conceal? How are scales construed and what effects do they have on the way those who abide by them think and act? This pathbreaking volume attends to the practical labor of scale-making and the communicative practices this labor requires.
From an ethnographic perspective, the authors demonstrate that scale is practice and process before it becomes product, whether in the work of projecting the commons, claiming access to the big picture, or scaling the seriousness of a crime.
Contents
List of Illustrations List of Tables Introduction: Pragmatics of Scale E. Summerson Carr and Michael Lempert PART ONE. SCALAR PROJECTS: PROMISES AND PRECARITIES 1. Projecting Presence: Aura and Oratory in William Jennings Bryan's Presidential Races Richard Bauman 2. Interaction Rescaled: How Buddhist Debate Became a Diasporic Pedagogy Michael Lempert 3. Shrinking Indigenous Language in the Yukon Barbra A. Meek PART TWO. INTERSCALARITY: IMAGINATION AND INSTITUTION 4. Scale-Making: Comparison and Perspective as Ideological Projects Susan Gal 5. Balancing the Scales of Justice in Tonga Susan U. Philips 6. Interscaling Awe, De-escalating Disaster E. Summerson Carr and Brooke Fisher PART THREE. PREDATORY SCALES: ENCOMPASSMENT AND EVALUATION 7. Scaling Red and the Horror of Trademark Constantine V. Nakassis 8. Semiotic Vinification and the Scaling of Taste Michael Silverstein 9. Going Upscale: Scales and Scale-Climbing as Ideological Projects Judith T. Irvine Acknowledgments References Cited Contributors Index
