Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America.

• Author: Cohen, Elisia L.

Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America. Edited by Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004; pp. xix-280. $59.50 cloth; $24.50 paper.

Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman's collection of essays concerning culture and empowerment in American public life examines diverse discourses of activism in the United States. Specifically, the volume presents ten unique case studies of cultural activism of interest to scholars committed to studying American cultural life. The topics of these case studies vary, from the opening essay on the "day-to-day dilemmas in the construction of a pluralistic U.S. environmental movement" in the South, to cases of contested issues of cultural diversity in communities in Silicon Valley, California, and Crown Heights, New York, to the closing analysis of Palestinianness and exile identity politics in the United States.

Perhaps this volume's greatest contribution to scholarship is its close attention to the relationship between researcher and subject, as it takes up the question of activism in academic research. The volume promises to foreground cultural activism in the United States "to highlight public efforts to challenge and re-configure aspects of our society that people perceive as oppressive" (4). The editors explicitly attempt to extend anthropologist Fay Ginsburg's work by "drawing on the broader anthropological definition of 'culture' as the full range of social practices and historical processes that people draw upon to conceive of and constitute their lives" (4). Similar to recent moves in the field of argumentation and more broadly, communication studies, the volume was motivated by new anthropological trends supportive of academic activism. Thus, the relationship between researcher and activist displayed in this volume explicitly critiques the detached research paradigm of objectivity. Instead, the volume seeks to render each author's contribution relevant to a broader project of examining public intellectual practice.

Each ethnographic study in this volume investigates dominant concepts in American public discourse such as "multiculturalism," "the arts," "the digital divide," "ethnicity," "transgender," and, of course, "academia." At the same time, it self-reflexively locates the researcher within the field of study. For example, Checker's first chapter, which investigates the problems of coalition-building in an environmental justice...