Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit

by John Hartigan Jr.

Across the globe, an expanding circle of care is encompassing a growing number of species through efforts targeting biodiversity, profoundly revising the line between humans and nonhumans. Care of the Species examines infrastructures of care—labs and gardens in Spain and Mexico—where plant scientists grapple with the complexities of evolution and domestication.  John Hartigan Jr. uses ethnography to access the expertise of botanists and others engaged with cultivating biodiversity, providing various entry points for understanding plants in the world around us. He begins by tracing the historical emergence of race through practices of care on nonhumans, showing how this history informs current thinking about conservation. With geneticists working on maize, Hartigan deploys Foucault’s concept of care of the self to analyze how domesticated species are augmented by an afterlife of data. In the botanical gardens of Spain, Care of the Species explores seed banks, herbariums, and living collections, depicting the range of ways people interact with botanical knowledge. This culminates in Hartigan’s effort to engage plants as ethnographic subjects through a series of imaginative “interview” techniques. Care of the Species contributes to debates about the concept of species through vivid ethnography, developing a cultural perspective on evolutionary dynamics while using ethnography to theorize species. In tackling the racial dimension of efforts to go “beyond the human,” this book reveals a far greater stratum of sameness than commonly assumed.

Genres: Nonfiction

354 pages, Paperback

Published October 4, 1999

About the author

I’m an anthropologist who just wrote a novel loosely based on my own department. The Last Cohort features a haunted archive, séances, and adventures in the Afterlife. The characters grapple with spirit-sapping technologies and “brain rot,” while they battle with supernatural forces unleashed through a séance. Here's the novel's backstory: https://hartiganj.substack.com/p/why-...
Read Chapter One: https://bit.ly/4fa23Nd (.epub) or http://bit.ly/474NuZ4 (.mobi)

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think I remember anything from this book other than there are a lot of Maltese in Detroit.

[Heather · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author switches tones and writing styles midway through the book which really annoyed me. If you are not an anthropologist or had multiple classes of anthropology I would not suggest reading. Its very hard to understand all the technical words without more than one class knowledge. In my own opinion, the author portrays the citizens as rather stupid and incompetent when they are actually fairly smart in different subjects.

[katie]

Hmmmm, "Lest whiteness and blackness become static versions of the Marxist superstructure/base paradigm––discrete, separate entities rather than constantly entangled registers––ethnographers must devise means to analyze how whites, as racial subjects, are embroiled in predicaments where the meanings of race are unclear and shifting, subjects of discourses or local idioms that are fashioned in fast-changing sites."

[Katie]

this man can write. its even more amazing to watch him lecture.

[Jillian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Clearly I'm not into jargon.