Low
Biographic Data
| ID | 1928 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Low |
| FAMILY NAME | Low |
| SIGNATURE | LOW |
| AFFILIATIONS | City University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1590-6342 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 91 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1071 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 91 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1952 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Towards a critical anthropology of freedom?
Ruben Andersson and Dace Dzenovska have written a provocative article about security “protectionism,” which, they argue, is a new paradigm sweeping through contemporary politics. Like Frédéric Gros (2014) a decade ago, they declare that ours is the age of security. The ethnographic evidence supporting their claim is a linear biographical description of the shift from neoliberalism to security in Sweden and Latvia. Elsewhere, they attach the “prot…
Response to Russ Castronovo’s Review of Trapped: Life under Security Capitalism and How to Escape It
Writing urban security
Security Inside Out: The Danger of 'Interiority' in a World of Inequality
Why Public Space Matters
Why Public Space Matters examines how public space contributes to individual and societal flourishing. Based on thirty-five years of ethnographic fieldwork on plazas, walkways, parks, markets, and beaches in the United States, Costa Rica, Argentina, India, Kenya, and France, it presents a new understanding of the role of social contact, public culture, and affective atmosphere in the creation of places essential to everyday urban life. This multi…
Cuaa: We Have Always Been Critical Engaged Urbanists
The Role of the Physical and Social Environment in Observed and Self-Reported Park Use in Low-Income Neighborhoods in New York City
Physical and social environments of parks and neighborhoods influence park use, but the extent of their relative influence remains unclear. This cross-sectional study examined the relationship between the physical and social environment of parks and both observed and self-reported park use in low-income neighborhoods in New York City. We conducted community- ( n = 54 parks) and individual-level ( n = 904 residents) analyses. At the community leve…
Domesticating Security: Gated Communities and Cooperative Apartment Buildings in New York City and Long Island, New York
Thoughts on Public Space and Flourishing during Covid-19
Public space offers the places, circuits and networks used for contact with the diverse people and different activities that make up our social and psychological world. There is 35 years of ethnographic research evidence that public space is a major contributor to a flourishing society by promoting social justice and democratic practices, informal work and social capital, play and recreation, cultural continuity and social cohesion, as well as he…
Thoughts about Public Space During Covid-19 Pandemic
Public space during Covid-19
When the public square is closed, all that remains is the tower and its shadow. As anthropologists of space and security, we watched as COVID-19 emptied our streets. The shadow fell on distant friends, then on close family; we also used the chilling language of 'common sense' to instruct others in these exceptional times. There is a lot wrong in wishing for a return to normality if 'normal' is oppression, but anger at injustice does not excuse in…
The resurgence of public space: From the Charter of Athens to the New Urban Agenda
This paper serves as an introduction to the December 2018 edition of The Journal of Public Space, and a reflection on the new importance of public space in international research, policy and practice. Nowhere is that more evident than in the New Urban Agenda, the ambitious new international agreement for the normative goals of urban development in the next two decades and beyond. In that document, public space is treated in no fewer than nine par…
Public Space and the Public Sphere: The Legacy of Neil Smith
This article attempts to untangle two threads of the intellectual and political legacy of Neil Smith. The first concerns the work that Neil and I did together on the The Politics of Public Space (Low and Smith , Routledge) on public space and the public sphere and then explains how our paths diverged. I elaborate some of the ways that the public space and public sphere have been expanded by later researchers and that left me with a sense of optim…
Problems, publicity and public space: A resurgent debate
Urban public space is once again high on the agenda of social science researchers across disciplines.The reasons for this renewed interest include a range of dramatic events that are redefining its importance as a centre for social encounter and interaction, forum for discussion and dissent, interface of virtual and material connections and stage for the reinstatement of democratic practice and resistance in the face of state repression.Beginning…
Security at home: How private securitization practices increase state and capitalist control
The impact of the security state is not only seen in the political and spatial restrictions on public space and the public sphere or inscribed in militarized national borders and cities, but also in the increasing penetration of the domestic and private realm of home. These securitization practices and how they work can be exposed through an ethnographic analysis of formal institutional structures as well as the affective, discursive and bodily p…
A sociospatial framework for the anthropology of security
Sunta's Senior Scholar/Lifetime Award: Reflections on My Career and Urban Anthropology
Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place
This book demonstrates the value of ethnographic theory and methods in understanding space and place, and considers how ethnographically-based spatial analyses can yield insight into prejudices, inequalities and social exclusion as well as offering people the means for understanding the places where they live, work, shop and socialize. In developing the concept of spatializing culture, Setha Low draws on over twenty years of research to examine s…
Homing the City: An afterthought
The desire for a homey environment, and in the case of Dutch urban planning, a homey city, seems unique to the Netherlands. This becomes pronounced when we examine the research from North and South
Propositions for more just urban public spaces
Across a diverse range of urban geographical contexts, the provision and governance of public spaces frequently generates conflicts of varying intensity involving urban inhabitants and urban authorities. A clear moral and philosophically based argument and evaluative framework is necessary for both critiquing and informing the positions that are taken in public space disputes. In this paper, we develop a model of socially just public space that c…
Shoestring Democracy: Gated Condominiums and Market-Rate Cooperatives in New York
This article develops the concept of shoestring democracy as a way to characterize the resulting social relations of private governance structures embedded in two types of collective housing schemes found in New York City and the adjoining suburbs: gated condominium communities (gated condominiums) and market-rate cooperative apartment complexes (co-ops). Drawing from ethnographies of gated condominiums and co-ops in New York City and neighboring…
Claiming Space for an Engaged Anthropology: Spatial Inequality and Social Exclusion
I use the concept of "engaged anthropology" to frame a discussion of how "spatializing culture" uncovers systems of exclusion that are hidden or naturalized and thus rendered invisible to other methodological approaches. "Claiming Space for an Engaged Anthropology" is doubly meant: to claim more intellectual and professional space for engagement and to propose that anthropology include the dimension of space as a theoretical construct. I draw on …
A multi-disciplinary framework for the study of private housing schemes: Integrating anthropological, psychological and political levels of theory and analysis
Inclusion and Dialogue: An Annual Report Summary
Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas
As a discipline, anthropology has increased its public visibility in recent years with its growing focus on engagement. Although the call for engagement has elicited responses in all subfields and around the world, this special issue focuses on engaged anthropology and the dilemmas it raises in U.S. cultural and practicing anthropology. Within this field, the authors distinguish a number of forms of engagement: (1) sharing and support, (2) teachi…
The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear
Across America, middle-class and upper-middle-class gated communities are creating new forms of exclusion and residential segregation, exacerbating social cleavages that already exist (Blakely and Snyder 1997; Higley 1995; Lang and Danielson 1997; Marcuse 1997). While historically secured and gated communities were built in the United States to protect estates and to contain the leisure world of retirees, these urban and suburban developments now…
Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas
As a discipline, anthropology has increased its public visibility in recent years with its growing focus on engagement. Although the call for engagement has elicited responses in all subfields and around the world, this special issue focuses on engaged anthropology and the dilemmas it raises in U.S. cultural and practicing anthropology. Within this field, the authors distinguish a number of forms of engagement: (1) sharing and support, (2) teachi…
Spatializing Culture: The social production and social construction of public space in Costa Rica
In this article I explore how an integrated approach to the anthropological study of urban space would work ethnographically. I discuss four areas of spatial/cultural analysis-historical emergence, sociopolitical and economic structuring, patterns of social use, and experiential meanings-as a means of working out of the methodological implications of broader social construction theoretical perspectives. Two plazas in San José, Costa Rica, furnish…
The Anthropology of Cities: Imagining and Theorizing the City
This review considers the following questions: Why is the city undertheorized in anthropology? Why is an anthropological voice rarely heard in the urban studies and urban policy discourse? Anthropological literature published since 1989 is reviewed, with an emphasis on contributions to urban theory and the locating of anthropological studies within the broader context of urban studies. The city is found not to be absent in anthropological theory,…
Embodied Space(s): Anthropological Theories of Body, Space, and Culture
Embodied space is the location where human experience and consciousness takes on material and spatial form. After identifying the inherent difficulties in defining the body, body space, and cultural explanations of body experience, the author traces the evolution of approaches to embodied space including proxemics, phenomenological understandings, spatial orientation, and linguistic dimensions. Embodied space is presented as a model for understan…
Claiming Space for an Engaged Anthropology: Spatial Inequality and Social Exclusion
I use the concept of "engaged anthropology" to frame a discussion of how "spatializing culture" uncovers systems of exclusion that are hidden or naturalized and thus rendered invisible to other methodological approaches. "Claiming Space for an Engaged Anthropology" is doubly meant: to claim more intellectual and professional space for engagement and to propose that anthropology include the dimension of space as a theoretical construct. I draw on …
Indigenous Architecture and the Spanish American Plaza in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean
sPlazas are often important spatial representations of society and social hierarchy. Those built in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean under the direction of the Spanish have been interpreted as architectural representations of colonial control and oppression. Underlying these interpretations is the tacit assumption that plaza-centered urban design was of solely European derivation, in spite of considerable evidence of pre-Columbian contributions. In …
A sociospatial framework for the anthropology of security
On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture
Friendly gossip, political rallies, outdoor concerts, drugs, shoeshines, and sex-for-sale—almost every aspect of Latin American life has its place and time in the public plaza. In this wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary study, Setha M. Low explores the interplay of space and culture in the plaza, showing how culture acts to shape public spaces and how the physical form of the plaza encodes the social and economic relations within its city. Low cent…
Propositions for more just urban public spaces
Across a diverse range of urban geographical contexts, the provision and governance of public spaces frequently generates conflicts of varying intensity involving urban inhabitants and urban authorities. A clear moral and philosophically based argument and evaluative framework is necessary for both critiquing and informing the positions that are taken in public space disputes. In this paper, we develop a model of socially just public space that c…
Thoughts about Public Space During Covid-19 Pandemic
Maintaining Whiteness: The Fear of Others and Niceness
This article links two ways of maintaining whiteness and white privilege employed by gated communities residents in the surrounding suburbs of New York City and San Antonio, Texas. The first, the fear of others, is well documented in the anthropological literature but not as a strategy for maintaining whiteness in the built environment, while the second, the desire for “niceness,” is a relatively new construct that focuses on the way people make …
Shoestring Democracy: Gated Condominiums and Market-Rate Cooperatives in New York
This article develops the concept of shoestring democracy as a way to characterize the resulting social relations of private governance structures embedded in two types of collective housing schemes found in New York City and the adjoining suburbs: gated condominium communities (gated condominiums) and market-rate cooperative apartment complexes (co-ops). Drawing from ethnographies of gated condominiums and co-ops in New York City and neighboring…
Fortification of Residential Neighbourhoods and the New Emotions of Home
Research on the fortification of residential environments and the spatial production of “security” within gated communities has lead to a broader understanding of how everyday emotions are being transformed by post 9/11 measures and terror talk. A new structure of feeling is infiltrating the most private of spatial domains, that of home, and further rationalizes and legitimates the practices of social exclusion, fortification, and racialization o…
The memorialization of September 11: Dominant and local discourses on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site
An inherent tension exists between the meanings of the World Trade Center site created by dominant political and economic players and the significance of the space for those who actually live near it. Most of the writing on and analysis of the site have focused on the construction of a memorial space for an imagined national and global community of visitors who identify with its broader, state-produced meanings. But New Yorkers, in general, and d…
Battery Park City: An Ethnographic Field Study of the Community Impact of 9/11
The authors report on an ethnographic study of Battery Park City in summer 2002, less than 1 year after 9/11. They sought to understand the impact of the disaster on this affluent residential enclave across the street from Ground Zero. The research team used rapid ethnographic assessment procedures (REAP), a productive yet relatively inexpensive rapid assessment methodology. The methods included participant observation, on-site interviews with a …
Security at home: How private securitization practices increase state and capitalist control
The impact of the security state is not only seen in the political and spatial restrictions on public space and the public sphere or inscribed in militarized national borders and cities, but also in the increasing penetration of the domestic and private realm of home. These securitization practices and how they work can be exposed through an ethnographic analysis of formal institutional structures as well as the affective, discursive and bodily p…
Towards an anthropological theory of space and place
This article takes a first step in linking anthropological analyses of the body in space (embodied space), the global/local power relations embedded in space (transnational/translocal space), the role of language and discourse in the transformation of space into place (meaning), and the material and metaphorical importance of architecture and urban design (the built environment). Embodied space, language and discourse, and transnational/transloca…
Theorizing the City: Ethnicity, gender and globalization
■ The city as a site of everyday practice provides valuable insights into the linkages of the global capitalist economy with the texture and fabric of human experience. My comments focus on cities as centers of abuse, violence and enslavement as documented in the papers of Ida Susser and Peter Kwong. I place each author's critique within this urban order by using the images of the 'ethnic city', 'gendered city', and 'global city'. By focusing on …
Interaction of nutritional and socioeconomic status as determinants of cognitive development in disadvantaged urban Guatemalan children
The relationship between nutritional status, measured by height for age, and cognition, measured by WISC full‐scale IQ, was studied in a longitudinal sample of 459 urban Guatemalan children, aged 4–9 years, from a disadvantaged community of the fringe of Guatemala City, examined annually over a 3 year period. Socioeconomic status (SES) was controlled by developing a composite index for each home. The mean IQ differed significantly from the lowest…
The medicalization of healing cults in Latin America
This paper examines the healing cults of two Latin American doctors-Dr. Moreno Cañas of Costa Rica and Dr. José Gregorio Hernandez-through a symbolic analysis of the doctors' life histories, the creation of myths about their lives, and the process of cult formation and transformation. The symbolic images of the two doctors are compared based on the doctors' individual characteristics and cultural meanings, the sociopolitical and historical contex…
Growth status of disadvantaged urban Guatemalan children of a resettled community
This paper reports the physical growth and body composition from the first year of a longitudinal study of 519 Guatemalan children, and their families, from a disadvantaged urban community consisting largely of refugees of the 1976 earthquake. Four cohorts are described, composed of children of 1,3,5, and 7 years at examination. The children are smaller, weigh less, and have reduced fat stores compared either to NCHS reference data or to upper SE…
Part III: Nervios in rural Costa Rica
Research in two rural communities in Costa Rica explores the concept of nervios, a culture‐specific complaint which covers a wide range of mental and physical symptoms. Nervios is shown to vary by sex, age, marital and parental status, and stage in the life cycle. The complaint does not correlate with socioeconomic status or power inequalities, nor is it a type of sick role behavior. Some nervios cases are shown to be linked with family problems,…
Public Space and the Public Sphere: The Legacy of Neil Smith
This article attempts to untangle two threads of the intellectual and political legacy of Neil Smith. The first concerns the work that Neil and I did together on the The Politics of Public Space (Low and Smith , Routledge) on public space and the public sphere and then explains how our paths diverged. I elaborate some of the ways that the public space and public sphere have been expanded by later researchers and that left me with a sense of optim…
Homing the City: An afterthought
The desire for a homey environment, and in the case of Dutch urban planning, a homey city, seems unique to the Netherlands. This becomes pronounced when we examine the research from North and South
Jacques Richard-Molard
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Health Planning and Policy
Specialists' Reports: Health Planning and Policy
Part III: Nervios in rural Costa Rica
Research in two rural communities in Costa Rica explores the concept of nervios, a culture‐specific complaint which covers a wide range of mental and physical symptoms. Nervios is shown to vary by sex, age, marital and parental status, and stage in the life cycle. The complaint does not correlate with socioeconomic status or power inequalities, nor is it a type of sick role behavior. Some nervios cases are shown to be linked with family problems,…
The meaning of nervios: A sociocultural analysis of symptom presentation in San Jose, Costa Rica
Power and Illness: The Political Sociology of Health and Medical Care . Elliot A. Krause
Dr Moreno Cañas: A symbolic bridge to the demedicalization of healing
Part 4: Family context and illness behavior in Costa Rica
Biomedical anthropology: An emerging synthesis in anthropology
Biomedical anthropology is a newly emerging focus within anthropology, combining concepts of physical anthropology and medical anthropology in the study of disease and health among human populations. It grows out of the tradition in anthropology of holism and related attempts to develop biocultural approaches to anthropological issues. While these issues have been studied by physical and cultural anthropologists working independently of each othe…
Culturally interpreted symptoms or culture-bound syndromes: A cross-cultural review of nerves
Growth status of disadvantaged urban Guatemalan children of a resettled community
This paper reports the physical growth and body composition from the first year of a longitudinal study of 519 Guatemalan children, and their families, from a disadvantaged urban community consisting largely of refugees of the 1976 earthquake. Four cohorts are described, composed of children of 1,3,5, and 7 years at examination. The children are smaller, weigh less, and have reduced fat stores compared either to NCHS reference data or to upper SE…
Interaction of nutritional and socioeconomic status as determinants of cognitive development in disadvantaged urban Guatemalan children
The relationship between nutritional status, measured by height for age, and cognition, measured by WISC full‐scale IQ, was studied in a longitudinal sample of 459 urban Guatemalan children, aged 4–9 years, from a disadvantaged community of the fringe of Guatemala City, examined annually over a 3 year period. Socioeconomic status (SES) was controlled by developing a composite index for each home. The mean IQ differed significantly from the lowest…
Society for Latin American Anthropology
Medical Practice in Response to a Folk Illness: The Diagnosis and Treatment of Nervios in Costa Rica
The medicalization of healing cults in Latin America
This paper examines the healing cults of two Latin American doctors-Dr. Moreno Cañas of Costa Rica and Dr. José Gregorio Hernandez-through a symbolic analysis of the doctors' life histories, the creation of myths about their lives, and the process of cult formation and transformation. The symbolic images of the two doctors are compared based on the doctors' individual characteristics and cultural meanings, the sociopolitical and historical contex…
Culture, Politics and Medicine in Costa Rica: An Anthropological Study of Medical Change
Housing, Organization, and Social Change: A Comparison of Programs for Urban Reconstruction in Guatemala
This analysis compares two policy approaches to the provision of post-earthquake housing in a community near Guatemala City. Two separate housing programs were implemented: 1) a sites and services program that gave new residents an improved lot; and 2) a minimum unit program that provided shelter and a lot. The presentation evaluates the history, social organization, physical improvement, and social change related to each housing program, and dis…
Introduction to the special issue
Gender, emotion, and nervios in urban Guatemala
This study of nervios in a poor, resettled colonia (neighborhood) outside Guatemala City is part of an ongoing analysis of the cross‐cultural significance and meaning of nerves. In the Guatemalan context, nervios is treated by sufferers as an illness, rather than a symptom, and is associated with experiencing strong emotions, particularly anger (cólera, se enoja) and grief or sorrow (pena), and with problems related to reproduction and child rear…
Health, culture and the nature of nerves: A Critique
The Built Environment and Spatial Form
which we live and work, but the appeal is not limited to examples from our own familiar surroundings. During the last several decades anthropologists have been increasingly joined by others in taking a more careful look at the built environments of nonl iterate societies, and especially the shelters they construct and occupy. The questions posed are broad: Why are there differences in built forms? What is the nature of these differences and what …
Puerto Rican Houses in Sociohistorical Perspective. Carol F. Jopling
Symbolic Ties That Bind
Place Attachment
Place Attachment
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