Setha M Low
Biographic Data
| ID | 86907 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Setha M Low |
| GIVEN NAMES | Setha M |
| FAMILY NAME | Low |
| SIGNATURE | LOW S M |
| AFFILIATIONS | City University of New York |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 992 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
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…
The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and the City
Within urban anthropology, scholars working on fear of crime have shed light on how measures taken in the name of security shape contemporary cities and the experiences of their inhabitants. Walls and gates, alongside other markers of socio-spatial separation, have featured prominently in the literature concerned with urban insecurity. Drawing on our research in the cities of Kingston, Jamaica, and Recife, Brazil, this chapter aims to add to thes…
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…
The People, Place, and Space Reader
Gender, Health And Illness: The Case of Nerves
Gender, Emotion And Nervios In Urban Guatemala, S.Low The University Of Nerves, K.Finkler nerves and psychsomatic illness, L.Kriegfer experience of nervousness and anxiety disorders in Puerto Rican women - psychiatric and ethnopsychological perspectives, J.D.Koss-Chioino nerves, worriation and black women - a community study in American South, L.A.Camino
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 …
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…
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…
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 Erosion of Public Space and the Public Realm: Paranoia, surveillance and privatization in New York City
Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space and Cultural Diversity
Urban parks such as New York City's Central Park provide vital public spaces where city dwellers of all races and classes can mingle safely while enjoying a variety of recreations. By coming together in these relaxed settings, different groups become comfortable with each other, thereby strengthening their communities and the democratic fabric of society. But just the opposite happens when, by design or in ignorance, parks are made inhospitable t…
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 …
Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America
In the last twenty years, thousands upon thousands of the upper and middle classes have retreated into gated communities. In 2002 it is estimated that one in eight Americans will live in these exclusive neighborhoods. What has sparked this alarming trend?Behind the Gates is Low's revealing account of what life is like inside these suburban fortresses. After years researching and interviewing families in Long Island, New York and San Antonio, Texa…
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…
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…
Construire l'exclusion à travers les communautés fermées
En une vingtaine d'années, la constitution de quartiers sécurisés s'est imposé comme un des phénomènes urbains majeurs en Amérique du Nord comme du Sud. Se protéger contre les nouvelles classes dangereuses, trop colorées ou trop pauvres, est la hantise de leurs habitants. Loin d'atténuer leur peur du vol ou de l'agression, la vie dans ces quartiers semble au contraire l'entretenir au quotidien, notamment lorsqu'il s'agit de sortir hors de l'encei…
Rapid Ethnographic Assessment in Urban Parks: A Case Study of Independence National Historical Park
This article presents a case study of the use of rapid ethnographic assessment procedures (REAP) to study an urban heritage park and its relationships with some of the cultural groups living in that city. The literature on REAP and rapid assessment, and on applied ethnographic research on parks, is surveyed. The context of the study is discussed at length: Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia and its historic relationship to the …
Commentary: Social theory and archaeological ethnographies
On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture
Lessons from Imagining the World Trade Center Site: An Examination of Public Space and Culture
The World Trade Center site allows anthropologists and educators to reflect on the relationship of public space to culture, and to consider the symbolic importance of this site for imagining the public culture of the future. Public spaces in the city have the potential of being places of learning and democratic practice, but the trend toward increased surveillance and policing of these spaces, exaggerated by September 11, makes this potential dif…
The Secret, the Unspeakable, the Unsaid spatial, discourse, and political economic analysis
"Introduction to "Remapping the City: Place, Order, and Ideology
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…
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…
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 …
Urban Fear: Building the Fortress City
Currently one third of all new homes built in the United States are in gated residential developments, and eight million people already live in such communities. Secured neighborhoods are a logical extension of social and political processes producing the built environment of the late-capitalist city. Although walled and fortified communities are not new, these recent developments are private rather than public, and are exclusively residential. F…
The Erosion of Public Space and the Public Realm: Paranoia, surveillance and privatization in New York City
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…
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 …
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,…
Health, culture and the nature of nerves: A Critique
Dr Moreno Cañas: A symbolic bridge to the demedicalization of healing
Cultura in the modern city: The Microgeographies of Gender, Class, and Generation in the Costa Rican Plaza
This article examines the microgeographies of everyday life in Parque Central and Plaza de la Cultura, two plazas located in the central city of San José, Costa Rica. These locales are created by the individual temporal and spatial attributes of plaza users whose daily movements and activities define these spaces. The growing differences of these locales in terms of the users' class, gender, and age, and their corresponding social activities, is …
The Secret, the Unspeakable, the Unsaid spatial, discourse, and political economic analysis
A Response to Castells: An anthropology of the city
Dans le cadre d'une anthropologie de l'espace urbain et en reponse a M. Castell, l'A. se concentre sur trois processus dialectiques qui illustrent les types de marqueur spatial, de preservation symbolique et de conflit social attendus dans une societe d'information : (1) la dialectique de la globalisation et de la vernacularisation de la ville, particulierement du voisinage, comme strategie symbolique et emotionnelle pour le maintien de l'identit…
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…
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
The Anthropology of Landscape Architecture
The anthropology of landscape architecture is a relatively undeveloped subfield of applied anthropology with tremendous research and practice potential. For a number of reasons discussed below, this area of study is experiencing an expansion of interest generated by the increase in professional needs and the growth of the applied discipline. The re-emergence of discussions of theory and action and the rediscovery of the research basis of applied …
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
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…
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
Dwellings, Settlements and Tradition: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Jean-Paul Bourdier and Nezar Alsayyad
Protest of the Body
Sociology (44 works) · Political science (25 works) · Anthropology (22 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Geography (13 works) · History (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Medicine (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works)