Avoiding Politics
How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life

Vivid study of American civic life, contrasting private politics and public apathy.

Nina Eliasoph (Author)

9780521587594, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 13 August 1998

344 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.51 kg

"...Eliasoph's hallmark accomplishment has been to reveal something consequential but heretofore all invisible. Avoiding Politics has taught me a lot about the political ambivalence of my students, about the hollow way everyday Americans, and the developers who sell us our houses, use the word "community", and about my own puzzlement over how to fit my politics into the mechanics of a comfortable middle-class life." Qualitative Sociology

Nina Eliasoph's vivid portrait of American civic life reveals an intriguing culture of political avoidance. Despite the importance for democracy of open-ended political conversation among ordinary citizens, many Americans try hard to avoid appearing to care about politics. To discover how, where and why Americans create this culture of avoidance, the author accompanied suburban volunteers, activists, and recreation club members for over two years, listening to them talk - and avoid talking - about the wider world, together and in encounters with government, media, and corporate authorities. She shows how citizens create and express ideas in everyday life, contrasting their privately expressed convictions with their lack of public political engagement. Her book challenges received ideas about culture, power and democracy, while exposing the hard work of producing apathy.

Acknowledgements
1. The mysterious shrinking circle of concern
2. Volunteers trying to make sense of the world
3. 'Close to home' and 'for the children': trying really hard not to care
4. Humour, nostalgia and commercial culture in the postmodern public sphere
5. Creating ignorance and memorizing facts: how Buffaloes understood politics
6. Strenuous disengagement and cynical chic solidarity
7. Activists carving out a place in the public sphere for discussion
8. Newspapers in the cycle of political evaporation
9. The evaporation of politics in the US public sphere
Appendices
Notes
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Cultural studies [JFC]