American Ethnic Practices in the Twenty-first Century The Milwaukee Study [Paperback]

Jill Florence Lackey melds sensitive ethnography with sophisticated discussion of the literature on ethnicity in contemporary American cities in American Ethnic Practices. She presents ground-truthing sociological theories derived from her experience at UrbAn, a grassroots non-profit organization in Milwaukee. This book tests sociological theories against the hundreds of interviews and observations that Lackey and her staff have made of several ethnic communities in Milwaukee. Rich and direct excerpts from these interviews invite readers to form their own conclusions. Organized, compared, and interpreted, the excerpts help to make up a clearly written picture of multiculturalism in an American heartland city.We must thank Jill Florence Lackey and her many associates for their labors in collecting these data and providing us with a vivid and somewhat unexpected view of the variety and the continuing significance of ethnicity in Milwaukee. Jill Lackey has demonstrated the many manifestations of this important phenomenon and how it can serve individuals, families, and communities and municipalities in our current situation.Anthropologist Lackey (founder, Urban Anthropology Inc.) presents the findings of a study of ethnic practices among a sample of 434 individuals in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, area. The author discusses the continued salience of ethnicity in the lives of her informants in the realms of organizational involvement, language, homeland remittances, religion, foodways, art, health care, genealogy, politics, and employment. She also presents informants' views of what they perceive as some of the primary threats to the maintenance of their ethnicity, as well as data and snapshots of informant interviews on a range of relevant topics. In a short concluding section, Lackey discusses the study's broader implications for understanding contemporary ethnicity in the US, though this section is limited to just a few pages, unfortunately. This case study from one metl#X