Description
This collection represents Michael Rosen’s encounter with an ‘ethnography of the center’-the study of cultural orders in the heart of the metropolis. In a field where it is more common to study the other rather than the self, the low rather than the high, the peripheral rather than the central, Michael Rosen instead took as his subject the complex, frenzied and interrelated occupational worlds of finance and advertising-and in one poignant case of contradistinction, a mirror image subworld of drug dealing-that create, channel and trade in the currencies of meaning that sustain and animate the cultural economy of the metropolis and the lives of its residents. This tantalizing collage of images, insights, stories, analysis and reflection gives the reader a taste of what ethnography can and should accomplish when directed at the citadels of power rather than its outposts.
