Showing papers in "Dialectical Anthropology in 2010"

Prisoner reentry as myth and ceremony

Abstract: The carceral boom in post-Civil Rights America results not from profit-seeking but from state-crafting. Accordingly, we must slay the chimera of the “Prison Industrial Complex” and forsake its derived tale of the “Prisoner Reentry Industry.” This murky economic metaphor is doubly misleading: first, most released convicts experience not reentry but ongoing circulation between the prison and their dispossessed neighborhoods; second, the institutions entrusted with supervising them are not market operators but elements of the bureaucratic field as characterized by Pierre Bourdieu. Post-custodial supervision is a ceremonial component of “prisonfare,” which complements “workfare” through organizational isomorphism, and partakes of the neoliberal reengineering of the state. Reentry outfits are not an antidote to but an extension of punitive containment as government technique for managing problem categories and territories in the dualizing city. To capture the glaring economic irrationality and bureaucratic absurdities of the oversight of felons behind as well as beyond bars, our theoretical inspiration should come not from the radical critique of capitalism but from the neo-Durkheimian sociology of organization and the neo-Weberian theory of the state as a classifying and stratifying agency.

The expanding prisoner reentry industry

Abstract: The prisoner reentry industry (PRI) has become a major part of the Social Control Industrial Complex. As with the Prison Industrial Complex, the PRI is not just a collection of institutions, organizations, and interest groups (both public and private); it is also a state of mind. Developing and facilitating programs and services for the formerly incarcerated have become a huge “cash-cow,” producing profits for the PRI at the expense of the taxpayer, while doing little to link the formerly incarcerated person to the social capital and human skills necessary to become a “citizen.” Data that include the voices of the formerly incarcerated, members of their families, and criminal justice practitioners suggest that a person’s level of success during their “personal reentry experience” varies in large part, by the individual parole officer they are assigned to and the number and types of programs they are required to participate in. Furthermore, their quality of life after release and their level of success is determined in large part by the program administrators managing those “for-profit companies” and “non-profit/for-profit agencies,” that supervise parolee programs. The argument here is that there must be a better system for monitoring the activities of those organizations that are in the business of facilitating prisoner reentry-related services. A process of accountability that will ensure that organizations part of the PRI are in fact providing services in the manner that was stated and agreed upon during their request for funding. The most important tool for ending this cycle lies in creating employment opportunities for the formerly incarcerated and empowering them to access those resources afforded all citizens. Consequently, if those agencies and organizations in the business of facilitating prisoner reentry were successful at making available the services they argue they do provide, members of these organizations would work themselves out of a job; that would be a valid indicator of organizational success.

Re-entry: a guide to success?

Abstract: This article is based upon a former prisoner/parolee’s first hand account and analyzes some of the more obvious obstacles awaiting parolees when released from prison Included is an examination of some basic resources the author considered necessary for successful re-entry Potential conflicts between providing helpful resources and the status quo within the current Prison-Industrial Complex are also considered

Imprisonment and prisoner re-entry in Australia

Abstract: The aims of this brief commentary are twofold. First, I want to offer a snapshot of the prison population in Australia and to make specific reference to the situation pertaining to Indigenous persons. Second, I want to comment on the connection between imprisonment and post-release life (the process of re-entry) in the Australian context. As shall be seen, Australia?although still arguably a 'low incarcerating nation'?is steadily moving towards an imprisonment rate that may soon require this apparently benign descriptor to be revised. The rise in prisoner numbers, of course, has less to do with more people doing more crime than it relates to changes in the intensity with which particular types of offences are policed (especially breaches of court orders) matched with increases in the numbers of prisoners serving longer sentences. Both these scenarios fundamentally impact the process of re-entry?the former by bringing more people into the system for shorter periods thereby placing more pressure on scant post-release services and resources and the other by delaying the process of re-entry thereby further entrenching the process of institutionalisation and the likelihood of recidivism.

Corporate oxymorons and the anthropology of corporations

Abstract: This article discusses the significance of the idea of “corporate oxymorons” for chartering an anthropology of corporations. It argues that a critical anthropology must consider not only the representations of corporate practices that circulate in public discourse and mass media, but also the specific features of the corporate form. These features include the structural tension between dispersed shareholders and professional managers as well as the contested legal status of corporate personhood.

Forum: the prison reentry industry

Abstract: This forum addresses the emerging Prison Reentry Industry (PRI). It features articles and essays from authors on three continents, and from a variety of perspectives. The authors included here range from ex-prisoners and current prisoners, PRI workers and activists, former prisoners now involved in academic and policy research, critics and practitioners. Together these essays mark a first effort to bring a number of perspectives to bear on a growing and already vast array of programs, in the United States and beyond. From these perspectives, the hope is that the criticism brought forward here will help stimulate debate and reform in future discussions about a processes that affect the lives of millions of people world-wide.

The reintegration of criminal deportees in society

Abstract: This article deals with reintegrating deportees in Jamaica. There is the belief among the citizenry, the media, and the government that the deportees are fueling the crime rate. Jamaica has one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Some 15,618 deportees were sent to Jamaica from various countries between 2005 and 2009. The purveyors of the deportee-crime link ignore the influence of garrison communities on the crime rate which are political communities governed by criminals. Another view argues that the deportees have a minimal impact on the crime rate. None of the viewpoints can be substantiated without a representative survey with a rigorous methodology on the deportee-crime link. The various viewpoints also ignore the need to reintegrate the deportees. Only one church group the Cornerstone Ministries has a reintegration program. The government has a temporary piecemeal program that provides assistance and temporary housing rather than reintegration. Some societies (e.g. China, New Zealand, and Australia) have reintegration programs for ex-offenders which give them a stake in conformity by reaccepting them in the community after punishment. These models can be applied to Jamaica with the creation of a national reintegration program taking into account the cultural differences.

Risky subjects: narrative, literary testimonio and legal testimony

Abstract: This article compares the textual production of legal testimony with that of literary testimonio. Using the controversy sparked by David Stoll’s expose of Rigoberta Menchu’s less than “factual” account of her life lived amidst the genocide of indigenous peoples in Guatemala, the analysis asks why Menchu should be indicted or acquitted based on cultural notions of legal testimony. I use the concept of language ideologies to explore how listeners hold narrators to standards of truth. By suggesting that there are interpretive ideologies of narrative production and function at work, the argument is made that any detractor can find a way to discredit narrative truth. I show this by examining how Latina women and state actors create legal testimony about domestic abuse. While these narratives share much with the Menchu testimonio, in particular the risks they present to their narrators, I conclude that the everyday victim in the U.S. adversarial system has much more to lose, and inevitably has far less discursive power, than Menchu. I examine these topics and themes from sociolinguistic and discourse analytic perspectives.

Palestinian prison ontologies

Abstract: During the first intifada uprising (1987–1993), thousands of Palestinians were arrested annually, and mass incarceration affected as many as 100,000 families. Relying on several recent ethnographies, and other published research including some of my own, this article describes the contests over Palestinian prison ontology as organized by (a) the jailers, (b) the prisoners, (c) the families of prisoners, and (d) a service agency in the emerging Palestinian Authority. What becomes evident is that mass incarceration involves ontological struggles over the framing of justice, agency, and gender. The conclusion asks how these ontological struggles may be part of other modern prisons.

Facilitating Failure: Parole, Reentry, and Obstacles to Success

Abstract: The emergence of the “Prisoner Reentry Industry (PRI)” has produced a multitude of mechanisms that now control the lives of formerly incarcerated individuals. These mechanisms and the resulting practices of the politically, socially, and economically advantaged entities afforded such control has resulted in adverse effects on the individuals directly affected by what is seemingly coercive action. New York State Parole began to contract private entities to provide parolee programs and services in an effort to reduce costs in the wake of a shrinking parole budget. This practice has created adverse effects on the daily lives of parolees and serves to inhibit the reintegration process, resulting in negative consequences for parolees, their families, and the public.

On the ethics and practice of contemporary social theory: from crisis talk to multiattentional method

Abstract: Using an approach derived from the anthropology and sociology of knowledge, this article explores the historical emergence of European social theory and its contemporary place in the human sciences. I direct ethnographic attention to a sense of crisis or impasse in social theory’s capacity to frame and to analyze the complexity of contemporary relations in the world. By reanalyzing this crisis talk as a phenomenological reaction to the growing (sub)specialization of social theory, I offer a new way of thinking about social theory in terms of specialized analytical attentions. I also suggest how we can move from crisis talk to a new ethics of theoretical complementarity, inspired by Dilthey, which I term “multiattentional method.”

Globalisation and bridewealth rhetoric

Abstract: This article offers a close analysis of a ‘classic’ body of ethnographic material on the rhetoric and ritual accompanying bridewealth exchange and argues both for the perspective it provides on the dynamics of cultural continuity, and for the contemporary significance of such continuity for theorising the politics of globalisation. Munn’s study on ‘spacetime’ provides a perspective on bridewealth, both as praxis of continuity and of articulation with global processes. I conclude this article by posing the question of whether subjects such as the Maring of Papua New Guinea can be said to have agency at the global level. I argue that the condition of such agency is the alienation of that agency from their specificity as subjects.

A jury of none: an essay on the last acceptable form of civic banishment

Abstract: Though many socio-legal scholars have criticized those measures that deny convicted felons the right to vote, few have challenged the statutes that withhold a convicted felon’s opportunity to sit on a jury. A majority of US jurisdictions bar felons from jury service permanently, creating a class of citizens defined and punished by the criminal justice system but unable to impact its function. This essay considers the invisibility of felon jury exclusion, notes its unlikely supporters, and asserts that by preventing convicted felons from taking part in civic processes, authorities work against reentry initiatives.

The prisoner reentry industry

Abstract: The Prisoner Reentry Industry found its beginnings in the recognition that men and women who were being released from prison continued to need assistance in their transition process. Depending upon the individual needs of each person, this determined the extent of what type of assistance needed. Within a short period of time it was determined that the greatest assistance was needed in the area of housing and employment. However, once a person completed this transition phrase that was usually understood to be about three years, the following questions arise: when does the reentry phase end? When does society allow the ex-offender to move on with their lives? Even when secure employment has been maintained, when other areas of the individuals’ life are functioning “at least like everyone else in society”, when does the reentry stop and the ex-offender allowed to enter into mainline society? This article attempts to show that we have not done a good job of allowing the ex-offender to move from the phase of prisoner reentry to the phase of contributor in our society.

The unintended effects of prisoner reentry policy and the marginalization of urban communities

Abstract: Despite the stated purpose of the Prisoner Reentry Industry, to effectively manage formerly incarcerated individuals’ transition back into the community, there is evidence to suggest that its policies may be counterproductive to this process. Drawing on personal experiences as a mentor to a formerly incarcerated African-American woman, this essay seeks to provide examples of how policy gridlock can impede the transition of individuals from prison, into the community, and how this contributes to the economic and social affliction of urban communities.

The management of “quality”: class decomposition and racial formation in a Chicago factory

Abstract: Workplace training offers a distinctly explicit and uniquely articulate site for the ethnography of the capital–labor relation as an ideological phenomenon, where the everyday work of hegemony is shown to be deeply grounded in the everyday hegemony of work. In this ethnographic account of a factory classroom devoted to introducing production workers to the precepts of Total Quality Management and training them in Statistical Process Control, the neoliberal reform of the labor process—which sought to accomplish a class decomposition of the company’s workforce in favor of an individualizing regime of workers’ personal responsibility and accountability for various quality control operations—repeatedly provoked the company’s Latino workers into angry and vociferous expressions of antagonism to management. Indeed, insofar as the management’s efforts to reform labor by decomposing the workforce as a class formation merely intensified the prevailing preconditions of their racial formation, they thereby only exacerbated anew the Latino workers’ antagonism as workers to the terms of their subordination. Thus, the generic (ostensibly race-neutral) reform of the labor process initiated under the aegis of “Total Quality Management” implicated the presumed management of “quality” in a concomitant reconfiguration of what was, effectively, a contemporary regime of racial management.

My Sentence Is Over But Will My Punishment Ever End

Abstract: While America has increasingly become known for having a higher rate of persons in prison or under correctional supervision than any other country in the world; over the last two decades, new laws have begun emerging in America, placing restrictions on former offenders long after their correctional supervision has ended. These laws directly impact the lives of millions of ex-offenders who are no longer under correctional supervision, placing restrictions on where they may live, work and travel. The following essay, by a former offender who discharged parole in December 2000, highlights the punitive and destructive nature of these laws.

The prison industry and the marketplace

Abstract: It is not surprising that an industry has arisen regarding reentry. The US penal system spawns industry. For nearly two decades, when the New York Times published its list of the fastest-growing job titles, justice-related positions justice related positions, typically some sort of corrections worker, were regularly featured. It is inconceivable, in the American context, that economic interests would not be closely tied to the growth of the prison industrial complex. At its core are prison jobs themselves, including business in the short term with its construction and development, and long-term employment created through staffing, such an efficient engine of job creation that it was inevitable a reentry enterprise would follow suit.That is, prison growth produced reentry growth, which in turn created the foundation for a prisoner reentry industry. For it to have been otherwise would have been very odd. What's so bad about that? It means jobs, after all; usually good-paying jobs with job security and benefits?often with union protection. What's to complain about? There are three layers of problems. The first is technical and has to do with opportunity costs. The prison industrial complex has created jobs, yes; and the pay these jobs provide leads to expenditures in the marketplace, boosting the economy. That is a plus. But what value, really, do these jobs create? One might argue that the jobs fall within an industry that produces community safety and in that way they represent "value added." But with all the recent research on the limited crime prevention capacity of the prison, combined with the now powerfully persuasive research about the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, it is no longer possible to say, credibly, that the prison industry is a major component of public safety. The technical problem is, we receive get far less from the investment in the prison sector than we might have, compared to an investment made elsewhere.. This is the point the advocates of "justice reinvestment" make: we ought to use the

Day labor halls as spaces of containment and control

Abstract: Temporary day labor agencies (commonly referred to as “day labor halls”) are privately run companies external to the formal Prison Re-Entry Industry (PRI). However, they frequently provide entry-level employment for recent, frequent, and reformed felons. All spaces associated with day labor employment are rigidly controlled and caught in a visual contradiction. While laborers are completely visible to the day labor halls for the purposes of surveillance, observation, evaluation, and ultimately control, they are simultaneously rendered invisible and hidden from the view of society at large. For day laborers with felony records, the duality is intensified. Once released from prison, former prisoners enter spaces under the view and control of law enforcement within the formal PRI system. Further, their world continues to be viewed, restricted, and controlled by privately owned day labor halls where over 50% of potential workers are felons. By examining the spatialities of the daily working lives of day laborers and their (im)mobility as they navigate difficult spatialities, it is possible to comprehend some of the major hurdles of re-entry. The spatialities of the everyday life of felons continue as restricted spaces for a “captive population” even beyond the prison walls and beyond the formal systems of the PRI.

Re-entry programs, from an anti-unconventional ex-offender

Abstract: The purpose of this article seeks to question the relationship of higher levels of educational attainment and the ability for successful reintegration into mainstream society for the formerly incarcerated. Specifically this article highlights societal negligence for individual success of the formerly incarcerated, opting for a corporatized exploitation of those in the reentry process premised on the socially constructed label “ex-con.” Research surrounding labeling and reentry suggests once individuals are released from prison the social stigma experienced in society is a recipe for failure and reoffending. One way this emerges is in the form of hiring policies in corporate occupations, prohibiting the hiring of individual s convicted of a felony. Critical criminology suggests the class structure is in place for those in power to stay in power and keep those who are inferior in inferior social positions. Using both points of view as a framework, with the idea of corporate monopoly as a lens, allows for an untraditional critical perspective of the reentry process as a capitalist, for-profit industry. Questioning the role and intentions of reentry initiatives provides a general discussion for increasing success rates of those in the reentry process and reducing capital costs spent for incarceration. The specific focus of this article presents my experience of the reentry process.

Development, heroism and the indigenous life project

Abstract: In the American 1990s animation, Captain Planet and the Planeteers (Turner and Pyle 1990), the superhero Captain Planet does not exist on his own but has to be summonsed. The key message, reinforced at every turn, is that only by working together across cultural divides and for a unified purpose can people protect the planet and provide solutions to environmental problems. The spirit of the planet, Gaia, no longer able to passively tolerate earth's destruction, has given extraor? dinary powers in the form of five special rings to five young people from five major continents. From Africa, 'Kwame' has the power of earth; from North America, 'Wheeler' has the power of fire; 'Linka' from the Soviet Union, is given the power of wind; 'Gi' from South East Asia harnesses the power of water; and from South America, 'Ma-Ti' completes the elemental forces with the power of heart. To call forth Captain Planet, the five planeteers must hold their fists aloft and join their elemental rings, chanting 'all powers combined' in unison. While his grass-green hair and sky-blue skin are meant to elevate Captain Planet from any particular cultural alignment or ethnicity, his chiselled jaw, sharp pectoral lines and

Comment on Trinch's risky subjects: Risky narratives in courtroom testimony

Abstract: Trinch’s article provides a thought-provoking consideration of the risks involved for abuse victims in telling their story. In bringing together two seemingly different types of narrative, Trinch compels us to consider what they share. First, there are similarities in the interactional production of the written versions of Rigoberta Menchu’s published testimonio and the stories which survivors of domestic abuse tell to paralegals. In both situations, the stories were/are told to an interested interlocutor who works to produce a written account in the first-person narrative of the storyteller. Second, Trinch’s analysis of the controversy surrounding Menchu’s testimonio and of the process by which the domestic abuse survivors’ written affidavits are produced highlights the risks involved for people reporting abuse. At the immediate level is the risk of antagonising their abusers, and on another level are the risks in the ways in which their story is transformed in the recontextualisation process, and the subsequent risks for the narrators involved in being seen as not ‘telling the truth’, or as embellishing the ‘facts’. It is this second level of risks which Trinch addresses, exposing powerful language ideologies about narrative truth relevant to the reception of these two different types of narrative. Building on her important (2003) book, Trinch’s work here on the interactional and entextualised nature of narrative production advances both the sociolinguistic analysis of narrative and linguistic anthropological work on language ideologies. Here, I take up Trinch’s point about the role of what she has referred to as the ‘ideology of narrator authorship’ (Trinch 2003, pp. 49–50) in the risks faced by victims of abuse in telling their story. As she explains in the article under review, ‘most listeners believe that the teller is the sole author of the narrative drafted’. This belief ignores the contributions to narratives made by interaction with interlocutors, for example by interviewers’ questions or listeners’ reactions, whether verbal or nonverbal. This ideology of narrator authorship is central to the ways in which the

Human services and the prisoner reentry industry

Abstract: What is really going on today when men and women coming out of prison go to work in human services—the positive, the negative, and the not easily categorized? This commentary draws critical connections between reentry industrial complex, human services workforce development, and race. Preliminary findings are offered from a pilot study that elicited perspective from human services professionals who have been formerly incarcerated. Directions for further exploration of this phenomenon are proposed.

Paradigms of expected failure

Abstract: This study explores the outsourcing and offshoring of clinical trials and how they interconnect with the dynamics of drug development and regulation in the United States I focus on the activities of United States-based contract research organizations, which make up a specialized global clinical trials industry focusing on the recruitment of human subjects and investigators Tracking this industry’s activities in eastern Europe and Latin America, two clinical trial market ‘growth regions,’ I address the strategies of evidence-making that inform clinical trial offshoring I also show how aspects of the clinical trial model—in which failures to predict safety outcomes or a paradigm of expected failure—are being exported along with the offshored trial The clinical trials industry is a crucial, highly mobile, and profitable arm of the global pharmaceutical industry Where state agencies furnish limited or no health care, drug developers claim that trial expansion and experiments have become social goods in themselves But questions remain: How is drug value and research integrity maintained? And how do the results of clinical trials strengthen or undermine the delivery of affordable and effective interventions? As this essay shows, clinical trials are not only hypothesis-testing instruments; they are operative environments redistributing resources and occasioning tense medical and social fields In highlighting the inefficiencies and uncertainties of global drug development, this study points to problems in the operational model of drug development and in systems of human protection It also considers new forms of accountability at the nexus of private sector science and public health

Fiends, friends and fools: screen images and/as rural struggle

Abstract: The snobbery of our films is not aristocratic. In British films, the aristocracy is generally.treated, though respectfully, as a fine old figure of fun. Similarly, the functions of working class characters are chiefly comic, where they are not villainous. They make excellent servants, good tradesmen, and first-class soldiers. The film director Anderson (2004: 235) writing in 1956 about the way in which class was represented in British films.

A virtual game and the actual Islamic rule: the recent presidential election in Iran

Abstract: The paper looks at the presidential election and the unrest that followed the declaration of its results in Iran in June 2009 as a disruption of an officially organised play by the voters equipped with a heuristically devised game. The play was designed to make the ruled confirm the Islamic identity they purportedly shared with their rulers which overrode the difference between the loser and the winner. Entering the election as the virtual space of a game, voters were able to drive a wedge between the candidates selected for them as ‘good players’ by playing them off one another as the ‘reformer’ versus the ‘hardliner’. The game was enhanced by the fierce competition among the ‘good players’ over access to Islamic faith as a privilege. The played out difference between the candidates allowed for a gap, forbidden under the Islamic rule, to emerge between the represented and representative that is the condition for politics. The consequent appearance of the represented as a subject that was spoken for undermined the rule in which the ruled were only spoken of by their rulers. The sudden public appearance of the represented became less tolerable at the time when it needed to be represented by the ruling mullahs pursuing a shared nuclear ambition, a necessity that spoiled the voters’ virtual game at some human cost.

Voltaire this ain't

Abstract: I think the only literary genre more frivolous than theologians writing about science (Teilhard de Chardin 1959) is scientists writing about theology (Miller 1999; Dennett 2006; Collins 2006; Roughgarden 2006). This latter group has now devolved into two camps: some scientists find it reasonable to seek spiritual meaning in the natural world, inheriting the centuries-old ambitions of John Ray and William Paley. The less pious also write about it, although with different goals. While the devout are trying to reconcile their beliefs about the non-material universe to the domain of science, the less devout are trying to convince them that they are idiots, a somewhat less respectable ambition, even if just as likely to be unsuccessful. Richard Dawkins, recently retired Oxford professor of the Public Understanding of Science and one of the leading voices of contemporary Darwinism, aggressively links science, and particularly evolutionary science, to his evangelical atheism. The result is a best-selling screed and an eloquent testimony to the poverty and problems of modern science education. I will discuss the book in terms of several critical paradoxes it raised for me. Science, as a set of tools for producing reliable knowledge of the natural world, is a product of seventeenth-century European minds. Its most fundamental assumption is that despite critical points of contact, there is some sort of basic division between Nature and Supernature, the former being governed by matter and law, and the latter by spirit and miracle. The uniqueness of that underlying assumption?that the natural and supernatural realms are basically distinct and separable from one

Comment on Boyer's multiattentional method

Abstract: Spurred by Rabinow's (1999:181) aspiration "of making something new happen in a field of knowledge" but wary of pronouncements that smack of "rejecting theory as a norm of intellectual practice," Boyer asks us to reflect on "how we should best understand theory as intellectual practice." He sets the stage through a stimulating look at the development of social theory in the European tradition across several centuries, aimed at revealing the roots of contemporary expressions of concern, including Rabinow's, "regarding the exhaustion, crisis, or failure of theory" despite "epistemic abundance." In light of this discussion, he queries: "Is it sufficient to say that theory is a method of framing data, of determining causality, or of producing a meta-reading?" After referring to Bourdieu's depiction of the "proscriptive, authoritarian capacities of the 'theory effect'" (1991:106), Boyer goes on to mention his own work on "theory as language, specifically as an exclusionary register of professional communication and as a medium of value-circulation through practices of citation." However, rather than continue to list the "purposes" or "functions" of theory, Boyer proposes a "new way of thinking about social theory in terms of specialized analytical attentions" and "new ethics of theoretical complementarity" grounded in the explicit cultivation and valuation of what he calls the "multiattentional method" of analytic engagement. In another piece, Boyer (2008:39) defines intellectuals as "knowledge special? ists...especially... those who operate as members of professional networks in organizational or institutional contexts." I found it useful in writing this commentary to slightly reframe the orientation of understanding social theory as intellectual practice to one of understanding social theorizing as the practice of intellectuals. Further, despite, or perhaps because of, the discussion concerning "para-ethnography" in relation to the "de facto and self-conscious critical faculty that operates in any expert domain" (Holmes and Marcus 2005:237) and the

Traveller or tourist? Jack Kerouac and the commodification of culture

Abstract: Jack Kerouac, the author of On The Road, was a central figure of the Beat Generation, a generation which rebelled against middle-class conformity in post-World War II America. Kerouac described himself as ''a religious wanderer'' (Kerouac 2006: 2), but an examination of his texts and life suggest his travels may also be understood as tourism. Viewed through the prism of tourism, this study will argue, for example, that MacCannell's notion of the tourist's quest for reality and authenticity (MacCannell 1989: 3) provides some insight into why Kerouac wrote that just south of Macon, Georgia, he and his travelling companion Neal Cassady stopped and got out of the car, ''and suddenly both of us were stoned with joy to realize that in the darkness all around us was fragrant green grass and the smell of fresh manure and warm waters'' (Kerouac 1957: 115). As Kerouac rebelled against being, as one of his protagonists in The Dharma Bums put it, ''imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume'' (Kerouac 2006: 73) he travelled across America on a rapidly improving network of highways, turning ''mobility into a retreat'' (Holladay and Holton 2009: 42). Kerouac alternately identified himself as a hobo (Kerouac 1973: 181) and ''not a real hobo'' (Kerouac 1973: 173), but this article asks whether Kerouac's travels were those of the last in a line of wanderers rebelling against conformity and modernization or a precursor of mobile mass tourism in America.