The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty
Abstract
This edited volume examines what the classic text The Ethnography of Reading (Boyarin ed., 1993), and the diverse ethnographies of reading it helped inspire, can offer contemporary scholars interested in understanding the place of reading in social life. The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty brings together new research and critical reflections from an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars who have kept their ears tuned to the voices in and around the texts they encountered and constructed in the process of bringing the ethnography of reading into the twenty-first century. Rather than operating from universalist assumptions about how people interact with and make meaning from written texts, each of the present contributors draw in one way or another on the theoretical, methodological, and creative legacies of The Ethnography of Reading. Under the broad umbrella of ethnographic reader studies, they collectively explore new relations between texts, social imagination, and social action.
... reading THe Books on THe sTreeT When I first turned my attention to Tirana's outdoor book markets in summer 2015, I was looking for a way to combine my long-standing interest in the ethnography of reading (Boyarin 1993;Rosen 2023) with site-specific methods for studying changing cities in anthropological perspective (Pardo and Prato 2012;Campkin and Duijzings 2016). Bringing the two aims together, I landed on the idea that the observable circuit of books on Tirana's streets could be read as a kind of index, much like the index in the back of a book. ...
This chapter explores the social world of Tirana’s informal economy with a particular focus on a group of independent entrepreneurs who specialize in the sale of second-hand books. Starting from the concept of books as artefacts with their own socio-historical narratives, the discussion connects the experiences of independent booksellers in Tirana to broader issues of urban inequality and the legitimacy of governance in Albania. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Tirana between 2015 and 2023, the discussion moves from street-level reporting to a social analysis with implications for contemporary studies in urban anthropology on issues of work, informal economy, and getting by in post-socialist late capitalism. The chapter concludes with two related recommendations. First, urban policymakers in Tirana can and should do more to support second-hand bookselling in the city. Second, booksellers themselves might do well to form a professional association to advocate more openly for their interests.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.