The Global Pigeon

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AuthorColin Jerolmack
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
PublishedMar 11 2013
Book FormatHardcover
ISBN-139780226001890
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BISAC
CategoriesSocial Science > Anthropology - Cultural & Social
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

The pigeon is the quintessential city bird. Domesticated thousands of years ago as a messenger and a source of food, its presence on our sidewalks is so common that people consider the bird a nuisance--if they notice it at all. Yet pigeons are also kept for pleasure, sport, and profit by people all over the world, from the pigeon wars waged by breeding enthusiasts in the skies over Brooklyn to the Million Dollar Pigeon Race held every year in South Africa.
Drawing on more than three years of fieldwork across three continents, Colin Jerolmack traces our complex and often contradictory relationship with these versatile animals in public spaces such as Venice's Piazza San Marco and London's Trafalgar Square and in working-class and immigrant communities of pigeon breeders in New York and Berlin. By exploring what he calls the social experience of animals, Jerolmack shows how our interactions with pigeons offer surprising insights into city life, community, culture, and politics. Theoretically understated and accessible to interested readers of all stripes, The Global Pigeon is one of the best and most original ethnographies to be published in decades.

Author Bio

I am a professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at New York University. I am also chair of the Dept. of Environmental Studies.

My new book, Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town (Princeton University Press, April 2021), is an intimate, ethnographic account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet—whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the very land beneath our feet—is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public’s consent. Based on time I spent living in a rural Pennsylvania community, the book documents the dramatic confrontation between personal sovereignty and the public good that unfolds from the fact that landowners have the right to lease the subsurface of their property for oil and gas development.

This "deeply reported" (Publisher's Weekly) community study reveals "the tradeoffs that follow from America's liberty-loving ways" (Sarah Smarsh [author of Heartland], the Atlantic). What's more, it serves as a lens through which to understand the cultural polarization that drives so much of contemporary American politics and stymies efforts to combat climate change.

Research Interests

Ethnography; urban communities; environmental sociology; animals and society; culture; health; social theory.

Education