Introduction.(Editorial)

Publication: Urban Anthropology & Studies of Cultural Systems & World Economic Development

Publication Date: 22-MAR-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 The Institute Inc.

After a decade-long battle against a polluting local factory, an African American community in Georgia begins soliciting new industries to locate within its boundaries. In Alabama, timber companies jump through cumbersome and time-consuming bureaucratic hoops to hire temporary guest workers over native employees, who disdain forestry work. Louisiana state legislators support a Native American community's quest for tribal recognition, against the interests of powerful oil companies that contribute to their political campaigns.

The contributors to this special issue of URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY find that traditional economic or social science models of community/industry relationships do not adequately explain the paradoxes described above, particularly when looked at in the complicated context of changing environmental conditions in the U.S. South. Past studies of community / industry interactions in environmental contexts have tended to offer one-dimensional analyses that portray community / industrial relationships as necessarily lopsided, with industries easily usurping power from local communities and riding roughshod over environmental considerations. Similarly, models that foreground the dominance of corporate and financial interests discount the degree to which state agencies might exert their own power in community/industry...

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