Essays on how a theory of "serious games"--as a way of conceiving of social and political power relations--can inform ethnographic research.

Introduction: Updating Practice Theory 1
Chapter One: Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture 19
Chapter Two: Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal 42
Chapter Three: Identities: The Hidden Life of Class 63
Chapter Four: Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World 80
Chapter Five: Subjectivity and Cultural Critique 107
Chapter Six: Power and Projects: Reflections on Agency 129
Notes 155
References Cited 167
Index 181

Sherry B. Ortner is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58, also published by Duke University Press; Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering; Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture; and High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism. She has received numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the J. I. Staley Prize.