Learning from New Orleans: The Social Warrant of Hostile Privatism and Competitive Consumer Citizenship

“Rethinking American Culture” was a forum featuring the work of George Lipsitz in a dialogue between American Studies and anthropology about the ways in which “new forms of commercial patterns and practices, new movements of people and products, and new communications technologies are producing new ways of studying culture.” This dialogue addresses the struggles over the social warrants of U.S. culture in the 21st century and how historians and anthropologists might best describe and analyze such warrants and reconstitute these fields, both of which are under pressure in a present “moment of danger” made all the more visible by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana.