'Stony the Road' to Change

Marilyn M. Thomas-Houston is currently Interim Director of African American Studies and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at the University of Florida. She received her PhD. in 1997 from New York University in Cultural Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Ethnographic Film during the same year. In addition to an MPhil. and MA in Anthropology from NYU, she also holds an M.A. in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi. She is a member of the American Anthropologist Association, a member of the Executive Board of the Society for Visual Anthropology (holding the office of Treasurer), a member of the Association of Black Anthropologists, and a member of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. Her research interests focus primarily on people of African descent in complex societies, power relations, development, transnational processes, social movements, and identity.

• Part I. The Cultural History of the Region: 1. Placing the stones: an historical look at the construction of a region; 2. Getting around the stones: the civil rights movement; Part II. Social Consciousness, Social Action: 3. Social consciousness and black public culture; 4. Social action in practice; Part III. Construction of an Intra-Racial Identity: 5. The interconnection of place, space, and belonging; 6. It's a white 'thang': ethnic identifiers; 7. Space: the final (AF) front.

'The involvement of the black community in a southern town during the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s may not seem like the classic setting for an ethnography but Thomas-Houston demonstrates that in deft hands anthropological analysis is not constrained by time or place.' William Arens, Stony Brook University