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"Shapira, Harel"
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How Attitudes about Guns Develop over Time
Existing scholarship usually presents people's attitudes about guns as fixed and fully formed. Rarely are such attitudes examined as the outcome of social processes. As a result, while we know a great deal about what people think about guns, we know very little about the development of these beliefs. In this paper, we use a combination of surveys and life history interviews with a national sample of college students between the ages of 18 and 24 to examine how attitudes about guns develop in childhood and young adulthood. We find that while family gun ownership matters, positive attitudes about guns develop through active socialization that continues beyond childhood and is not reducible to family background. Relationships play a key role in this process, with changes in relationships often driving changes in attitudes about guns. Changes in attitudes about guns can take place in terms of both the content (what young adults think about guns) and the form (how young adults think about guns). In the transition to young adulthood, attitudes about guns develop from being articulated primarily as personal experiences connected to the activity of shooting guns or experiencing gun violence, to being articulated as political beliefs, connected to issues of regulation. These findings contribute to our understanding of gun attitudes by offering insights on not only what people think about guns but also how people come to think about guns in the ways that they do.
Journal Article
Learning to Need a Gun
Millions of Americans feel the need to carry guns with them everywhere they go. They feel this need in their minds as well as in their bodies. Cognitively, they feel their lives are in danger and physically, they feel unease when they are not carrying their guns. In this article, we demonstrate that the practice of carrying guns is constituted by both cognitive schemas about risk and safety, as well as sensory and embodied experiences of comfort, and even pleasure, in holding, shooting, and carrying a gun. As with other social practices, these cognitive schemas and embodied experiences are not innate, but rather learned. Drawing on interviews with 46 people who regularly carry guns, as well as fieldwork at firearms training schools, we examine the process by which people learn the cognitive schemas (how people think about guns) and embodied experiences (how people physically experience guns) associated with the practice of carrying guns.
Journal Article
From the Nativist's Point of View
Based on my participant observation of the border militia group known as the Minutemen, this article examines what motivates people to participate in social movements. Building on social movements' scholarship, I argue that participation cannot be reduced to the expression of the beliefs which group members hold. However, while previous scholarship has turned toward organizational dynamics and networks to move beyond the ideological foundations of political behavior, I turn to everyday practices. By focusing on practices, ethnography allows us to expand our understanding of movement participation by showing not just the “before” of a movement (understood as a set of ideas or interests people hold) or the “outcomes” of a movement (understood as securing of material interests) but the “during” of a movement. And, as I show through the Minutemen, the “during” of the movement can sometimes be what inspires and sustains participation, and indeed, be the very crux of what the movement is about.
Journal Article
From the Nativist's Point of View: How Ethnography Can Enrich Our Understanding of Political Identity
Based on my participant observation of the border militia group known as the Minutemen, this article examines what motivates people to participate in social movements. Building on social movements' scholarship, I argue that participation cannot be reduced to the expression of the beliefs which group members hold. However, while previous scholarship has turned toward organizational dynamics and networks to move beyond the ideological foundations of political behavior, I turn to everyday practices. By focusing on practices, ethnography allows us to expand our understanding of movement participation by showing not just the \"before\" of a movement (understood as a set of ideas or interests people hold) or the \"outcomes\" of a movement (understood as securing of material interests) but the \"during\" of a movement. And, as I show through the Minutemen, the \"during\" of the movement can sometimes be what inspires and sustains participation, and indeed, be the very crux of what the movement is about.
Journal Article
Waiting for José: The Minutemen and the United States/Mexico border
Over the course of the past five years, hundreds of people, mostly retired, middle class, male, and white, have traveled to the U.S./Mexico border from across the country in order to prevent what they see as the collapse of America. Some come with their spouses, others with friends, but mostly they come alone, often driving hundreds of miles instead of flying so that they can bring their guns with them. At times characterized as a drug dealer carrying Ak-47's, at other times a rapist incapable of assimilating, and at yet other times a hard worker seeking a better life, the Minutemen come to stop an elusive and contradictory figure they often refer to as \"José Sanchez.\" They come to defend their America. Based on three years of participant observation on the Minutemen, this dissertation provides an ethnography of the political community. In the social sciences, the study of politics, approached through the unduly restrictive lens as the study of \"ideology,\" misses some crucial dimensions of political life. We assume that to understand the political community we should try to understand their members' ideology. But this is a mistake. Being a Minuteman is not about having any specific beliefs about immigration. An ethnographic approach to the Minutemen is intimately connected to a theoretical contribution, showing that what is usually analyzed through \"ideology\" can be opened up through a focus on practice. To study the Minutemen through \"ideology\" would be to marginalize the practices they undertake and place emphasis on the non-situated dimension of their politics, but to understand the Minutemen we need to place them in their camp and on the patrol line. If you want to understand the Minutemen you need to understand that their camp and their patrols are important to them not because they reflect an \"ideology,\" but a way of being in the world, a way of being that they have lost and seek to reclaim. The set of practices they undertake in the camp and on the patrol line are organized as an activity of soldiering, undertaken in a space constructed as a battlefield, allowing these men to reclaim a lost sense of respect and dignity. A dignity and respect connected not to beliefs but practices.
Dissertation
