Roscoe Scarborough

Firefighters make life-or-death decisions based on shared understandings of whose lives matter. Drawing on three years of participant observation as a volunteer firefighter and 30 semistructured interviews, I examine tensions surrounding the value firefighters place on their own lives and the lives of the public they serve. There is a tension between firefighters and their officers over the value of a firefighter's life. Firefighters tend to be cavalier in their willingness to endanger their own lives in high-risk situations, while fire officers feel responsible for protecting the lives of their crew. A second tension exists between prejudiced individuals and an institutional culture of public service. Some firefighters harbor individual prejudices, which are at odds with an institutional culture of egalitarian service. Fire service, state, county, department, crew, and peer cultures suppress individual prejudices. This case study suggests that deep integration into an institutional culture of public service mitigates discriminatory behavior. Instead of evaluating discrimination among first responders as an individual-level trouble, bias and its associated dysfunctions can be reframed as a social issue to be ameliorated through cultural reform.

This research examines how musicians understand art and commerce in a music scene dominated by cover bands. Drawing on thirty semi-structured interviews and one hundred hours of ethnographic observation, I find that most musicians self-identify as artists but perceive social status to be rooted in commercial success. This research details what it means to “make it” in an art world that offers little institutional support or remunerative reward for artistry. Musicians employ three approaches to negotiate the disconnect between artistic identities and commercially defined status: segregating their artistic and commercial pursuits, locating artistry in their commercial work, and justifying their commercially viable activities as a means to attaining a comfortable lifestyle. This on-the-ground account of commercial influences’ effects on musicians informs post-Bourdieusian research on fields of cultural production. I suggest that future research on culture producers must distinguish between social status—a position in a social hierarchy—and respect, or personal admiration. When aesthetics are marginalized as a basis for status, musicians’ status becomes bound to employment opportunities and expansible relative to the extent of the scene.