Kurt Borchard

Between Poverty and a Lifestyle: The Leisure Activities of Homeless People in Las Vegas

Housed people judge homeless people, and in particular their leisure activities, as indicators of whether that person has chosen a “homeless lifestyle” and therefore deserves homelessness. To achieve a more complex understanding of contemporary homelessness, the author conducted ethnographic fieldwork over ten months in Las Vegas, Nevada, interviewing and participant observing dozens of homeless men and women, including observations of their leisure activities and “free time.” The author argues that homeless people’s pursuit of leisure activities helps explain the popularity of both Las Vegas as a destination for homeless people and why it is a difficult place for homeless people to end their poverty. A consideration of homeless people’s lifestyles in such a postmodern tourist environment also shows how such environments both sustain homeless people and produce homelessness.

BETWEEN A HARD ROCK AND POSTMODERNISM:: Opening the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino

Various researchers have promoted the use of ethnographic accounts in subjective descriptions of postmodern spaces. The Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas represents such a space, embodying several key features of postmodern culture. These features include the commodification of image signs and popular culture, the commercial neutralization of signifying practices subversive to capitalism, ephemeral architecture informing ephemeral social relationships, and the creation of spectacles of ironic pleasure. The author merges his experience of the Hard Rock Hotels opening night, his interaction with the space and others in it, and his thoughts relating these to a postmodern moment/ethnography.

Las Vegas Mon Amour

Here, the author uses the film/screenplay Hiroshima Mon Amourto discuss contemporary trends in Las Vegas. A new elitism/renaissance in the city can be contrasted against an absence of history/memory. New gambling technologies promote a smoother capitalism while simultaneously encouraging nostalgia and distracting players from considering the houses edge. Television has also gained greater importance in defining Las Vegas, both nationally and locally. These seemingly innocuous patterns, though, belie a core (yet often unspoken) truth: that what is commonly promoted as entertainment in Las Vegas is also destructive. The city is one that ethnographers should take more seriously as an expression of deep, contradictory currents in postmodern life.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG! and Grand Theft Autoethnography

Here, I use autoethnography, media accounts, and work in sociology to consider the popular video game series Grand Theft Auto (GTA), its abstraction of violence and social relations, and the formation of my Self. I also consider the video game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (or Role Playing Game) as a deconstruction of cause and effect arguments concerning links between video game violence and real-world violence. I consider such games as sites for ideological reproduction, particularly of sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as for critical thinking about the social worlds we want.

An Experiment in Second Person Writing: Notes on a Partial Jewish Identity

Jewish people are a unique minority group identified through a religious belief system, a culture, and supposed biological traits. I describe myself here as a partial Jew, indicating my unique status parallels the identities of mixed race individuals who feel some other minority group members see them as like themselves but marginally or partially so, at times creating a double marginalization. Through my marginal identity, I encounter prejudice and discrimination from non-Jews and Jews alike. Taking cues from Claudia Rankine, I write examples of everyday identification, prejudice, and discrimination in the second person, in a style unique to sociology. I note my silences, responses, and thoughts about those encounters. I consider whether these everyday encounters constitute microaggressions, and what, then, I am, and you are, left with.