Ethnographic Notes on a Trailer Park Community in Rural America

Abstract: While Jim Siegel is best known for his work on Indonesia, his anthropological reflections have included other contexts where he has lived and worked, such as Japan, Paris and Cornell. His intellectual curiosity encompasses the quotidian and intimate, and it was his passion for understanding America anthropologically that motivated this study on a trailer park in upstate New York. Through these raw ethnographic notes on what is considered the "underbelly" of America, this article tangentially reflects on anthropology's approach to otherness and difference, a theme that Jim Siegel was revisiting toward the end of his teaching career at Cornell.