Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, Summoned presents an account of the fabric of everyday life in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, and an attempt to think through the relationship among actors' identifications, the crystallization of their social worlds, and the micro-patterning of social interaction. I trace the ways in which both entrenched institutions and fleeting moments of interaction on the streets of LA's Melrose-La Brea neighborhood solidify actors' identifications and social worlds. Through this case, I argue that focusing on the rhythms and expectations of interaction allow sociologists to tie interactional analyses to wider social patterns and cut through some of the debate between theorizations of identity and identification.
Iddo Tavory is an Assistant Professor at NYU. His book Abductive Analysis (co-authored with Stefan Timmermans) presents a pragmatist approach to the relation among theory, method and observations in qualitative research (University of Chicago Press, 2014). His second book, Summoned, is an ethnography of an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles, as well as a treatise on the patterning of interaction, identification, and social worlds (University of Chicago Press, 2016). His work was previously published, among other places, in the AJS, ASR, Sociological Theory, and Theory and Society.