- 237 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
About this book
In The Urban Grotesque, Doreen Lee shows how ordinary life is made and sustained in Jakarta, one of the world's largest and most dense cities, through obligation and debt, grift and grounded financial practices. Lee centers the concept of the urban grotesque as a fiscal imaginary and ethical schema, demonstrating how it moves comprehension of urban life beyond the aspirational toward a more sober understanding of the costs of living alongside others in an unequal and expensive modern city. Weaving ethnographic descriptions with parables that illuminate core urban lessons, Lee draws readers into the movements and moods of everyday experience in Jakarta across the city's most common spaces and problems. Utilizing tropes of circulation to reveal and critique the social forms of Jakarta, The Urban Grotesque explores how compliance and resistance to debts and gifts inform the financial streams that underlie the urban landscape.
Information
Publisher
Duke University Press BooksYear
2026Print ISBN
9781478039327
9781478034346
eBook ISBN
9781478062912
Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Jakarta: The Urban Grotesque (Alternatively, “Jakarta: A Love Letter”)
- Parable 1. The Fake Gift
- 1. Urban Futures
- Parable 2. The Big Durian (Reuse, Recycle, Repurpose)
- 2. Absolute Traffic
- Parable 3. The Haircut
- 3. Gemstones
- Parable 4. The Switch
- 4. The Friendship Bank
- Parable 5. Consignment
- 5. Urban Crime
- Parable 6. The Hot Phone
- 6. Hypnotic Crime: A Theory of Compliance
- Parable 7. A Sick Child (Circulation, Territory, Rules)
- Afterword
- Notes
- References
- Index
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Yes, you can access The Urban Grotesque by Doreen Lee in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Cultural & Social Anthropology. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.