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"Manufacturing” Community: Solidarity, Profit, And The Bar Owner, Timothy Hartshorn

Anthropology Department Honors Papers

The following study examines the potential of eight independently run bars in New London, Connecticut to “manufacture” community. This process is examined with particular focus on the tension felt by bar owners, who must continually attract new patrons while still keeping their current “regulars” content. Inherent to this study is the reexamination of “community” as an analytically useful term in anthropological scholarship, with particular emphasis on disproportionate feelings of belonging and commitment as manifested by individual interpretation of collectively rendered symbols.

This data for this study was collected by virtue of semi-structured interviews as well as ethnographic field observation. The …