Fred Davis – författare

What do our clothes say about who we are or who we think we are? How does the way we dress communicate messages about our identity? Is the desire to be "in fashion" universal, or is it unique to Western culture? How do fashions change? These are just a few of the intriguing questions Fred Davis sets out to answer in this provocative look at what we do with our clothes--and what they can do to us. Much of what we assume to be individual preference, Davis shows, really reflects deeper social and cultural forces. Ours is an ambivalent social world, characterized by tensions over gender roles, social status, and the expression of sexuality. Predicting what people will wear becomes a risky gamble when the link between private self and public persona can be so unstable.

Based on a study of fourteen families in which a child had contracted paralytic poliomyelitis. Passage Through Crisis: Polio Victims and Their Families, first published in 1963, was widely praised for its penetrating--and, for its time, innovative--analyses of doctor-patient communications, and for its interpreta-tion of the meaning of physical disability in American society. In his new opening essay, Davis reflects on the enduring sources of this profound problem in human relations as well as on those changes in the culture of American health care that are helping to restructure doctor-patient relations along more open, less authoritarian lines. The emergence of patient self-help groups, the political militancy of the Gay community in regard to AIDS, and the fading of the early post-World War II naive faith in the humanitarian efficacy of science are some of the developments dealt with. A parallel discussion of the importation into medical sociology of such concepts as the reality-structuring power of professional discourse and of the meta-phoric significance of different diseases for different historical eras seeks to relate developments in the culture of health care to sociology's study. Passage Through Crisis retains for today's readers that essential quality that most engaged readers of a quarter century ago: its vivid and probing ethno-graphic account of the impact of serious illness on the family, the difficult processes of adjustment that ensue and, in these connections, the role played (and toll exacted) by American values.