Human Rights Syllabi: Anthropology 640: Urban Poverty

Anthropology 640: Urban Poverty

FALL 2002

Brett Williams Office hours:
T-45 Battelle Tompkins Tuesday 4-8
885-1836 Friday 10-12
bwillia@american.edu and by arrangement

The Anthropology of Urban Poverty explores the causes and consequences of harsh inequality in the United States. We will use interdisciplinary tools and a variety of lenses to examine changing experiences and understandings of poverty. The course begins with social history, to trace the different forms that poverty has taken, the connections between poverty and the economy writ large, and the shifting ideologies that have explained and distorted what it means to be poor. Because this class focuses on urban poverty, we pay particular attention to the role of capital and government in inscribing race and class on the built environment. We then turn to the special characteristics of the new poverty, which is marked by a kind of multicultural placelessness and new ideologies about individual responsibility, the shrinking, but increasingly disciplinary role of the state, and the benevolence of the market. We will examine the changing nature of work, its relationship to welfare reform and booming incarceration, and the illness and death that poor people suffer from treatable problems like tuberculosis and hot weather. Throughout the course, we will ask questions about the role of ideology in promoting and masking such harsh inequality, and the problematic role of anthropology in interpreting poverty over time.

Readings:

Kenneth Kusmer, Down and Out, On the Road
Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis
Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky, The New Poverty Studies (selections)
Adolph Reed, Without Justice for All (selections)
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed
Paul Farmer, Infections and Inequalities
Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave
Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism
And selected articles, to be distributed in class or mailboxes

August 27 Introduction to the course

September 3 The Wandering Poor

Read Down and Out, On the Road

September 10: Ghettos
Read The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Chapters 1-6

Recommended readings: Kenneth Kusmer, The Black Urban Experience, and African Americans in the City Since World War II, in Journal of Urban History March 1995; Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto; James Grossman, Land of Hope; Neil McMillan, Dark Journey; Arnold Hirsch and Raymond Mohl, editors, The Making of Urban America; Edward Orser, Block-Busting in Baltimore; Neil Smith, New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity; Michael Katz, The Underclass Debate: Views from History; John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes

September 17 Continue The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Chapters 7 to the end Also Read Dennis Judd, Symbolic Politics and Urban Policies (in Reed); Matthew Rubin (in Goode and Maskovsky)

September 24 The Weight of History and the New Poverty

Read Brett Williams, A River Runs Through Us (in American Anthropologist June 2001); Larry Bennett and Adolph Reed, The New Face of Urban Renewal (in Reed); Maskovsky and Goode, Introduction to The New Poverty Studies; Patricia Zavella, The Tables are Turned (in Goode and Maskovsky); Dwight Conquergood, Life in Big Red, in Structuring Diversity, Louise Lamphere ed.

Recommended readings: Micaela di Leonardo, The Political Economy of Street Harrassment; Jane Kay, California's Endangered Communities of Color (in Robert Bullard, ed., Unequal Protection); Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie

October 1 Racism, Welfare, and Work

Read Steven Steinberg, Occupational Apartheid in America, Mimi Abramowitz and Ann Wilborn, Playing by the Rules (both in Reed); Frances Fox Piven, Welfare Reform, Vincent Lyon Callo, Homelessness, Employment, and Structural Violence, Peter Kwong, Poverty Despite Family Ties (all in Goode and Maskovsky); Alan Howard, Labor, History, and Sweatshops (in Andrew Ross, ed. No Sweat)

Recommended Readings: Jo-Ann Mort, Sweatshop Workers Speak Out, Steve Nutter, The Structure and Growth of the Los Angeles Garment Industry, Michael Piore, The Economics of the Sweatshop, Julie Su, Slave Sweatshops, all in Andrew Ross, No Sweat; Saskia Sassen, Overview, and Conclusion, in The Global City; Carol Stack, Coming of Age in Oakland (in Goode and Maskovsky)

October 4 Ethnography paper due

October 8 Fall Break
No class

October 15 Work, continued
Read Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed
October 22 Crime?
Read Dwight Conquergood, Street Literacy, in Research on Language Learning, Families, Communities, and Classrooms; Cathy Schneider, Racism, Drug Policy and AIDS, in Political Science Quarterly 113:3 1998; Steven Gregory, Time to Make the Doughnuts, in Political and Legal Anthropology Review 1994; Michael Peter Smith and Bernadette Tarallo, Who Are the Good Guys? in The Bubbling Cauldron, edited by Joe Feagin and Michael Peter Smith: pp. 50-73 ; Heather Reisinger and Mike Agar, A Heroin Epidemic at the Intersection of Histories (in Medical Anthropology 21); Micaela di Leonardo, White Lies and Black Myths, in the Gender/Sexuality Reader

October 29: Sick Because You're Poor
Read Infections and Inequalities

November 5 Death by Public Policy
Read Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave

November 12 Politics and the State

Read Lesley Gill, Introduction and Chapters 1,2,3 in Teetering on the Rim; Judith Goode, "Let's Get Our Act Together," Nina Glick-Schiller and Georges Fouron, "I Am Not a Problem without a Solution," Jeff Maskovsky, Afterword (all in Goode and Maskovsky)

Recommended: Preston Smith, "Self-Help," Black Conservatives, and the Reemergence of Black Privatism; Rogers Smith, Toward a More Perfect Union (in Reed) Susan Hyatt in Maskovsky and Goode

November 19: Latinos Recreate American Cities?
Read Magical Urbanism

November 26: Discussion of ethnographies

Ethnography paper due again

December 3: Conclusions to the course

Reflective essay due

Grading:
Class participation counts one-third of your grade. Class participation includes:

Doing all of the reading carefully and critically
Coming prepared with questions and comments for discussion
Speaking (but don't monopolize!)
Yielding so that others may talk and even encouraging others to talk
Listening with attention and respect
Making your comment relevant to the one that came before
Staying on topic, or changing the subject gracefully and for a good reason
Helping to be sure that we fully cover the readings
Integrating your ethnography when appropriate in class discussions
Suggesting gaps/ areas to cover

Reflective essay: @10 pages, counts one-third percent of your grade
In a self-authored final exam type paper, reflect on the tools, or gifts, that you will take away from this course to study poverty. You can focus it in any way that reflects what you have actually learned and valued. If you like, you can turn your lens on a newspaper article, or a current event, to talk about how you could draw on the readings from this course to build a research project, a book, or an informed political campaign around the issue.

Ethnography under glass (Ethnography urine test?): Scrutinize one of the following ethnographies, subjecting it to the litmus test we will develop in this class about what an accurate, worthwhile, compelling ethnography of a poor community should be and do.

Ethnographies of poor communities from which you may choose:
(You may be able to find another more to your liking, but clear it with me first, please)
Joyce Ladner, Tomorrow's Tomorrow
William Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged
Camille Jeffers, Living Poor
Horace Cayton and St. Claire Drake, Black Metropolis
Carol Stack, All Our Kin, Call to Home
Elliot Liebow, Tally's Corner, Tell Them Who I am
Terry Williams, The Cocaine Kids; Crackhouse
Betty Lou Valentine, Hustling and Other Hard Work
Alise Waterston, Love, Sorrow, and Rage
James Spradley, You Owe Yourself a Drunk
Dan Rose, Black American Street Life
Elijah Anderson, Streetwise, Code of the Street
Mercer Sullivan, Getting Paid
Mitchell Dumier, Slim's Table; Sidewalk
Katherine Newman, No Shame in My Game
Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect
Steven Gregory, Black Corona
Joyce Aschenbrenner, Lifelines
Jagna Scharf, King Kong on 34th Street
Roger Sanjek, The Future of Us All
Michel Laguerre, American Odyssey
Phillip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York
John Hartigan, Racial Situations
Rhoda Halperin, Practicing Community
Ida Susser, Norman Street
Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street, Streetwise
Patricia Pessar, Visa for a Dream
Mary Anglin, Women, Power, and Dissent in the Hills of Carolina
Joe Howell, Hard Living on Clay Street
Ann Kingsolver, Nafta Stories
Pem Buck, Worked to the Bone
Kim Hopper, One Year Later
Merrill Singer, The Political Economy of AIDS
Jennifer Toth, The Mole People
David Simon, The Corner

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