Download or read book King Kong On 4th Street written by Jagna Wojcicka Sharff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-19 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book chronicles an ethnographic teams involvement over a span of fifteen years with the people of a poor, largely Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York City. Jagna Sharff focuses on a group of families who live within a radius of a few blocks of her storefront office, especially the children who come first to interact with the team. She contrasts her teams initial observations of how people grapple with daily life with the residents expressed hopes and dreams in a community lacking jobs but rife with underground activities. Through lively and interconnected stories, she traces over time the fate of the neighborhood and the outcomes for individual children and adults during an era when the local and national policy of the war on poverty was transmuted into a war against the poor. The books lyrical, cinematically vivid style makes it appealing both for college social science courses and for the general public. }In King Kong on 4th Street, Jagna Sharff chronicles an ethnographic teams involvement over a span of fifteen years with the people of a poor, largely Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York City. Anchoring her observations in field notes, she recounts the joys, fears, and disappointments of daily life as well as the drama of large events. Arson, the murder of a popular local teenager, the mobbing of a grocery store as an act of retribution for his deathall are projected onto a canvas of shifting local and national policies toward poor people and neighborhoods.Sharff provides new insights into gender and family roles, how adaptations to available resources from the welfare state may shape the membership of households, and how children may be trained for specific adult roles that will advance the familys well-being. She also reveals how the underground economy, particularly the commerce in drugs whose profits are realized outside of the neighborhood, undermines neighborhood-wide solidarity and sends people scrambling against one another for jobs in the quasi-licit and illicit sector. Following the lives of a number of families into the next generation, Sharffs ethnographic team documents how external political decisions that change the war on poverty into a war on the poor affected them. Paramilitary sweeps of the neighborhood, in tandem with gentrification and declining social services, produce severe dislocations and relocation to homeless shelters, welfare hotels, and prisons. But the reality described is not all grim.The books vivid style shows that life is more than grim reality. People get real pleasure from raising children and taking part in the human drama around them. Kinfolk, real and fictive, keep each other afloat and reconnected to new neighborhoods and opportunities, including that of upward mobility through religious conversion. Adults and children achieve satisfaction and a measure of security through grit, wit, and acts of heroism and solidarity. }

Download or read book King Kong written by Ray Morton and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 2005 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicling the making of all seven feature films in which King Kong has appeared - including the Peter Jackson film due for release in December 2005 - this book includes coverage of all the original films as well as the many variants and offshoots.

Download or read book Surviving HIV AIDS in the Inner City written by Sabrina Chase and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-19 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surviving HIV/AIDS in the Inner City explores the survival strategies of poor, HIV-positive Puerto Rican women by asking four key questions: Given their limited resources, how did they manage an illness as serious as HIV/AIDS? Did they look for alternatives to conventional medical treatment? Did the challenges they faced deprive them of self-determination, or could they help themselves and each other? What can we learn from these resourceful women? Based on her work with minority women living in Newark, New Jersey, Sabrina Marie Chase illuminates the hidden traps and land mines burdening our current health care system as a whole. For the women she studied, alliances with doctors, nurses, and social workers could literally mean the difference between life and death. By applying the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to the day-to-day experiences of HIV-positive Latinas, Chase explains why some struggled and even died while others flourished and thrived under difficult conditions. These gripping, true-life stories advocate for those living with chronic illness who depend on the health care "safety net." Through her exploration of life and death among Newark's resourceful women, Chase provides the groundwork for inciting positive change in the U.S. health care system.

Download or read book King Kong On 4th Street written by Jagna Wojcicka Sharff and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 1997-11-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In King Kong on 4th Street, Jagna Sharff chronicles an ethnographic team's involvement over a span of fifteen years with the people of a poor, largely Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York City. Anchoring her observations in field notes, she recounts the joys, fears, and disappointments of daily life as well as the drama of large events. Arson, the murder of a popular local teenager, the mobbing of a grocery store as an act of retribution for his death—all are projected onto a canvas of shifting local and national policies toward poor people and neighborhoods.Sharff provides new insights into gender and family roles, how adaptations to available resources from the welfare state may shape the membership of households, and how children may be trained for specific adult roles that will advance the family's well-being. She also reveals how the underground economy, particularly the commerce in drugs whose profits are realized outside of the neighborhood, undermines neighborhood-wide solidarity and sends people scrambling against one another for jobs in the quasi-licit and illicit sector.Following the lives of a number of families into the next generation, Sharff's ethnographic team documents how external political decisions that change the war on poverty into a war on the poor affected them. Paramilitary sweeps of the neighborhood, in tandem with gentrification and declining social services, produce severe dislocations and relocation to homeless shelters, welfare hotels, and prisons. But the reality described is not all grim.The book's vivid style shows that life is more than grim reality. People get real pleasure from raising children and taking part in the human drama around them. Kinfolk, real and fictive, keep each other afloat and reconnected to new neighborhoods and opportunities, including that of upward mobility through religious conversion. Adults and children achieve satisfaction and a measure of security through grit, wit, and acts of heroism and solidarity.

Download or read book Crime s Power written by P. Parnell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-07-17 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The changes that are engulfing the world today - the fall of nation-states and dictatorships, migrations and border crossings, revolution, democratization, and the international spread of capital - call for new approaches to the subject of crime. Anthropologists engage a variety of methods to answer that call in Crime's Power . Their view of crime extends into the intimacies of everyday life as war transforms personal identities, the violence of a serial killer inhabits paintings, and as the feel of imprisonment reveals society's potentials. Moving beyond the fixities of law, this book explores the nature of crime as an expression of power across the spectrum of human differences.

Download or read book Stuck Moving written by Peter Benson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "AUTHOR'S NOTE: This book is unconventional. A self-conscious experiment in form that draws together two vernaculars: anthropological thought and the pop culture of my youth. It is a fraught exercise. I write as a White guy about angst and alienation in the privileged spaces of anthropology and higher education. I appreciate the irony. I hope nonetheless that my experiences with and critical perspectives on social conventions, the culture of liberalism, and ableism in academia might be useful. I seek to expand possibilities of anthropological representation while challenging epistemological, aesthetic, and professional norms in my discipline. It bothers me that anthropology can be so sanctimonious. I take aim at the ableist conceit that anthropologists are non-characters studying a messy world. Much of my life has been a mess. My work has been undertaken amid struggles with pregnancy loss, bipolar disorder, and drug addiction. I have deep regrets about my participation in an exploitative field. I have deep regrets about many things. I have hurt people and been hurt by people. I hope my stories and reflections add to what others have already written about a more open, honest, and self-deprecating anthropology"--

Download or read book Cracks in the Pavement written by Martin Sanchez-Jankowski and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Neighborhoods have been central to American sociology since its inception, yet we have understood little about how the institutions in urban communities evolve, disappear, or persist over time. Instead, as of late, many scholars have treated neighborhoods as collections of individuals and families, ignoring the institutional ecology. Understanding the dynamic role of local institutions is critical not only to sociological scholarship but also to important public policy debates about urban poverty. Martín Sánchez-Jankowski offers the reader an important, comprehensive look at how local institutions ranging from barbershops to street gangs to public housing both reflect and shape the culture and daily rhythms of the residents who live with them. His ecological perspective offers an important missing link in debates about 'neighborhood effects' and should be read by anyone interested in understanding urban poverty."—Dalton Conley, author of Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America "In his famous and moving preface to Les Miserables, Victor Hugo warns us that as long as there is poverty, such tales will be told. But stories are not often told about the resurgence of poor communities—their struggles to mobilize and change their condition. But this book does just that—filling in the rest of the picture; and not of individual Horatio Algers, but with textured and critical analysis of the barriers these communities face and the pathways they take to achieve social change."—Troy Duster, New York University

Download or read book Urban Life written by George Gmelch and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2018-01-03 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than half of the world’s population lives in cities. What are their lives like in very different global and globalizing cities? How can urban anthropologists study and understand the diverse and complex experiences of urban dwellers all over the globe? The latest edition of Urban Life explores questions about how to study urban lives and examines experiences of urban inhabitants in cities across the globe. Authors ask questions such as, how can one study the activities in a huge fish market in Tokyo? How do elderly residents benefit from urban agriculture in New York City? How do people maneuver ever-present traffic jams in Istanbul? How do low-income residents in Cairo manage their lives drawing on neighborhood social networks? How do immigrants fight for green spaces in Paris? How do families manage transnational ties between New York City and Ecuador? The book is organized into six parts: Urban Fieldwork; Communities; Urban Structure, Inequality, and Survival; Immigrants, Migrants, and Refugees; Changing Cities; and Current Topics in Urban Anthropology. The last part addresses issues at the forefront of anthropological research and broader political debates, like environmental justice, disability and accessibility, and access to water supplies. Each part includes an introduction and each chapter is preceded by notes about its context and relevance. The rich ethnographic content of the chapters makes them highly accessible to students while addressing relevant topics and themes.

Download or read book New Poverty Studies written by Judith G. Goode and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stock market euphoria and blind faith in the post cold war economy have driven the topic of poverty from popular and scholarly discussion in the United States. At the same time the gap between the rich and poor has never been wider. The New Poverty Studies critically examines the new war against the poor that has accompanied the rise of the New Economy in the past two decades, and details the myriad ways poor people have struggled against it. The essays collected here explore how global, national, and local structures of power produce poverty and affect the material well-being, social relations and politicization of the poor. In updating the 1960s encounter between ethnography and U.S. poverty, The New Poverty Studies highlights the ways poverty is constructed across multiple scales and multiple axes of difference. Questioning the common wisdom that poverty persists because of the pathology, social isolation and welfare state "dependency" of the poor, the contributors to The New Poverty Studies point instead to economic restructuring and neoliberal policy "reforms" which have caused increased social inequality and economic polarization in the U.S. Contributors include: Georges Fouron, Donna Goldstein, Judith Goode, Susan B. Hyatt, Catherine Kingfisher, Peter Kwong, Vin Lyon-Callo, Jeff Maskovsky, Sandi Morgen, Leith Mullings, Frances Fox Piven, Matthew Rubin, Nina Glick Schiller, Carol Stack, Jill Weigt, Eve Weinbaum, Brett Williams, and Patricia Zavella. "These contributions provide a dynamic understanding of poverty and immiseration" —North American Dialogue, Vol. 4, No. 1, Nov. 2001

Download or read book Selling the Lower East Side written by Christopher Mele and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lower East Side of Manhattan is rich in stories -- of poor immigrants who flocked there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; of beatniks, hippies, and artists who peopled it mid-century; and of the real estate developers and politicians who have always shaped what is now termed the "East Village". Today, the musical Rent plays on Broadway to a mostly white and suburban audience, MTV exploits the neighborhood's newly trendy squalor in a film promotion, and on the Internet a cyber soap opera and travel-related Web pages lure members of the middle class to enjoy a commodified and sanitized version of the neighborhood. In this sweeping account, Christopher Mele analyzes the political and cultural forces that have influenced the development of this distinctive community. He describes late nineteenth-century notions of the Lower East Side as a place of entrenched poverty, ethnic plurality, political activism, and "low" culture that elicited feelings of revulsion and fear among the city's elite and middle classes. The resulting -- and ongoing -- struggle between government and residents over affordable and decent housing has in turn affected real estate practices and urban development policies. Selling the Lower East Side recounts the resistance tactics used by community residents, as well as the impulse on the part of some to perpetuate the image of the neighborhood as dangerous, romantic, and bohemian, clinging to the marginality that has been central to the identity of the East Village and subverting attempts to portray it as "new and improved". Ironically, this very image of urban grittiness has been appropriated by a cultural marketplace hungry for new fodder.Mele explores the ways that developers, media executives, and others have coopted the area's characteristics -- analyzing the East Village as a "style provider" where what is being marketed is "difference". The result is a visionary look at how political and economic actions transform neighborhoods and at what happens when a neighborhood is what is being "consumed".

Download or read book Families written by Alex Liazos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-03 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike other family textbooks that mostly emphasize conflicts and problems, this book also features the joys and pleasures of family living and its mutually nourishing qualities. Its perspective reflects polls, surveys, and student essays indicating that most people value their families. Families everywhere provide love, support, and sustenance to their members, but they do so in many different arrangements.Understanding the wide variety of families historically and across cultures gives the student a better basis for understanding how families change and a better grasp of more controversial changes such as the gradual acceptance by Westerners of same-sex marriage and child-rearing by single people. Liazos offers two poignant chapters not found in other texts. Family Living (Chapter Six) focuses on the social value of caregiving and family meals. Kin and Community (Chapter Seven) focuses on relationships among kin and the larger community.

Download or read book Catching a Case written by Tina Lee and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Influenced by news reports of young children brutalized by their parents, most of us see the role of child services as the prevention of severe physical abuse. But as Tina Lee shows in Catching a Case, most child welfare cases revolve around often ill-founded charges of neglect, and the parents swept into the system are generally struggling but loving, fighting to raise their children in the face of crushing poverty, violent crime, poor housing, lack of childcare, and failing schools. Lee explored the child welfare system in New York City, observing family courts, interviewing parents and following them through the system, asking caseworkers for descriptions of their work and their decision-making processes, and discussing cases with attorneys on all sides. What she discovered about the system is troubling. Lee reveals that, in the face of draconian budget cuts and a political climate that blames the poor for their own poverty, child welfare practices have become punitive, focused on removing children from their families and on parental compliance with rules. Rather than provide needed help for families, case workers often hold parents to standards almost impossible for working-class and poor parents to meet. For instance, parents can be accused of neglect for providing inadequate childcare or housing even when they cannot afford anything better. In many cases, child welfare exacerbates family problems and sometimes drives parents further into poverty while the family court system does little to protect their rights. Catching a Case is a much-needed wake-up call to improve the child welfare system, and to offer more comprehensive social services that will allow all children to thrive.

Download or read book Cultural Neuroscience Cultural Influences on Brain Function written by Juan Y. Chiao and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2009-11-25 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents recent empirical advances using neuroscience techniques to investigate how culture influences neural processes underlying a wide range of human abilities, from perception and scene processing to memory and social cognition. It also highlights the theoretical and methodological issues with conducting cultural neuroscience research. Section I provides diverse theoretical perspectives on how culture and biology interact are represented. Sections II –VI is to demonstrate how cultural values, beliefs, practices and experience affect neural systems underlying a wide range of human behavior from perception and cognition to emotion, social cognition and decision-making. The final section presents arguments for integrating the study of culture and the human brain by providing an explicit articulation of how the study of culture can inform the study of the brain and vice versa.

Download or read book Odd Tribes written by John Hartigan Jr. and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-14 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Odd Tribes challenges theories of whiteness and critical race studies by examining the tangles of privilege, debasement, power, and stigma that constitute white identity. Considering the relation of phantasmatic cultural forms such as the racial stereotype “white trash” to the actual social conditions of poor whites, John Hartigan Jr. generates new insights into the ways that race, class, and gender are fundamentally interconnected. By tracing the historical interplay of stereotypes, popular cultural representations, and the social sciences’ objectifications of poverty, Hartigan demonstrates how constructions of whiteness continually depend on the vigilant maintenance of class and gender decorums. Odd Tribes engages debates in history, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies over how race matters. Hartigan tracks the spread of “white trash” from an epithet used only in the South prior to the Civil War to one invoked throughout the country by the early twentieth century. He also recounts how the cultural figure of “white trash” influenced academic and popular writings on the urban poor from the 1880s through the 1990s. Hartigan’s critical reading of the historical uses of degrading images of poor whites to ratify lines of color in this country culminates in an analysis of how contemporary performers such as Eminem and Roseanne Barr challenge stereotypical representations of “white trash” by claiming the identity as their own. Odd Tribes presents a compelling vision of what cultural studies can be when diverse research methodologies and conceptual frameworks are brought to bear on pressing social issues.

Download or read book Drugs in America written by Ansley Hamid and published by Jones & Bartlett Learning. This book was released on 1998 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This basic analysis of the drug problem in America describes the historical and present use of mood-altering drugs; the economics of drug trafficking; theories of addiction; and the resulting crime, violence, and community deterioration. In addition, the author focuses on the effects of legalizing drugs and the role of law enforcement. This is an ideal text for any course discussing drug use and abuse.

Download or read book New Perspectives in Political Ethnography written by Lauren Joseph and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-09-20 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethnography is uniquely equipped to look microscopically at the foundations of political institutions and their attendant sent of practices, just as it is ideally suited to explain why political actors behave the way they do and to identify the causes, processes and outcomes that are part and parcel of political life. This volume, based on a special issue of Qualitative Sociology offers an ethnographic study of politicians and political systems.

Download or read book Women Redefining the Experience of Food Insecurity written by Janet Page-Reeves and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women Redefining the Experience of Food Insecurity: Life Off the Edge of the Table is about understanding the relationship between food insecurity and women’s agency. The contributors explore both the structural constraints that limit what and how much people eat, and the myriad ways that women creatively and strategically re-structure their own fields of action in relation to food, demonstrating that the nature of food insecurity is multi-dimensional. The chapters portray how women develop strategies to make it possible to have food in the cupboard and on the table to be able to feed their families. Exploring these themes, this book offers a lens for thinking about the food system that incorporates women as agentive actors and links women’s everyday food-related activities with ideas about food justice, food sovereignty, and food citizenship. Taken together, the chapters provide a unique perspective on how we can think broadly about the issue of food insecurity in relation to gender, culture, inequality, poverty, and health disparity. By problematizing the mundane world of how women procure and prepare food in a context of scarcity, this book reveals dynamics, relationships and experiences that would otherwise go unremarked. Normally under the radar, these processes are embedded in power relations that demand analysis, and demonstrate strategic individual action that requires recognition. All of the chapters provide a counter to caricatured notions that the choices women make are irresponsible or ignorant, or that the lives of women from low-income, low-wealth communities are predicated on impotence and weakness. Yet, the authors do not romanticize women as uniformly resilient or consistently heroic. Instead, they explore the contradictions inherent in the ways that marginalized, seemingly powerless women ignore, resist, embrace and challenge hegemonic, patriarchal systems through their relationship with food.