Matthew D. Marr, Cornell University Press, 2015
Book Review
Rayna Rusenko
Florida International University
In Better Must Come, Matthew D. Marr takes a comparative look at homelessness in two global cities, Tokyo and Los Angeles. He brings into relief the relation of homelessness to structural conditions at multiple levels and the vital importance of social resources for facilitating exit. Drawing on ethnographic data, Marr traces trajectories into and out of homelessness while depicting in striking detail the ways in which inequalities fueled by economic and ideological neoliberalism have impacted governance, policy, and communities in each city, thus shaping experiences and treatment of homelessness. Through analysis of multiple exit stories, Marr’s work not only identifies a myriad of social, structural, and systemic obstacles that complicate transition out of homelessness, but also shines a light on the contextual conditions that facilitate pathways to greater socio-economic security.
Marr’s exploration of processes of exiting homelessness draws from in-depth longitudinal interviews with 34 informants, 17 each from Tokyo and Los Angeles, who he follows through and beyond their participation in transitional housing programs. His underlying aim is to challenge acculturation theories commonly utilized in homelessness studies and ethnographic research, which advance thinking of homelessness “as an entrenched state, identity, or culture� (p. 182) that takes hold of people over time. By positing the question “What enables exit?� and placing the stories of his informants at the heart of his analysis, Marr directs our attention to how social structures and systemic arrangements promote or hamper exits from homelessness by tracing individual experiences in navigating state aid, local services, labor and housing markets, and general interpersonal interactions. He also draws from extensive secondary literature on social policy, organizational studies, and social tie activation to develop a highly sophisticated multilevel contextual analysis that plainly illustrates how socio-political and economic conditions tie into factors shaping individual lives.
The book consists of four parts, each intermixed with exit stories from Tokyo and Los Angeles, to ground a vigorous comparative analysis of policies, programs, social contexts, and lived realities. The first part investigates neoliberalism’s “glocalization� in Tokyo and Los Angeles, and provides a backdrop for understanding how globalization has shaped homelessness and policy responses in each city through its interface with conditions at global, national, and local scales. The second part delves into interviewees’ experiences in welfare programs and labor and housing markets, often marked by exclusionary treatment and ongoing struggles with precarity. The third part illustrates the instrumental role that social ties play as interviewees negotiate exit from homelessness through interactions with organizations, family, and friends. The final part draws on lessons from all previous chapters and both cities to outline policy implications.
Marr’s work is valuable for the advances it makes in delineating the ways in which neoliberalism, welfare systems, labor markets, support programs, social attitudes, and civic, private, and public sector actors interact at two distinct urban points in the global picture of homelessness. Moreover, his work retains a crisp focus on the interplay between structural and social influences at multiple levels and how these shape long-term trajectories—and possibilities for exit—in individual lives. For example, he details the ways in which informants variously navigate constrained labor and housing markets, utilizing social capital where possible, despite formidable barriers imposed by neoliberal forces, such as increased competition for sinking wages and personal entanglements with the penal state and debt. In a salient analysis of state aid, Marr demonstrates how systematic and street level practices of exclusion at government agencies hinder the universality of universal programs (p. 92) such as Supplemental Security Income in the US and livelihood assistance in Japan, thereby needlessly complicating transitions out of homelessness and even fracturing families or undermining health.
While drawing attention to how exclusionary practices sustain homelessness, Marr pinpoints social ties as a solution, principally those found in social programs and families. In particular, he highlights the critical importance of client-staff ties in organizations, and introduces three key principles—holism, flexibility, and homophily—for developing beneficial relationships that nurture trust and resource mobilization. He defines the first principle, holism, as staff capacity to recognize broader social causes of client circumstances and to subsequently connect clients to essential assistance, as opposed to placing blame on the individual. The second principle, flexibility, refers to staff capacity for considering individual circumstances when overseeing program rules and timelines, and requires openness to adjustment rather than rigid insistence on conformity. The third principle, homophily is presented as the shared background between staff and clients, such as in class, culture, or experience with homelessness, that reduces social distance. Marr gives detailed examples of how organizational client-staff ties are helped or harmed through the lens of each of these principles, while also emphasizing their material and affective impacts on clients. Moreover, he clearly documents how extra-organizational contexts—such as policy and legal restrictions—shape the formation of these ties and, by extension, client opportunity and security in outcomes.
In his conclusion, Marr highlights how neoliberal approaches underlie and exacerbate socio-economic insecurity as experienced by his informants, and then proposes interventions. He specifically directs attention to “persistent structural arrangements� (p. 189) that generate and perpetuate homelessness, because of the limitations they place on the success of supportive programs in facilitating lasting exits. Marr offers a compelling and empirically supported case for the need for broader structural fixes, such as greater regulation of labor and housing markets and expansion of social safety nets. However, he does not draw as fully from his findings as he could. In particular, while his book richly illustrates the power and peril of social contexts in facilitating, or frustrating, exit from homelessness, he considers social forces with less vigor in his conclusion. Thus, for example, his largely structural proposals do not address problems of social and systemic discrimination, which he has shown to affect universality. Also, although he identifies social movements as a positive essential force for change, he underplays their relevance for the development of multilevel solutions. Greater consideration of the social forces that generate, sustain, and, conversely, offer solutions to homelessness could lead us to conceive of new social and institutional schema, such as for re/defining work and family, to correct exclusionary paradigms that undermine collective human security.
In Better Must Come, Marr does not shy from challenging widely-held perceptions of homelessness. He advances a rigorous and graceful analysis of conditions in both cities using clear language, well-defined terms, and concise organization that together render the subject accessible to a wide range of readers, regardless of familiarity with homelessness or related policy in Japan or the US. At the same time, it is a sharp academic work that will interest scholars, policymakers, and practitioners alike. Marr’s resonant message, that “the struggle to transcend homelessness is more central to the experience…than is adaptation� (p. 181), serves as both a notice and warning that acquiescence to the predicament of homelessness may be more prevalent among persons without direct experience, than those who grapple with it.
Keywords: homelessness, urban studies, Los Angeles, Tokyo
Download a PDF of Rayna Rusenko’s book review here
Edward Murphy, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015.
Book Review
Elizabeth Youngling
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
In For a Proper Home: Housing Rights In the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010, anthropologist and historian Edward Murphy deftly explores the ways in which “certain practices and expectations of propriety have oriented the political field of housing since the mid-20th century� (p. 3) and analyzes the home’s varied social, political, and economic significance in a period of tremendous national and global change. The book combines extensive archival research on the roots of 20th century Chile’s changing political-economic and social agenda and its impact on urban planning and housing policies with participant observation among those most affected by Chile’s development plans: the low-income residents, or pobladores, living in Chile’s unrecognized, underserved, and isolated urban slums. Through an examination of the ways in which housing activists’ struggles for housing rights and legitimate homeownership both challenged and mirrored Chile’s own vision of itself as an exemplary Latin American state, For a Proper Home offers readers a compelling, nuanced account of the entangled nature of propriety, politics, and citizenship in the second half of the 20th and the first decades of the 21st century.
Based on thirty months of archival and ethnographic research conducted over a twelve-year period, Murphy gives the reader an in-depth education in Chilean political, social, and economic history, while also using the oral histories he gathered to highlight the experiences of several generations of housing activists who fought for homes of their own over the course of the country’s tumultuous journey from socialism to authoritarianism to neoliberal democracy. Organized into eleven chapters and divided into four parts, the book follows a loose chronological order. However, Murphy is attuned to recurrent themes (such as the import placed on “propriety� as evidenced by traditional family structures and gender roles) that influence both state housing policies and the Chilean citizenry’s expectations for their homes, even in the midst of political change. At times, the density of the book’s long-range historical perspective overshadows Murphy’s use of his ethnographic materials. However, his careful attention to the continuities and disjunctures of the past and present serves as an example for any ethnographer seriously committed to historical analysis, as well as for any historian interested in deepening their work through ethnography.
In Part One, Murphy addresses “the urban politics of propriety� and its implications for the forms of activism that those without “proper homes� use to petition the state. He also examines the influence of 19th century ideals of urban aesthetics and organization on Chilean politicians and city planners as they sought to “propel [Santiago] and its residents into the very latest in urban design and governance� (p. 43), even as Chile’s “inequitable and often volatile economy constantly upset the ideal of urban development� (p. 44). In Part Two, Murphy examines the successive waves of housing activism and land seizures that became quotidian events in Chile in the late 1960s and early 1970s and their long-term, often less than satisfying outcomes for their participants, who gained homes but were denied true equality. He also addresses the high hopes and unfulfilled promises of the Allende years, and the ways in which regressive forces from within and outside of Chile (most notably, from the United States) stymied and eventually destroyed Allende’s ambitious agenda for greater social and economic equality.
In Part Three, the book moves into the years of the military dictatorship, paying particular attention to the ways in which Pinochet’s regime attempted to decouple housing from politics by attending to individual, apolitical petitions for homeownership rights and ignoring the claims of politically-affiliated activist groups. Murphy also makes connections between Dictatorship-era planners’ concern with constructing orderly, well-maintained urban spaces that would show Chile to its best advantage (such as by razing the slums that border the highway leading from the international airport to Santiago’s city center) and the desire to project an image of Chile as a modern state in the late 19th century. Part Four describes the transition to democracy in Chile and the lost opportunities for collective action and political critique that paradoxically accompanied many Chileans’ successful bids for homeownership. Murphy also addresses the continued stigmatization of pobladores in Chile, as well as the painful rise of indebtedness and insecurity in poor urban neighborhoods, where work is unstable and homes, while now owned, are often poorly constructed and socially isolated. In his conclusion, Murphy asserts that, “in making their homes, pobladores have contributed to making their city and society. In doing so, they have also played a role in the extension of private property regimes, the unfolding of state power and citizenship, and the production of space in the city…their efforts to build lives of dignity continue� (p. 271).
Although For a Proper Home focuses on the evolution of low-income housing in Chile in the late 20th century, the story Murphy tells is of much broader relevance: in essence, he gives us a sorely needed analysis of the limits and possibilities of socioeconomic transformation through individual empowerment and ownership—a hallmark of neoliberal projects the world over. While the land seizures of the 1960s and ‘70s were collective projects that also attended to the perceived needs and desires of proper households, the rejection of community-based political activism in favor of individual petitions for ownership during the Pinochet era effectively depoliticized housing claims. Homeownership rates continue to be included in the development indices of entities such as the World Bank and the United Nations, but Murphy’s book questions what kinds of political and social formations may be lost when ownership is gained.
For a Proper Home is an ambitious book that makes important contributions to anthropology and history, urban anthropology, political and legal anthropology, and the anthropology of Latin America. Early on, Murphy notes that by “…becoming insurgent owners, former squatters have helped to transform the state. Yet they have also been ensnared within its web� (p. 6). His tireless attention to both political ensnarement and transformation, and his use of the archives, ethnographic fieldwork, and oral history makes for a complex and engaging text, suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in anthropology as well as history, urban planning, political science, and Latin American studies.
Keywords: Chile, housing rights, homeownership, history, urban studies
Download a PDF of Elizabeth Younglin’s book review here
Alice Goffman, University of Chicago Press, 2014
Book Review
Linda Rabben
University of Maryland
Is On the Run a “truly wonderful book,� “clear-eyed and gripping,� as elite reviewers contend— or is it a mess, based on ethically dubious methods and unsubstantiated claims that strain the reader’s credulity to the maximum? I asked myself these questions after reading a debunking exposé of the book in the Chronicle of Higher Education and again while reading the book for this review (Campos 2015).
My own experiences during some 35 years as an applied, urban, and engaged anthropologist, working outside academia, sometimes doing fieldwork under difficult conditions, strongly affected my response to On the Run. I cannot pretend to be an objective reader. But who can? Neutrality is a myth, and the truth is often a slippery thing to grasp.
* * *
Starting as an undergraduate, Alice Goffman spent six or seven years studying impoverished African-Americans in a largely segregated neighborhood in Philadelphia. She immersed herself in the lives of black boys, girls, men, and women who were hiding, running from, or confronting the criminal justice system. They spent years behind bars or on parole or probation, while their loved ones tried and often failed to maintain relationships with them.
Goffman was no ordinary fieldworker. Daughter of renowned sociologist Erving Goffman (who died aged 60 in 1982), she is also the daughter and stepdaughter of prominent sociolinguists. Her teachers and supervisors at elite academic institutions served as powerful backers of her work. In a “Methodological Note� that doesn’t address her methods, Goffman writes that her parents gave her “substantial financial support, understood what I was trying to do and brought their own experience to bear� on her research (231). Her professors encouraged her and devoted considerable time to helping her, she says.
As an experienced fieldworker, I cannot help feeling that they should have stopped her before she lost her sense of self, witnessed numerous crimes (including an alleged murder by police), endangered herself and others, showed signs of post-traumatic stress and apparently acted as an accessory to convicted violent criminals. She reports that she even considered committing felonies as a way of getting closer to her informants’ life experiences.
Or maybe her supporters did try to stop her, but she couldn’t be deterred. She mentions that several white friends cut her off with “harsh words about the strange and risky life I was leading� (244).
I hope nobody thinks that Goffman’s extreme field methods warrant emulation. (She paraphrases her father, from a 1974 talk on fieldwork, that doing ethnography involves “cutting yourself off from your prior life and subjecting yourself as much as possible to the crap that people you want to know about are being subjected to.� Perhaps she took his injunction too literally.) Not only were these methods dangerous, but her actions included serious violations of ethnographic ethics, such as over-involving herself in her informants’ private lives and failing to question or investigate possible exaggerations, distortions, and lies. Goffman does not substantiate many of the stories her subjects told her but reports them as facts. She admits that some of the storytellers might have been self-serving but does not cite evidence to confirm their accounts of their arrests, incarcerations and other information that she could have found in the public record. Although she presents her subjects as real people, I wondered if some of them might be composites. She doesn’t say. She also makes contradictory and inconsistent claims about her own actions.
As a result the CHE reviewer lost faith in her veracity and charged Goffman with inventing many things, including a story that police took her into custody without a warrant and interrogated her at the station after laying their guns on the table with the barrels pointing at her. Did she report certain experiences—such as police throwing her to the floor during a warrantless raid, pushing her down with a knee in her back, bruising her face and hands as she lay there and forcibly cuffing her—that others, not she, might have undergone? This particular story seems to contradict her claim that police habitually paid little or no attention to her, even when she was at the scene of a crime.
Traumatized people (as Goffman seems to have been) sometimes suffer cognitive damage or memory lapses that lead them to present unverifiable stories as facts. It is unclear if she was so impaired that she could not accurately report what had happened to her and her subjects. Responsibility for this state of affairs lies partly with her supervisors, who should have ensured that her work met high standards of proof and reliability.
But maybe the editors of the paperback edition, published by a trade press, decided, for the sake of marketability, to omit the copious documentation, citations and bibliography that her dissertation included (Singal 2015). If so, then they must take responsibility for publishing an account that could be construed as false, misleading, or distorted. I couldn’t help wondering: If Goffman had come from a less-prominent background, without powerful backers, would such a manuscript, so lacking in independently verifiable evidence, have been accepted for publication?
Perhaps Goffman should have published the book as a memoir or a novel, “based on a true story,� and thus forestalled the many unanswerable questions it raises as an ethnography and a professed work of nonfiction.
But let’s assume that Goffman is telling the whole truth, meticulously documented over years of research, in a highly readable and skillfully assembled book. In that case she has successfully survived the cruel ordeal of ethnographic fieldwork that her father prescribed and produced an extraordinary, original and important work, well suited for classroom use. Read it and decide for yourself.
Keywords: Criminalization, race, Philadelphia, urban studies, fieldwork, ethics
References
Campus, Paul. 2015. “Alice Goffman’s Implausible Ethnography,� Chronicle of Higher Education, August 21.
Singal, Jesse. 2015. “Here’s What’s in Alice Goffman’s Dissertation,� Science of Us, July.
Download a PDF of Linda Rabben’s Book Review Here
Leslie Irvine, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012
Book Review
Jayne Howell
California State University, Long Beach
Leslie Irvine asserts in her Introduction to the poignant My Dog Always Eats First: Homeless People and their Animals that the United States is a nation of animal lovers. Over 70 percent of households have pets as do millions of homeless individuals. Estimates range from a conservative 1 in 10 to a high of up to 1 in 4 members of subpopulation having at least one cat or dog (pp. 8-9). While homeless people with pets are not always visible, there is no question that members of the public are aware of, and often vocally criticize, these pet owners. Irvine, a social psychologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, uses her failed attempt to purchase a dog from a homeless man as a stepping off point for examining the lived experiences of 75 men and women who are committed to the welfare of their pets (from 1 to 15 animals), frequently at the expense of their own meals and comfort (p. 55-57).
The study is informed by Irvine’s long-standing convictions about and research regarding the “importance of animals in human society� (p. 9). Over the course of eight chapters, she uses a structural-functional framework to explore a number of topics regarding the identity, social interactions, and economic and material circumstances emerging in this unique situation, including: (1) Why do these individuals have pets? (2) How do they care for them, including what sacrifices do they make and what, if any, assistance do they receive? (3) What kinds of emotional bonds form between owner or “guardian� and pet? (4) What are the benefits and drawbacks of owning a pet? (5) How does owning a pet factor into the owner’s sense of self? This study shines an important light on a poorly understood dimension of the lifestyle of a growing number of urban residents whose lives are shaped by “poverty and a lack of affordable housing� (p. 33).
Irvine analyzes narratives collected in five cities (Boulder, Colorado; Berkeley, Sacramento and San Francisco, California; and Miami, Florida) with individuals the author divides into four broad categories. The recently dislocated (n=17) are having the most difficulty as they learn to cope with the realities of a job loss or eviction; most hope that homelessness will be a temporary condition. Straddlers (n-17) are in a liminal state, having moved between being homelessness and housed at least twice in recent years. Irvine distinguishes between two types of outsiders (n=25), individuals who are chronically homeless and quite literally live “outside of mainstream society� (pp. 35-37). Among these are nine “settled� men and women who have been “on the streets� for at least 5 years and have semi-permanent alternate accommodations such as living in vehicles or junkyards. Sixteen other individuals, including a number of youth, are “travellers� who move around, often “couch surfing� with friends or family. The fourth category includes sixteen “housed� individuals who were recently homeless but now are “domiciled� or reside in a treatment program. As explained in Chapter Two, these data are supplemented through interviews with a range of service providers for pets (including veterinarians and students and shelter workers), personnel at shelters and agencies for members of the homeless population, and surveys of domiciled (e.g., non-homeless) residents. She stresses the importance of working with gatekeepers to gain entry into a community whose members have learned to cope with criticism and verbal abuse (pp. 21-22).
Irvine found that homeless pet owners wanted to discuss their animals (p. 26), and their narratives are the strongest element of this text. All insisted that their pets are well fed and well cared for, with some asserting that beyond “eating first,� these animals benefit from having near constant companionship and the greater “freedom� of being outdoors relative to pets with homes. Thus, although a number of researchers maintain that there is no evidence that having pets improves their owners’ lives (p. 106), Irvine finds strong bonds between her interviewees and their pets. At least one-third of her informants describe their pets as “friends,� and to a lesser extent, as their “children.� In some cases, the pets have been “lifesavers� or “life changers,� who have given their owners inspiration to live, including seeking treatment for substance abuse. Many dog “guardians� have received “service tags� for their companions (p. 31) that allowed them to enter locations such as shelters, soup kitchens and government agencies (pp. 8-9).
Fully acknowledging the possibility that critics will accuse her of “romanticizing homelessness� by asserting that agency can develop through pet ownership (p. 172), Irvine maintains that bonds with animals are vital to the “construction of [homeless peoples’] positive moral identities� (p. 158). Her compelling argument ends with a number of recommendations that would help homeless people and their pets, including developing affordable housing that allows pets, and increasing the numbers of shelters accepting pets and veterinary clinics providing low cost if not free medical care.
This engaging book makes an important contribution to the literature about the lifestyles of the homeless population, whose circumstances are arguably among the greatest social problems in US cities of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Irvine’s vivid descriptions of attachments to pets complement the importance of social bonds raised in classic ethnographies of homelessness, including Elliot Liebow’s (1993) Tell Them Who I Am, Robert Desjarlais’ (1997) Shelter Blues, and Irene Glasser and Rae Bridgman’s (1999) Braving the Street: The Anthropology of Homelessness. It is suitable for lower and upper division courses as well as graduate seminars.
Keywords: homelessness, urban studies, human-animal relations
References
Desjarlais, Robert. 1997. Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood among the Homeless. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
Glasser, Irene, and Rae Bridgman. 1999. Braving the Street: The Anthropology of Homelessness. New York: Berghahn Books.
Liebow, Elliot. 1993. Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women. New York: Free Press