Alanna E. Cooper, an anthropologist and a Jewish cultural historian began her research on an old Central Asian Jewish community because of a small and curious dictionary:

 I don’t remember the name of the man who sold the dictionary to me. He was one of the many people I met in the 1990s who was getting rid of his belongings in advance of his migration from Bukhara. He invited me to his home and showed me the small stack of books on the floor of his empty living room.

I couldn’t quite make out what they were, except that they had been printed in Jerusalem about a century earlier. The man wanted only a few dollars for them, so I took them with me.

The dictionary was the most curious of the lot. Less than 50 pages long, with translations of just 700 words, its ambition lies not in its length but in its breadth. Six columns run across each page: Hebrew, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Arabic and Turkish.

Read the rest at the Jewish Daily Forward:

Jews of Bukhara Helped Me To Understand Personal History
By Alanna E. Cooper, May 09, 2013

The Toronto Star discusses the research of Jennifer Lansford, a professor of psychology and cultural anthropology at Duke University.  Lansford conducts cross-cultural research on motherhood. 

 “Universally, one of the key tasks of motherhood is to make children feel loved, accepted and valued, and that’s regardless of cultural context…Mothers who are able to do this successfully will have children who are better adjusted,” she says.

“In the U.S., for example, a good mother is reactive… She responds to the child’s needs, feeding or changing him when he cries. In contrast, a good mother in Japan is proactive, attempting to anticipate the needs of her baby before he cries.”

 “Lansford acknowledges that her research makes cultural generalizations, and cautions against drawing sweeping conclusions because there is significant variation within countries and cultures.”

Read more at thestar.com

Mothers love differently around the world

New research explores the different ways mothers show they love their babies in countries around the world.

Marco Chown Oved, May 09 2013

Writing for NPR, the anthropologist Barbara King observes: “some parents, mostly in one area of New York City, as far as I can tell, are raising their children from birth without diapers.” She speaks to Meredith Small, an anthropologist from Cornell University, who explains: "Only Westerns make such a big deal about toilet training," and adds that the lack of diaper use in many cultures does not reflect a lack of diapers:  “Of course they could use any cloth, but often this is the much easier way.”

Read more at NPR:

Asef Bayat. 2012. “Politics in the City-Inside-Out” City and Society 24, 2:110–128.

In cities such as Beirut and Cairo, the quiet everyday ways that poor people reappropriate space from the rich in the Middle East creates a new version of urban public space that Asef Bayat terms the “city-inside-out.” This new version of urban public space is one in which the city’s levels of public-ness mean that the city is, quite literally, inside out, a place in which poor people have no option but to have a heavy presence outdoors, on the streets, and in which the response of the rich is to seek their own exclusive and enclosed zones. 

For the poor and disenfranchised the streets are central because they are simultaneously a place to express contention and an indispensable asset where economic and cultural life is reproduced. Bayat argues that in both of these ways people are involved in creating a set of “street politics.” These “street politics” take the form of conflicts over the control and use of public space and are also venues “where people forge collective identities and extend their solidarities beyond their immediate familiar circles” (120). Here slum settlements, street hawkers, and the urban disenfranchised form particular types of mobilization that Bayat terms “non-movements,” because they are “the collective actions of non-collective actors”(121).

As the streets are used by the urban poor for daily practices they become spaces where people “carve off, claim, and even push back elites from sizable pieces of the urban universe” (122). This occurs not only through physical control but also through the creation of social and political spaces that mean that the city is a place where the subalterns are overwhelmingly present in public arenas. This presence then is a way that the disenfranchised, who have been denied the benefits of urban citizenship, force elites to retreat into gated communities and locked vehicles and to hide behind private security guards. This art of presence is the way the disenfranchised reclaim the city.

"FEMA has took over this parish. We know what we need to do and how to do it, but you know, what can we do when somebody else is calling the shots?" 

-Buffy (November 2005)

Katrina tore into the Gulf Coast in 2005 bringing fright and ruin and heartbreak. It ripped open the collective American psyche and, for a brief moment, left a void. That space within fresh disaster is quiet, and in its stillness we breathe the rawness of impermanence, and we wonder if anything can ever be mended back. None whose lives were changed by the horror of Katrina needed anything more to endure beyond the shock and grief of the disaster. They needed every possible comfort, every shred of understanding a rescue could lend. Instead, the system deployed to secure their recovery and help them heal piled on bewildering new hardships, and in the years to come, increased the suffering of survivors and prolonged the time it took them to get their lives back in order. 

The storm and levee breaches left a “terrifying wilderness of ruins”ⁱ that constituted the largest residential disaster in US history,ⁱⁱ with damage or destruction to more than 500,000 homes in Louisiana and countless other structures in a 90-square-mile area. Every one of the 300 family members in my research experienced profound material loss from Katrina. ⁱⁱⁱ

But there was more than material loss. Invisible blows also threatened the group’s connective tissue formed from generations of cultural adaptations and traditions. In both visible and invisible ways, the community of African Americans I studied suffered at a collective level as a “wounded culture.” Meanwhile, the work to recreate communities was placed in the hands of recovery authorities like FEMA and Road Home.^iv Institutional authorities rarely recognize the presence of their own assumptions or the problems those assumptions pose for those unfamiliar with them. We need not attribute malice to those who intended every good. But at the same time, we do need to become aware that authorities carry with them their own institutional culture, systems, procedures, values, and expectations, and for purposes of this discussion, I am calling these authorities the “rescue culture.” 

What follow are some of the stories that demonstrate how post-Katrina communication between cultures failed and, in failing, undermined recovery. In this piece, I introduce three types of communication failure: “the unheard local knowledge,” “the non-responsive response,” and “the black hole.” 

*   *   *

Buffy is a soft-spoken 45-year old man who lives within a 15-minute drive of scores of family members in the bayou-rich area of St. Bernard Parish, just southeast of New Orleans. He is hard working and, as a black man in a mostly white parish, has had experience taking things in stride. Buffy’s cousins and aunts and uncles respect his carpentry skills and his role as a head cook at large family gatherings. He is one of the few family members with a parish government job, a job with the road crew that he had been promoted to supervise not long before the storm.

Buffy did not evacuate with his family to Dallas before Katrina. The hurricane season is serious, but when the caravan of cars headed for Texas and shelter with cousin Connie, both Buffy and his cousin Terb stayed put out of a sense of obligation. Terb was a hospital tech who, with the other staff who stayed, moved the sick to safety. They endured four ghoulish days of panic, lack of food and supplies, and death. 

As a parish employee, Buffy reasoned that staying was the only responsible thing to do. He wanted to help residents who lacked transport or were elderly or handicapped. He had stayed before many times, but this time, the experience proved terrifying and left him with haunting memories. Not until years later did Buffy feel comfortable enough with me to share a few of those horrors, stories I will recount in the book I am writing about this research.^v All I knew then was that unexpectedly sudden and massive storm surges put Buffy at extreme risk as he helped the helpless find their way to safety. When he talks about the days-long wait for relief from their helpless perch on a rooftop, Buffy’s face tells the story—his mouth works as his eyes narrow. He shakes his head in disbelief. But with a deep breath later, he allows the authorities some slack. After all, he says, they had far more trouble on their hands than they knew how to handle. 

Buffy: “Don’t You Know What I Do?”

Buffy’s own effort to rescue others makes clear his sense of obligation and loyalty to his job and to the parish. So once the floodwaters had receded and it was time to begin cleanup, Buffy’s role as road crew supervisor seemed straightforward. He pulled together the few crew members he could, and together they undertook a big cleanup of the “yard” (Buffy’s term for his job site) where their equipment was stored. They sorted the odd fragments of plastic, concrete, iron, and metal from machine parts, broken and uprooted trees, and debris that had been blown in by the wind. But after they had it sorted, collected, and dumped, all their progress got unceremoniously reversed by FEMA. In March, 2006, Buffy told me,

"We can’t do street repairs, clean up trash, can’t do much of anything. We could clean up this whole area, all the trash. We tried that—we cleaned up our area, our yard where we work at, we went to the landfill to dump it, where all the trash at. FEMA made us bring it back, put it back on the ground, and they have another crew come over and inspect it to pick it up."

Buffy didn’t understand why FEMA blocked his initiative, why they couldn’t recognize the common sense of his effort. By FEMA’s own account, some 3.3 million cubic yards of debris needed collecting in the parish and more than 12,000 homes and other structures needed demolishing.^vi Surely a little help from local residents would be welcome. For their part, FEMA’s envoys charged with cleanup and recovery used a playbook filled with top-down rules and favored, no-bid contractors. They had no idea who Buffy was or how he was capable of helping. FEMA arrived and took over without knowledge of local people, their community, or how to tap into their strengths. They did not know that most people in this part of Louisiana claim membership in large family groups and are used to taking care of themselves through their own family networks. Instead, the government personnel in charge seemed to import everything they would use to do their job, including assumptions about what people needed, procedures for getting things done, lists of approved contractors, and even the language for how to talk to people and how to oversee a disaster zone. Buffy assumed his work would be a desirable aid in the process of cleanup, but FEMA wasn’t listening.

Cultural Insiders with No Standing

When FEMA turned back Buffy’s effort to clean up, they trivialized his initiative and undermined his sense of potency in his home environment. The rigid adherence to a set of rules developed elsewhere signaled the beginning of a chronic mismatching of expectations between local residents and the agencies charged to help them. Over the first year of cleanup, demolition, and trash hauling, FEMA repeatedly dismissed the efforts of other cousins in the family, who, like Buffy, were skilled workers and accustomed to taking care of things themselves. No black residents of the parish were ever awarded contracts from FEMA to help in this work, and according to the men I interviewed, the contracts went to people who weren’t even from Louisiana. How could local talent, the pride of local residence and the financial need for work suddenly carry so little value in the parish’s post-disaster setting? Buffy chafed at the situation:

"We’re not used to that, you know, because they say we taking money from the contractors."

FEMA’s personnel on the ground remained unresponsive and non-negotiable, more concerned with maintaining an efficient central command than with using the energies of the communities it was charged with helping. The communication failure in this situation arises from a pattern in which authorities did not “hear” or “recognize” local knowledge.

Negotiating the Divide in Dallas: Connie as Culture Broker

The experience of Buffy and his male relatives demonstrates how the seeds of miscommunication take root in disaster recovery efforts immediately and if not addressed, can grow from there into a thicket of more and more failures and disconnects. Yet these problems are neither necessary nor inevitable. Perhaps what Buffy and FEMA needed to help them cross the divide was a person or team of translators. In fact, Buffy’s evacuated relatives had such a person to help them out—Connie, a relative who had grown up with the family and moved to Texas with her husband. For four months in Dallas, I witnessed first hand the value of Connie’s role as a “culture broker.” Then, after family members had returned to their home communities of St. Bernard Parish where life in FEMA trailers would drag on for years to come, I witnessed an ongoing succession of struggles in dealing with FEMA and Road Home, dealings people had to navigate without benefit of a Connie. Ultimately, I came to realize that Connie’s role in Dallas could provide a model for a new paradigm, one that would increase the effectiveness and responsiveness of recovery authorities and give local people in the wounded culture a reason to trust the outsiders. The Dallas story demonstrates how a “culture broker” can work. 

In 2005, Connie was 40 years old and had lived in Texas 20 years. She was cousin to some, aunt to others, daughter or granddaughter to others, sister to others who arrived at her home, a natural refuge for the family. Huddled around Connie’s TV in the days following Katrina’s landfall, family members learned that St. Bernard Parish had taken the brunt of the storm. There would be no quick returning home. Suddenly, they needed everything basic to living: clothing, medical supplies, prescription glasses, and lodging for the months to come. They had to tend to the sick, the elderly, the children. They had to register with FEMA to get a victim ID number, contact insurance companies, and get on a waiting list for a trailer.

Connie could help her family with all of these jobs. She was one of them and recognized their needs. She got on the phone with FEMA, Red Cross, local housing authorities, and a host of private landlords. She worked to get her family members into decent housing. In a hundred ways, every day, Connie smoothed the path and “rescued” her family from the inside out. Never once did they feel misunderstood because Connie mediated the disaster for them. She understood their language, their attachment to the parish, their ritual feasts, their reliance on each other, and their strong faith. She knew how to give them comfort. 

At the same time, Connie had been educated in the language and skills of the world beyond the bayou. She knew how to communicate with bureaucracies. She understood from years of practice with institutions that there is a way to talk to such people, to ask the right questions, and know when to press. Connie managed all the communication with the bureaucracies charged to help her relatives—getting registered in the FEMA database, working to locate other family, collecting rent payments, requesting short-term credit cards, and filing the paperwork needed to get a FEMA trailer. She also called upon her extensive network of “weak ties,”^vii that is, ties to people she didn’t know well, but could ask a favor of. With the help of these differently positioned secondary friends from work and church, Connie secured an astonishing array of resources: housing, clothing, personal supplies, furniture, and counseling. According to Connie, God had sent her all these relatives so that she might have a chance to help them and regain a cherished role in the family she had left 20 years before. This belief and her unbounded love of family led her to become a warrior for their cause, sparing nothing to make things work. 

Of course, Connie could not solve all the problems her family faced. She couldn’t take away the shock and stress of damaged or destroyed homes. She couldn’t help them secure the familiar foods they needed for emotional comfort, and she couldn’t duplicate the home churches where her relatives had worshipped together for generations. But she could provide safety and material aid. She could also supply emotional comfort with both her large, modern kitchen, where family members could prepare their own gumbo, and her sprawling backyard, where they had the space to gather and talk. Everything from home on the bayou that could be replicated was replicated in Dallas.

The example of Connie’s role is instructive: she supplied a bridge over the communication divide between the cultures of the wounded and the institutions assigned to recovery. She lived outside the wounded culture, but her knowledge and experience positioned her to recognize what cultural comfort looks like and to maximize its availability. Then, her family went back home.

The Short-lived Euphoria of Being Back Home

At first, when Connie’s sister Robin returned to St. Bernard Parish after 10 months in Dallas, she was euphoric, like everyone else. 

"It’s just so good to be back, where people know who you are and you don’t have to say something 23 ways for them to understand what you mean or even what you’re trying to say. That’s home. I don’t care about the house, I don’t care about the car. I just wanna be home because that’s where I feel good. It’s comfortable."

Robin’s relief of being back home “where people know who you are” and where she felt recognized and understood points up the insularity of her family system. Members of the 300-plus family rarely traveled outside southeast Louisiana. That limited experience with the outside world and their habits of high-context communication ^viii intensified their difficulties in speaking to disaster authorities once they got back home. 

Robin did not realize that although people in Dallas spoke differently and had trouble understanding her accent, she had been spared a more painful indignity—not being understood in her own home environment, now occupied by FEMA and its alien culture. In Dallas, Connie had brokered all that unfamiliar communication for Robin and the rest of the family. Once home, Robin and her relatives faced a harsh and unexpected irony—the people she could communicate with could not help her. The people who could help, did not understand her.

Robin: “Don’t You Know What I Need?”

As the first anniversary of the storm approached in August 2006, Robin and her family could not escape a bitter reality: the home environment they had longed for during their dislocation was gone. Forever. Where the modest character of small brick and wood homes had anchored a people’s sense of community, there were now rows and rows and miles of disfigured homes: broken, collapsed, but not yet demolished, sometimes invaded by wildly overgrown vegetation. Big heaps of debris crowded the streets with the ghastly remnants of individual lives—furniture, appliances, beds and personal belongings, purged from the guts of homes. 

To patch up this emotional landscape of hurt, FEMA brought its promise of human solutions— tens of thousands of tiny white trailers. For Robin, the “itty bitty” FEMA trailers seemed more an emblem of a faceless, shrunken future than a cause for hope. But it was all there was. There was no nearby grocery store, cleaner, pharmacy, bank, post office, or restaurant. The local churches had been destroyed, and attending Sunday services required a drive into another parish to an unfamiliar congregation.

Into the second year after the storm, unsettling realities from the previous months shifted from background nuisances to stressful, preoccupying concerns. For Robin, the fact of her powerlessness started sinking in during the fall of 2006 after she had taken on two jobs to try to keep herself and her daughters afloat financially. Her repeated calls to FEMA went unanswered (the non-responsive response), and her confidence about the future began to dissolve. 

"My trailer is leaking right over the big bed. I had to put pots in the middle of the bed. I’ve called them, but they never come. I have a work order, they promised to come in 72 hours. Nothing."

By spring 2007, Robin’s exasperation with her trailer had spilled over into her whole life:

"They keep saying everything is getting better. But it’s not true. Half the houses are still not gutted out because they don’t have trailers to stay in to get the work done. You’re working and you still can’t do anything. Men not feeling like men anymore. We came back as soon as we did because we wanted what we used to have. What we used to have was comfortable. What we have now is misery. I’m miserable." 

The spring of 2007 brought no relief, and as another hurricane season loomed, the sense of despair deepened. The rescue culture had no idea of the collective (and invisible) suffering they had made worse by their lack of attention to the fundamental needs of a black, bayou community. Communication failures were not simply additive in their impact—the repeated instances of these problems across family members compounded the collective sense of alienation and frustration. 

Katie: “Don’t You Know Who I Am?”

A communication “black hole” occurs when the words one says to a bureaucrat or other authority simply disappear into the void. Black holes in this sense are especially common when stylistic barriers exist in how people in an exchange use language. Members of the bayou family are native English speakers. But their strong inter-reliance on each other, their high-context form of communication, their unusually limited travel outside the parish, and their autonomy from government aid all put them at a serious disadvantage in speaking effectively to representatives from large, impersonal bureaucracies. The communication style recognized within institutional hierarchies of government takes practice to master: to articulate one’s needs in a concise way, to ask the right questions at the right time, and to push for answers with force but diplomacy tends to demand either the use of front-end credentials or linguistic agility that authorities on the other end will recognize as worthy of respect.^ix

Katie was Buffy’s favorite aunt; she was Connie’s “nanny” (godmother). She was mother to Terb, Roz, and Nell, and grandmother to a growing tribe of children who called her Bammy. I met Katie in Dallas and quickly observed how she filled the room with her buoyant spirit and easy laugh. Without ever breaking a sweat, she cooked the most food I had ever seen come out of a single kitchen. Katie was fiercely devoted to her family and her home community in lower St. Bernard Parish. She drew people to her through her storytelling and creole cooking. Few could rival her gumbo or stuffed bell peppers. On Sundays, she had always cooked enough to feed dozens after church.

Few who did not know Katie would have guessed that she wore a prosthetic leg. Her movement was so normal and her personality so vibrant, it was easy to miss the slight limp. While she was still living in Dallas, Connie had helped Katie order a handicapped trailer to put on the lot where her home had been. But when FEMA called months later to say she could go home, the trailer was wrong. Never mind, she told them, she’d take what they had brought because she could not wait another day to get home. 

But just a few weeks after getting installed in the trailer, Katie fell down the rickety metal steps to the front door. The injury to Katie’s leg, which never properly healed, reversed 60 years of unassisted walking. 

After her fall, Katie could either walk with crutches or use a wheelchair. She called FEMA; her daughter Nell called FEMA. Both begged for the handicapped trailer. Weeks later, a carload of six FEMA employees came out to take pictures of the step and prepare the necessary paperwork for her new trailer. Nell looked at the men in disbelief and cried out, “Why you want a picture of the step? You see she ain’t got but one leg. What more you want?” The men left. Months passed. No word, no handicapped trailer. Finally, in July of 2006, they delivered the trailer along with the hope that living there would be temporary. Indeed that summer, nearly a year after the storm, Louisiana’s Road Home program began accepting applications. Road Home was FEMA’s designated state authority charged to evaluate these applications and allot compensation to eligible homeowners from the pot of $7 billion of federally allocated funds. Road Home would pay homeowners up to $150,000 for the cost of their damaged or destroyed homes, minus the amount paid by insurance.

One humid summer day nearly two years after Katrina, I stepped up into Katie’s trailer. She was sitting as she often did, sunken down on the end of a narrow, cream-colored couch with her head turned to watch the small TV perched at the top of an étagère straddling the opposite corner. The physical strain of living in a small container designed for a weekend hunting trip was showing, even if she rarely complained. 

What do you hear from Road Home, I asked, knowing full well the answer, having asked the same question every few weeks for months. “Nothing. I don’t hear nothing.” I asked her if she had tried to call them. She had been calling every week lately. And every time, she said, they told her the same thing, that she was in the “verification phase.” Well, what is that, I asked? “Nobody can explain it—it’s just what they say.” I knew it was time to figure out what was happening, so I asked her if she would mind calling them while I was there so I could listen. 

Katie pulled herself up and took the crutches I handed her. She was fiercely independent, and even though she could have easily pointed me to the folder on the pantry shelf, she stood, hoisted her weight with the crutch, and then hopped past the couch to pull the file off the shelf and up under her arm. 

“You know, every time I call, it’s a different person. I try to get the name of somebody and then the next time, nobody heard of that person. You can’t get nowhere with these people.” 

She dialed the Road Home number she knew by heart and waited for the recorded voice. She held out the phone so I could hear the message, “Remember, Louisiana wants you to come home.” She glanced at me, shaking her head. It took another 5 or 6 minutes to get a human voice.

“Hello, this is Katie Williams,” she offered politely. "My case number is 06HH087563. I’m calling to find out where my case is and how much longer I got to wait.” Several minutes passed before the agent came back. “I’m showing you are in the verification phase, Ms. Williams.”

“Well, how long is it going to take to get out of there?” It had been more than a year since Katie had submitted her paperwork for the Road Home program. 

“We have no information about that. But it will be as soon as possible. Thank you for calling. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Wow, I thought. The Road Home people really know how to clear callers off the phone lines. Polite and completely non-committal, all in the flow of a single sentence. But I knew their tricks. I had learned for myself that bureaucracies were full of ordinary people who follow the rules they are given. The clerk gave Katie the only answer she had. 

“Katie, what if I called them just to see if I could get somebody else who might tell us more?”

How could someone so important to so many be so easily dismissed, I wondered. “You can’t talk to them,” she said. “Has to be the name on the file. Nobody else. “Okay, then,” I said, “I’ll pretend I’m you.” She mustered a smile and handed me the receiver. 

Over the course of the next 45 minutes, I worked my way up four levels of clerks to a top-level supervisor who finally gave me what I was looking for. “I need to understand exactly what the verification phase entails,” I said politely. For the first time, the person I was talking to actually left the phone to search for Katie’s application. She came back with a sheepish apology: “I’m very sorry, Ms. Williams. There is nothing in your file.” “What?” I said with alarm. “That isn’t possible. Back in November of 2006, my husband and I met with your people, and I handed them all my documents. (Katie was pointing to her inch-thick file folder) That was seven months ago. Where did those go?” 

“I can’t say, Ms. Williams. I can only say that they aren’t there now.”

Katie and I were both in shock. Before I returned to Colorado that next day, I took her folder, copied all the documents, and once I got back home composed a stern memo to fax along with all the documents. Three days later, Katie called me to say she had been contacted by Road Home and moved out of the verification phase. They had assigned her a case manager, and she would be getting her check soon.

But the misery wasn’t over. When her check arrived late that summer, it was dramatically less than she expected, just $25,000. She had used the money she got from her insurance to pay off the mortgage on her demolished house. Connie stepped in to file an appeal, but by early December 2007, Katie got the word that the appeal had been denied. Two weeks later, Katie suffered a massive stroke, leaving her without speech and without the ability to walk on crutches as she had done since her fall. Katie died three and a half years later. 

Conclusion

The communication failures of “the unheard local knowledge,” “the non-responsive response,” and “the black hole” illustrate some of the degrading effects that cultural divides can produce, especially when a wounded culture and the rescue culture are asymmetrical in power. Yet there is a bright spot in this painful saga, a way to see how things might work if we proceeded with more awareness and applied a little imagination. In this story, Connie’s knowledge and experience allowed her to straddle cultures and lighten the burdens for those who needed so much help. In every disaster, there are people who could be tapped to work with agents of recovery—people who understand local cultural systems and values, and who could help broker communication with outsiders. There are also anthropological studies of most every disaster-vulnerable area on the planet that could be synthesized in advance and used as a local roadmap. These are possibilities that Connie can help us imagine. And, as poet Rita Dove once said, it takes imagination to make possible other realities.

"You have to imagine it possible before you can see something, sometimes. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible."^x

What Anthropology Brings to the Study of Disaster

The long arc of time needed to reclaim a familiar, routine life after disaster dramatizes a key insight—only by documenting the full expanse of time people need to resettle can we see how the process unfolds. For plenty of people in southeast Louisiana, the experience of recovery from Katrina took longer and hurt worse than it had to. For the family I came to know, the movement toward settling into a new reality was neither linear, nor steady, nothing like the way a bone heals. Alien logic and inflexible systems piled on new sources of exhaustion and frustration and added insult to hardship, leaving people with the sense of having lost control of their lives and futures.

When I reflect on what I have learned over these last seven years, I ache for the people whose lives and needs remained opaque to authorities. Perhaps the agents of recovery made no attempt to understand local needs or the resourcefulness of local people because they could not imagine a way to work with these needs and also maintain control. A lack of awareness, a lack of curiosity, and a lack of imagination effectively prolonged suffering. With imagination, compassion, good sense, and experience, I believe we could discover that there is another way, a better way, to help the wounded recover from collective devastation.  

Katherine E. Browne, Ph.D. is Professor of Anthropology at Colorado State University. Browne’s research has focused on French Caribbean societies like Martinique and New Orleans. She has published two books, Creole Economics: Caribbean Cunning Under the French Flag, and Economics and Morality: Anthropological Approaches, and produced two documentary films: Still Waiting: Life After Katrina (broadcast on PBS stations) and Lifting the Weight of History: Women Entrepreneurs in Afro-Creole Martinique (broadcast in French on French TV and French global satellite channel, TV5). Browne is currently preparing a book about her post-Katrina research with the large bayou family discussed here. Her work has been funded by numerous grants from National Science Foundation and she is currently president of the Society for Economic Anthropology.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the members of this beautiful bayou family for sharing their struggles and stories with me over the years. Their wisdom and courage have inspired me to work from the heart and to aim that work toward a broader public.

Notes

^[i]Wallace (1956:127)

^[ii] Plyer (2008)

^[iii]My research with this bayou family from the lower, eastern part of St. Bernard Parish has spanned seven years following the storm. The first two of these years focused on producing a documentary with filmmaker Ginny Martin. Our film, Still Waiting: Life After Katrina was broadcast on PBS stations nationwide. My research continued for five more years, through 2012, after the film’s initial broadcast.

^[iv]FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency.The Road Home program was put in place and funded by the US Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and administered by the state of Louisiana .

^[v]The working title of the book I am writing is Standing in the Need: A Bayou Community’s Struggle After Katrina. The book is part of the SSRC’s Katrina Bookshelf being published by University of Texas Press.

^[vi] FEMA news release dated April 30, 2007. http://www.fema.gov/news-release/2007/04/30/st-bernard-parish-benefits-fema-funds.

^[vii]See Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” 1973. Connie’s family members had few if any weak ties.

^[viii]High-context communication tends to characterize speakers who communicate primarily within their own highly dense social networks, making verbal shorthand a common practice (Hall 1976). People from this area are not accustomed to having to explain themselves to outsiders.

^[ix]For example, Cushman, The Struggle and the Tools (1998).

^[x]Rita Dove, was former poet laureate of the United States. This quote comes from an interview with her in 1994.

References Cited

Cushman, Ellen. 1998. The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 

Dove, Rita. 1994. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/dove/onlineinterviews.htm.

Granovetter, Mark. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6, 1360–1380.

Hall, Edward T. 1976. Beyond Culture. New York: Anchor Books.

Plyer, Allison. 2008. “Four Years after the Storm: The Road Home Program’s Impact on Greater New Orleans.” Testimony presented to the House Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity on August 8, 2008 by Deputy Director of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.

Wallace, Anthony F.C. 1956. Tornado in Worcester. Disaster Study Number Three, Committee on Disaster Studies, National Academy of Sciences—National Research Council.

New York has long been a city of immigrants, and as a result of waves of immigration, language experts describe it as the most linguistically dense city on earth. Mark Turin travels to the Big Apple to track the many languages of New York. He travels the 7 train, designated a US Heritage Trail, as it rattles its way from Flushing to the heart of Manhattan, passing through areas where Korean, Bengali and Spanish are the languages spoken on the street. He meets the linguists who are tracking New York's many languages and hears from those who believe that the US needs to promote the English language ahead of all others.

His journey ends with a story of linguistic rebirth as he discovers how the Yiddish language, once in decline, has attracted a new generation of speakers.

This post originally appeared here, Monday, December 17th, 2012. 

Mark Turin has also written about New York's linguistic diversity for BBC news here. 

Audio originally produced by Mark Rickards.

​In December, nine Pakistani health workers, most of them women, were murdered as they went door-to-door delivering polio vaccines to the children of their neighbors. Media attention to this event has focused on the fact that the CIA recently used a fake vaccination campaign as a cover when searching for Bin Laden, claiming to be giving children vaccinations while actually taking blood samples.  This reprehensible CIA plot has contributed to public distrust of vaccination and suspicion of health workers. That said, in the last month, other female health workers, not working on polio or immunization, have been targeted, so the story is not quite that simple. I don’t have insight into the motives of the militants, and nobody has claimed responsibility for the killings. But it’s likely that the murders are part of a broader militant effort to destabilize the Pakistani government, and militants may have focused on polio workers because of intense international pressure to eradicate polio in the country.

The assassination of health workers in Pakistan does make a couple of points crystal clear. These workers, often women, are the critical links in delivering health services across the most dangerous and undeserved areas of Pakistan. Terrorists targeted them precisely because of this importance. Yet while these workers have put their lives on the line, their own government and the international organizations that sponsor their work have undervalued them.

Women who deliver polio vaccine in Karachi and other cities in Pakistan are, for the most part, struggling to get by. They're doing hard work for a small amount—under $5 a day—because they don't have other options, and because they aim to serve God by serving their neighbors.

“I get paid for my blood and my sweat, but there’s relief in the work too,” Aisha [names have been changed], a confident and articulate 25-year-old, explained to me last year as I interviewed polio workers in Pakistan. She works on polio campaigns—and does broader work providing basic health education to her neighbors—because it was some of the only work available when her husband abandoned her and her young son.

 “I'm very satisfied,” she explained, “that I didn't have to beg from anyone. Sure, my salary was very small, but it was my own money. With that money I took care of myself, I took care of my son.  Everything is so expensive now, so expensive, but I can scrape by. My son is seven, mashallah, and he's in second grade. I'm sending him to school.

“Standing on your own two feet is the most important thing. It's just the first step that someone has to take by themselves. When someone tries, Allah surely will give them rewards for their work, and Allah builds courage in that person. And I’m satisfied with my life, thanks to God.”

Hamida, in her thirties with three children, added, “I think it’s better than complaining about your fate to work hard. Feed your children, raise them well. But when after working so hard you get so little money, your heart breaks.”

And as committed as these women are, job advancement is all but impossible. “I had such a desire to become a doctor!” said the lively and slender Shazia, laughing. “There was a dentist here, and I used to go to her office and follow her around.”

When her father died unexpectedly, Shazia began working for the health department to support her mother and young siblings. The money she made wasn’t nearly enough, but it was better than nothing, and it was honestly earned. Over the years—she is now in her mid-thirties—she has sacrificed her opportunities to have a family of her own in order to continue to live with her aging mother.  “I’ve been thinking of further study, because really, I want to move up. But I look, and there really aren’t any ways for me to advance. There’s no chance, absolutely no way. All of my dreams, I’ve left them all behind. What I wanted to do.”

The women who died were drawn from a group of the most pious, moral, and inspiring women I know. They bravely ignore the gossip that follows them in neighborhoods where many women only rarely leave the house. They tell me that if they do the right thing, God will provide.

Fear of murder must not be compounded with financial insecurity and lack of support as among the problems these brave women face. Partners in polio eradication—WHO, UNICEF, CDC, Rotary, and the Pakistani government—should immediately prioritize funding for support of these critical workers. Given the dangers, $20 a day for polio work is not too much. These partners should also make scholarship funding available for those brave women who want to do more to serve their communities. It is time for everyone who desires the eradication of polio to affirm the commitment and worth of some of the world’s most courageous women.

Svea Closser is a Middlebury College assistant professor of sociology and anthropology. She is the author of the book, “Chasing Polio in Pakistan” (Vanderbilt University Press, 2010). The research described here was carried out in the summer of 2011 and was funded by UNICEF.

Anthropologist and linguist Dr Mark Turin travels to South Africa to get to grips with the country's complex language politics and policies. Until the mid 1990s, there were just two official languages, English and Afrikaans, while other indigenous African languages were sidelined. Today the situation is different, with eleven official languages recognized by the Constitution of South Africa as having equal value and importance.

But what does that mean in reality? How can so many languages operate alongside each other in Parliament? And can they all have equal weight? Mark Turin visits a Soweto school to find out which languages children learn and what they speak in the playground, and talks to multilingual journalists and writers about the importance of their mother tongues.

He meets Afrikaans speakers to learn whether their language can shake off its associations with the racist apartheid regime, and visits Cape Town to see the South African Parliament in action and meet the interpreters that make it work.

Mark Turin is used to heated discussions when it comes to politics and language, and in South Africa he finds his greatest challenge.

This post originally appeared here, Monday, December 10th, 2012. 

Audio originally produced by Mark Rickards.

Landlocked and mountainous Nepal is home to over 100 languages, many of which are now endangered. Languages spoken for generations may soon be extinct. Anthropologist and linguist Dr Mark Turin has spent years talking to the last speakers of languages under threat, and now he returns to the Himalayas to show us how communities are preserving and even reviving their speech forms, as well as what will be lost when languages die out.

Mark travels to the mountains of Eastern Nepal, where Thangmi is now spoken by only a few thousand people. Like many other languages that are at risk, Thangmi is a mine of unique indigenous terms for flora and fauna that have medical and ritual value. When people switch to speaking another language, traditional knowledge about man's place in nature falls into disuse. With the death of the last speaker, these unique ways of seeing the world can be lost forever.

Mark has lived with the Thangmi community for years, and speaks their ancestral language. Thangmi, whose speakers live in a highly mountainous region, has four distinct verbs that equate with the English verb 'to come', including yusa 'to come from above (down the mountain)' and wangsa 'to come from below (or up the mountain)'. Languages, like species, adapt to and reflect their environment.

Through these windows into the world of Thangmi speakers, and in discussions with language activists and educators across Nepal, Mark explores the enduring relationship between language, culture and identity and explains why it's so critical for linguists to work with indigenous communities to document and protect these vanishing voices before they disappear without record.

This post originally appeared here, Monday, December 3rd, 2012. 

Audio originally produced by Mark Rickards.

A lineup of hot-button issues has plagued the political life of the United States for decades, at least since the 1970s: abortion, sexualities, religion, evolution, censorship, recreational drugs, guns. An odd list on the face of it, but supposedly, the nation’s population divides into one of two camps over each issue, or so sociologist James Davison Hunter influentially claimed in Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991). If a person opposes abortion, we should be able to predict that they’ll oppose recreational drug use, GLBT sexualities, and erotic imagery in the media, and they’ll probably tote a gun. 

Right? 

I’m one of the few anthropologists who has actually looked for this predicted creature “in the field.” After 18 years of research, I must report that I have not found it, not yet anyway. At this point, my professional opinion is that it’s a bogeyman. Real U.S. citizens do not line up so predictably on the “culture war” front. 

I’m not saying that there are no gun-toting rednecks out there, but rather that they are probably as likely as anyone to try recreational drugs or peep at porn on the Internet. I’m saying that perceiving the population through the lens of the “culture wars” reduces a vast cultural field of conservative pulls and experimental tugs in every direction, to a two-dimensional cartoon. Looking through that lens, we can imagine the worst about the people around us, and even despair of democracy altogether. 

Working-Class Conservatives 

In the 1990s, as Hunter’s book was hitting the stores, I dove headfirst into the belly of the beast, setting up in central New York State, where I could study flag-waving, guntoting conservatives at close range. I expected to find the people I was educated to find, the people who blocked progressive reform, complacent, mired in the ignorance of outdated views. I reasoned that capital flight, out-sourcing, and massive job loss would surely have cracked the shell of complacency in which conservative ignorance could fester.

Instead I found working-class conservatives with long memories—informed, opinionated, and ready to talk. I found a grassroots conservatism, not dulled, but sharpened by the return of hard times and different in many particulars from the “culture wars” template. 

My base of operations was Ilion, New York, a small manufacturing center in a depressed Rustbelt region. Ilion has been the hometown of the Remington Arms company since the 1820s. Nearly every adult in the region, man and woman, is a member of the National Rifle Association (NRA) or a sympathizer with its aims. 

As it happens in ethnographic fieldwork, the people I was studying were also studying me. They quickly nailed me as a gunhating liberal and needled me about it with what sounded like NRA boilerplate. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” they said, and “If guns are illegal only criminals will have guns.”

Over the months I observed how they handled firearms and talked about them— respectfully, even reverently. I explained it to myself in the terms I was trained to use: it’s fetishization, attributing living qualities to an inanimate object. Well, why wouldn’t they fetishize guns, considering their position? The situation for most households is unrelieved, nerve-wracking insecurity. They have no say in the decisions that govern their livelihoods. They are politically weak, and they know it. When you’re “the little guy” at the mercy of the “big guys,” guns become a symbol of strength, the great equalizer. In an area where they are readily available, guns too can be weapons of the weak. Locked up in a drawer or closet, as they usually were among the people I studied, guns symbolize a hidden reserve of power. 

Then one night I found myself in an excited conversation with a group of local activists about the harassment several of them had experienced at the hands of local police and government officials. One man said in mock exasperation that he was just about ready to blow some heads off. Others chimed in with their own fantasies of decisive force, and suddenly I caught their point of view. It wasn’t exactly the NRA slogan, “If guns are illegal only criminals will have guns.” It was more like, “If guns are illegal only police will have guns.” The danger they were looking at was not from criminals but from “the government”—the State. 

Reasons of State 

Working-class conservatives’ suspicion of the state does not represent ignorance but conservatism, in the basic sense of cultural conservation. Anti-statism was a political cornerstone of the United States from its formation and for more than a century. As everyone knew in those days, states are predisposed to tyranny. To avoid that outcome, the founding generation insisted on adding a Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution—the list of things that the State may not do, including disarm its citizens. 

States have long tried to keep weapons out of the hands of “dangerous classes” (often made dangerous by actions of said State). A sword in the belt was the mark of a “gentleman” because the State did not permit “commoners” to bear swords. Firearms law under the British Empire followed this ancient pattern, effectively limiting the right to bear arms to “gentlemen.” 

In liberating itself from that empire, the United States’ founding generation turned to republicanism, the radical European political theory of the 1700s. Republicanism called for a state in which sovereignty resided not in a monarch but in “the people,” each vested with “natural rights.” These were popular political ideas in the colonies. Republican thought connected popular sovereignty with a broad right to bear arms. Cato’s Letters of the 1720s, a foundational text of Anglophone republicanism, saw “the Exercise of despotick Power” as “the unrelenting War of an armed Tyrant upon his unarmed subjects.” 

In the heat of the American Revolution, “commoners” made a claim to equality with real teeth: the right of all free men to bear arms. Their claim prevailed because the Revolution could not have been fought without “commoner” soldiers, tradesmen, and farmers. 

At the First Congress in 1789, legislative debate around the Second Amendment to the Constitution heated up from time to time, but never questioned the right to bear arms itself. The hot-button issue was the role of militias. Democratically inclined leaders wanted the Second Amendment to prohibit “standing armies,” that great tool of tyrants, except in times of war. “What, Sir, is the use of a militia?” demanded Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts on a hot August 14. ”It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty!” 

In historical context there can be no question that the U.S. Constitution recognizes a right to bear arms for all free men (implicitly including women), both for the “natural right” of self defense, and for collective self defense against State tyranny. Bearing arms ceased to signify “gentleman” in contrast to “commoner” but it picked up another symbolic task, signifying free as opposed to enslaved, a contrast that the country’s earliest gun-control policies strictly policed. 

The Gun-Rights Side 

Gun-rights advocates still draw on republican tradition. At the surface of their appeals is the less controversial claim, the natural right to self-defense. This finds voice in emotional tales of crime and criminals, all to illustrate that firearms are necessary for the defense of life and property. But under the surface, just as I found in central New York, is an appeal to the controversial side of republican tradition, in which a collective right to bear arms is the ultimate guarantee of popular sovereignty. The Web site of a nonprofit called the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), for example, ends a long FAQ about crime and self-defense this way: 

Finally, the founding fathers believed that gun ownership was necessary for a country to truly be free. If the government distrusted the people so much as to disarm them, then that government no longer truly represented the people. In other words, in our structure of government, the power is supposed to lie in the hands of the people. 

Another example, a blog by gun-rights activist Theodore Lang, tells several hairraising stories of policing gone horribly wrong, to make a point: if you think that the police will protect you, you are “encased within the imaginary bliss of police state security.” Then the argument shifts. Contemplating “the despotic, secret and criminal activities of the present regime inside the Beltway” (he meant George W. Bush’s), Lang ends on a note of fiery republicanism: 

What possible last resort is available to a people oppressed by statist tyranny if not to use its own force to throttle such despotism?

As with the SAF example, the clincher assumes that the ultimate political problem is collective self-defense against State tyranny. 

A final example, found all over the gunloving Web (24,900 hits in Google on 11/12/09), pushes the collective self-defense argument to mythic proportions. “A Little Gun Control History” argues that the hidden history of 20th century genocide is the in-ability of stigmatized groups to defend themselves. The Web site reads: 

“The Soviet Union established gun control in 1929. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated. 

Turkey established gun control in 1911. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated. 

Germany established gun control in 1938. From 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated. 

… [likewise China, Guatemala, Uganda, and Cambodia] 

With guns, we are “citizens.” Wthout them, we are “subjects.” 

The Gun-Control Side 

Before the 20th century, gun control laws in the United States were usually aimed at African Americans. The liminal category of free blacks was a special target for enforcement. After the Civil War all African Americans became “dangerous” in the eyes of the State. The so-called Black Codes, later known as Jim Crow Laws, effectively disarmed African Americans in the South. 

In the early 20th century, the stigma spread to new immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. New York’s groundbreaking Sullivan Law regulated handguns for all law-abiding citizens, but in the long effort to get it passed, proponents used images of hot-tempered foreigners to recruit support. A January 27, 1905, New York Times editorial supported a ban on all concealable weapons in these terms: 

[The proposed] measure would prove corrective and salutary in a city filled with immigrants and evil communications, floating from the shores of Italy and Austria-Hungary. … Italian and other south Continental gentry here are acquainted with the pocket pistol, and while drunk or merrymaking will use it quite as handily as the stiletto. … It is hoped that this … mode of settling disputes may not spread to corrupt the native good manners of the community. 

The measure, effectively a handgun ban for all but the wealthy and connected, passed in 1911, after the fatal shootings of a New York City mayor and well-known muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips seemed to establish the existence of a threat. 

In those days the Left uncompromisingly opposed gun control. Socialist Labor Party leader Daniel De Leon, for example, attacked the Sullivan Law on the front page of the Daily People (October 3, 1911)—in the venerable terms of republican tradition. 

The Sullivan Law is a midnight burglarious attempt upon the freedom of the citizen and residents generally, their right “to KEEP and bear” arms;—it is a backstairs manoeuvre to place the State under martial law. … Even if it were not unconstitutional, the Sullivan law should be opposed tooth and nail as a scheme of tyranny. 

Federal gun control laws followed. First, under the Progressive government of Wood – row Wilson, was a 1919 excise tax that raised the price of firearms, then a 1927 ban on mail-order guns through the U.S. Post Office. (Private shipping was OK.) Both measures had the socially engineered effect of reducing the availability of guns to poor folk. 

More comprehensive laws extended their predecessors’ prohibitive taxes and licensing policies. The National Firearms Act of 1934 passed in a media blitz of sensationalist stories about the machine-gun violence of Al Capone and other hot-tempered foreign mobsters. The 1968 Gun Control Act passed in the wake of the assassinations of President Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, and Dr. King. Proponents focused public attention on lone gunmen misfits, although not far under the surface was a fear-mongering subtext about the danger of urban “race riots.” Gun control, to put it bluntly, has ever operated at the lowest common denominator of racial/ethnic fear mongering. 

Today’s gun-control proponents are sensitive to overtly biased language but have not renounced the strategy of gaining support for the measures they propose by stigmatizing a recognizable segment of the population. A rash of recent gun-control appeals symbolically equates working-class whites, like the people I studied, with gun violence. The Web site of the DC nonprofit, Violence Policy Center (VPC), for example, warns ominously against 

a palpable, growing unrest among domestic fringe groups. … It was just this sort of discontent that led to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. 

The VPC (along with other gun-control activist groups) is waging a campaign against gun shows, portrayed on its Web site as a

readily available source of weapons and ammunition for a wide variety of criminals, including street gangs, white supremacists, would-be presidential assassins, and domestic terrorists. 

They’re tarring white gunlovers with the brush of “domestic” terrorism. Isn’t “domestic” a proxy for “white”? Considering that many gun-control activists are white, the finger of stigmatization would point perceptibly to class, and indeed studies show a class gap between gun-control proponents and gun-rights proponents. 

Another example from the wireless service provider, Credo, fans the same flames. Consistent with their branding as liberalprogressive activists, Credo fashioned a gun-control campaign around the fatal shootings of a medical doctor who performed abortions and a security guard at the Washington, DC, Holocaust Museum. Gone is the lone-gunman focus of 1968. In Credo’s appeal, these killings are not the acts of deranged individuals but “horrifying acts of right-wing domestic terrorism.” The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the appeal anxiously asserts, has called “rightwing extremism” the “most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.” 

A final, more explicit example: journalist Yasha Levine in an Alternet article linked a nationwide-ammunition shortage to the Tea Party demonstrations and the rants of a white supremacist. After describing a Tea Party demo as “channeling the spirit of Timothy McVeigh,” Levine too cited the Department of Homeland Security, warning that 

America’s shifting political landscape, the economic downturn and influx of returning vets all combined for a perfect storm likely to cause a swell in right-wing extremist organization activity. 

DHS has evidence, Levine claims, that the ammunition shortage can be explained by one thing: “Extremist groups are stockpiling weapons and ammo in preparation for … something.” This is stigmatization. 

Culture of Distrust 

Gun rights and gun control operate from mutually exclusive premises. One assumes a tyrannical state. The other assumes a benevolent state. One fears tyranny “from above.” The other fears disorder “from below.” One bases its argument on tradition. The other argues modern progress. 

But has gun control been progressive? Sociologist Gary Kleck’s 1997 book, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, finds defensive gun use in the deterrence of crime to be many times more frequent than official figures indicate. Economist John Lott’s More Guns Less, Less Crime (1998) argues (with abundant statistics) that widespread gun ownership actually lowers crime rates by increasing the “cost” of committing a crime for the criminal. If a possible crime victim might be armed, Lott explains, the stakes are higher—life and limb. The gun-control side of course has its own statistics: clearly gun control reduces the number of gun-related crimes. Overall crime rates, however, remain too close to call. 

So perhaps, from the State’s point of view, crime rates are not the point. Perhaps the State continues to commit public resources to the legislation, adjudication, and enforcement of gun-control measures for other reasons, classic but unmentionable reasons of State. The issue’s culturally polarizing effect could itself be a boon for the State, dividing the ranks of the governed for a symbolic combat that absorbs their energies and leaves actual governing to the experts. Mutual distrust between middle-class progressives and working-class conservatives would have the salutary political effect (from the State’s point of view) of pre-empting the emergence of an overwhelming popular mandate for deep systemic change. 

It seems to me that recent history gives us a good example of how this polarization effect works. The gun question, along with the other “culture-wars” issues are so-called “wedge issues.” To see what they wedged apart, we have only to consider whose feelings would have been polarized over these traditional versus modern “cultural” issues. 

In this case, I think what has been wedged apart was the working-class/middleclass political coalition of the New Deal era, a political problem for the restless “globalizers” of the 1970s. Intact, the political alliance that brought us the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, and other restrictions on the flow of capital, would have been capable of impeding the progress of “globalization.” 

It doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to connect these dots. It takes a longer view of history. The political alliance of middleclass professionals with the working-class, the people at the front lines of economic risk, has ever been the bane of financial schemers. Examples abound in the histories of industrial states. 

The great U.S. labor historian Herbert Gutman pointed out years ago how local middle classes of the late 19th century, including constables and sheriffs, commonly allied with strikers against the aggressions of the newly forming corporate giants. Together they chose state and federal politicians to fight “the trusts,” the disreputable ancestors of today’s corporate giants. The “wedge issue” trotted out by corporate promoters then was as old as the hills, the “violent” nature of the working class or socalled “lower classes.” Given a strong enough strike, unsympathetic newspapers would invariably accuse strikers of violence, splashing page one with a giant, fearsome headline—”Reign of Terror!”—even if it took paying local toughs to stage a riot. No expense was spared. The political alliance of middle class and working class had to be broken then, and had to be broken again after the New Deal reconstructed it. 

In our time, as it happened, workingclass livelihoods were spirited away in a torturous, prolonged process of global investment and local disinvestment, with no apologies and few defenders. Across the country, countless households, neighborhoods, and towns took a vertiginous fall from the brink of prosperity, and the bottom is not yet in sight. The people I studied in central New York believe that “the elite” have turned their backs on the “little guy” and on traditional American values in general. That would explain why residents were harassed for exposing the unethical schemes of local officials, or why “politically correct” administrators dismantled the High School marksmanship team at a time when hunting skills can put meat on the table more reliably than a paycheck. Along with millions of others in their position, the people I studied feel disenfranchised. 

This is where the gun question has been critical to the “culture wars” intervention. Without it, the other issues lack the force to make depressed working-class whites look scary enough to be political bogeymen. 

Working-class whites—and not only whites—are depressed for good reason, because they lost the homes and hopes that were theirs by generations of “sweat equity.” But they are no longer the only victims. In recent years, the risks and losses of “globalization” have ramified up the social scale, affecting even the lives of middleclass professionals. 

As it was in the 1930s, hard times so widely shared can be the foundation of a reinvigorated popular politics. Then as now, the disastrous fall-out of financial schemes, executed with the full connivance of public officials, revealed that our political problem is not the people beside us but the people “above” us. Liberated from the “culture wars,” we might again agree, across the middle-class/working-class gap, that the people “above” us have gone too far. 

References and Suggestions for Further Reading 

Adams, Jane, and D. Gorton. 2006. “Confederate Lane: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the Mississippi Delta.” American Ethnologist 33:288–309. 

Bageant, Joe. 2007. Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. New York. Crown Publishers. 

Bluestone, Barry, and Bennet Harrison. 1982. The De-industrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry. New York: Basic Books. 

Doukas, Dimitra. 2003. Worked Over: The Corporate Sabotage of an American Community. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 

Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth A. 1994. Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 

Ginsburg, Faye D. 1989. Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Hansen, Ed. 1995. “The Great Bambi War: Tocquevillians versus Keynesians in an Upstate New York County.” In Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric R. Wolf. Jane Schneider and Rayna Rapp, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Kleck, Gary. 1997. Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control. Chicago: Aldine Transaction. 

Lott, John R., Jr. 1998. More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Dimitra Doukas is a semi-retired anthropologist who continues to study and write about class cultures, politics, and local economies in the United States. She has taught at New York University, Cornell University, Dalhousie University, and the University of Denver.