Down and out in New York City.
Item
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Title
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Down and out in New York City.
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Identifier
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AAI9912605
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identifier
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9912605
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Creator
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Marcus, Anthony Allen.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Ida Susser
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Anthropology, Cultural | History, United States | American Studies | Sociology, Public and Social Welfare
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Abstract
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This dissertation, based on over 4 years of participant-observation fieldwork among under-housed poor and mostly non-white populations in New York City during the late 1980's and early 1990's, is an anthropological study of the social construction of the homeless crisis. This crisis, which developed because of rising housing costs, declining employment opportunities, and reduced social services, drove many New Yorkers into the streets to beg by day and sleep in public during the night. Rather than constructing this crisis of social reproduction as a problem of housing policy, employment markets, or public education and health care that confronted the majority of the working population of New York City, it was imagined as a homeless crisis involving a group whose social difference was defined through its relationship to housing. Following earlier crises of urban poverty the debate over the homeless developed into a mirror image of the earlier culture of poverty debate. Scholars debated how the homeless fit into categories of poor people, and the degree to which their suffering was a result of macrostructural determinants or faulty values. This dissertation is an attempt to deconstruct the social categories and theoretical assumptions upon which this debate rests. Using data from the lives of those designated as homeless and those employed to provide services for them, this dissertation shows the ways in which American political culture, U.S. urban poverty scholarship and institutional constraints often lead to reifying folk categories of social distinction. These categories, which define and delimit success and failure, obscure rather than clarify the causes and effects of poverty in American society.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
