Volume 57, No. 1, Spring 1998
Constraining Responses to Homelessness: An Ethnographic Exploration of the Impact of Funding Concerns on Resistance
Vincent Lyon-Callo
Key words: homelessness, ethnography, resistance, funding agencies, US, Massachusetts
Despite a wealth of scholarly studies detailing the link between systemic inequality and increased homelessness in the United States during the past two decades, routine responses to homelessness by concerned agents within the homeless sheltering industry often do not adequately address systemic concerns. Instead, the focus remains on treating perceived disorders of homeless people themselves. Using information from three years of activist ethnographic research and ten years of working in homeless shelters, this article explores this dynamic through analyzing the role that funding plays in constraining how social actors in the homeless sheltering industry respond to and resist homelessness.
The Elaboration of "Choice" in a Program for Homeless Persons Labeled Psychiatrically Disabled
Anne M. Lovell and Sandra Cohn
Key words: homelessness, mental illness, psychiatric rehabilitation, empowerment, social construction, US, New York City
In the United States, those street-dwelling homeless persons who suffer from serious psychiatric disabilities often reject the dependency generated by treatment modalities. Psychiatric and/or psychosocial rehabilitation, which emphasizes client choice, resonates with recent empowerment perspectives in community psychology, consumer-run mental health alternatives, and nontraditional homelessness programs. However, few of these approaches have been analyzed. This article examines critically how client choice, as a driving principle and idiographic concept, was constructed in a program for street-dwelling homeless persons labeled mentally ill by service providers. The cultural underpinnings of individualist choice are traced. This article analyzes the paradoxes of applying an idiographic framework, which favors case-by-case approaches over universally applicable rules, in a larger context of normatively oriented service organizations upon which the program depended for desired resources. Finally, it demonstrates how the emergence of a collectivity within the program redefined the outer limits of individual choice.
Market or Community Failure? Critical Perspectives on Common Property Research
Bonnie J. McCay and Svein Jentoft
Key words: Common property, resource management, environmental policy, embeddedness
The best known revisionist perspective on the so-called "tragedy of the commons" underscores important conceptual and hence policy errors and has been important in contributing to understanding of conditions in which collective action for common benefits, with respect to common pool resources, can take place. Characterizing this perspective as a "thin" or abstract, generalizing explanatory model, with strengths and weaknesses thereby, we discuss a "thicker" or more ethnographic perspective that emphasizes the importance of specifying property rights and their embeddedness within discrete and changing historical moments, social and political relations. We argue that this perspective leads to a focus on "community failure" rather than "market failure" as the presumed cause of environmental problems, and hence, to questions about how markets, states, and other external and internal factors affect the capacities of communities and user-groups to respond adequately to environmental change.
Preservation and Research of Sacred Sites by the Zuni Indian Tribe of New Mexico
Barbara J. Mills and T. J. Ferguson
Key words: Zuni Indians, Sacred Sites, Historic Preservation, Archaeology, US, Southwest
Sacred sites are important in the ceremonial life of the Zuni Indians of the American Southwest. To protect these sites, both on and off the Zuni Indian Reservation, the Zuni Tribe has used two research and management strategies: (1)historic preservation, and (2) legislation and litigation. In this article, the Zuni Tribe's use of historic preservation to manage sacred sites is analyzed using the report series of the Zuni Archaeology Program. While sacred sites were only a small fraction of the total number of sites recorded, the treatment of these sites as cultural resources resulted in their protection. The Zuni Tribe has also successfully managed sacred sites through special Federal legislation and litigation of land claims. In two instances, sacred places have been added to the Zuni Reservation. Although the strategies employed by the Zuni Tribe have generally been successful, our analysis identifies two as yet unresolved issues: (1) the limited ability of archaeologists to recognize sacred sites, and (2) the unknown impact that may result from the reduction of a dynamic oral tradition to the literate scholarly and legal forms of the dominant society.
Lobster Trap Limits: A Solution to a Communal Action Problem
James M. Acheson
Key words: lobster industry, rational choice, local level management, US, Maine
Most major fisheries of the world are becoming depleted, largely by human over-exploitation. The basic problem is that fishers cannot or will not generate rules to conserve the resources upon which their livelihood depends. They are unable to solve this communal action dilemma although all would gain. Some fisher groups have been able to establish conservation-oriented guidelines either by lobbying the state (a centralized solution) or by generating self-imposed rules (a decentralized solution). We analyze the factors that allow lobster fishers on four Maine islands to benefit from self-imposed trap limits while most other lobster fishers must await decisions of the state legislature. It is argued that Knight's bargaining theory of norm development explains the trap limit. At root, trap limit rules are the result of a distributional fight over the resource. However, a number of other factors are necessary for fishers to constrain themselves informally. This case modifies and extends the use of rational choice theory in understanding the generation of rules for conserving resources.
Thresholds of Danger Perceived Risk in a New England Fishery
Richard B. Pollnac, John J. Poggie, and Stephen L. Cabral
Key words: maritime anthropology, occupational safety, fishing, risk, Post- traumatic Stress Syndrome, US, New Bedford ME
Building on previous research published in this journal (Pollnac et al. 1995), the paper examines individual and cultural factors that influence the thresholds of danger among North Atlantic fishers from New Bedford, Massachusetts. Refined measures of perceptions of the dangers of fishing are developed and examined in terms of their relationship to individual differences such as ethnicity, age, fishing experience, onboard position, type of fishing, vessel size, and prior experience with hazardous fishing incidents. Relationships uncovered are, in turn, examined in relation to aspects of the occupational subculture of fishing that adapt fishers to the dangers associated with the occupation. Implications of these adaptations with respect to fisher safety training are explored.
Artisanal Fishing Along the Alleppey Coast, Southwest India
Tomy Chacko
Key words: artisanal fisheries, fisheries economics, fisheries technology, India, Kerala State
Please note: Mr. Chacko's address was not printed correctly in this issue. His mailing address is: Mr. Tomy Chacko, Pottackerril, Chevoor Post, Trichur 27, Kerala, S. India.
This article discusses the artisanal fishing fleet of the District of Alleppey on the southwest coast of tropical India. This fleet is typical of the important but largely ignored artisanal fisheries of the world. Alleppey has a coastline of 82 km., from Valiyazheekal to Pallithode. There are about 4,510 traditional fishing crafts operating in this area, spread among about 30 fishing villages. Motorization of fishing in the traditional sector in 1980 has brought advantages as well as disadvantages to the fishermen of Alleppey. Except most of the small Dinghy boats, all craft are motorized, and this imposes heavy financial burdens on fishermen. It was found that medium-sized boats with one outboard engine and one gillnet are more economical than other boats.
La Maroma, or Chile, Credit and Chance: An Ethnographic Case of Global Finance and Middlemen Entrepreneurs
Robert R. Alvarez, Jr.
Key words: cultural logic, transnational markets, global finance, middlemen, economic strategy, ethnography of finance, Mexico, U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
This article seeks to explain the local business behavior of middlemen entrepreneurs engaged in global-level capitalism. Following the trajectory of one commodity, chile, this case illustrates the cultural dynamics articulated by Mexican middlemen in business transactions, tying peasant producers to transnational capital and global markets. La Maroma, a logic of strategy, illuminates the financial manipulation, balance, and control used in coping with large capital expenditures in a transnational market system.
Craft Production and the Challenge of the Global Market: An Artisan's Cooperative in Oaxaca, Mexico
Jeffrey H. Cohen
Key words: economic development, cooperatives, markets, textile production, Mexico
In 1987 the Artisan's Society of Santa Ana was founded to bring the global market for handmade woolen textiles to Santa Ana del Valle, Oaxaca, a rural Zapotec community. Santa Ana is part of Oaxaca's well-documented treadle loom industry, but remains in the shadow of its economically dominant neighbor, Teotitl‡n del Valle. The Artisan's Society was established in response to Teotitl‡n's control and was generally well supported by villagers. However, the cooperative has not accomplished its goal of gaining better market access for local weavers. Over the last decade the Society has struggled, nearly collapsing in 1995. The example of the Artisan's Society allows an opportunity to examine the advantages and disadvantages of cooperatives as avenues toward economic development. The problems facing Santa-ero weavers are not solely local. The evidence presented suggests our anlysis must take account of the control and flow of information and market knowledge; the place of the cooperative in regional, national and international economic processes; and the critique of local socio-economic trends.
Alpaca Sweater Design and Marketing: Problems and Prospects for Cooperative Knitting Organizations in Bolivia
Janet Page-Reeves
Key words: knitting, women's work, craft production, cooperatives, development project funding, Bolivia
This article examines aspects of a handknit sweater industry in Bolivia. This industry employs many rural women, and as a result, has attracted funding from development agencies. The focus here is on the dynamics of exporting and marketing Andean handknits. Particular attention is given to grassroots knitting organizations and the problems they face in moving beyond subsidized markets to compete with private entrepreneurs.
A Mix of Cultures, Values, and People: An Organizational Case Study
Richard H. Reeves-Ellington
Key words: value orientations, organizational culture, organizational conflict, Bulgaria
The key premise of this article is that normative and prescriptive value orientation collisions are underlying causes of organizational culture conflict. This article explores the premise by examining the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG); an organization rife with internal conflicts between its major internal constituencies of American faculty, Bulgarian administrators, and Bulgarian students. Arguably, the conflict reduced the effectiveness of the school's educational mission. For better understanding of the causes of conflict at AUBG, I examine the normative and prescriptive values of each constituency within the internal cross-cultural context of the institution.
Gender, Cognitive Categorization, and Classroom Interaction Patterns of Guatemalan Teachers
Ray Chesterfield and Kjell Enge
Key words: education, teacher perceptions, gender, classroom ethnography, Guatemala
In countries such as Guatemala, where a large percentage of the female population does not attend school or dropout after first grade, female teachers are seen as providing greater opportunities for girls' success in school. Such teachers are felt to have a better understanding of the students and be more sensitive to their needs. In the developing world, however, there exists little evidence on the way teachers of different genders view female or male students or on the relationship between such views and teachers' interaction patterns with students. This study uses proximity techniques, classroom observations, and multi-dimensional scaling to examine differences in teachers' cognitive conceptualization of male and female students. Results show distinct patterns in the attributes associated with male and female students by teachers of different genders. The findings are related to the observed behaviors of sample teachers in their interactions with students in the classroom.
How Ambiguity Results in Excellence: The Role of Hierarchy and Reputation in U.S. Army Special Forces
Anna Simons
Key words: military organization, U.S. Army Special Forces, US, North Carolina
This article explores how group reputations get made and unmade within the strictures of an elite military organization. For instance, within teams there are both formal and informal pecking orders. Above teams there exist layers of command and control. 'Need to know' and information flows are critical to the construction of A-team identities both among teams and for commanders' consumption. Yet, the view from within teams and of teams is never the same. From within, teams are thought never to be equal. From above they are expected to be interchangeable. As this article describes, hierarchy is actually bolstered by such different perspectives, and teams work better as a result.
