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Re: Build Your Own Best-Seller [was work (markets)]
Timothy Mason (mason@CIE.FR)
Tue, 1 Oct 1996 11:26:22 -0500
-- [ From: Timothy Mason * EMC.Ver #2.5.02 ] --
John McCreary wants someone to write a book about all those welfare cheats
out there. Already done. Christopher Jencks - among others - has written dry
, compassionate and intelligent books about the Aemrican Welfare system. If
you don't feel comfortable with your stereotypes - and you would be right
not to do so - try flipping through 'Rethinking Social Policy ; Race,
poverty and the underclass', (Harvard, 1992). You could also try William
Julius Wilson's 'The Truly Disadvantaged ; the inner city, the underclass,
and public policy, Chicago, 1987. I could go on. (Bourdieu's most recent
book is in the same area).
These issues are also discussed regularly in the New York Review of Books. I
often get the feeling, reading this list, that anthropologists are unwilling
to apply their training to the observation of their own culture, and are
quite happy to accept the pontifications of opinion mongers. Whilst you are
ready - quite rightly - to accord full human cognition to the Yanomamo, you
are reluctant to go beyond the caricature to look at the lives of women
struggling to bring up their children in the inner city ghettoes - who live
- if Robert Snower will excuse my unauthorized misuse of his typo -
ghettorized lives.
Tim Mason
(mason@cie.fr)
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