My reactions to readings for Week 5:

I’m struck by the ethnocentric characteristics of Fortes work and the review of works around Community Studies in Sullivan’s chapter. I know, I’m supposed to be shocked, stunned by studies waged in reaction to the development of the concept of “culture of poverty”, fights that with hindsight we can assume wouldn’t be necessary if methods for understanding the roots of social disparities hadn’t developed out of positivist, ethnocentric research agenda. The intense lack of Fortes’ membership as a legitimate community member, and his entire lack of appreciation of the fact that his domineering presence as a representative of a colonial power comes through when he writes that his questions evoked responses like “he replied reproachfully,” and “she responded almost indignantly” (p. 11). Gee, Meyer, do ya think you might be asking inappropriate questions? No, he didn’t. It was his job, his position, and (if you got to know him) he might say his “duty,” in the 1930s, to ask people questions that made them mad at him, and to feel comfortable continuing to invade their lives, in the name of scientific research.
I thought Sullivan’s presentation of the methods leading to the on-going debates over the concept of “culture of poverty” was a powerful example of the need to pursue longitudinal, multi-level, and cross-cultural analyses in ethnographic work (Corsaro, p. 420). As Sullivan puts it, “By focusing on processes internal to a poor community, the researcher continually faces the risk of ascribing the causes of problems within the community entirely to its own members and neglecting problems of disempowerment, exploitation, and exclusion emanating from powerful interests and institutions outside the community” (p. 209).
Eric H.