Luke Bergmann, and what practicing anthropology and social work really looks like

I can't begin to say how proud I am of my colleagues, how incredible I think their achievements are and how grateful I am to share an intellectual space with them. Luke Bergmann is an exemplar of what we do best, and what I aspire to achieve. He's an inspiration to me of how knowledge from anthropology and social work can fuse into something quite new and remarkable, a radical way of approaching the world to understand the experiences of other people, their beliefs and challenges, and to address their suffering in powerful and uniquely sensitive ways. Luke continues to live and work in Detroit to help improve the conditions in the city where he spent three years living and studying the lives of drug dealers for his doctoral dissertation.

Luke's dissertation-turned-book, Getting Ghost, circulates and receives rave reviews. He's going on a book tour this month that includes the Bay Area, Portland, Chicago, and Ann Arbor.

Below I'm pasting the event description for the Berkeley event. If he's coming to your town, I highly recommend going to check out the event.

Wednesday, January 28, 7:30 PM at First Congregational Church of Berkeley

LUKE BERGMANN

Getting Ghost: Two Young Lives and the Struggle for

the Soul of an American City

While some American cities like New York have recovered from the depths of their urban decay in the 1970s and 80s, Detroit is admittedly not one of them. A city pockmarked with ever more abandoned neighborhoods, empty lots, and vacant factories, Detroit is where sociologist Luke Bergmann connected in a juvenile detention facility with Dude Freeman and Rodney Phelps -- two teenage petty drug dealers facing profoundly uncertain futures. Following Dude and Rodney, Bergmann spent three years embedded on the streets of northwest Detroit, living side by side with its residents, and from these experiences comes Getting Ghost, an unforgettable portrait of two young men and of the troubled city they call home.

A tour de force of original analysis and powerful storytelling reminiscent of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and Sudhir Vankatesh's Off the Books, Getting Ghost chronicles Dude's and Rodney's lives, tracking their attempts to get by however they can in a city betrayed by broken promises of urban revitalization, where the drug trade is so ubiquitous that entire families are involved. Bergmann portrays the lives and work of young African American drug hustlers not as the product of some exotic inner city jungle that we can't possibly relate to, but rather as an often seamless part of the everyday reality of the larger African American community.

Luke Bergmann was a postdoctoral fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and an associate research scientist at the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley. He is now a research director at the Detroit Department of Health and Wellness Promotion and a faculty associate of the University of Michigan. He lives on the East Side of Detroit.

Prisons, Torture, and Mental Health

For those of you in Michigan, there will be a rally and teach-in on Wednesday, August, 6, in Lansing, in commemoration of the 2-year anniversary of the death of Timothy Joe Souders. For those of you who are not familiar with this story, Liz Spikol gave a clear and poignant picture of the story on her blog a couple years ago.

The emphasis of the upcoming march on Lansing is prison torture, and the deeply problematic continuing practices of prisoner segregation, restraint, and water withholding. These are very important issues, but Timothy's case also highlights the obvious need for improved attention to health care, especially mental health care, both in the United States at large and specifically in the justice system. I encourage you also to explore the information at Mental Health America, which promotes the advancement of mental health policy and education in our country, and will facilitate your active involvement as a concerned citizen.

I heart the interwebs -- alternative news round-up

One thing I like about reading my news from a custom-designed list that makes use of RSS feeds of a variety of international sources (NPR, New York Times, Al Jazeera, BBC, etc. . ) is that I'm able to see a lot more variation in the top stories than you do if you read the top US newspapers. It's even more interesting than the days when I read the World Press Review magazine.

Case in point: Although the New York Times is reporting on the German dairy strike, the US seems oblivious to the fishermen's work stoppages in Spain in protest of rising fuel prices: "'Compliance is total. The entire Spanish coast is at a halt," Jose Caparros, of the fishermen's co-operative in the major northeastern port of Barcelona, said." Apparently Portugal has already seen similar action and Italian and Belgian fishermen are expected to follow suit, according to Al Jazeera and the BBC.


Of course, I personally am interested to see social work and anthropology and Eastern Europe in the mainstream news today, and Roma in the international press.

First off, social work: The Supreme Court has ruled that child welfare workers in Texas overstepped their bounds in their removal of the children from the polygamist compound outside Eldorado last month.

Next, Eastern Europe: Croatia has jailed a war crimes general following his conviction in the Croatian court. As the BBC reports, "The UN war crimes tribunal's decision to transfer the case to Zagreb was in recognition of the progress Croatia had earlier made in dealing with war crimes investigations, the BBC's Balkans analyst Gabriel Partos said."

And finally, anthropology gets its five minutes in the spotlight. The secret to Stonehenge finally been uncovered (and now reported all over the mainstream press). My favorite commentary on the recent discoveries at Stonehenge has to be the interview with Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap.

Meanwhile, in northern France, archaeologists are "seeking to uncover a suspected mass grave of hundreds of Australian and British troops from World War I."

Also, there's also been yet another "uncontacted tribe" 'sighted' in the Amazon by Brazil's National Indian Foundation (Fundacao Nacional do Indio, whose website was down last I tried). True to the form of salvage ethnography, there are folks convinced we need to save them.

CNN reports:"'These pictures are further evidence that uncontacted tribes really do exist,' said Stephen Corry, director of Survival International. 'The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct.'" I just wonder how long it'll be before they send in a translator to communicate with them.

© Gleison Miranda/FUNAI

On the other hand, in the international press, there are some new, disturbing reports on Roma. One of the oldest Romani populations in the world, that of Istanbul, is experiencing dislocation due to urban renewal in Sulukule. Human rights advocates are very concerned for the Romani families who have been living in the neighborhood for centuries. There are allegations that illiterate families have been asked to sign papers they don't understand, and that "tenants in Sulukule were left on the streets as the houses they resided in were sold and then destructed by the municipality."

In Italy, meanwhile, schoolchildren's drawings are telling a frightening tale of xenophobia and violence underlying the recent firebombing of a Romani camp outside Naples, according to the Daily Mail.

"Burning the houses of the Roma is justified," wrote some children. Another said, "They steal babies and use them for begging or sell their organs for transplants." The frightening messages of hatred communicated without filter through the words and images of children give startling insight into the dangerous social situation for Roma in Italy.

Parenthood, Childhood, and the State -- starting the first draft.

Well, I've written the beginning of a draft of my paper for Parenthood, Childhood, and the State.
It's funny, I sometimes get really passionate when I write papers for social work.

Want to see what I've got so far? If it's boring to you, by all means, you can skip it. :)

Just one other thing. I got a personal thank-you note in email tonight from one of my students. Aww, I feel all warm and fuzzy now.


So, here's the beginning of the draft. No title as of yet, and don't even really like the subtitles. It still needs work, editing, and a lot more thinking. But if you do read it and you have a comment, I'd love to hear it, especially if it might help with the conceptualization of what I'm trying to bring together. It's still not clear yet from what I've written so far, I'm afraid. I've got a veritable tower of books here I'm still sorting through and trying to think about, and realistically, this is probably going to feed directly into my preliminary exams, since I know I'm not going to get the mastery of the material that I want to in the next ten days. But, still to come is: Meredith Small, Margaret Mead (somewhere I need to work in those wacky videos!), Foucault, Ann Stoler, more history and law, some historical sociology on Hungarian social welfare (Lynne Haney), some stuff on the control of reproduction, and some interdisciplinary stuff on child welfare, child abuse and neglect, the framing of child development in social work, and some more policy stuff. In other words, it's a right mess and I really need to figure out how to pull it all together.

My Point of Entry for this Inquiry

My interest in drawing together a rather disparate body of literature on parenthood, childhood, and the state, in this course, originated out of a nagging sense that policymakers and social workers ought to pay more attention to anthropology and history. Social work courses at the master's level often take as a given social constructions that we consider an object of inquiry at the doctoral level, and the treatment of childhood and the relationship between the state and the child in particular were two areas that had troubled me in my MSW courses. "What are the goals of childhood?" asked one instructor at the beginning of a course on Child and Infant development, yielding a series of student responses such as "learning language", "learning to walk," "play," "going to school," "learning to read and write," "learning math," and so on. The implication that this was a scientific question being presented to the class, one that could be answered in a way that could apply to all settings, concerned me deeply. The very framing of childhood as a context where goals ought to be made, striven toward, and accomplished seemed odd to me. With regular social contact with communicative adults, every child without specific limitations comes to be able to communicate through language and walk without assistance. The concept that these processes require specific parental (or social work) intervention is one that is patently untrue, and one that promotes an ethnocentric view of families where childhood is not a "project" to succeed or fail in and of cultures where work, rather than play, is the emphasis for children.

After all, setting aside our own enculturation as Americans and emotional cues to the contrary, there is nothing that makes our categorization of a menstruating twelve-year-old female as a child any more appropriate or natural than that of another culture that may view her as ready for marriage. Such arguments, when they arise in international media, frequently yield cries from international experts who cite apparently harmful physiological effects of early child birth, economic and social effects of curtailing her enrollment in formal public education, and human rights established and agreed upon in some international forum. I do not mean to dispute any such claims in this instance, but merely to point out the remarkable variation that has existed across time and space in (1) what we consider a child, (2) what roles we consider appropriate and inappropriate for someone in that category, (3) what modes of interaction we consider appropriate between parents or other caregivers and children, and (4) how and when we believe we ought to intervene in these interactions as a public (whether as a state representing the people, or as other authority figures or neighbors in a shared community).

There is no doubt that there are trends and even universals in human development across the life course, and I don't contest that these features are important for future social work practitioners to learn. But it is my contention that the ahistoricism and ethnocentrism that plague many practice-oriented social work courses do a profound disservice to both practitioner and client in the long term. Why? Because it robs the social worker of an education in critical theory that could aid her or him in contextualizing — and challenging — the normative, and ultimately could shape a profoundly more radical version of social work than currently appears to be inculcated in schools of social work.

In order for real social change to occur, a systematic and thorough understanding of the current situation is necessary, and such an understanding is impossible without knowledge of what has preceded. In the words of Robert van Krieken, a "lack of historical understanding" . . .

encourages the tendency to see promising novelty where there is often recycling of old ideas and old recipes, and disables us from perceiving long-term trends. As David Thompson puts it, to neglect history "means that we often fail to appreciate that the options facing us now are very familiar to those considered, tried and discarded by previous generations which also had to decide how to care for the lonely elderly, the husbandless mother, the parentless child or the unemployed family man (Thompson 1986:357)" (van Krieken 1991:2).

Furthermore, I would add, as globalization continues to reshape our social world in quite profound ways, and social workers are more and more likely to come into contact with clients socialized in environments dramatically different from those they grew up in themselves, the lessons of anthropology become increasingly important to integrate into the training of social work practitioners. The application of a tried-and-true method in a culturally inappropriate setting is arguably no less foolhardy than the application of a method that was "tried and discarded by previous generations". However, without placing a greater value on the contributions of both anthropology and history to the education of those conceptualizing interventions, these are both inevitably mistakes they will make.

* * *

Weapons of the Powerful

Debates for or against a particular change in policy often draw on the public's emotions by rhetorically establishing a frame of normalcy, then placing a certain belief or practice outside that frame by invoking what is natural or what is universal. These constructs, however, almost never are used with the basis of scientific evidence that informs of what was practiced by our ancestors, or how practices vary across human populations. In the area of the family, this type of rhetoric is particularly popular for attempts to discredit such far-ranging practices as polygamy, homosexuality, various approaches to parenting, and the list goes on.

In just one of the more recent of such debates, calling for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, President Bush made the following statement:

The union of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution, honoring, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith. Ages of experience have taught humanity that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society.

Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society. Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all.

Within two days, the American Anthropological Association stepped forward to dispute the claim President Bush had made, stating that:

The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

Anthropology and history provide powerful tools for challenging commonsense understandings of the natural by countering assumptions about what is universal with empirical evidence of how human social structures have varied over time and space.

Works Cited

AAA statement on Marriage and the Family, issued February 26, 2004, available at: http://www.aaanet.org/press/ma_stmt_marriage.htm

Bush, President George W., Statement of February 24, 2004, "President Calls for Constitutional Amendment Protecting Marriage," available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/02/20040224-2.html

Van Krieken, Robert (1991). Children and the State: Social Control and the formation of Australian Child Welfare. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.