From Studyplace

These are notes I'm taking for Professor Varenne's class on the Dynamics of Family Interaction. I'm using it as an opportunity to play around with wikis and shared community knowledge. Please feel free to contribute to these notes or share your ideas about how it can be expanded, changed, improved.

Aaron Hung

Contents 1 For richer and poorer: The extension of the family in the United States 1.1 Readings 1.2 Reading notes 1.2.1 Stack, Carol. All our kin. 1.3 Class notes

For richer and poorer: The extension of the family in the United States

Readings

• Stack, Carol. All our kin. New York: Harper and Row. 1975

Reading notes

Stack, Carol. All our kin.

Class notes

Link to Professor Varenne's notes

• V: we are not the products of our culture, but transformers of our culture
• studies of poverty often erases the types of meaningful activities people living in poverty perform
• A: reminds me of the movie Catch me if you can about passing as someone else
• social workers often tell people how to lie

• Culture of poverty
  • people in poverty may have more people to rely on than those in the middle class
  • Moynihan: wrote Beyond the melting pot in 1960; argued that melting pot does not work
  • Parsons: if you don't have stable families you will have unstable adults
  • Moynihan started "war on poverty"; poor reproduce their poverty
  • blacks, poor not genetically deficient; therefore this must have been something they acquired
  • Moynihan and Oscar Lewis (culture of poverty) were attacked later although they had support at the time
  • Bernstein: poverty will change the minds of people
  • Lewis: two kinds of poverty; some kinds are temporary; other kinds will cause them to remain poor
  • John Ogbu: voluntary and involuntary immigration
  • V: Ogbu's argument is the same culture of poverty argument
  • Bourdieu: cultural capital; habitus is similar to Lewis, Ogbu's argument
  • slavery, involuntary migration deteriorated African American families
  • rate of literacy among slaves could have been same has the whites in the south; slaves taught themselves how to read
  • deterioration of family focus on rates of divorce

• All our kin
  • immediate reaction within anthropology, sociolinguistcs against Moynihan
  • A: I heard Labov talk recently at the applied linguistics conference; seems like his main focus now is on phonology as (one of the main) causes of school failure, poverty, etc. This seems like a very different position he has taken up now. Some of his more recent work can be found at his Upenn website
  • Heath: working with black families, trying to see how they raise their children; what forms of talk do people in poverty use
  • poor people have more kin; will have an easier time finding help
  • "acting white" is a form of risk-taking
  • A: reminds me of Finding Forrester about a black student who purposefully does poorly in class to fit in with his friends
  • what happens to families when there is an emergency; who do they go for help?
  • V: many statistics collected by institutions may be inaccurate, since social workers have to fit their clients into particular categories
  • A: Bill Cosby has had been a vocal critic of black families, and been criticizes for those criticisms