Laurison, Daniel

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Methodological concerns aside, Williams’s ethnographic approach (which hedescribes as “a personal art form” [p. xxiv]) yields a heartbreaking collectionof data points on the life and, in some cases, death of troubled teens. Tohis credit, he clearly intends to put this personal art form to work in sociallyredemptive ways. I have come to think of this form of nonﬁction storytellingas rhetorical pointillism. The author carefully places different dots on the can-vas, but it is mostly left to the reader to stand back, squint a bit, and connectthose dots into a meaningful whole. Some readers will ﬁnd this an aesthet-ically pleasing and intellectually rewarding exercise. Others, much less so.Williams sketches out some of the larger implications in the afterword—in-cluding his arresting claim that self-harm constitutes a crucial rite of passagefor American teens as they transition to adulthood—but the bulk of the bookis given over to his highly impressionistic style.I wonder whether the book advances our understanding of what drivesteenage kids to suicide and self-harm. The answer to that question will de-pend in large part on what is meant by the word “understanding.” For thosewho believe sociological understanding should be grounded in methodo-logical and analytical rigor, the book will likely disappoint. For much of thebook, Williams seems content to offer up vivid, writerly descriptions of whathe has gleaned from years of what might be called compassionate observa-tion, and there is no doubt that this constitutes a kind of understanding. Thebook offers insights but no new theories.Williams says he wanted to write a book that would “confront our collec-tive denial and constant need to blame the victim” (p. xiv) when it comes tosuicide. That is an urgent goal, one I share with Williams, particularly whenit comes to the soaring suicide rate among middle-aged Americans, whoserates are more than double the teen rate. While this book does little to ad-vance existing research on suicide, it is written in a way that should enableit to gain wide readership. If it does, it could help stir the conscience of an ap-athetic nation in denial about our growing epidemic of self-destruction.Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor. By JoanMayaMazelis. NewYork:NewYorkUniversity Press, 2017. Pp xvii1283. $89.00(cloth); $28.00 (paper).Daniel LaurisonSwarthmore CollegeWe, as sociologists, know that poverty is primarily a social issue, not an indi-vidual failing. Many of us work to illuminate the ways in which social policy,U.S. history, and the vicissitudes of job and housing markets combine to trapmany families in poverty, no matter how virtuous they are or how hard theywork. Nonetheless, what Joan Maya Mazelis calls the “achievement ideol-ogy”—the belief that success is available to everyone if only they try hardenough—persists. In Surviving Poverty, Mazelis asks three important ques-American Journal of Sociology1528This content downloaded from 130.058.107.199 on May 30, 2018 11:11:55 AMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).tions about poor Americans’ engagement with this dominant narrative aboutpoverty: How much do they believe poverty is their own fault, how does thisaffect their relationships and lives, and what can poor people working togetherdo about all this?Through extensive interviews with 50 poor Philadelphians, Surviving Pov-erty gives compelling answers to each of these questions. The ﬁrst chapterdemonstrates how much poor interviewees buy into the achievement ideol-ogy: blaming themselves for their poverty, blaming others who are poorer,and believing—often in the face of strong evidence to the contrary—that ifthey can just apply themselves and make the right choices, they should beable to escape the crushing poverty they are experiencing. The next chapterexplains how achievement-ideology-infused shame about being poor com-bines with other aspects of poverty to make most poor respondents reluctantto give or receive help, except (sometimes) from close kin. Respondents tellMazelis that they avoid forming social ties because they believe their needindicates a personal failing, because they do not feel safe in their neighbor-hoods, and because they and those around them have so little that they arenot able to adhere to norms of reciprocity when help is asked for or granted.These ﬁrst two ﬁndings—the prevalence of achievement ideology amongthe poor themselves and the avoidance of the kind of social capital exchangethat can ameliorate the worst deprivations of poverty—are important in theirown right but are presented primarily to lay the groundwork for showinghowmeaningful the work of the KensingtonWelfare Rights Union (KWRU),an organization by and for poor people in Philadelphia, is for its members.Half the people Mazelis interviewed were KWRU members, and the bookalso relies on extensive participant-observationwithin the organization.Maze-lis demonstrates the ways the KWRU combats achievement ideology so thatpoor people start to understand the structural, systemic forces underlying theirpoverty. One of the most powerful sections of the book includes quotes fromKWRUmembers (pp. 110–13) describing the ways their perspectives on theirownandothers’poverty shifted as they learned that people all over the countryfaced similar conditions.More important than that, however, are the ways KWRU helped its mem-bers survive with somewhat less deprivation than they might otherwise havefaced. Mazelis describes how, for many members, KWRUmeant the differ-ence between housing and homelessness or between having enough to eatand going without. Through facilitating what Mazelis calls “sustainable ties,”KWRU helped members make their lives more liveable. While MatthewDesmond (Evicted: Poverty and Proﬁt in the American City [Crown Pub-lishers, 2016]) ﬁnds only what he calls “disposable ties” in the poor commu-nities he studied in Milwaukee, and the non-KWRU members in Philadel-phia also mostly rely on disposable ties or family, Mazelis demonstrates howKWRUwas able to facilitate longer-lasting, mutually beneﬁcial, nonkin, sus-tainable ties. Because individuals who received help had a reciprocal obliga-tion to the organization rather than to a particular individual, they were morelikely to be able to repay that obligation (by volunteering at the ofﬁce, goingto protests, or helping other members with housing, food, or babysitting whenBook Reviews1529This content downloaded from 130.058.107.199 on May 30, 2018 11:11:55 AMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).they were able). This group, rather than individual, reciprocity also allowed ex-changes of help to feel less instrumental. The book thus makes an importantcontribution to literatures on both poverty and social capital: it is good to knowthat poverty does not make longer-term relationships of reciprocal assis-tance impossible and that an organization can facilitate poor people’s abil-ity to help themselves and each other.I have a few quibbles with the book’s approach: Mazelis sometimes usesacademic buzzwords where more substantive vocabulary would be helpful(e.g., I wondered about relationships, acquaintances, and friends, not just“ties”) and might give “neoliberalism” more direct causal power than is en-tirely accurate. Butmymain critique of the book is that Iwantedmore: in itseffort to make its contribution about how “sustainable ties”were built, it doesnot give much empirical or theoretical attention to the other sociologicallyimportant aspects of KWRU as an organization. Much of what KWRU ac-complished for its members went beyond sustainable ties: Mazelis reports thatKWRU took over abandoned houses for its members, received substantialfunding to rent additional houses for members, and organized protests to helpmembers get needed beneﬁts. While all of these accomplishments were pos-sible because poor people worked together, they are not the kind of direct ex-change Mazelis means by “sustainable ties” and might have lessons for (andfrom) studies of social movements as well.Mazelis is careful throughout the book not to overstate what we can knowfrom comparing non-KWRUmembers to members; the two groups were dif-ferent inmanyways,most centrally thatKWRUmembers generally had ex-perienced even severer poverty than nonmembers, which is often what ledthem to turn to the organization in the ﬁrst place. The book nonetheless pro-vides a compelling account of how KWRUmembers’ lives would likely havebeen worse without KWRU and that much of what KWRU provided wasthese sustainable ties. Mazelis argues that if social service agencies adaptedsome of KWRU’s policies and practices around reciprocity, they could bothincrease their reach and help empower those in poverty.Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy. By DouglasHartmann. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2016. Pp. xiv1259.$105 (cloth); $35 (paper).David LeonardWashington State UniversityIn recent years, midnight basketball has become as much a part of the colle-giate landscape as March Madness, the swoosh, and exploitation. Kickingoff the season each year, midnight basketball is part celebration, part peprally, and part commercial. While no longer happening as the clocks strikes12 (proﬁts increase at a more reasonable hour), the symbolic power of mid-night basketball is clear.American Journal of Sociology1530This content downloaded from 130.058.107.199 on May 30, 2018 11:11:55 AMAll use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).

Review Of  Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties Among The Poor  By J. M. Mazelis

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Review Of Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties Among The Poor By J. M. Mazelis

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