>Since we all acknowledge, as does Ehrenreich, that there is no way she
>can truly understand the experience of being poor what exactly is gained
>by the subterfuge that cannot be gained through dispensing with the
>charade and letting working people tell their own story? Other than
>self-aggrandizing I mean.
>Maybe lying to large numbers of working people to gain their confidence
>so you can write a best-seller is really not such a bad thing and I
>should not hold such behaviours in the incredibly low regard that I do.
>I guess I should get with the times and stop holding to antiquated ideas
>concerning honesty. At least where national treasures are concerned anyway.
heh. you're talking to a sociologist. as i headed off to graduate school, i was informed that the plant the wasband worked for was shutting down. I cracked, "oh hey! now i have a dissertation to write about people's misery." this was a defense for my own fear about our economic circumstances and a crack about what i knew was well known and oft discussed among academics: the uses and abuses of our "respondents" and all for the gain of folks getting phds, making their research bones, etc. unlike some of the economists on this list, though, i wasn't that filled with self-loathing, since academia is hardly a lone bastion of making your bones while stepping on others backs, and i hardly had the expectations of it that others seem to.
note: i grew up near the little town studied by bensman and whosit, Small Town in Mass Society. When the townfolk found out that they'd been working under cover, they had a parade and burned their effigies they were so outraged at what they'd exposed. there's a whole article on it and other deceptions at lingua franca's archives, title is "Spies like us". (Thing is: we've gotten loads of excellent information this way, especially on cops and the powerful, when researchers lie. I was kind of disgusted with some of the new institutional research rules installed by my own uni. given i was researching the powerful or relativesly so, if i'd had to adhere to them, i would have gotten a lot less info.)
we lie all the time to get information that people wouldn't otherwise give us. studs terkel holds back on his own thoughts. he pitches himself a certain way in order to gain their trust. blah blah.
there are different reasons for doing participant-observation as opposed to doing interviews -- different because you get different kinds of experience, information, etc. when i studied downsized professionals who'd been out of work for 9 months or more, sometimes two years, what i learned from them through interviews was often very different than what i observed when i sat with them at the transition agency where they met with other unemployed folks, psyching themselves up for another week of degradation, etc.
as for the rest, i read her very differently than you -- which happens. i saw her wrestle with the morality of what she was doing, often beating herself up (i thought needlessly) for not really being poor. as for knowing her mind and motivations for using the car -- i thought that was sarcasm, not some kind of cover. e.g., i thought she was very honest about the public transportation issue. which is truly the dregs in Key West (and no doubt Maine).
cards on the table: i have nothing but contempt for people who think that having been poor (or whatever) gives them some sort of identity license for being outraged when someone else dares speak to "their", viewed as some sort of impostor or some shit. i understand the impulse, but i rilly rilly RILLy don't think that playing "I'm more authentic than you" gets us anywhere. it's, as Doug might put it, regressive and "deeply silly" because it makes a fetish out of pain and plays right into the victimization narratives so loved by the identity politics movement in its worst forms. here i'm taking my cue from Wendy Brown's work on "wounded identities" -- so getting the bright idea that i'm opposed to id politics wouldn't be especially bright.
so basically, were i ehrenreich in the face of these accusations, I'd just say, "Yeah. Isn't it nice." (maybe that's a longer way of saying, "whatever"? heh.)
speaking of which -- that is, speaking of the issue of speaking for the poor and downtrodden -- it turns out that ehrenreich's own insights and recommendations re: maids probably would have been met with hostility had the research been pumped out in the 70s. iow, they sounded a whole lot like downsized workers at the companies i studied.
when the company hired armed goons to stand on the roof and shoot people in case an uprising broke out over the announcement of the plant closing, they'd been unprepared for the fact that, instead of anger, everyone started crying and acting out various forms of repentance scenarios: sure that if they did right, behaved right, did something anything, the company wouldn't close.
why i should uphold that attitude as anything other than a kind of "mighty white of ya" attitude and let the "people" speak their truths in that instance.... beyond me.
with regard to maids, "the people" in all their authenticity would have wanted rather the opposite of ehrenreich's prescription. this is not because ehrenreich didn't get the deep propensity for the workplace to encourage you to fashion yourself into a tool for the man, but precisely because she refused to valorize this attitude. three cheers for ehrenreich.
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