All Our Kin: Strategies For Survival In A Black Community - Softcover

Stack, .

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061319821 ISBN 13: 9780061319822

Publisher: Basic Books, 1983

Synopsis

All Our Kin is the chronicle of a young white woman's sojourn into The Flats, an African-American ghetto community, to study the support system family and friends form when coping with poverty. Eschewing the traditional method of entry into the community used by anthropologists -- through authority figures and community leaders -- she approached the families herself by way of an acquaintance from school, becoming one of the first sociologists to explore the black kinship network from the inside. The result was a landmark study that debunked the misconception that poor families were unstable and disorganized. On the contrary, her study showed that families in The Flats adapted to their poverty conditions by forming large, resilient, lifelong support networks based on friendship and family that were very powerful, highly structured and surprisingly complex. Universally considered the best analysis of family and kinship in a ghetto black community ever published, All Our Kin is also an indictment of a social system that reinforces welfare dependency and chronic unemployment. As today's political debate over welfare reform heats up, its message has become more important than ever.

About this title

About the Author

Carol B. Stack is professor of women's studies and education at the University of California at Berkeley. The author of All Our Kin and numerous articles on poverty and social policy, she is also past president of the Society for Urban Anthropology. She was awarded the Prize for Critical Research in 1995 from the Society for the Anthropology of North America. She has received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Russel Sage Fellowships. She returns often to a home in North Carolina.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1983
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061319821
• ISBN 13: 9780061319822
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192