All Our Kin
May 1-2, 2009
2009 marks the 35th anniversary of the publication of All Our Kin, Carol Stack’s path-breaking ethnography of the survival strategies of African-American women living in poverty in urban America. All Our Kin: A Conference in Honor of Carol Stack celebrates more than three decades of Stack’s contribution to ethnography as a method of critical inquiry into the social conditions and public policies that shape people’s everyday lives. Hosted by the Public Humanities Initiative of the American Studies Program at Yale and co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and the Department of African and African-American Studies at Yale, this interdisciplinary conference brings together anthropologists, sociologists, journalists, and community activists to examine the book's significance to academic and public knowledge about poverty and economic inequality in America.
All Our Kin: The Book
When Carol Stack's All Our Kin was published in 1974, anthropologist Ward Goodenough wrote that it "shows how inadequate most writings on the subject [of the African American family] have been, even by social scientists, and demonstrates the importance of the anthropological approach which emphasizes living with people, learning their way of seeing things, and learning how to operate acceptability in accordance with their standards for dealing with one another. [Stack's] book should be read by the general public." Over the past 35 years, All Our Kin has informed social policy, become a staple of college course reading lists, and served as a touchstone for generations of ethnographers.
What made All Our Kin unique? Why did it become an exemplar of ethnographic studies of poverty and social inequality? The organizers of this conference believe it was Stack's willingness to let her informants' voices guide her interpretations. This radical approach to social inquiry broke new ground in social theory and public policy and revolutionized the way ethnographers conceptual their role as investigators and writers. By attending to the voices of black women struggling to raise children in inner city Chicago, Stack showed that behaviors the broader society condemned as “pathological” were actually strategies for maintaining social cohesion and meeting economic needs. Her extended time in "The Flats" allowed her to make the observation that government aid to the poor often misunderstood the real needs of people and communities. Stack’s book demonstrated the power of qualitative research to shape poverty policy in ways that take into account the lived experience of those who have first-hand knowledge of the social problems policymakers wish to address.
Ethnography Today
The social realities ethnographers document today have changed since the publication of Stack's landmark work. The crack cocaine epidemic has decimated communities. Tens of thousands of African-American men are incarcerated. Welfare reform of the 1990s has destabilized systems of support in poor families throughout rural and urban America. Deindustrialization has radically altered economic opportunity in manufacturing communities, even as the globalization of high-tech and service industries has steadily eroded the job security of white-collar workers. Patterns of de-institutionalization, housing scarcity, and low-wage employment have cast thousands of Americans into the streets and homeless shelters. Disasters such as hurricane Katrina and the subprime mortgage crisis have exposed the effects of neoliberal policies that systematically undercut the living standards in marginalized communities.
This conference showcases the work of ethnographers who study social inequality in the United States in the model of Carol Stack's research. Speakers will consider the ongoing relevance of All Our Kin for understanding the drastic changes in living standards throughout the United States over the past 35 years. In particular, we will reflect on how ethnographic methods, theory, and forms of representation can continue to offer valuable insights into public policy arenas.
