Jason A O Woodruff
Poverty, Neoliberalism, and Activism: Reflections on the Work of Dr. Jeff Maskovsky
Jason A O Woodruff
18 Nov. 2014
Reeling from the hours of research into prospective subjects for this paper and project, I decided to return to some of my past papers to see -if perhaps- there were other subjects that I could add to my list. To my surprise, there was one article that I utilized for two separate projects. The article provided a summary of various anthropological perspectives on poverty within the United States. The authors, Sandra Morgen and Jeff Maskovsky, both have devoted significant time to researching various aspects of poverty and its interaction with various processes. After mulling over my list, I decided to email both of these authors to invite them to be the subject of this paper. Both responded in a matter of minutes. Sadly, Dr. Morgen was unable to do the interview due to illness. Dr. Maskovsky, on the other hand, allowed me to interview him. The downside to the interview, was that the interview had to take place the next morning! Amazingly, I took him up on the interview. This paper draws upon my personal interview with Dr. Jeff Maskovsky, a review of his work on poverty on its own and in comparison to the work of others, and my own reflections on the topic in correlation to my own personal goals and career aspirations.
In the hours before the interview, I began to do a cursory review into the work of Dr. Jeff Maskovsky. Dr. Maskovsky's work bridges a wide swath of topics: neoliberalism, poverty, modern imperialism, AIDS activism, politics, and economics. The work that greatly interested me dealt with the issue of poverty. In my interview with Dr. Maskovsky, he remarked that his interest in poverty research began with his focus on AIDS activism among gay men in the Philadelphia area. The idea drawn from that work, in relation to poverty, is that AIDS activism was taken over by wealthier gay populations. The result of this 'take-over' was the plight of the lower income homosexual men. Throughout his work, culled from the cursory review, it is clear to see a strong intermingling of the many topics themselves.
My personal interest in poverty comes from both my lived experience from childhood to early adulthood and research conducted through my coursework at IUPUI on urban abandonment and mass transit. It is my opinion that my personal experience dealing with poverty allows me to see things from a different angle than most researchers of this issue. Understanding the 'reality' seen through those eyes, an example of intimate ethnography, allows me better insight in grappling the larger issues that create and nurture the conditions for poverty. Despite this intimate familiarity with issues of poverty, there is plenty that I don't know. Thus, from my vantage point, understanding the scholarly knowledge and opinionated formulations provides a comfortable 'cross-comparison' upon which I can soundly come to understand these issues. It is the understanding of these issues from both sides that, I feel, will better position myself in finding work within either the public or private sector.
My work at IUPUI began with an interest in paleolithic cultures, evolution, and genetics. I was eager to learn about the evolution of the human species, our continued development, and how our evolutionary adaptations are presently changing. My move towards an interest in sociocultural anthropology was slow. It was through taking the Development of Anthropological Theory course, where I was introduced to the work of Boas, Mead, Levi-Strauss, Geertz, Obeyesekere, Sahlins, and many others, that I began to see an interest in culture. Applied Anthropology and Urban Anthropology furthered this interest. The one burning question is how do I take this interest and transform it into a career? Dr. Maskovsky provided a great deal of insight into poverty, neoliberalism, and activism. However, he didn't quite provide insight into what can be done to create a career outside of academic circles.
So, how does one build a career that deals with complex social issues -with the hopes of providing substantial contribution to alleviating their impact? While this question wasn't asked of Maskovsky, he did provide some insight into its answer: education and experience. Maskovsky began his undergraduate career with an interest in learning East Asian languages. From this point, Maskovsky began to nurture an interest in social issues -beginning with looking at AIDS activism. While he didn't provide any clear 'road-map' of his transition into anthropology, he did stress the importance of furthering education and taking part in extra-curricular activities such as research, internships, field schools, and literature reviews. The outcome of these activities should be a broadening of one's interest areas as well as a better understanding/mastery of the processes that impact and shape those interest areas.
Maskovsky has a lot to say about poverty. Neoliberalist policy and governance, he finds, are intimately linked to the disappearance of poverty from the 'public eye.' In becoming invisible, the impoverished are capable of becoming stigmatized (Goode and Maskovsky 2001). Further, this stigmatization is filtered through the ideological lens of neoliberalist economic thought. Those in poverty, it contends, are in their condition by their own actions. Within this train of thought, morals and values have shifted towards the goal of eliminating dependency on social welfare programs and, in some cases, remove those programs which are believed -under the conceptualization of neoliberalist ideology- to nurture dependency. Thus, the prevalence of race, power, politics, and economics as variables by which neoliberalism can be gauged serves as the focal point in most of his work.
Neoliberalist ideology, as stated by Maskovsky, also has undermined the ability of poverty research to provide meaningful contributions to the reversal of patterns of current patterns of economic polarization and social inequality. This is done through specific patterns (Maskovsky 2001). First, researchers of poverty are pressured to to the idea that participation in the low-end labor market is the primary goal of anti-poverty policy. This is reinforced through the public perception that this participation is a 'social good.' This workist consensus, as termed by Maskovsky, promotes low wages as a counterbalance ot the frenzy of credit-driven consumption that has sustained national economic growth through the 1990s. Second, is the fragmentation of policy implementation. This fragmentation has correlated with the promotion of different identities for the poor that each have its own prescription for social change: homeless, drug addict, welfare mom, Medicaid recipient, and so forth. Third, is the individual's role in his/her condition. The ideologies of individual mobility and uplift that lay balme on the poor for their own impoverishment. Researchers are pressured to ensure that the voices of the poor conform to the dominant tenets of the mainstream political agenda which calls for the personal responsibility and the renunciation of 'state' dependency. To address these factors, Maskovsky calls for a change in the goals of research should be focused on the true political empowerment of the poor. The poor, as he states, have been excluded from real political and decision-making power. By studying the various mechanisms that sustain this exclusion, scholarship can assist in the reorientation of public discussion back towards the putative goal of poverty policy.
The need to empower the poor and include their voice in poverty policy serves as a good objective for poverty research and policy. However, it is my opinion that there are factors that serve -or have the ability- to undermine this. First among these is the need to transplant the message of empowerment into the daily realities of the poor themselves. Families with a sustained history of poverty, as I have witnessed firsthand, often develop a strong distrust of power, wealth, and government. Stressing to these families the need for empowerment requires the need to break through this long-seated distrust. Second is the development, among the poor, of various communities or groups that result from issues that stem from poverty. Many of these groups provide a network that -in their believes- assists in providing some sense of power to the poor. Much of this power, however, is exerted on other impoverished individuals, often to the detriment of the larger low-income community itself. Third is the extent to which fragmentation -as described above by Maskovsky- had damaged the ability of the impoverished to come together as a group. Through my experience, culled from assisting in neighborhood organizing with my Uncle, the various identities ascribed the poor (drug addict, welfare mom, etc.) also come with stigmatized beliefs. These beliefs have resulted in further splintering the poor -a fact that is mentioned in quite a few scholarly articles by Maskovsky and others. Furthering splintering also occurs via intersection with other factors. One of the most widespread is the intersection of poverty with race. Some communities view poverty as being differentiated by race. One example from my experience comes in the administering of social welfare programs. I have heard countless times, throughout my childhood and adulthood -both often spent in poverty, that black Americans receive aid easier than white Americans. Further, stigmatization of the black poor was continuously enforced through various sayings: black welfare 'mamas' call there children welfare checks, blacks have many kids so they get more food stamps, and you ever want food stamps -just go buy them from a black person. At the same time, the white poor often deal with a low sense of dignity and self-esteem. Furthering these feelings along is, as Maskovsky points out time and again, the neoliberal view of self-responsibility for one's condition. Many of these factors, whether they be from the impact of neoliberalist ideology on the poor or more historical ideologies, must be dealt with in the process of 'empowering' the poor. Maskovsky, however, doesn't provide a clear means at which to do this.
In reflection, much of my experience has come from living and working in Indianapolis, Indiana. Cities, despite the larger shared culture, have a distinct 'flavor'. This flavor comes from a mix of historical, social, economic, policy, and developmental factors. Indianapolis has a manufactured flavor to it. Despite a few pockets of organic development, most of the development within the city has been planned. For the longest time, main thoroughfares within the city were required to keep a 'desirable' visual aesthetic. Historical buildings were evaluated on their contribution to the desired look of the city and to a lesser extent on the history that occurred in the structure itself. The inner city areas, including the downtown, began to serve as transient points of residence from the 1850s onward. The city, in turn, embraced suburbanization -an embrace that was cemented with the construction of I-70, I-65, and I-465. In keeping with this idea of transient residence patterns and an embrace of suburbanization, the city is currently experiencing a 'building-boom' of sorts in the urban core. This boom is an attempt to attract younger professionals -many with expendable money due to lack of family based financial burdens (children, home maintenance costs, etc.). These younger professionals, it is believed, will 'reject' the suburban lifestyle that has characterized American life since the end of WWII in favor of urban living. This 'manufactured' development is typical of Indianapolis. It is based on a predicted future demand, much like other developments -many of which have failed. Despite this building boom, Indianapolis has witnessed a still strong development in the 8 counties that border Marion County. These counties serves as the sites of new suburban development -and thus still show a strong demand for suburban living.
This look at the historical origin of an urban landscape mirrors the idea of conceptualizing the United States as used by critical American scholars -and, coincidentally, serves as the topic of another article by Maskovsky. In this work, Maskovsky lays out four commonly used conceptualizations of the United States: 1) settler society, 2) former slave holding society, 3) industrial society, and 4) imperial nation-state (Maskovsky 2013). Through providing the definition of these four conceptualizations, Maskovsky concludes that the result of the scholarship undertaken by critical Americanist researchers is that the United States has become an increasingly polarized, unequal place. It is recognized that the complexity of America requires multiple conceptualizations in order to trace the working of power.
It is my strong belief that one, when researching a population or urban area, must come to understand the development and history of the subject. To understand the branches of a tree, one must understand the roots. Thus, to understand an issue facing a city or a neighborhood within a city, one must understand the development of the city or the neighborhood within the city. Is the issue long-standing? Is an issue sustained through factors previously unknown? My research on urban abandonment began with a look at the historical development of the near east side up to and including the beginnings of its current abandonment. My findings pointed to an admixture of factors that contribution to the decline and decay of the neighborhood: deindustrialization, suburbanization, urban restructuring, and civic policy. Despite these factors, the residents -many of them very much representative of the overall transient nature of Indy's inner city and downtown populations- pointed to race as the main driver behind abandonment. Laying blame on a visually verifiable differentiation from the overwhelmingly homogenous whole provided a means for the residents to attempt to explain the changes that many of them found themselves dealing with. Had I not had the foresight to look at the historical development of the neighborhood, it would've appeared that the area had a problem with race relations that was deep-seated. Yet, in looking through its history, this was not the case.
In reflecting on the work of Maskovsky and his interview, it is clear to see that his work is not restrictive to one area of interest. From his work with AIDS activism, as mentioned above, he moved to poverty research. From poverty research he moved into the dynamics of neighborhood organization and administration. From all points he moved on to neoliberalism. His work witnessed a change in his view of the usage of neoliberalism. This fluidity of interest is a strong mark of his and something that should be taken away as a favorable trait for any socio-cultural minded worker.
In following, my interests from my years at IUPUI ranged from paleoarchaeology to urban abandonment. I've looked at mass transit, efficacy of social welfare programs, analyzed two thousand year old Native American remains, and contemplated genetic (physical) anthropology with an interest in cranial morphological correlations with mental illnesses. This exploration of my interests has led me to a strong interest in socio-cultural anthropology -in particular urban anthropology. Understanding how urban populations and individuals interact within complex processes has strongly fascinated me in the last two years of my studies at IUPUI. The work of Maskovsky, Hyatt, Goode, and others presents a wealth of information that has the potential to inform and provide the change necessary to assist those who demand it.
While much of his work stands as commentary, introduction, or compilation of the various approaches to researching subject matter, reviewing his work has demonstrated that there is a need for critical scholarship -both academic and non-academic. This need is prevalent regardless of whether one focuses on poverty research, advocating the negative impact of neoliberalism, or looking at the intricacies and complexity of neighborhood organization. It is this need that will ultimately shape my career and present a rough goal for where to move forward after graduation.
Throughout my life, I have desired to contribute to society -and the world- in some manner. In my early twenties, I worked to contribute artistically. As a composer, my work pushed the envelope by taking the modern harmonic freedom and coupling it with classical ideas of melody and form. The result was a musical language rich in expression and -while still modernly relevant in terms of harmonic expansion- returned contemporary classical music back to its roots in terms of thematic development and 'listenability'. My works were performed in Chicago, Athens, Germany, France, and England. I became a published composer three years ago. Yet, despite these accomplishments, I felt that my contributions to society were miniscule at best.
Today, as I prepare to complete my bachelors in Anthropology, it is clear that I have turned my focus away from music composition (and art, in general) to a field that is far removed. Despite this change in focus, there is a similarly shared embrace of 'abstract' theory between the two fields. Much as the composer ventures out and explores new worlds of harmonic expression and melodic construction that adds to the overwhelmingly complexity of music, so to does the anthropologist venture out and explore new variables that reveal socio-cultural processes which add to the overwhelmingly complex nature of human culture. So while it is a different direction of focus, it shares a similar sense of exploration.
In doing this review of the work of Maskovsky and reflecting on my own experiences in life, it is clear that goals and interests change. While I am interested in researching poverty and providing means in assistance, it is my goal to venture to other areas of interest throughout my career. Whether those interests are related to those looked at during my undergraduate career is unknown. Being open to the possibilities of new interests, I feel, is a positive thing -and one that will expand my own understanding of the world around me.