Braving the Street: The Anthropology of Homelessness. (Book Reviews).

Wagner, David

Glasser, Irene and Rae Bridgman.

Braving the Street: The Anthropology of Homelessness.

New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999.

132 + xii pp.

ISBN: 1-57181-097-8.

$29.95 (hardcover); $12.95 (paper), U.S.

We are now entering the third decade in which homelessness is a public issue. Few of my students, if any, remember a time before there was widespread homelessness in the United States and Canada, but I am old enough to remember a time when the term "homeless" evoked my parents' memories of the 1 930s Great Depression rather than a current social ill. With this background, I fight off some impatience in reading academic articles and books, recognizing that hosts of monographs, reports, and academic treatises do not move politics or economics.

I must admit that some of this frustration emerges when I read Glasser and Bridgman's short compendium, Braving the Streets. Some of my impatience is not the book's fault: it hits on the proper notes, with the causes and consequences of homelessness evident in the book, if at times buried. And Glasser and Bridgman make the point that policymakers do not do much with a lot of social science research. Braving the Streets perhaps is best at what its subtitle does not imply; providing a short introduction, particularly to students and neophyte researchers, into some of the 'basics' of the homeless research industry. For despite the subtitle and the authors' disciplines, the book spends a great deal of time in defining homelessness, reviewing the debates about its causes, explaining issues of counting, and even providing the reader with familiar subdivisions of the homeless (mentally ill, women, youth, homeless families, substance users) which are handily summarized. Although a number of ethnographies and "etic" a pproaches to homelessness are mentioned throughout the first three chapters, it is not until Chapter 4 ("Surviving the Streets") that we get an organized description of some anthropological (or better termed 'ethnographic,' since many of the authors are not anthropologists by trade) studies which have documented the different strategies engaged in by the very poor to survive. This chapter in many ways seemed the freshest (although it is far from comprehensive) in that it provides the qualitative researcher with an overview to strategies that they need to attempt to become 'insiders' in the world of the streets, shelters or soup kitchens.

Here lies my frustration. What Glasser and Bridgman appear best at, describing and reviewing ethnographic approaches to poor populations, is not a majority in the book. Rather than a ground-level, insider's view, far too much of the book reads like many other social policy and social service books in reviewing familiar service divisions, debating old arguments ("personal pathology" versus social causations), and reviewing service programs across th United States and Canada.

Of course, some of the "basics" are necessary to orient the reader, but in addition to its bulk undermining what is more interesting about the book,] found much of the policy level discussion to be far from "cutting edge." Ever in the United States, the "personal pathology" model (e.g. that homelessness is caused primarily be personal deficits such as alcoholism, mental illness, laziness or poor work habits) has few, if any, academic supporters and does not warrant the many pages it receives. Generally, the book is remiss in not even mentioning radical or socialist work on homelessness (as opposed to many liberal or mildly reformist) and this tends to exclude work that more holistically looks at the world economy, housing markets, deindustrialization, and wholesale social benefit cutbacks as causative. The issues are mentioned, but appear as a multitude of possible areas of interest or causation. The weakness of the authors' social policy or political thinking is indicated in the last chapters ("Pathways out of Homelessness" and "Concluding Thoughts") in which micro and mezzo level solutions appear as the only solutions to homelessness.

In sum, the book contains some pages which I would highly recommend, particularly where it provides some international studies of homelessness and where it compiles lists of ethnographic studies. It fails, however, at what it purports to do, give us an insider's view of homelessness. Rather, like many scholarly works, it ultimately distances itself from its subjects and fails to highlight the deep-seated structural changes that would be necessary to end homelessness and extreme poverty. It leaves us with a review of various well meaning studies and disconnected facts which North American researchers have been able to glean in the first two decades of the current period of widespread homelessness. And, as we enter another decade, we can only hope that we will not need to have homeless research forever.