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King Kong on 4th Street: Families and the Violence of Poverty on the Lower East Side (Institutional Structures of Feeling)

Average customer rating:

Tedious and Pointless
A Moving Analysis of the Forces Shaping a Poor Neighborhood

King Kong on 4th Street: Families and the Violence of Poverty on the Lower East Side (Institutional Structures of Feeling)
Jagna Wojcicka Sharff , and Jagna Wojcicka Sharff
Manufacturer: Westview Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 081332937X

Book Description

This book chronicles an ethnographic team's involvement over a span of fifteen years with the people of a poor, largely Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York City. Jagna Sharff focuses on a group of families who live within a radius of a few blocks of her storefront office, especially the children who come first to interact with the team. She contrasts her team's initial observations of how people grapple with daily life with the residents' expressed hopes and dreams in a community lacking jobs but rife with underground activities. Through lively and interconnected stories, she traces over time the fate of the neighborhood and the outcomes for individual children and adults during an era when the local and national policy of the war on poverty was transmuted into a war against the poor. The book's lyrical, cinematically vivid style makes it appealing both for college social science courses and for the general public.

Customer Reviews:

Tedious and Pointless.......2006-04-13

As an ethnographic anthropological researcher, Sharff should know better than others how to properly conduct an ethnography and offer valuable research to her audience. In documenting the tragedy and drama of the poverty-stricken individuals she is studying, Sharff believes that simply regurgitating their lives moment-by-moment qualifies as significant. At the very least a reader should be able to identify the problem she is reseaching, the goals of her research, and why it might be significant.

Instead, the book reads as though Sharff simply regurgitated her field notes onto the page without reflection or analysis. The reader is left unable to engage in a broader dialogue about anything of significance. No conclusion are drawn, or themes explored. The reader is expected to be interested in a dull and consistent recounting of serious human tragedies absent of being placed in a larger context. The result is a mish-mash of lives thrown together, and reading about Sharff's personal reactions to each. Yet, because Sharff focuses only on mere details of daily lives and does not discuss larger issues, it is not clear why her study is important or what it has accomplished.

No conclusions are made by Sharff; the book simply ends by wrapping up the current state of various individuals. I am left feeling as though the individuals in this ethnography were the victims of a terrible hoax - the only voice that comes through loud and clear is Sharff's own. The individuals themselves are left mute, unable to rely on their researcher to analyze and contextualize their tragedies to influence further research in any significant way.

The book adds nothing of immediate value to the current literature on ethnography. If indeed one is interested in this topic, and in reading an excellent ethnography that offers convincing arguments and challenges existing theories about poverty, oppression, and race, read "In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio" by Philippe Bourgois. Unfortunately for Sharff, it is everything this book is not.

A Moving Analysis of the Forces Shaping a Poor Neighborhood.......2000-06-15

Jagna Sharff is an anthropologist who spent several years in the early 70s living in a poor Puerto Rican neighborhood in the Lower East Side before arson and gentrification forced the poor out. In vivid, cinematic style, Sharff analyzes the different forces at work in the decline of the families in the neighborhood: the loss of manufacturing in the region throws men out of work; rules governing payments in Aid to Dependent Families break up marriages; cheap drugs flood the streets, providing a source of employment for young men as well as violence and drug addiction. Sharff gives detailed and touching portraits of family and neighborhood intereconnectedness and survival skills, while at the same time describing the part maternal dependence on drug money to survive plays in their sons' need to work on the street. Sharff has a gift for describing the joys as well as the constant anxiety about hunger or illness these families face: finally a father finds work in a dry cleaning store; soon after, his son falls several stories in an elevator shaft in their public housing unit, leaving the family (now off Medicaid) with a $10,000 medical debt that will crush the family's meager income for decades to come. Sharff ends the book with two intimate portraits of a brother and sister: the first, who witnessed a murder at the age of 11, spends years in solitary confinement in state prison "for his own protection" from other inmates; the second becomes a police officer in a neighborhood much like the one in which she grew up. Sharff is not dispassionate: a childhood survivor of war-time Poland who at 8 watched bombs dropping on the labor camp in which she and her 5-year-old brother were interred, she sees the children of this neighborhood as suffering from the traumatic stress of those who live in wartime: instead of bombs comes the smell of gasoline and the arsonist's torch, the whine of bullets between dealers, the sight of a bloody rug in which higher level dealers have rolled up the corpse of a young dealer they have murdered, to "send a message." Sharff draws an indelible portrait of this terrible, wonderful neighborhood, and especially of its children, and makes a convincing case for bureaucracies more in touch with the realities of the poor.

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