The New Poverty Studies The Ethnography of Power, Politics and Impoverished People in the United States

"These contributions provide a dynamic understanding of poverty and immiseration." (North American Dialogue,Vol. 4, No. 1, Nov. 2001) "The New Poverty Studies takes us to immigrant communities, work places, homeless shelters, and urban neighborhoods to examine the heart-rending stories of Chinese newcomers caught in a system of wage-slavery, the tedium of labor in fast food restaurants, the search for housing to match income from minimum wage jobs, and the web of cash checking stores and pawn shops that fostered indebtedness in low-income communities. What emerges is the centrality of human agency and the struggles of real people, rather than the bankrupt image of poor Americans as marginalized victims of larger economic forces." - Louise Lamphere,University of New Mexico "This wonderful collection is a key intervention in the analysis of intensifying poverty in the globalizing United States from both street-level ethnography and political economy vantages. The contributors document the livesand lavishly quote the narrativesof impoverished American residents across lines of race, gender, nationality, and regional location. They give us historical perspective and up-to-the-minute critiques, and we gain a fresh and strongly grounded understanding of 'welfare reform,' 'multiculturalism,' and 'the new urbanism': the multi-layered horrors of the marketizing policies imposed on all the poor in our era of neoliberal triumph." - Micaela di Leonardo,Northwestern University

Judith Goode is Professor of Anthropology at Temple University. She is author of Urban Poverty in a Cross-Cultural Context, Anthropology of the City, and coauthor of Reshaping Ethnic and Racial Relations in Philadelphia: Immigrants in a Divided City.

Jeff Maskovsky is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Montclair State University.