Unemployment and Disposable Workers in Philadelphia: Just How Far Have The Bastards Gone?

Unemployment and Disposable
Workers in Philadelphia: Just How Far

HaveThe Bastards Gone?
Robert T. O’Brien
Temple University, Philadelphia, USA
abstract Drawing on ethnographic research in Philadelphia, this article illustrates

the ravages of a capitalism moving beyond worker alienation to worker disposability.
Uneven geographic development within the context of neoliberalism is destroying
marginal workers’ tools of social reproduction and creating ‘disposable workers.’
Workers in deindustrialized East Kensington are pushed out in a process of neigh-
borhood imperialism, as the community they depended upon for survival is creatively
destroyed by finance capitalists and gentrifiers.
keywords Social networks, social reproduction, imperialism
A
s a surging trend of underemployment in the US suggests, worker
‘redundancy’ is reaching crisis proportions. 1 Worse still, state re-
trenchment and gentrification are destroying workers’ means of social
reproduction in new and troubling ways. This article approaches unem-
ployment in light of a pattern of revanchist capitalism that destroys the social
safety net, deregulates and transforms industry, and — as I describe in the
case study below — is in the process of laying waste to the means of social
reproduction for un-, under-, and informally-employed (hereafter ‘marginal’)
workers.
Revanchism (from the French revanche, meaning ‘revenge’) is a term used
since the 1870s to describe the reclamation of property, capital, and territory
formerly held by an aggrieved (and usually capitalist or nationalist) party. At
their worst, revanchist political campaigns have used nationalist, ethnocentric,
classist, and racist ideologies to encourage property seizures, imprisonment,
state repression, and war. Neil Smith used the term to refer to the US state’s
‘all-out attack’ on New Deal social policy throughout the 1990s (1996: 44 – 46).
Following this line of reasoning, I argue that the violent trends in global and
eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

© Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis, on behalf of the Museum of Ethnography
issn 0014-1844 print/issn 1469-588x online. doi: 10.1080/00141840600733678
166 robe rt t. o’br i e n
local capitalisms of the post-Soviet, neoliberal-cum-neoconservative era are

deserving of the same nom de guerre.
Unemployment must be understood in light of this process of revanchism.
In the developed states workers are facing marginal employment; losing
ground on unionization and collective bargaining (Kasmir 2004; Kingsolver
2001), health care and other aspects of social reproduction (Kingfisher 2002;
Mullings & Wali 2001); and facing employer expectations of increased pro-
ductivity and longer hours — all under reduced health and safety standards
and job security (Harvey 1989).
As activist scholar Susan George has recently been telling audiences, a
worldwide surge in anti-globalization movements can be partially explained
by the fact that ‘the bastards have gone too far’ (2004). The bastards — or
capitalist class (in crass Marxian terms) — have engaged in an open and brutal
use of the market, the likes of which has not been seen in over a century. No
longer held in check by cold war balances of power or alternative models of
state socialism, capitalists have pursued practices of ‘primitive accumulation’
(Marx 1965: 713–16) characterized by Harvey as ‘accumulation by dispos-
session’ (2003).
Drawing on ethnographic research in East Kensington, a white, and his-
torically working-class Philadelphia neighborhood,2 I analyze the effects of
a particular aspect of revanchism on the subsistence strategies of marginal
workers. I describe a form of uneven development – neighborhood imperialism
– where capitalists realize profits from a mixture of land speculation and
accumulation by dispossession. Specifi cally, I examine contestation over
the use and exchange value of community space (Logan & Molotch 1987;
Pérez 2002), paying particular attention to disruptions in social networks and
spaces on the part of finance capitalists and gentrifying newcomers. In this
scenario, revanchist capitalists (and their accomplices in the state and civil
society) move beyond the alienation of workers to their very disposability,
dispossessing residents of property with use value and pathologizing the
place-based social networks that constitute marginal workers’ enfranchise-
ment in economic, social, and political citizenship.
In order to explain the processes affecting marginal workers in Kensington,
this article begins with a theoretical and historical background and a portrayal
of uneven development, and the geographic and social spaces across which it
operates. I discuss the ideological underpinnings of uneven development – its
narrative ‘fit’ within free market development – and its role in creating new
conditions for neighborhood imperialism. I then use ethnographic data to

Unemployment and Disposable Workers in Philadelphia 167
demonstrate the ways in which uneven development contributes to ongoing

crises, creating the material and discursive conditions that disenfranchise
marginally-employed residents. Analyzing recent transformations in Ken-
sington, I describe how capital has created ‘disposable workers.’ No longer
useful in the flexible economy, workers in deindustrialized Kensington are
disposed of as the community they depended upon for survival is ‘creatively
destroyed’ (Schumpeter 1975) by finance capitalists and gentrifiers. Through-
out, my assumption is that such an analysis provides a necessary backdrop
for understanding changing employment patterns in the US.
The field research this work is based on was conducted from September
of 1999 to May 2004, in two East Kensington neighborhoods (Fishtown/
New Kensington and Kensington South). It included participant observation
at Community Development Corporations (cdcs) and other community-
based organizations (cbos), schools, community health programs, and public
meetings. I conducted interviews with community residents, with the staff,
board members, and consumers of cbos and health programs, with private
developers and realtors, and with city and state officials. In the summer of
2001, I supervised and conducted a door-to-door survey with a representa-
tive sample of approximately 750 people in the Fishtown/New Kensington
neighborhood.
Capitalist Revanchism and Neighborhood Imperialism

A severe and steadily worsening pattern of unequal economic development
since the 1970s has created the greatest wealth gap in the history of capitalism.
Within this global context, marginal US workers struggle to survive despite
cuts in social welfare, support for corporate ‘welfare,’ and the deregulation
of industry. These changes, alongside new uses of an historic ideology that
blames individuals for their poverty (Katz 1995; Maskovsky 2001), have allowed
capitalists to ‘reclaim their estate’ at global and local levels. These changes have
constituted a revanchist capitalism where wealth gaps within the US are baldly
exploited for the further enrichment of the wealthiest, and where the poor are
blamed both for their own poverty and for the failing economy — even in the
face of scandals at the highest levels of corporate and state governance.
Over twenty years ago Bluestone and Harrison (1982) detailed the dis-
mantling of US basic industry. They described the devastating process of the
dispossession of workers from meaningful, living-wage work by companies
seeking greater profits. Private and public disinvestment in workers and their
communities underdeveloped vast expanses of the American landscape. This

deindustrialization was not the result of market excess, but rather inherent to
the postwar capitalist crisis. The ‘long downturn’ of the US postwar economy
is the result of competition between the major capitalist economies (Brenner
1998). The competition reduced profitability for entire economic sectors, as
uncompetitive firms drove profitability down.
Attempts in the US to manage the postwar crisis with Keynesian debt
expansion, monetarist intervention, and the manipulation of exchange rates
have had mixed results. The social welfare state drove an internal market as
it underwrote social mobility through the military’s GI Bill, and suburba-
nization through Federal Housing Authority (fha) fha 3 guaranteed mortgages
fha)
(Davis 1992; Patterson 1999; Brodkin Sacks 1994). However, it did so in a
manner that privileged groups who were differentially recruited to ‘white-
ness’ (Hartigan 1999; Smedley 1999). As Brenner demonstrates, this system
was ultimately unsustainable. Fordist production in the US, with high rates
of fi xed capital and high labor costs, could not withstand either competition
from abroad or the withdrawal of state commitments to social welfare Key-
nesianism under the Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, or Clinton administrations.
On the one hand, the failure of Fordism and subsequent labor-market
restructuring have meant a steady decline in full-time, permanent work with
opportunities for advancement, job security, and benefits. Two peripheral
groups have filled out the labor force: relatively low-skilled, easily replaced
full-time employees with decreased options for career advancement; and a
rapidly increasing group of contingent workers with even less job security
(Harvey 1989). Organized subcontracting has led to an increase in older
systems of domestic, paternalistic, sweatshop, and informal production.
On the other hand, the capitalist crisis of the long downturn has exacer-
bated another pattern of exploitation of the poor and working class. Uneven
geographic development provides a framework for understanding this process
and the local particularities of class struggle as they have played out in Ken-
sington. What it provides is a ‘spatial fix,’ where capital uses the advantage
inherent in investing in un- or underdeveloped areas to seek higher profits
(and a temporary respite from crisis) (Harvey 1999, 2003; Smith 1982, 1984).
Rather than utilizing a level playing field, capitalism develops in geographic,
social, and historical contexts that begin fundamentally uneven.
At the heart of the processes I describe is a zero-sum conflict over the
use and exchange values of urban space, between marginal workers trying
to make ends meet in a deindustrialized community and capitalists seeking
increased profits. People who are not speculators most often think of land

in terms of use values, and household economies also depend on use values.
‘People . . . create supportive, place-based networks with neighbors, small
business owners, schools, and other institutions that both provide material
sustenance and engender emotional and sentimental attachments to a parti-
cular place’ (Pérez 2002: 39). The places and social ties within which people’s
daily lives occur ‘have a certain preciousness for their users that is not part of
the conventional concept of a commodity’ (Logan & Molotch cited in Pérez
2002:39, emphasis in original).
But, as Logan and Molotch describe, space also has a potential commodity
use and exchange value: entrepreneurs and speculators gain monopoly access
to land and find profit by exchanging that land for a price higher than that
which they paid (1987). Urban fortunes are made through the realization of
exchange values, and the development of a ‘growth machine’ ideology over
and above any notion of appreciating space for its use value and the public
good.4 As land values and parcel sizes increase, smaller ‘serendipitous en-
trepreneurs’ tend to drop out, leaving land speculation to wealthy capitalists
and capitalist firms. The pursuit of greater exchange values leads speculators
and other capitalists to work in their common class interest, using the growth
machine to ‘coordinate the needs of corporate elites with the behavior of
local government and citizens’ groups’ (Ibid:Ibid: 34).
Ibid
In East Kensington, as I will illustrate, the good fortune of those who have
survived marginal employment is to be found in a pattern of social repro-
duction based in use value. Anthropological research on social reproduction
and social networks has demonstrated the importance of social networks
and ‘transformative work’ in creating community despite racism, sexism,
and class oppression (Mullings 1997; Stack 1996). Anthropologists have also
interrogated the structural reproduction of inequality related to the disruption
of social networks (Colen 1995; Pérez 2002).
However, the different potentials found in the ‘conditions and levels of
development’ of different geographic areas create advantages exploited by
capitalists (Smith 1982). In the urban environment, fixed capital is sunk into
the built environment in successive waves, and then valorized and devalorized
in waves of land speculation and disinvestment. In the postwar period, these
differentials in ground rent have set the stage for several waves of uneven
development.
Philadelphia has provided sites for uneven development over the course
of the past three centuries. Two recent episodes provide the backdrop for
neighborhood imperialism in Kensington. First, federal ‘urban renewal’ pro-

grams created spaces of consumption and land speculation in the Society

Hill section of Center City Philadelphia in the 1960s. Second, market-driven
restructuring in the past 15 years has witnessed massive investment in the
city’s central business and entertainment district, which has increased tenancy
and tourism in the center, but drawn wide criticism from residents in the
city’s neighborhoods. These two changes have created pressures that have
pushed some capital out of the city’s center, finding advantageous conditions
for investment in the neighborhoods on its borders.
Increased ground rents from successive waves of gentrification have priced
out investors. Many of these investors note the profits made by those who
bought as gentrification crept north, from Society Hill to Old City and from
there to Northern Liberties. Renters, artists, and craftspeople who crossed
Girard Avenue — the border between Northern Liberties and Kensington
— seeking the inexpensive spaces they had previously found in the southern
neighborhoods were followed by ‘pioneer’ investors. From the ‘marginal
gentrifiers’ (Smith 1996) who realized a profit from the sale of a single pro-
perty, to the development firms accumulating and building on multiple use
properties, and from local residents to investors from New York and Boston,
speculators have flooded into East Kensington seeking lower ground rents.
It is this latest episode of uneven development that I am referring to as
neighborhood imperialism.
Neighborhood imperialism is a process of uneven development where
capitalists bring to bear a form of ‘market imperialism’ (Harvey 2003) within
the boundaries of a(n) (over)developed country. The chickens of capitalist
overproduction have come home to roost in the urban US, in neighborhoods
that are poor (and, usually — although not in the present instance — black
and/or Latino/a). On the one hand, I am describing an elaboration of the
capitalist search for profit at all cost, a process that has been well-documented
by anthropologists and other social scientists concerned with gentrifica-
tion.5 On the other, however, I am demonstrating that this process involves
a restructuring of both the means of dispossession and the subjectivities and
social relations of production, which ultimately suggest a reimagining of the
impoverished that is so destructive as to make the working-class residents of
the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia both discursively and practic-
ally disposable. I suggest, further, that the ultimate ‘instrument effect’ (Fergu-
son 1994; Foucault 1982, 1991) of this process is the elision of class struggle
on the part of the capitalist class which conceals the common class interests
of the ‘middle class’ and the poor.

The City of Philadelphia’s market-driven development plan has produced

local efforts to ‘clean up’ the physical and social environments. Under this
regime of neoliberal ‘development,’ many residents come to believe that com-
munity membership should only be extended to those who are productive
in the sense of contributing to the exchange value embedded in the com-
munity. Others who do not meet this standard are socially excluded — and
physically excluded, if possible — through imprisonment, removal through
eminent domain, and development that prices residents out of their own
homes. Marginal workers become impediments to development when they
cling to the use value embedded in the community. As I demonstrate below,
the state and civil society provide support for those who prove themselves
‘deserving’ (by, tautologically, having the capital to compete) while, like
so many abandoned homes, cars, and garbage, the ‘undeserving’ 6 become
disposable. Those who cannot maintain their homes (because of marginal
employment) are seen as being similar to drug users, the homeless, and sex
workers (who are themselves pathologized and blamed for their marginal
positions).
The deepening crisis of historical capitalism has created the conditions for
this revanchist capitalism. In the process of neighborhood imperialism, the
capitalist class profits from this system in several ways. Development — as
increased capital investment in real estate — is constructed as an unqualified
good. Marginally-employed residents who depend on the use value in their
community are constructed as impediments to development, and therefore
as disposable. In the process, disposable workers become a discursive mar-
ker in the ideological policing of middle-class identity. Finally, speculation
creates an outlet for unproductive capital, which can be maintained by the
continued construction of new communities of disposable workers, and their
continued dispossession.
The Geography and Ethnography of Neighborhood Imperialism

Several processes explain the barriers to investment in Kensington which
created these conditions for uneven development. The neighborhood has
been the site of deindustrialization since the 1950s (Seder 1990). Textiles,
the mainstay of Philadelphia’s industrial economy, were hardest hit (due
to a relatively portable technology and a lower relative skill level vis-à-vis
other US industries). Brewing, electronics, and other industries followed suit.
Ancillary service industries collapsed. Redlining (a process of denying home
loans and insurance in black and poor neighborhoods)7 and subsequent racial

and ethnic conflict contributed to the decline of the housing and economic
infrastructure in the community since deindustrialization (Goode & Schneider
1994). Schools and public services declined as local political and economic
power decreased. Finally, as relatives and friends left the neighborhood in
search of opportunities elsewhere, both social networks and abandoned
buildings crumbled.
In the neoliberal era, social services that might alleviate the social effects
of these changes have seen dramatic cutbacks. Nationally, federal funding
for welfare-transfer payments, meal programs, public housing, healthcare,
and education have slowed to a trickle or dried up. Locally, cbos that once
provided services ranging from English as a Foreign Language (efl) and
welfare counseling to support for micro-credit programs and sweat equity
housing8 have collapsed, as they have lost funding to agencies that cater to
the city’s neoliberal development model (Goode & O’Brien 2006). Two local
hospitals have closed. Moreover, these changes have occurred in a racially
segregated neighborhood that has recently experienced a significant influx
of new immigrants (US Census Bureau 1990, 2000). No new social supports
have accompanied these immigrants.
Community Development Corporations (cdcs), created in the 1960s and
1970s with federal Community Development Block Grant monies during the
War on Poverty, are now clearing vacant, trash-strewn lots for future real
estate, retail, and light industrial investment. Middle-class homebuyers seek-
ing investment properties and ‘starter’ homes, and larger investors hoping for
tax incentives and leveraged public funds, have joined the boards of cdcs and
Neighborhood Advisory Councils (nacs) and have begun to reimagine part
of the area ‘JuNoGi’ (‘Just North of Girard’). To attract investment, new cdcs
pursue targeted housing and economic development that involves building
only owner-occupied housing, and promoting façade improvements for local
businesses. Finally, the cdcs encourage home improvements and the acqui-
sition of large-scale investment lots and side yards through a streamlined
acquisition process and low-interest loans. The success of their efforts has led
Philadelphia’s Mayor John Street to pursue this model citywide in the form
of his $265 million ‘Neighborhood Transformation Initiative’ (nti).
According to Philadelphia’s former director of housing, ‘[n]early everyone
likes cdcs, because, at their best, these organizations represent the principle
of neighborhood self-help in a very tangible way’ (Kromer 2001). In truth,
the cdcs have helped those established residents with sufficient economic
capital to become upwardly mobile. By the same token, they also still provide

utilities subsidies to impoverished residents of the community. However,

most residents earn too much to benefit from programs like home energy
improvement grants and too little to afford loans available for façade impro-
vements. Residents I surveyed voiced overwhelming disappointment in the
cdcs’ priorities. Only one cdc development project – owner-occupied housing
– made the list of top ten priorities for development among those I surveyed
(in seventh place).9 Ironically, income requirements and the restriction of
benefits to first-time homeowners make the overwhelming majority of East
Kensington residents ineligible for this project.
Recent investment in the community is therefore consistent with the
schema of both neoliberal development and development across uneven
geographic contexts. Neighborhood ‘self-help,’ as it is constructed in the
dominant narrative is very similar to other neoliberal discourses of self-help
and voluntarism (Cruikshank 1994, 1996; Hyatt 2001; Lyon-Callo 1998, 2004).
The state has enabled both large-scale developers and those individuals who
have capital to invest, but who missed their opportunities to buy cheaply in
neighborhoods closer to Center City. Long-term residents and low-income
renters — the overwhelming majority of whom are marginal workers — have
received little, if any, of the state largesse distributed by the cdcs. And in
the process, they have become further marginalized — both economically
and socially.
Kensington’s impoverished residents have borne the full brunt of recent
economic changes. The full-time unionized jobs that, at one time, provided
them with the disposable income that was the hallmark of the postwar
‘middle-class’ are gone (Adams et al al. 1991). Contingent service and informal
sector employment – alongside transfer payments for those eligible – consti-
tute the major sources of income (US Census Bureau 1990, 2000). Sweated
labor, drug sales, sexwork, and day labor paid for with heroin10 are among
Kensington’s new forms of labor organization.
The dual movement of capital into low-wage service-sector jobs and land
speculation constitutes the material expression of neighborhood imperialism.
Dispossession from living-wage work coincides with residents’ inability to
gain any benefit from capital sunk in their own homes and businesses. Many
residents are second, third, or fourth generation owners of a property that
has had no equity since the 1960s. Property abandonment has been an en-
demic problem, as older residents die and their relatives are unable to either
sell property or maintain tax payments. In the context of bank redlining,
residents have fallen prey to predatory lending in the form of credit cards,

check cashing fees, and high interest, short-term home equity loans. 11 Unlike
cbos in the War on Poverty era, which fought for micro-credit programs and
against predatory lending, the cdcs have only responded by providing budget
counseling, for those residents whose incomes are low enough to qualify.
Examining residents’ discussions of employment, community membership,
and community development, I use the concept of neighborhood imperialism
in the remainder of this article to explain the manner in which newcomer
gentrifying residents cite established residents’ ideas about social reproduction
as ideological justification for their disposability.
In what follows, I first describe the subsistence strategies among estab-
lished marginally-employed residents to illustrate how their pattern of social
reproduction has allowed them to survive deindustrialization and under-
development. I then provide a pair of vignettes that expose conflicts across the
uneven divide between gentrifying newcomer and marginalized established
resident. In the final ethnographic section I describe the ways that gentrifying
residents interpret these conflicts to craft established residents as disposable
workers and the consequences of this for both sets of residents.
Social Reproduction in East Kensington

Residents have survived — and even done well — during the long downturn
by nurturing the community’s use value. This use value has been central in
supporting a pattern of household economies and interdependent social
networks.
The public and parochial schools in Kensington continue to train resi-
dents for low-skilled jobs that no longer exist. Mastbaum High School is a
‘technical’ school for students who are not ‘college material.’ Kensington
High School, which has begun to aggressively train students for the ‘new
economy,’ still graduated fewer than 20 percent of its incoming freshman
in 2002. Consistent with census numbers, 71 percent of respondents to the
survey I conducted in 2001 had a high-school education or less (40 percent
and 31 percent respectively).
Among established residents there is a diversity of employment strategies.
However, census and survey data demonstrate that over half of long-term
residents are unemployed or on disability. Seasonal employment — even for
relatively high-wage trade union jobs — accounts for some of the joblessness.
Likewise, the physical nature of much of the available work in the formal
sector accounts for some of the disability cases. Finally, women are dispro-
portionately represented among the unemployed.

To make ends meet, a crucial aspect of social reproduction for estab-

lished residents has been homeownership. Over 75 percent of the residents
I interviewed in New Kensington/Fishtown owned their homes. The vast
majority of these individuals grew up in the community (61 percent), were
preceded by one or more generations in the community (59 percent), and
had lived at their current address for 10 years or more (51 percent, with a
mean tenure of 18 years). The stability of these household economies has
depended on low ground rents. Low property costs and mortgage rates
have meant that many residents own their homes outright, and pay only
utility costs and relatively low property taxes to maintain ownership. Rental
properties have also charged well below the average rates in more affluent
neighborhoods.
The increased property values and tax assessments that come with spe-
culation have threatened residents’ means of subsistence. Even if able to sell
their homes and move elsewhere, the transfer payments, pensions, and low
wage jobs they may receive will not help the marginally-employed survive in
the face of increasing costs and decreasing social supports. Some may profit
(as ‘serendipitous entrepreneurs’) if they can sell their homes during the land
speculation currently under way. Others who leave may do so because they
have lost the social networks needed for interdependent household economies
to run on use values. Of particular concern to many interview respondents
are the elderly who struggle to survive in an environment where they receive
little help from institutions of the state or civil society and have few remain-
ing social ties. One elderly woman described the agonizing process of leaving
her home and moving into her daughter’s suburban home. As if appealing to
all whom she left behind, the woman cried as she explained that ‘we don’t
have what we should have here . . . When you get older, there’s nowhere to
go. There’s no help for people.’
For those fortunate enough to have social ties in the neighborhood, the
indirect subsidy of low ground rents supports other aspects of social repro-
duction. These place-based ties offer residents useful social networks. Joe
McGovern, a former ward leader in the area between east and west Kensington,
is a widower who stays in the community even though most of his children
and neighbors have moved or passed away. He lives with his granddaughter
Katie. This arrangement puts Joe and Katie within walking distance of Katie’s
school and the homes of her separated parents. (Both depend on walking and
public transit to get around.) This arrangement allows three generations of
family to live together. As if in response to those who have left, Joe says, ‘What

else can I do? Live with my kids in the suburbs? And do what? Wait for them
to give me a ride somewhere once in a while?’
Nick Budschalow is a block captain who has worked with a cdc to clean
up his street. He and his wife have removed abandoned cars, tires, trash,
and glass from several lots around their home. One lot now serves as a com-
munal yard for three abutting properties. The work invested in clearing this
lot has paid off in the form of reciprocal relationships with their neighbors
that include shared childcare, shared investment in a swimming pool, and
decreased food costs from shared meals throughout the year.
Nick works as a mechanic both on and off the books — doing some work
in the yard next to his house. His wife Sam tends bar at a downtown eatery,
earning most of her pay in unreported tips. The transformative work (Mul-
lings 1997; Stack 1996) they do on their block, the indirect benefits of the
social ties involved, and their informal sector jobs are all means of surviving
underemployment.
One afternoon, sitting in the yard with Nick and Sam and watching the
families from the two abutting properties play, I listened while Nick de-
scribed his vision for the neighborhood. ‘That [factory] up the corner came
in saying they were gonna hire people from the neighborhood. There’s not
one person from the neighborhood working there. Seems to me this [area]
is residential. There’s not enough places for kids to go as it is, we don’t need
any more businesses.’
Ironically, in a neighborhood devastated by deindustrialization — where
nearly two generations have gone without living wage employment and
where many blame their ‘quality of life’ problems on a lack of jobs — most
marginally employed residents share this assessment. They do not want to
see ‘development,’ in the sense of land speculation.
These established residents are envisioning a community of use value
— of course they want jobs and equity in their homes, but not at the expense
of the social networks that have allowed for their social reproduction. The
‘preciousness’ of the houses they have held on to, and of the lower density
of lots cleared of abandoned buildings and trash, are preferable to a factory
that would bring increased traffi c and the industrial pollution that older
residents remember all too well. And like the factory Nick mentions, few
new businesses (most of which receive direct state support from tax breaks
or indirect support via state-funded cdcs) hire local residents.
Despite the deprivations of dispossession from living-wage employment,
some established residents have used their social networks to expand on

their (useful) homes. Anne Baker and her husband Gerry have been living on
his disability pay and her nursing salary. Two of their three grown children
still live at home and contribute to the family income. They also help with
childcare and work in and around the house.
Anne has been block captain for twenty years and has gotten several vacant
lots nearby cleared of trash and drug sales. Like many of their neighbors,
the Bakers have invested effort and have mobilized their social networks to
create a home where their means of social reproduction is guaranteed.
I’ve got a pool and fruit trees . . . [My family and I] put a lot of back-breaking work
in the yard. And not with heavy machinery — We’re talking shovels and stuff.
Gerry doesn’t intend to leave, preferring to stay and fight for his commu-
nity.
[O]n the next block are drug dealers, but I’m not moving. I’ve got everything I
want. It took me 15 years to fix the lot next door up. [The neighborhood will] come
back up again. There are families moving in and buying houses. They’ll get the
neighborhood running. Eventually you’re going to have to accept it. The world’s
changing and you’ve got to live with it, instead of pulling this white flight stuff.
The new families Gerry imagines would be ‘working people like [himself ]
who happen to be Spanish [Puerto Rican] or black.’
Unfortunately for the McGoverns, the Budschalows, and the Bakers, it is
precisely the families who are moving in who will test their means of social
reproduction and the use value inherent in their community. And these
newcomers are not exactly ‘working people,’ like Gerry. They bring capital,
development goals, and social ties that are antithetical to the community
that established residents have come to count on.
Whose (Who’s) Community?

The two vignettes that follow — about women from both sides of the
uneven divide — provide a fulcrum for weighing different claims to commu-
nity, divergent constructions of rights and membership, and contradictory
explanations of community underdevelopment.
Both stories are partial in every sense of the word. Barbara points out her
atypicality as community resident. She says, ‘look what you’ve got — I’m a
recovering alcoholic, lesbian, attorney, okay?’ As a Common Pleas Court
judge, she earns well in excess of the neighborhood’s average income of
$19,040. Our interviews turned into long discussions during which Barbara

tried to make sense, in light her self-professed liberalism, of the problems

caused by the gentrification she promoted.
Mary is also less than typical. Popular conceptions of impoverished neigh-
borhoods like Kensington tend to focus on those residents who survive on
welfare benefits, drug sales and sexwork — residents like Mary. Yet, these
constructions of impoverished neighborhoods ignore the social networks
that residents like Mary depend on and contribute to. Further, they omit
discussion of how the actions of residents like Barbara disrupt the economic
capital and social networks that all impoverished residents have come to
count on. 12 Popular and scholarly representations of impoverished com-
munities that ignore the value of marginal workers’ social ties contribute
to the denigration of the very fabric of workers’ social reproduction under
revanchist capitalism (Goode & O’Brien, in press).
To whom the community belongs and who counts as part of it are fields of
struggle over space, as well as over the constitution of civil society and of its
responsibilities (vis-à-vis members and with respect to the state and market).
Anthropologists have described these struggles as a dialectic among place,
politics, identity, and work where selves are ‘crafted’ (Gregory 1996; Kondo
1990; see also Jones 1987). Crucial battles in these struggles rage over the
valorization or devalorization of individual laborers (Hyatt 1997; Lyon-Callo
2000; Maskovsky 2001; Susser 1993), informal sector work (Bourgois 1995;
Sharff 1998), and transformative work like that done by the Budschalows
and Bakers (Hyatt 2001; Mullings 1997: 87 – 104; Stack 1996). These contested
domains in Kensington are both created by a history of uneven development
and constitutive of a neighborhood imperialism where residents are dispos-
sessed of their land and their social ties and made disposable.
Barbara
Barbara is a white woman in her mid-50s. She came to Philadelphia to
attend college in 1969. She and her partner both attended law school after
moving to Kensington in the 1980s. The couple were living in Northern Lib-
erties in the mid-80s when the ‘prices went out the wazzoo.’ They looked at
the surrounding neighborhoods and found that they could afford Kensington
even though they ‘had no money.’
A recently elected judge whose partner is a law clerk, Barbara served as
board president of the local nac, a sort of lobbying group for the community
and a necessary prerequisite for forming a cdc and, thereby, getting access
to a pool of public money.

She is excited about people moving across the symbolic boundary of Girard
Avenue, which has until recently been gentrification’s northernmost frontier.
In characterizing these newcomers, she ignores mention of their orientation
toward exchange value. Instead, she presents them as ‘pilgrims’ — people with
values and social ties that connect to the powers that be, on the other side of
the geographic divide. Moreover, these ties bring with them additional social
and political networks important to earlier pilgrims13 like Barbara.
We’re getting people who are comfortable trying on a new neighborhood that is
still close to what they value. And for them the value’s gonna be in the proximity
to . . . all that Center City offers. [O]ur neighborhood is currently being really well
served by our state representative [and] our city council representative. [W]e need
the financial backing of our elected [officials]. [O]ur state representative got us
a $100,000 grant for housing, the first one we’ve had in a long, long time. We’re
gonna use that to build more houses.
When I ask why her neighborhood was able to get this kind of funding when
other nearby communities were not, Barbara points to the social relationships
that new residents and their advocates possess.
To the extent that [nac executive director] John Dougherty can converse well
— and competently — with our state representative and with our city council rep
and that they can look at him and see him as a white man who has an interest in
this neighborhood, we’re well served — because they are white people . . . And . . . I
know that our numbers keep going up at the polls. We keep getting more and more
voters registered in our neighborhood. And politicians look at that.
What Barbara does not acknowledge — if she sees it — is that politicians and
speculators are mutually looking toward pilgrims like her, to raise the ground
rents.
Like most residents who value the proximity to ‘all that Center City of-
fers,’ Barbara spends a majority of her time outside of the neighborhood. ‘In
the community,’ Barbara says, ‘I am probably closest to three, maybe five
households out of the total . . . They’re people who’ve lived there for at least
two generations . . . [and who] I know through my limited relationship with
St. Michael’s Church.’ In one of the long conversations Barbara characterized
as a ‘confessional,’ she struggled with including ‘nuisance’ neighbors in her
notion of community.
[S]hortly after we moved into the neighborhood, I became very friendly with
a woman . . . A couple of years after I met her, she asked me to drive with her

down to Wildwood, to identify her son’s belongings. He had died in a fire, of an

overdose. He’d broken into a house. He was a life-long drug user . . . I went with
her down to the sheriff’s office in Wildwood, you know, to identify his belongings
and it was heart wrenching
wrenching.
I’ve since learned that he was primarily responsible for a huge binge on break-ins.
Had he not died down there, there’s a good chance that he would’ve been living
[nearby]. I don’t know how it is that the word ‘community’ gets stretched enough
to encompass the people who make it hard to live [here], by their habits.
Mary
Mary is also white and in her mid-50s. She lives with her daughter Ma-
ryanne, who works as a court stenographer, and Maryanne’s fiancé Bob, a
union carpenter. Mary has trouble with the fact that her daughter takes care
of the bills. There’s been tension throughout Maryanne’s life about Mary’s
varying ability to provide for them and, now, for herself.
According to Mary, drug use is a ‘coping mechanism’ that takes up a lot of
her time. This coping mechanism — over a quarter century of heroin injection,
methadone treatment, crack use — has left its marks. It is so consuming that
it leaves little time to focus on the problems Mary acknowledges she ‘should
be straightening out.’
The problems stem from a ten-year-old bench warrant. Fearing imprison-
ment, believing that a court appearance might ‘dredge up old beefs’ from her
years of sexwork and drug sales, Mary has yet to resolve this summons. With
the summons hanging over her head, however, she cannot seek the Social
Security disability insurance to which she’s entitled — which would provide
an income and health coverage.
I asked Mary if she could explain why she continued to get high, why she
couldn’t clear up her ‘legal problems,’ and why she rarely worked ‘straight’
(formal sector) jobs anymore. She told me about a school for the deaf that
she had worked at in the early 1980s. She was on methadone at the time and
living at the school. A housekeeper found Mary’s medication and reported
it to her employers. Although they did not fire her, stories of Mary’s metha-
done use were circulating and affecting her relationship with children at the
school. Mary left.
At another job, two police officers who had once arrested her for dealing,
came in to pay their bills. According to Mary, ‘the cops put doubt in the
owner’s mind, so he counted the drawers more closely. I got aggravated
with it and quit.’

Finally, Mary decided to apply for a program that would pay for her to
enroll in college. Worried about a possible return to drug use, Mary made
certain that she could remain in the methadone program and still qualify for
the education grant. After getting assurances from a counselor at the funding
agency, Mary completed the paperwork for state funding. After she had been
admitted to community college she was told by her methadone counselor
that she would have to detoxify from methadone before the state would pay
for school. That was Mary’s last attempt to work ‘straight’ jobs.
Mary says the problem of current community development efforts is
that they ‘blame the victim and nothin’ changes. Focusing on the addicts is
a . . . way of blaming the people and the drug when the government or com-
munity organizing ain’t working.’
Although providing adequate access to drug treatment might allow people
like Mary some chance of getting clean if they chose, Mary doesn’t believe
this would work without other supports. When substance users have access
to meaningful work and social welfare they have no need for ‘a hustle’ like
sexwork, theft, drug sales, or other informal sector employment to meet
their needs.
Barbara, in a telling discussion of the differences between being an addict
with and without material resources, seems to agree.
Every community [has] people who are disabled by addiction. The extent to which
they impact the neighborhood has everything to do with their income. The wife
of the attorney that I used to work with was addicted to coke. I don’t think she
had a negative impact on her neighborhood ’til she cracked up her car one day.
She was invisible because her addiction didn’t involve the loss of somebody’s
property or an assault.
As I demonstrate below, however, Mary’s presence constitutes an assault for

many newcomer residents. Mary points to her neighbor, Chloe, a single mother
of four children, and says that she is ‘sufferin’ because if I wasn’t the badee, her
kids could go out and play. By this, Mary implies that the state and civil society
have shifted their responsibility for making the streets safe for Chloe and her
children onto ‘problem’ residents like Mary. As we will see, however, newcom-
ers often fail to differentiate between Mary, Chloe, and Chloe’s children.
The Disposable Indigenous Culture

Zbegniew Kosciusko, an artist who emigrated from Poland and lives in
East Kensington with his wife and daughter, cited positive, market-driven

changes in the community. According to Kosciusko, ‘[over] the last two

years I have seen the progress . . . in Northern Liberties [the gentrified space
of consumption immediately south] . . . I hope this kind of movement . . . is
going to come here. I don’t believe that if people [imagine] a better place
than this, that it won’t be this way.’ For Kosciusko, economic development
will help all of the neighborhood’s residents.
For many newly settling residents, however, every established resident
is either unemployed (and, perhaps, unemployable), a drug-using deviant,
or mentally incompetent. John Dougherty, executive director of the nac on
which Barbara serves, says:
Everyone in the neighborhood drinks too much. It’s why people look so much
older than they are. The drug problem is intractable because it’s part of the history
of the neighborhood. People selling drugs were doing something else harmful
before they sold drugs.
These people cannot become part of the market-based community, accord-

ing to John.
If you don’t want to work at conventional [jobs], if you like to live on the edge, if
you get a rush over that sort of thing . . . , then all that has a certain appeal to you.
Somebody who has dropped out of high school and can’t, or isn’t particularly
interested in reading and doesn’t know how to do math, and computers are just
something that they steal, I don’t know the compelling argument for a lot of those
people not to do this kind of stuff. I’m not sure that economic development models
have anything to do with that culture.
Dougherty’s views are echoed in another resident’s presentation of local

‘cultural’ differences to explain problems between older residents and them-
selves. Pete Stevens is an artist who moved to the neighborhood ten years
ago. His daughter attends private school and is not allowed to play with the
children of established residents, who are ‘too rough and unsupervised.’ He
explained that both the children’s roughness and the lack of adult supervision
were due to the fact that, like their parents, ‘most of [the neighborhood] kids
are uneducable. The harsh reality is that they just cannot learn.’
Stevens commented that no amount of funding for schools would make a
difference. While he believes that ‘anything that helps the clueless around here’
is a good thing, he has no faith in social services or the abilities of established
residents. ‘The indigenous population around here have been left behind, if
these programs were to vanish tomorrow, the neighborhood would chug on.’

This is so because established residents are ‘peripheral to society.’
But, as the socioeconomic situation shifts, that’ll change. Middle-class people are
demanding. It’ll just happen . . . The market will fix these things in a way that the
agency [cdc] never could. The agency would have to go out of its way for the un-
derdog, but the underdog people are hardly up to owning their own property.
Siobhan O’Connell and her husband may portend the changes that the market
will bring. Newer residents who moved to Fishtown from Center City fifteen
years earlier, gentry couples like the O’Connells see their physical home as
enclosed, not as part of the sociality of the community, and in a location
convenient to work, recreation and leisure. Like generations of established
residents who had at one time been able to do so on the basis of the social
wage of Keynesian social welfare, O’Connell and her husband bought a small
home at the shore. ‘We have a little getaway on the weekends.’ Unlike residents
of summers past — or even those Kensington residents who can still afford to
socialize together in the low-rent shore town of Wildwood, the O’Connell’s
can now orient their social lives away from local space and sociality.14
Colonizer and Colonized on the New Urban Frontier

The failure to see marginally employed residents as people with rights
and membership in the community is consistent with the processes of neo-
liberalism, wherein people who do not adapt to the dictates of the free
market and bourgeois normativity are created as undeserving. Public policy
in the US has shifted over the past four decades from a War on Poverty to a
‘new war on the poor’ (Katz 1995; Goode & Maskovsky 2001). Goode and
Maskovsky argue that in the neoliberal era, the invidious distinction between
‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor is used to police the poor and erase them
from public discussion. While I agree that this constitutes an important aspect
of neoliberal governance, I disagree with the argument that this ‘regime of
disappearance’ is only — or even primarily — about the poor.
As Goode and Maskovsky argue (and as numerous case studies have
shown), impoverished people are trotted out as examples of social ‘problems,’
while the possibility of a social effort to change their conditions is left unex-
amined. What disappears, then, is a public and a public good which includes
the poor. The poor themselves have not been more visible — as ‘problems’
and goads to ‘correct’ social behavior — since the early Victorian era in the
US and Great Britain. In that period, Charles Booth, his poverty maps, and
an army of social workers, used the ‘shortcomings’ of the poor to create the

social institutions and governmentalist techniques that ultimately led to a

shoring up of middle-class identity (Donzelot 1979; Foucault 1978; Topolov
1993). Today, the poor are once again being used in a morality play that is
more concerned with policing the middle class than it is with the poor or
their welfare.15
The disappearance of an awareness of the public good is akin to a political
assassination (aa la los desaparecidos
desaparecidos), used to shape and police middle-class
identity. The regime of disappearance, then, might be better conceived as a
veiled threat (which, as Gramsci noted, always accompanies hegemony). In
this case, the threat is at one and the same time indirect and gratifying — the
poor are disposable, and their disposability serves as ideological justification
for neighborhood imperialism.
It is in new residents’ inability to see poorer, established residents in the
new, market-based community — or, in some cases, to see their shared hu-
manity — that the disposability of impoverished residents and the excesses
of neighborhood imperialism are clearest. Ultimately, Barbara and other re-
sidents cannot make the leap to extend their own deserving status to others.
There is a disconnect among residents like Barbara that takes residents like
Mary out of history — because newcomers like Barbara are not connected to
or aware of established residents’ histories and struggles. They do not have
a context in which to put long-term residents and their actions which would
enable them to be counted among the ‘deserving.’
Uneven development and neoliberalism create new tensions and crises,
which have the potential to erode the stability of the hegemonic, govern-
mentalist notion that the market will provide if one is only virtuous and
deserving enough. Yet emerging counterhegemonies need not be progressive,
as Amin points out (1998). Memmi (1991, 2000) and Fanon (1963) long ago
encountered colonizers and national bourgeoisie with counterhegemonic
consciousnesses that nonetheless supported actions which derailed pro-
gressive action. Memmi demonstrated that while there can be a colonizer
who rejects his or her oppressive role (like Barbara), in the long run this is
an untenable position (1991). The question of resistance then, for both the
colonizer and the colonized on the new urban frontier, is tied into locating
progressive counterhegemonic spaces.
The ultimate danger of neighborhood imperialism, capitalist revanchism
and worker disposability is in its construction of a ‘regime of disappearance’
that elides the class continuities among gentrifier and gentrified, colonizer and
colonized, worker and worker. As anthropologist Paul Durrenberger recently

suggested to me, the capitalist class uses one part of the working class — the
so-called ‘middle class’ — to manage the other part. Prince makes a similar
point in her discussion of ‘professional managerial workers’ — ‘[a]ccumulation
would be severely hampered without the labor of individuals trained to
oversee the care, management and socialization of the ranks of productive
labor and other workers’ (2002: 9). Likewise, Logan and Molotch argue that
rentiers are tolerated by capital – even when they negatively affect profits
– because of the stabilizing role they play in growth machines.
Not all East Kensington residents have submitted to the logic of the market
and its goals. Many see opportunities to organize that the city and cdcs do
not credit them with. Unlike the organizations and individuals who prioritize
the exchange value of the community, local residents on both sides of the
uneven divide prioritize the use value of space, and would prefer existing
homes (and the social relations that have developed among the people living
in them), recreational spaces (and the social relations they foster) and in-
creased social services (and the economic and human capital they provide)
to new construction, land speculation, and spaces of consumption.
Future developments are, of course, uncertain. Many people will likely
take the opening speculation provides them to get out — many who have sur-
vived on use values may choose exchange values where possible. Ultimately,
for those marginal residents who do stay, the influx of financial capital will
put greater economic and social pressures, that will likely make continued
dependence on use value and marginal work untenable.
Yet, most established residents will have no options but to stay. Those
who have not made improvements on their homes and lots will not receive a
price equal to the social equity of their property. Few want to leave the social
ties that they have in the community. In response to the label ‘the Badlands’
that the neighborhood has acquired in the local and national media, one
respondent stated, ‘I don’t care. Whatever they call it, its home.’ Whether
marginal workers will be able to hold onto this home, or newcomer residents
will be able to embrace it (and the vision of a public good that it contains),
remains to be seen.
Acknowledgments
This work would have been impossible without the patience and generosity of
those who welcomed me into their lives over the past decade. The fieldwork for this
research was made possible by two National Science Foundation grants, a Temple
University Fellowship supported by Temple’s Graduate School and Department of
Anthropology, and a Fels Foundation Summer Internship grant. The arguments

made here have been immeasurably improved by Angela Jancius’ kind, generous,
and patient editing and by comments on earlier drafts by Christopher Carrico, Paul
Durrenberger, Genevieve Fulco, Judith Goode, Anastasia Hudgins, and Neil Smith.
Discussions with Brett Williams, Sydney White, Kathy Walker, Jeff Maskovsky, Su-
san Hyatt, and the students and faculty of the Urban Studies Program at the Uni-
versity of Washington, Tacoma have helped me flesh out what were but thoughts
of thoughts. The mistakes are all mine, but the camaraderie of these friends makes
them bearable.
Notes
1. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls) uses a range of measures char-
acterizing employment. However, bls measures are typically cited selectively in
the press. The bls measure most often cited (the ‘u-3’ category) represents those
unemployed but actively seeking work and finding none during the period mea-
sured. US u-3 unemployment ranged from 4– 6 percent from August 1994 – June
2005 (with a brief spike above 6 percent in 2003). Philadelphia’s u-3 for the period
has ranged from 3.4– 6.3 percent. However, the bls’ alternative measures account
for a much larger proportion of people who would be considered un- or under-
employed. A more comprehensive measure, including those in the u-3 measure,
those who have found but chosen not to take work, and those who are categorized
as ‘discouraged’ puts unemployment at over 6.4 percent. Including those who are
employed but seeking additional work for financial reasons, pushes national under-
employment above 7.6 percent. Finally, including people who hold multiple jobs for
financial reasons, the US underemployed rate is nearly 13 percent. Race, gender,
and access to higher education drive these numbers higher.
2. Unlike many of the gentrifying neighborhoods that social scientists have studied,
over 90 percent of the neighborhood’s residents are US born and of European
descent. Due to space constrictions, I will have to develop the specific ‘class pre-
dicaments of whiteness’ (Hartigan 1999) and effects of other racialized aspect of
neighborhood imperialism elsewhere.
3. The GI Bill provided benefits to returning soldiers after the Second World War.
The fha created the now widespread system of low interest, long-term fixed rate
mortgages.
4. Amin presents an argument against conflating the expansion of capitalism with
development. Capitalism ‘must be considered on two levels, that of its imminent
(abstract) tendency and that of its historical (concrete) reality. The concept of dev-
elopment, on the other hand, is by nature ideological. It enables one to judge results
according to criteria that have been drawn up a priori — the same criteria that
contribute to the definition of a social project.’ (1997 :14).
5. Pérez 2002; Prince 2002; Smith 1996; Williams 1988, 2002.
6. On the deserving/undeserving dichotomy, see Katz 1995; Goode & Maskovsky
2001; Maskovsky 2001.
7. ‘Redlining’ refers to the lines banks and insurers would draw around neighborhoods
considered bad, marginal, or good risks. The process was initiated by the US Fede-
ral Housing Authority (fha)fha) in 1934. The fha denied guarantees to mortgages in
fha
predominantly black, Latino, or poor neighborhoods.

8. These programs allow residents to earn credit towards owning a home in exchange
for work done rehabbing abandoned properties.
9. Survey respondents also included in their top ten priorities the creation of increased
educational opportunities for both children and adults, safe spaces for children and
teens, health clinics, and housing for the elderly.
10. Workers are paid a small amount in cash or drugs before a shift and given time to
purchase and or use their drugs. After working a 12–16 hour day, workers are paid
again — usually 1 1⁄2 times what they received when the shift began.
11. See Williams 2004 for a discussion of the role of debt in creating and maintaining
inequality in the US.
12. In fact, as DiLeonardo 1998; Goode & Maskovsky 2001; and Prince 2002 demon-
strate (and problematize), a narrative of uplift through proximity to the ‘middle
class’ prevails.
13. Although they use the word ‘pioneers,’ Smith 1996 and di Leonardo 1998 discuss
similar dynamics.
14. Williams (1988) makes a similar argument about how gentrifiers orient their lives
externally and range far and while older residents orient their lives within the neigh-
borhood and stay close.
15. I would like to acknowledge Susan B. Hyatt for this insight.
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Unemployment and Disposable Workers in Philadelphia: Just How Far Have The Bastards Gone?

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Unemployment and Disposable Workers in Philadelphia: Just How Far Have The Bastards Gone?

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Unemployment and Disposable

Workers in Philadelphia: Just How Far

abstract Drawing on ethnographic research in Philadelphia, this article illustrates

keywords Social networks, social reproduction, imperialism

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

local capitalisms of the post-Soviet, neoliberal-cum-neoconservative era are

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

demonstrate the ways in which uneven development contributes to ongoing

Capitalist Revanchism and Neighborhood Imperialism

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

grams created spaces of consumption and land speculation in the Society

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

The City of Philadelphia’s market-driven development plan has produced

The Geography and Ethnography of Neighborhood Imperialism

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

utilities subsidies to impoverished residents of the community. However,

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

Social Reproduction in East Kensington

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

To make ends meet, a crucial aspect of social reproduction for estab-

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

Whose (Who’s) Community?

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

tried to make sense, in light her self-professed liberalism, of the problems

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

down to Wildwood, to identify her son’s belongings. He had died in a ﬁre, of an

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

As I demonstrate below, however, Mary’s presence constitutes an assault for

The Disposable Indigenous Culture

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

changes in the community. According to Kosciusko, ‘[over] the last two

These people cannot become part of the market-based community, accord-

Dougherty’s views are echoed in another resident’s presentation of local

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

This is so because established residents are ‘peripheral to society.’

Colonizer and Colonized on the New Urban Frontier

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

social institutions and governmentalist techniques that ultimately led to a

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

eth nos, vol. 71:2, j u n e 200 6 (pp. 165–19 0)

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