Anthropology of Contemporary Issues

Kim Hopper has dedicated his career to trying to correct the problem of homelessness in the United States. In his powerful book, he draws upon his dual strengths as anthropologist and advocate to provide a deeper understanding of the roots of homelessness. He also investigates the complex attitudes brought to bear on the issue since his pioneering fieldwork with Ellen Baxter twenty years ago helped put homelessness on the public agenda. Beginning with his own introduction to the problem in New York, Hopper uses ethnography, literature, history, and activism to place homelessness into historical context and to trace the process by which homelessness came to be recognized as an issue. He tells the largely neglected story of homelessness among African Americans and vividly portrays various sites of public homelessness, such as airports. His accounts of life on the streets make for powerful reading.

Cities, Classes, and the Social Order brings together nine conceptual and theoretical essays by the anthropologist, Anthony Leeds (1925–1989), whose pioneering work in the anthropology of complex societies was built on formative personal and research experiences in both urban and rural settings in the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, and Portugal. Leeds brought to his anthropology a simultaneous concern for science and humanism, and for explanation and interpretation. He constructed a nuanced and intricate vision of the connections among ecology, technology, history, evolution, structure, process, power, culture, social organization, and human creativity. The essays in this book draw on his approach to demarcate the role of cities in human history, the use and abuse of class analysis, the bases of power in complex societies, and an agenda for ethnographic and social-historical research in the contemporary world. In addition to major but little-known writings and an important essay on Marx here published for the first time in English, a selection of Leeds's ethnographically and politically inspired poems are included, as are several of his professionally exhibited photographs. In addition, introductory essays by R. Timothy Sieber and Roger Sanjek chart the course of Leeds's career and the development of his theoretical viewpoint.