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All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community

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All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community

By: Carol B. Stack  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5

Description:
All Our Kin is the chronicle of a young white woman's sojourn into The Flats, an African-American ghetto community, to study the support system family and friends form when coping with poverty. Eschewing the traditional method of entry into the community used by anthropologists -- through authority figures and community leaders -- she approached the families herself by way of an acquaintance from school, becoming one of the first sociologists to explore the black kinship network from the inside. The result was a landmark study that debunked the misconception that poor families were unstable and disorganized. On the contrary, her study showed that families in The Flats adapted to their poverty conditions by forming large, resilient, lifelong support networks based on friendship and family that were very powerful, highly structured and surprisingly complex.

Universally considered the best analysis of family and kinship in a ghetto black community ever published, All Our Kin is also an indictment of a social system that reinforces welfare dependency and chronic unemployment. As today's political debate over welfare reform heats up, its message has become more important than ever.

Publisher: Basic Books

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
ok for an anthro book - I was made to read this book for my anthro class. It was interesting to read about teh family situations, I read all of this book. This book contains a lot of diagrams and charts, so there is even less text to read. A little outdates perhaps though!

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Carol B. Stack isn't as boring as I thought - By looking at the cover.. you'd think this was the most boring book available at the bookstore. I dreaded reading this when it was assigned to my Anthropology course.. however when I finally got around to reading it is insightful and interesting. It brought up facts that I've seen around me but failed to recognize as part of a culture.

One question I do pose though, when the family which inherits a large sum of money decides to share it among the poor community. Wouldn't the community be better off if that one family decided to move out of poverty, enabling the poor community to become smaller and thus have more items being able to rotate within the community? Eventually the community can become richer because of this instead of dragging those around them down.

Interesting book..

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Carol B. Stack isn't as boring as I thought - By looking at the cover.. you'd think this was the most boring book available at the bookstore. I dreaded reading this when it was assigned to my Anthropology course.. however when I finally got around to reading it is insightful and interesting. It brought up facts that I've seen around me but failed to recognize as part of a culture.

One question I do pose though, when the family which inherits a large sum of money decides to share it among the poor community. Wouldn't the community be better off if that one family decided to move out of poverty, enabling the poor community to become smaller and thus have more items being able to rotate within the community? Eventually the community can become richer because of this instead of dragging those around them down.

Interesting book..

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Truly enlightening & moving portrait of poor black culture - This book was assigned reading for an introductory anthropology course, however, once I started reading the book, I simply was unable to put it down. This is one of the most enlightening books I have ever read, detailing every aspect of working poor African Americans in the 60's. Carol Stack immersed herself in this culture and was able to learn all aspects of their daily lives and convey to the reader a vivid and detailed portrait of truly difficult lives of a group of people that make up only 1% of African Americans in this country. As a white woman, this book was especially enlightening to truly understand a completely foreign culture. This should be required reading for all.

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