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edited by Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky. New York: New York University Press, 2001. 494 pp. $22.50 paper. ISBN: 0-8147-3116-3.
One of the major shortcomings inherent in poverty research over the past several decades has been the tendency to focus on who loses in the economic game, rather than analyzing why the game produces losers in the first place. Poverty researchers have largely concerned themselves with factors such as human capital, family structure, and attitudinal or motivational characteristics in explaining the poverty of individuals and families. There has been a conspicuous lack of emphasis in both the academic and policy communities on the structural dimensions that produce American poverty.
In The New Poverty Studies, editors Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky utilize an ethnographic approach in attempting to reveal such structural processes. Goode and Maskovsky note that the book's underlying premise is to treat "poverty as a political, economical, and ideological effect of capitalist processes and state activity. The essays in this collection are united by their treatment of poverty as a function of power, as an essential and utterly predictable effect of the ideological and political-economic processes of late capitalism" (p. 3). The concept of the book originated with a collection of papers given at the American Anthropological Association's Annual Meetings in 1996 and 1997. Three of the fifteen chapters...