Braving Homelessness on the Ethnographic Street with Irene Glasser and Rae Bridgman

Abstract

Epistemological concerns about the construction and theorization of `the homeless' in relation to `the street' form the basis of this extended review of Irene Glasser and Rae Bridgman's Braving the Street: The Anthropology of Homelessness. Glasser and Bridgman promote their brand of anthropology as an effective means of generating insights into, and policy on, homelessness. Their interventions echo the contradictions of a liberal capitalist discourse that advocates the minimization of state intervention and maximization of individual autonomy for affluent citizens while extending a multiplicity of disciplinary means of state intervention into the lives of the impoverished. Glasser and Bridgman locate their `holistic', `ecological' approach within a dominant tradition of ethnography of poverty on one's doorstep from Tally's Corner onwards. I argue that Glasser and Bridgman's work is in keeping with a tradition that serves to exoticize the poor with the authority of empirical science. They reproduce a temporally and culturally distanced version of `the homeless' as highly modern yet primitivized objects of study that serves to flatter the anthropologist. The review takes seriously the idea that discourse is constitutive and has material effects for the self and `the Other' and so is particularly critical of Glasser and Bridgman's foundationalist approach to research as a means to depict and explain a given `reality' that reconstructs an untenable one-to-one relationship between reality and representation.