Gender, sexuality, and health in a turn-of-the-century "black metropolis".

Abstract

or nearly a decade now, the Cultural Systems Analysis Group (CuSAG) has been engaged in critically important applied research in several fieldwork sites in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area. CuSAG's qualitative and quantitative research has focused on low-income African Americans, the quality of everyday life in their communities, and the uneven structure of opportunity available for meeting both individual and community-wide needs in such domains as employment and economic development, education, housing, health care, and governance. In partnership with a number of local and national organizations devoted to public policy matters, CuSAG has used an impressively diverse methodological repertoire to triangulate qualitative and quantitative methods to address a range of difficult and important questions concerning the complex and contradictory predicament of the population problematically characterized as an underclass (Maxwell 1993). Under Tony L. Whitehead's able direction, the critical anthropological project that CuSAG pursues is holistic and relatively systematic in its scope of data collection and analysis. Whitehead resists nihilistic views of the social world and of the ability of social scientists to analyze, explain, and help to change reality. In this respect as well as in others, the larger CuSAG project draws on a century-long tradition of urban research, particularly the trajectory that W.E.B. DuBois (1899) initiated with The Philadelphia Negro. A bit closer to our anthropological home, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's classic Black Metropolis (1945) brought the concerns of DuBoisian activist scholarship into the peripheral vision of the anthropological canon, from which it was virtually excluded (Harrison 1988, 1992). Drake and Cayton's classic ethnographic and historical sociological study of Chicago's South Side was the first research to involve anthropology in the study of a large metropolitan center (Harrison 1988, 1992). Fifty years before its time, the Black Metropolis project foreshadowed many of the trends that have become central to sociocultural anthropology today. Whitehead's research in the impoverished black metropolis of the Baltimore-Washington corridor, like the best work within this activist-oriented tradition of African American social research, interrogates local