YANOMAMO; SHERPAS & EAST HARLEM-ITES
Traditional paradigms within the anthropological community have been narrow and shortsighted in retrospect. This is because many of them fail to consider the econo-political aspects of culture and how it imposes racial segregation and economic marginalization on a people. In his book In Search of Respect, Philippe Bourgois (12) plans to restore the “agency of culture, the autonomy of individuals, and the centrality of gender and the domestic sphere to a political economic understanding of the experience of persistent poverty and social marginalization in the urban United States.” However, if we study the residents of East Harlem the author contends experience such segregation and marginalization, we can see that the ideologies and rituals of other cultures in non-urban areas share many similarities with them. In a way, all three groups of peoples represent cultural creativity in the way they maintain sustenance as segregated, maginalized groups different than the dominant econo-political one shaping the larger environment in which they exist.
The scope of this research is too narrow to identify all the similarities and differences between the three cultures. However, if we focus on two in particular we get a good sense of how these cultures have used “creative” methods to sustain in the midst of racism and poverty: employment/economic opportunity; education/cultural identity. In East Harlem, a culture has developed that is a counterculture to the norms held up as values in traditional American society. The drug dealers have created a viable economy in the midst of poverty and little education, and certainly as little political representation. The author contends the values, habits and occupations of this group have arisen as a counterculture to the mainstream American one. It has “spawned what I call ‘inner-city street culture’: a complex and conflictual web of beliefs,...