Question

How should American society address the phenomena of addiction and homelessness that we see intertwined in the lumpen abuse?
Please explain in one page

Answer 1

Lumpen Abuse. Definition: The authors' theory of the way structurally imposed everyday suffering generates violent and destructive subjectivities. Example 1: Sal is violent as a form of redemption. It is mindful, targeted, effective, and ethical within its own logic.

The fledgling school of “public anthropology” attempts to bring the participant-observation methodological tools and theoretical insights of our discipline to bear on the urgent social challenges of our era. Ideally, public intellectuals avoid becoming embroiled in the narrow details of partisanship or political positioning, so as to document the larger social-structural patterns that can be made visible through reflective, calm theoretical inquiry. The goal is to communicate to a wider public without dumbing-down or sanitizing an uncomfortable analysis. It requires entering policy debates and devoting energy to accessing wider media forums than those offered by our peer-review journals and university press publishers.

In the spirit of public anthropology we organized a photo-ethnographic exhibit at the Museum of Anthropology and Archeology at the University of Pennsylvania as well as an audio-visual installation at the Slought Foundation, an alternative art gallery, in Philadelphia. Old-fashioned, dusty-halled anthropology museums are beautiful, calm, reflective spaces. They offer a valuable but underutilized forum for heightening the visibility of ethnographic work on public issues. The aesthetic medium of museum display enables thoughtful audiences, who are different from those who buy and read academic books, to confront, evaluate and experience viscerally the world’s “everyday emergencies” (Taussig 1986).

Good museum curators translate complex historical and social ideas into a balance of images with minimal text. Our museum co-curator (Kathleen Quinn) transformed the jumble of text and photographs we initially provided into an elegant succinct display that covered six central theoretical and topical themes we had wanted to emphasize. She selected a long hallway gallery so that a walk through the exhibit space might approximate a quasi-ethnographic experience of homelessness, addiction, and war on drugs:

1. The political economy of the lumpenization of the former industrial working class whose descendants make up the bulk of the indigent in the urban United States.

2. The virulence of ethnic antagonism on the street, especially between whites and African-Americans, as well as its institutional reinforcement by law enforcement, social services, and everyday U.S. racism.

3. The contradiction between the War on Drugs and the delivery of public health and social services.

4. The unintended negative consequences of social services and drug treatment that renders biopower abusive under punitive neoliberalism, exacerbating suffering.

5. The cross-generational familial roots and ongoing interpersonal psychodyamics of violence, intimate betrayal and loss among friends, lovers, and kin of the homeless.

6. And finally, the moral economy of gift-giving and mutual solidarity that propagates infectious diseases but also prolongs the survival, bonding, and hierarchies of street-based micro-communities of addicted bodies self-styled as righteous dopefiends.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-744X.2011.01045.x/pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjJ0LLV5antAhUS5nMBHdp8AcQQFjAAegQIARAB&usg=AOvVaw2TIb2JQwDrvIyw8puQJ-q0