Pem Davidson Buck

written in 2005, reposted from LJ:

Know thyself. Some scoff at this multi-authored sentiment, but as the warning to those entering the Oracle of Delphi and as the philosophies of Socrates and the Upanishades, among others, have dared state, "if you do not know who you are, how can you know others?" From this, it logically follows that through knowledge and understanding of others, positive change can occur. In Worked to the Bone, Pem Buck embraces and mothers both of these ideas, never flinching in her goal that through understanding "the view from under the sink" and the role a divide-and-conquer elite has played in fashioning the stratified state and notion of "whiteness" that structures many communities in today's America, it will be possible to change the attitudes that make such divisions a lasting issue.

As a contemporary anthropologist, Buck's incorporation of self is key to helping readers understand her perspectives and the motivation inherent in her work. And her perspectives are unique. By acknowledging - or knowing - herself, she has found a niche, and establishes at the onset that she embodies both the "self" and the "other" within the book's anthropological context. In turn, she uses this powerful position to explore and expound on the issues she addresses in a way an outsider might not capture. Additionally, with out this understanding of self, the potential for her harsh and focused look at the evolution of subjugation and race relations in America might be seen as less an anthropological work and more an activist's platform. Ultimately, the question of where the book falls can only be answered by the reader.

Much like Sharon Hutchinson's Nuer Dilemmas, Buck's use of historical data is pivotal in her illustration of social changes - specifically the construction of race and gender lines - that occurred as elitist control invaded, seeded, and engulfed the land. From the promotion and use of the slave trade and indentured servitude as cheap labor, to the creation of the ideals of white privilege, Buck's "view from under the sink" diagrams the establishment of a cultural plumbing system which, to this day, taps the underprivileged for every drop the elite can drain.

Buck's is an unavoidably Marxist approach, and she examines an extensive array of changes that occurred via the complex interplay of control over economic factors as well as the array of methods employed by the elite to maintain that control, even in the face of uprisings spurred by intense awareness of inequality. Again, using historical research to support her, Buck explains that the idea of race was not inherent in the system; that early on, slaves came in many ethnicities, as did indentured servants, and that all had the potential for living a free life with the benefit of land ownership. It was not until, as Buck states, the elite "chose" to manipulate these groups that ideas such as racial segregation, white supremacy, and sharp class stratification came to the fore.

Even as the elite funneled away the economic wage, the "psychological wage" of being white, and therefore empowered, was dangled before the increasingly disenfranchised middle and lower classes to distract and divide. Colored minorities were then stripped of all previous privilege, and the buffer-zone whites received just enough privilege to ensure the relative safety of elitist ventures. Throughout Worked to the Bone, Buck cites many historical instances of elitist sleight of hand.

However, general historical data can only carry a case so far, and as an ethnography of the people in "North" and "South" counties, Worked to the Bone falls short. Unlike Hutchinson's ethnography, in which she is removed from the dual role of self and other, Buck's employment of self as other overwhelms the voices of those she has chosen to represent to compensate for their need of privacy, even while calling out for recognition of the necessity for change. Buck keeps readers at arm's length or further, and her discussions of contemporary life lack immediacy, which detracts from their impact.

In Worked to the Bone, Buck has taken a historically complex and continually damaging situation and given it a new voice: one that is strident and impossible to ignore. As she states, "the future is shaped by our view of the past", and the knowledge her "boney-fingered" view of the past gives may well succeed in making the changes the future so desperately needs. From one boney-fingered woman to another; you go girl!… (mehr)