Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Social Problems Community Policy and Social Action 6th Edition Ebook PDF
Social Problems Community Policy and Social Action 6th Edition Ebook PDF
8
p.v
p.vi
9
For B. D. S. and B. W. S.
p.vii
10
p.viii
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.
11
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Title: Social problems : community, policy and social action / Anna Leon-Guerrero, Pacific Lutheran University.
Revised edition of the author’s Social problems, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Classification: LCC HN59.2 .L46 2018 | DDC 306.0973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017892
18 19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR INFORMATION:
12
Production Editor: Tracy Buyan
Copy Editor: Colleen Brennan
Typesetter: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd.
Proofreader: Caryne Brown
Indexer: Wendy Allex
Cover Designer: Candice Harman
Marketing Manager: Kara Kindstrom
13
p.ix
BRIEF CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 4 • Gender
Chapter 8 • Education
14
PART IV • INDIVIDUAL ACTION AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Chapter 17 • Social Problems and Social Action
Glossary
References
Index
15
p.x
DETAILED CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Conflict Perspective
Feminist Perspective
Interactionist Perspective
Chapter Review
Key Terms
Study Questions
16
What Does It Mean to Be Poor?
The Federal Definitions of Poverty
Functionalist Perspective
• TAKING A WORLD VIEW: Income Inequality in China
Conflict Perspective
Feminist Perspective
p.xi
Interactionist Perspective
• IN FOCUS: The Power of Political Action Committees
Health
Responding to Class Inequalities
U.S. Welfare Policy
Chapter Review
Key Terms
Study Questions
Conflict Perspective
Feminist Perspective
17
Interactionist Perspective
• IN FOCUS: Black Lives Matter
Health
Responding to Racial and Ethnic Inequalities
Immigration Policy Since 2009
Affirmative Action
Employment
Education
Chapter Review
Key Terms
Study Questions
4. Gender
Sociological Perspectives on Gender Inequality
Functionalist Perspective
p.xii
Interactionist Perspective
Income Inequality
• EXPLORING SOCIAL PROBLEMS: The Wage Gap
18
Intimate Partner Violence and Sexual Assault
Responding to Gender Inequalities
Key Terms
Study Questions
5. Sexual Orientation
Sociological Perspectives on Sexual Orientation and Inequality
Functionalist Perspective
Military Service
Key Terms
Study Questions
19
Functionalist Perspective
Conflict Perspective
Feminist Perspective
Interactionist Perspective
p.xiii
Ageism
Age and Social Class
Health and Medical Care
Key Terms
Study Questions
Functionalist Perspective
Conflict and Feminist Perspectives
Interactionist Perspective
20
The Problems of Time and Money
Community, Policy, and Social Action
Chapter Review
Key Terms
Study Questions
8. Education
The New Educational Standard
p.xiv
Functionalist Perspective
Conflict Perspective
Feminist Perspective
Interactionist Perspective
21
Antiviolence and Antibullying Programs in Schools
• VOICES IN THE COMMUNITY: Wendy Kopp
Key Terms
Study Questions
Functionalist Perspective
Conflict Perspective
Feminist Perspective
Interactionist Perspective
Problems in Work and the Economy
Unemployment and Underemployment
Globalization
Minimum Wage
A Hazardous and Stressful Workplace
Federal Policies
Chapter Review
Key Terms
Study Questions
22
p.xv
Conflict Perspective
Feminist Perspective
Interactionist Perspective
Gender
Education
Chapter Review
Key Terms
Study Questions
Conflict Perspective
Feminist Perspective
Interactionist Perspective
23
The Media and Social Problems
Loss of Privacy
p.xvi
Chapter Review
Key Terms
Study Questions
Functionalist Perspective
Conflict Perspective
Feminist Perspective
Interactionist Perspective
What Is Drug Abuse?
Alcohol
24
Problem Drinking Among Teens and Young Adults
Punishment or Treatment?
Key Terms
Study Questions
Conflict Perspective
Feminist Perspective
Interactionist Perspective
Violent Crime
Property Crime
Juvenile Delinquency
White-Collar Crime
p.xvii
Offenders
Victims
Our Current Response to Crime
25
The Police
Prisons
Key Terms
Study Questions
Homelessness
Gentrification
Urban Sprawl and Transportation
26
Community, Policy, and Social Action
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
Study Questions
p.xviii
Feminist Perspective
Interactionist Perspective
Social Problems and the Environment
Climate Change
Air Quality
Hazardous Waste Sites and Brownfields
Federal Responses
27
• SOCIOLOGY AT WORK: Research
Chapter Review
Key Terms
Study Questions
War
U.S. Conflicts
Terrorism
Sociological Perspectives on War and Terrorism
Functionalist Perspective
Conflict Perspective
Feminist Perspective
Interactionist Perspective
• EXPLORING SOCIAL PROBLEMS: U.S. Global Engagement
The Problems of War and Terrorism
p.xix
Military Response
Key Terms
Study Questions
28
17. Social Problems and Social Action
Understanding Social Movements
Key Terms
Study Questions
Glossary
References
Index
29
p.medialibrary
Media Library
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 1.3: Me Too at the Golden Globes (Tarana Burke)
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 2.2: The Feminization of Poverty
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 3.2: Ferguson Demonstrations
30
Chapter 4 Gender
PREMIUM VIDEO
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 4.1: Gender Stereotypes
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 5.1: Sexuality, Race, and HIV
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 6.1: Students Reside in Retirement Homes
AP News Clips 6.2: President Obama Highlights Issues Facing Aging Americans
Chapter 7 Families
PREMIUM VIDEO
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 7.2: Elder Abuse
Chapter 8 Education
31
PREMIUM VIDEO
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 8.2: Declining School Conditions in Venezuela
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 9.1: President Obama Speaking about Fair Pay
AP News Clips 9.2: Supreme Court Case About Woman Wearing Hijab
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 10.1: PTSD Therapy through Dance
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 11.2: The Role of Facebook in Society
32
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 12.1: Drinking Culture in the Workplace
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 13.1: Juvenile Locked Up For Life
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 14.1: Suburbanization of Asian Americans, Decline of Historic
Chinatowns
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 15.1: Renewable Energy
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 16.1: US Women in Combat Roles
33
AP News Clips 16.3: Antiwar Protests
AP NEWS CLIPS
AP News Clips 17.1: Occupy Wall Street
34
p.xx
PREFACE
I wrote this text with two goals in mind: to offer a better understanding of the social problems we
experience in our world and to begin working toward real solutions. In the pages that follow, I
present three connections to achieve these goals. The first connection is between sociology and the
study of social problems. Using your sociological imagination (which you’ll learn more about in
Chapter 1), you will be able to identify the social and structural forces that determine our social
problems. I think you’ll discover that this course is interesting, challenging, and sometimes
frustrating (sort of like real-life discussions about social problems). After you review these different
social problems, you may ask, “What can be done about all this?” The second connection is between
social problems and their solutions. In each chapter, we review selected social policies along with
innovative programs that attempt to address or correct these problems. The final connection is one
that I ask you to make yourself: recognizing the social problems in your community and identifying
how you can be part of the solution.
• A focus on the basis of social inequalities. Using a sociological perspective, we examine how
race and ethnicity, gender, social class, sexual orientation, and age determine our life chances.
Chapters 2 through 6 focus specifically on these bases of social inequality and how each
contributes to our experience of social problems.
• A focus on the global experience of social problems. Throughout the text, the consequences
of social problems throughout the world are highlighted, drawing upon data and research from
international scholars and sociologists. In a boxed chapter feature, Taking a World View,
specific social problems or responses are examined from a global perspective. We look at
China’s aging population (Chapter 6), Japan’s educational tracking system (Chapter 8),
Mexico’s maquiladoras (Chapter 9), the International Women’s Media Foundation (Chapter
11), and marijuana legalization in other countries (Chapter 12).
• A focus on social policy and social action. Each chapter includes a discussion on relevant
social policies or programs. In addition, each chapter highlights how individuals or groups have
made a difference in their community. The chapters include personal stories, some from
35
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
DANCE ON STILTS AT THE GIRLS’ UNYAGO, NIUCHI
I see increasing reason to believe that the view formed some time
back as to the origin of the Makonde bush is the correct one. I have
no doubt that it is not a natural product, but the result of human
occupation. Those parts of the high country where man—as a very
slight amount of practice enables the eye to perceive at once—has not
yet penetrated with axe and hoe, are still occupied by a splendid
timber forest quite able to sustain a comparison with our mixed
forests in Germany. But wherever man has once built his hut or tilled
his field, this horrible bush springs up. Every phase of this process
may be seen in the course of a couple of hours’ walk along the main
road. From the bush to right or left, one hears the sound of the axe—
not from one spot only, but from several directions at once. A few
steps further on, we can see what is taking place. The brush has been
cut down and piled up in heaps to the height of a yard or more,
between which the trunks of the large trees stand up like the last
pillars of a magnificent ruined building. These, too, present a
melancholy spectacle: the destructive Makonde have ringed them—
cut a broad strip of bark all round to ensure their dying off—and also
piled up pyramids of brush round them. Father and son, mother and
son-in-law, are chopping away perseveringly in the background—too
busy, almost, to look round at the white stranger, who usually excites
so much interest. If you pass by the same place a week later, the piles
of brushwood have disappeared and a thick layer of ashes has taken
the place of the green forest. The large trees stretch their
smouldering trunks and branches in dumb accusation to heaven—if
they have not already fallen and been more or less reduced to ashes,
perhaps only showing as a white stripe on the dark ground.
This work of destruction is carried out by the Makonde alike on the
virgin forest and on the bush which has sprung up on sites already
cultivated and deserted. In the second case they are saved the trouble
of burning the large trees, these being entirely absent in the
secondary bush.
After burning this piece of forest ground and loosening it with the
hoe, the native sows his corn and plants his vegetables. All over the
country, he goes in for bed-culture, which requires, and, in fact,
receives, the most careful attention. Weeds are nowhere tolerated in
the south of German East Africa. The crops may fail on the plains,
where droughts are frequent, but never on the plateau with its
abundant rains and heavy dews. Its fortunate inhabitants even have
the satisfaction of seeing the proud Wayao and Wamakua working
for them as labourers, driven by hunger to serve where they were
accustomed to rule.
But the light, sandy soil is soon exhausted, and would yield no
harvest the second year if cultivated twice running. This fact has
been familiar to the native for ages; consequently he provides in
time, and, while his crop is growing, prepares the next plot with axe
and firebrand. Next year he plants this with his various crops and
lets the first piece lie fallow. For a short time it remains waste and
desolate; then nature steps in to repair the destruction wrought by
man; a thousand new growths spring out of the exhausted soil, and
even the old stumps put forth fresh shoots. Next year the new growth
is up to one’s knees, and in a few years more it is that terrible,
impenetrable bush, which maintains its position till the black
occupier of the land has made the round of all the available sites and
come back to his starting point.
The Makonde are, body and soul, so to speak, one with this bush.
According to my Yao informants, indeed, their name means nothing
else but “bush people.” Their own tradition says that they have been
settled up here for a very long time, but to my surprise they laid great
stress on an original immigration. Their old homes were in the
south-east, near Mikindani and the mouth of the Rovuma, whence
their peaceful forefathers were driven by the continual raids of the
Sakalavas from Madagascar and the warlike Shirazis[47] of the coast,
to take refuge on the almost inaccessible plateau. I have studied
African ethnology for twenty years, but the fact that changes of
population in this apparently quiet and peaceable corner of the earth
could have been occasioned by outside enterprises taking place on
the high seas, was completely new to me. It is, no doubt, however,
correct.
The charming tribal legend of the Makonde—besides informing us
of other interesting matters—explains why they have to live in the
thickest of the bush and a long way from the edge of the plateau,
instead of making their permanent homes beside the purling brooks
and springs of the low country.
“The place where the tribe originated is Mahuta, on the southern
side of the plateau towards the Rovuma, where of old time there was
nothing but thick bush. Out of this bush came a man who never
washed himself or shaved his head, and who ate and drank but little.
He went out and made a human figure from the wood of a tree
growing in the open country, which he took home to his abode in the
bush and there set it upright. In the night this image came to life and
was a woman. The man and woman went down together to the
Rovuma to wash themselves. Here the woman gave birth to a still-
born child. They left that place and passed over the high land into the
valley of the Mbemkuru, where the woman had another child, which
was also born dead. Then they returned to the high bush country of
Mahuta, where the third child was born, which lived and grew up. In
course of time, the couple had many more children, and called
themselves Wamatanda. These were the ancestral stock of the
Makonde, also called Wamakonde,[48] i.e., aborigines. Their
forefather, the man from the bush, gave his children the command to
bury their dead upright, in memory of the mother of their race who
was cut out of wood and awoke to life when standing upright. He also
warned them against settling in the valleys and near large streams,
for sickness and death dwelt there. They were to make it a rule to
have their huts at least an hour’s walk from the nearest watering-
place; then their children would thrive and escape illness.”
The explanation of the name Makonde given by my informants is
somewhat different from that contained in the above legend, which I
extract from a little book (small, but packed with information), by
Pater Adams, entitled Lindi und sein Hinterland. Otherwise, my
results agree exactly with the statements of the legend. Washing?
Hapana—there is no such thing. Why should they do so? As it is, the
supply of water scarcely suffices for cooking and drinking; other
people do not wash, so why should the Makonde distinguish himself
by such needless eccentricity? As for shaving the head, the short,
woolly crop scarcely needs it,[49] so the second ancestral precept is
likewise easy enough to follow. Beyond this, however, there is
nothing ridiculous in the ancestor’s advice. I have obtained from
various local artists a fairly large number of figures carved in wood,
ranging from fifteen to twenty-three inches in height, and
representing women belonging to the great group of the Mavia,
Makonde, and Matambwe tribes. The carving is remarkably well
done and renders the female type with great accuracy, especially the
keloid ornamentation, to be described later on. As to the object and
meaning of their works the sculptors either could or (more probably)
would tell me nothing, and I was forced to content myself with the
scanty information vouchsafed by one man, who said that the figures
were merely intended to represent the nembo—the artificial
deformations of pelele, ear-discs, and keloids. The legend recorded
by Pater Adams places these figures in a new light. They must surely
be more than mere dolls; and we may even venture to assume that
they are—though the majority of present-day Makonde are probably
unaware of the fact—representations of the tribal ancestress.
The references in the legend to the descent from Mahuta to the
Rovuma, and to a journey across the highlands into the Mbekuru
valley, undoubtedly indicate the previous history of the tribe, the
travels of the ancestral pair typifying the migrations of their
descendants. The descent to the neighbouring Rovuma valley, with
its extraordinary fertility and great abundance of game, is intelligible
at a glance—but the crossing of the Lukuledi depression, the ascent
to the Rondo Plateau and the descent to the Mbemkuru, also lie
within the bounds of probability, for all these districts have exactly
the same character as the extreme south. Now, however, comes a
point of especial interest for our bacteriological age. The primitive
Makonde did not enjoy their lives in the marshy river-valleys.
Disease raged among them, and many died. It was only after they
had returned to their original home near Mahuta, that the health
conditions of these people improved. We are very apt to think of the
African as a stupid person whose ignorance of nature is only equalled
by his fear of it, and who looks on all mishaps as caused by evil
spirits and malignant natural powers. It is much more correct to
assume in this case that the people very early learnt to distinguish
districts infested with malaria from those where it is absent.
This knowledge is crystallized in the
ancestral warning against settling in the
valleys and near the great waters, the
dwelling-places of disease and death. At the
same time, for security against the hostile
Mavia south of the Rovuma, it was enacted
that every settlement must be not less than a
certain distance from the southern edge of the
plateau. Such in fact is their mode of life at the
present day. It is not such a bad one, and
certainly they are both safer and more
comfortable than the Makua, the recent
intruders from the south, who have made USUAL METHOD OF
good their footing on the western edge of the CLOSING HUT-DOOR
plateau, extending over a fairly wide belt of
country. Neither Makua nor Makonde show in their dwellings
anything of the size and comeliness of the Yao houses in the plain,
especially at Masasi, Chingulungulu and Zuza’s. Jumbe Chauro, a
Makonde hamlet not far from Newala, on the road to Mahuta, is the
most important settlement of the tribe I have yet seen, and has fairly
spacious huts. But how slovenly is their construction compared with
the palatial residences of the elephant-hunters living in the plain.
The roofs are still more untidy than in the general run of huts during
the dry season, the walls show here and there the scanty beginnings
or the lamentable remains of the mud plastering, and the interior is a
veritable dog-kennel; dirt, dust and disorder everywhere. A few huts
only show any attempt at division into rooms, and this consists
merely of very roughly-made bamboo partitions. In one point alone
have I noticed any indication of progress—in the method of fastening
the door. Houses all over the south are secured in a simple but
ingenious manner. The door consists of a set of stout pieces of wood
or bamboo, tied with bark-string to two cross-pieces, and moving in
two grooves round one of the door-posts, so as to open inwards. If
the owner wishes to leave home, he takes two logs as thick as a man’s
upper arm and about a yard long. One of these is placed obliquely
against the middle of the door from the inside, so as to form an angle
of from 60° to 75° with the ground. He then places the second piece
horizontally across the first, pressing it downward with all his might.
It is kept in place by two strong posts planted in the ground a few
inches inside the door. This fastening is absolutely safe, but of course
cannot be applied to both doors at once, otherwise how could the
owner leave or enter his house? I have not yet succeeded in finding
out how the back door is fastened.