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Dr. Wes Browning |
I’ll admit it, sometimes here at Adven-
tures in Irony we don’t want to write
one more word about our mandated
subject, Homelessness. We, meaning me,
Copyright Dr. Wes Browning, have/has
a long list of subjects I think are vastly
more fun and entertaining. One of those
subjects is Anthropology.
I probably like Anthropology because
I am an anthropon myself. In fact, when I
fi rst learned that Anthropology meant the
study, by human beings, of human beings,
I pictured an Anthropology professor
standing at a mirror, checking herself
out. Or maybe I already had that picture
in my head. I should get that studied.
It turns out that United Way has just
discovered that people who are homeless
are human beings, so they have hired an
anthropologist to study them. I learned
about it in the P-I last Thursday. So I get
to talk about Anthropology after all!
Her name is Debra Boyer and the pic-
ture accompanying the story shows her
standing in a Seattle alley “that is com-
monly populated by drunken homeless
people” with a proud Vince Matulionis
standing well behind her, clearly thrilled
to have her there and ready to anthro-
pologize away.
Vince Matulionis directs the United
Way of King County’s Ending Homeless-
ness group. I met Mr. Matulionis a few
years ago when the King County Ten Year
Plan to End Homelessness was just get-
ting started. He talked about the Ten Year
Plan, such as it was, and the need to deal
with chronic homelessness fi rst, and gave
every impression of knowing about whom
he and his Ten Year Planning people were
planning for. After all, he had different
names for different kinds.
It wouldn’t make sense, would it, to
go off and plan to end a bunch of people’s
homelessness in ten years, if you didn’t
know anything about the people whose
homelessness you were ending? It would
be sort of like going to war in a foreign
country when you didn’t know anything
about the people who lived there, or
whether they would greet your troops
with flowers or guns. Only a moron
would do that.
So it’s a bit of a shock to me now
that Mr. Matulionis is so proud of United
Way’s implied belated admission (what’s
it been, four years?) that they have been
planning to end the homelessness of
people they didn’t know.
Let me explain what a fi eld anthro-
pologist does. The P-I article isn’t real
clear on this point, so I think it’s worth
spending a few words on it. An anthro-
pologist gets to know people by going
and meeting them and talking to them.
Then, she goes and thinks about what
they said to her, and writes up what that
tells her about them.
So, in other words, you hire an an-
thropologist to get to know people you
don’t have the time or the interest to get
to know. Your anthropologist sums up
her fi ndings, and you work from there.
I feel compelled to make an admission
of my own. Obviously, I did not get to know
Vince Matulionis as well as I should have,
those four or fi ve years ago. Perhaps I was
too interested in ordering lunch. Perhaps I
just didn’t care enough about Vince Matu-
lionis and his planning group people.
And it’s not just Mr. Matulionis. It’s the
whole bunch of them. I’m talking about
all the Ten Year Planning to End Home-
lessness Planners. I’m talking about their
Governing Board. I’m talking about the
Interagency Council.
Who are these suits? Why am I always
fi nding out they know less each day than
they claimed to know the day before?
Is it part of their culture? Is it passed
down from father to son, from mother
to daughter? Or, are there no fathers and
mothers? Are their families structured
some weird way I never heard of, and
everybody is raised by pigs?
What I’m saying is, I need a field
anthropologist to get to know Mr.
Matulionis & Friends, and report back
to me. |
