Downtown Dealings and the Pursuit

The point has come for me to begin research. This period of post B.A., pre graduate school has been rewarding and at times agonizingly boring. Life as a career girl has its pluses and I enjoyed a short lived complacency with my job and the life structure of a nine to five. I found meaning in my work where I could and continued to read and attend lectures in the evenings. This time has past and I have restructured my life to better accommodate my current interests and to enrich my preparation for graduate school. Research has started, with the project summarized below, and I can once again attend some day time lectures, when all the good ones seem to take place, let ideas stream forth and allow myself to pursue them with immediacy and can now dedicate myself to a volunteer position that will allow for some preliminary field work so as to better develop my research goals. I am thoroughly enjoying this process and though I must continue to make an income, I have reached that point where I feel more an anthropology student than worker bee and this has energized me beyond belief. Below, my project at hand and the focus of my intellectual pursuits.

This project is going to be, eventually, an ethnography of street youth, also identified as "street kids", in urban areas, starting in my hometown, Seattle. These aren't really youth, to start off with, but young adults that have only just entered the world of what our culture would call functioning adulthood. This group, ages 18-25 apx, are stuck somewhere between social services that cut them off at 18 and the work a day life someone nearing 30 is expected to have.
This is an especially difficult maturation period to endure during this economic climate, with many college graduates moving back home for lack of finding meaningful work or any work at all. It's a tough pill to swallow when you graduate with a non-professional degree and have to find work as a barista until further notice. For those who didn't get the privilege of a college degree or other vocational training, who perhaps didn't graduate from high school or who simply haven't had much support growing up; their pill is a lot tougher to swallow.

And so urban areas are finding these young adults out on the streets, in the few specialized shelters for their age groups, on street corners selling cigarettes and small bags of marijuana, asleep in transit tunnels or camped out in store front alcoves at night to sleep. They are loud and boisterous in public and have as much personality as any 20 something year old and hold many of the characteristics of those more stable than them at the same age.

After several months of preliminary observations, I have found these youths to be sociable, industrious, creative and capable to live on the streets without an apparent discomposure of spirit. It takes a lot of work to maintain a life on the street or with vulnerable housing situations. It requires skills of survival they learn in the groups they find so much solidarity in. These peer groups are a key structure in their developmental processes and have an immense role in their adaption, or maladaption, to homelessness.

While the city often finds them a public nuisance, just as any loud, congregating group can be, they provide a window into a life I was fortunate enough to avoid. They are exceptionally sociable and so animated that simply observing them can reveal volumes about why they are there, who they are and what they think.
These observations inspired me to look further and start a research project learning about their lives and in particular, their drug abuse habits. Here, I am including alcohol and tobacco as well as illicit and pharmaceutical substances. Cigarettes hold a significant amount of value on the street and play heavily in economic dealings so their role is twofold. Alcohol is interestingly not as publically consumed among this group as among the older generation. Marijuana is heavily used and spoken of openly however harder drug use is much less apparent. Due to this urban landscape, a plethora of drugs are available fairly easily however this group has certain preferences I wish to explore further. Crystal Meth and injected drugs are also used and the abuse of pharmaceuticals, mostly stimulants, has been noted. With the recent shortages of these stimulants, I hope to learn more about the effect it will have on black market dealings and subsequent abuse.
To do this I am going to continue street level observations, initiate closer interactions through an age specific shelter for those 18-25, supplementing with a review of existing literature. I aim to not only note the specifics of their drug use but to identify the causations of influence over the behaviors and attitudes that surround drug use. In particular, I will look to homelessness, Seattle’s unique urban landscape and the existing problems this age group faces in the nation’s economic climate macrolitically and in Seattle’s economic climate microlitically.

This research will take place over the next 12-15 months while I remain in Seattle. Due to the uniqueness of every urban landscape, I plan to conclude this study upon the end of my residency here and use it as support for my master’s thesis proposal.

Homage to the Red Rump

Today an article was re-posted in reference to the February 14th day that it is, Valentine's Day. The article, by Mark Changizi, professor of cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, illustrated a theoretical analysis on the ubiquitous "heart" icon we love to love.

We all know this heart isn't anatomically correct; perhaps it was modeled after the heart but in actuality, an oval with arms would've been just as apt a representation. Changizi's idea is that the heart represents a sexually aroused, in this case primate, rump which has natural ties to amorous feelings and therefore Valentine's Day. The red of course being the blood engorged area, which naturally swells; sending a loud and clear "come and get it" message. See below.

This is a proposed theory, of course, and don't take it too seriously just because he's a professor and has a blog. I feel sometimes anthropologists, perhaps social scientists at large, get a bad rap for writing a little less formally and a little more casually online. It's a great theory and I applaud the social scientist who let's those academic ties loosen and engages openly with society. The rump thing is pretty darn convincing. Changizi's ending point is that the heart symbol has been culturally selected over myriad other symbols of love that no doubt have made their appearance in years past. The selective factor here, and it goes without saying this is not with cognitive purpose, is our adeptness as sensing arousal in a partner. For humans, even though we are the only continually receptive primate on the earth, it is nevertheless important to know when to try a little somethin' and when to back off. The more familiar we are with that, the more sex we will have and the more offspring we will produce, as the theory goes. Many other things in our culture represent physiological arousal or at least preceding or ensuing states, serving the same purpose as the rump heart (e.g. red lipstick).

Bottom line (pun intended), there aren't a lot of explanations for the ambiguous "heart" shape we so love and the red rump thing makes pretty good sense. We are a sexual culture, more so than others and less so than some. It would be an interesting undertaking identifying the cultures where the heart symbol is used on the level ours is and those where they have less meaning and then comparatively analyzing the role sex plays in their lives. This study may not get ample funding but with the global fertility rate slowing as it is (excluding many African countries), more research in cultural sexuality may be deemed important.