Abstract
“Residential is like a black box,” a therapist tells me. He uses the informal “residential” to indicate residential treatment for mentally ill youth. “You have all of these services and interventions but you never know which one is working. And each kid is different. You just hope something sticks.” We are walking across Havenwood’s large college-like campus, from one clinical meeting to another. Havenwood is a residential treatment center, a present-day asylum, located near a major midwestern city in the United States.1
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Notes
The framework comes from Wilhem Cauer’s circuit theory. However, to refer to something as a “black box” is common in other fields as well. Jay Friedenberg and Gordon Silverman also use the term “black box” to identify how behaviorists viewed the mind—something too complex to understand the internal workings of—in their text Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Study of Mind (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006) 85.
Havenwood identifies the youth that live there as “troubled” and the goal of the institution is in making them “productive citizens.” The concept of “troubled youth” is pervasive in the field of residential treatment as is the framework of “at risk” youth. See, for example, Larry Brendtro and Mary Shahbazian Troubled Children & Youth: Turning Problems into Opportunities (Champaign, IL: Research Press, 2004), Larry K. Brendtro, Martin Brokenleg, and Steve Van Bocken’s Reclaiming Youth at Risk: Our Hope for the Future, revised edition (Bloomington, ID: National Education Service, 2002), and Nicholas J. Long, Mary M. Wood, Frank A. Fecser’s (2001) Life Space Crisis Intervention: Talking with Students in Conflict, second edition (Austin, TX: Pro-Ed, 2001), Kenneth Cmiel’s A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Bethany Lee, Bright, Svobda, Fakunmoju, and Barth “Outcomes of Group Care for Youth: A Review of Comparative Studies,” Research on Social Work Practice 21 no.2 (2011):177–189, and Bethany Lee and Curtis McMillan’s “Measuring Quality in Residential Treatment for Children and Youth,” Residential Treatment for Children and Youth 24 no.1/2 (2007): 1–17, Richard Barth’s Institutions vs. Foster Homes: The Empirical Base for the Second Century of Debate (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, School of Social Work, Jordan Institute for Families, 2002), and Magellan Health Services Children’s Services Task force 2010 report on residential versus community based treatment.
I use the framework of abjection based on Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
I based this assumption on Geertz’s definition of experience-near ethnography, which is when the ethnographer tries to put oneself in the other’s skin (1984:125). Other anthropologists have conducted similar kinds of research with psychiatric patients, specifically Sue Estroff in Making it Crazy: An Ethnography of Psychiatric Clients in an American Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
Catherine Lutz’s Unnatural Emotion: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) provides the grounds for emotion as something that anthropology can investigate, as human emotions are not universal or natural, but rather contextual and differ cross-culturally. See also Robert Levy’s “Introduction: Self and Emotion” Ethos 11 no. 3 (1983): 128–134, and “Emotion, Knowing, and Culture” in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, Richard A. Shweder and Robert LeVine, editors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 214–237 and Michelle Rosaldo’s (1984) Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, Richard A. Shweder and Robert LeVine, editors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 137–157.
See for example, Anthony Gidden’s The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Oxford: Polity Press, 1992), Jennifer Hirsch and Holly Wardlow’s Modern Loves: The Anthropology of Romantic Courtship and Companionate Marriage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), William Jankowiak’s edited volume Intimacies: Love and Sex across Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), and Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), Perveez Mody’s The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi (Delhi: Routledge, 2008), Elizabeth Povinelli’s The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), and Linda Rebhun’s The Heart is Unknown Country: Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
See for example, Zoë Wool and Seth Messinger’s “Labors of Love: The Transformation of Care in the Non-Medical Attendant Program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 26 no. 1 (2012): 26–18 and Catherine E. Bolten’s I Did It to Save My Life: Love and Survival in Sierra Leone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
I am indebted to scholars of and work on subjectivity and subject formation in anthropology. In particular, see João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman’s Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), Tanya Luhrmann’s “Subjectivity,” Anthropological Theory 6 no. 3 (2006): 345–361, Nick Mansfield’s Subjectivity: Theories of the Self From Freud to Haraway (New York: New York University Press, 2000), and Sherry Ortner’s (2005) “Subjectivity and Cultural Critique,” Anthropological Theory 5 no. 1 (2005): 31–52. For a special focus on race and subjectivity I am indebted to Stuart Hall’s (1997) “Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities,” in The House that Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, Wahneema Lubiano, editor (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997) 289–300, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 no. 2 (1986): 5–27, and “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structure in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980) and John L. Jackson Jr.’s Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
I use both terms African American and Black to talk about the men and women in the book. I use African American to index a respect for the historical and contemporary significance that race has in the United States, especially for African American individuals. However, I also use the term Black. I use this term because only one person, Steve, ever used the term “African American” during my research tenure, and he only used it a handful of times. Therefore, I use both terms almost interchangeably. I am aware of ways that race shapes research and knowledge (Twine and Warren 2000) and interracial communication practices (Ray 2009; Spears 2007). I am familiar with the emergence of African American as a term during the shift in American social life to ethnicize rather than racialize difference (Hacker 1992; Omi and Winant 1994). I often thought about these ways and practices because Steve only used the term African American when he was speaking to me. When he did so he was teased by some of the youth for “talking white.” As we became closer, Steve stopped using “African American” altogether. When most people at Havenwood talked about race they talked about white and Black. I understood the use of these terms as an important way that the men understood, experienced, and were communicating to me things about race. I want to respect these experiences, understandings, and ways of communicating here by using the terms most common in my field site. As a critical race scholar adamant about pushing past color-blind ideology, I have come to use African American, white, Black, and European American. I do this in an effort to be more inclusive of the various ways to talk about race and to facilitate more open and honest discussions about race (Duncan 2002; Jackson 2008; France Widdance Twine, “Racial Ideologies and Racial Methodologies.” In Racing Research, Researching Race: Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies, ed. France Winddance Twine and Jonathan Warren, 1–34. New York: New York University Press, 2000; Twine, France Winddance, and Jonathan W. Warren, eds. Racing research, researching race. New York: NYU Press, 2000).
See also Murray Forman’s “General Introduction” in That’s The Joint!: The Hip Hop Studies Reader, second edition (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
For a detailed discussion of why she locates hip hop in a distinctly Black American tradition in contrast to Caribbean and Latin traditions see the chapter “Hip Hop’s Mama” in Perry’s Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
“Do you” as a concept of living authentically does not originate in hip hop. I appreciate my reviewer’s comments on this point. “Do you” can be found in Isaac Hayes song titles in the early 1970s, “Do Your Thing” and the framework emerges in literature from the 1930 and 1940s as illustrated in Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965/2012). Even today, neosoul artist India. Arie’s titled a song off her 2013 album Songversation “Just Do You.” In other words, “do you” did not originate, nor is it solely located, in hip hop. It, like hip hop, is a product of a long African American cultural and political history. Nonetheless, for the young men of Havenwood “do you” has salience as a hip hop phrase.
There are therapeutic programs however, which do explicitly and formally integrate rap into therapy, see for example, Susan Hadley and George Yancy’s (2012) edited volume Therapeutic Uses of Rap and Hip-Hop (New York: Routledge).
See for example, John Jackson’s Racial Paranoia and Amy C. Steinbugler’s Beyond Loving: Intimate Racework in Lesbian, Gay, and Straight Interracial Relationships (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
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© 2015 Katie Rose Hejtmanek
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Hejtmanek, K.R. (2015). Introduction. In: Friendship, Love, and Hip Hop. Culture, Mind and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137544735_1
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