Publication: Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless

• Desjarlais, Robert

LCCN: 97-8656
Series: Contemporary Ethnography (UPenn)

Winner of the Victor Turner Prize of the Society for
Humanistic Anthropology

Desjarlais shows us not anonymous faces of the homeless but
real people.

While it is estimated that 25 percent or more of America's
homeless are mentally ill, their lives are largely unknown
to us. What must life be like for those who, in addition to
living on the street, hear voices, suffer paranoid
delusions, or have trouble thinking clearly or talking to
others.

Shelter Blues is an innovative portrait of people residing
in Boston's Station Street Shelter. It examines the
everyday lives of more than 40 homeless men and women, both
white and African-American, ranging in age from early 20s to
mid-60s. Based on a sixteen-month study, it draws readers
into the personal worlds of these individuals and, by
addressing the intimacies of homelessness, illness, and
abjection, picks up where most scholarship and journalism
stops.

Robert Desjarlais works against the grain of media
representations of homelessness by showing us not anonymous
stereotypes but individuals. He draws on conversations as
well as observations, talking with and listening to shelter
residents to understand how they relate to their
environment, to one another, and to those entrusted with
their care. His book considers their lives in terms of a
complex range of forces and helps us comprehend the
linkages between culture, illness, personhood, and
political agency on the margins of contemporary American
society.

Shelter Blues is unlike anything else ever written about
homelessness. It challenges social scientists and mental
health professionals to rethink their approaches to human
subjectivity and helps us all to better understand one of
the most pressing problems of our time.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [285]-301) and
index.