On the legacy of Elliot Liebow and Carol Stack: Context-driven fieldwork and the need for continuous ethnography

cans in the priority they placed on holding down a job and in their commitment to their children, wives, lovers, and friends. The central dialogue of the book, often implicit, was with the ideas that poverty is transmitted from generation to generation through culture and that the black family was now the effective cause of perpetuating black poverty in the U.S. Though Liebow was trained as an anthropologist, we see in his work the influence of the sociologists Everett Hughes, Howard S. Becker, and Erving Goffman, who had brought the concerns of symbolic interactionism into the air of social science in a very prominent way. The emphasis on roles, “definition of the situation,” presentation of self, acting, concealment, and vulnerability of the self in social life and group life are central in this account. Liebow argued that “the desire to be . . . noticed by the world he lives in is shared by each of the men on the street corner. Whether they articulate this desire . . . or not, one can see them position themselves to catch the attention of their fellows in much the same way as plants bend or stretch to catch the sunlight” (p. 60). Like Goffman in The Presentation of Self, he looked for ways in which friendship is a relationship between people who remain “unrevealed” to one another as they conceal their failures, but also like the Goffman of Stigma and Asylums, he shows us people who must deal with the emotional toll that comes when audience segregation cannot be maintained—when one has been fully exposed as a failure and has lost all confidence in oneself: