Anthropologists!

I'll admit it, sometimes here at Adventures 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 first 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 picture accompanying the story shows her standing in a Seattle alley "that is commonly populated by drunken homeless people" with a proud Vince Matulionis standing well behind her, clearly thrilled to have her there and ready to anthropologize away.

Vince Matulionis directs the United Way of King County's Ending Homelessness group. I met Mr. Matulionis a few years ago when the King County Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness was just getting started. He talked about the Ten Year Plan, such as it was, and the need to deal with chronic homelessness first, 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 field anthropologist 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 anthropologist 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 anthropologist to get to know people you don't have the time or the interest to get to know. Your anthropologist sums up her findings, 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 five years ago. Perhaps I was too interested in ordering lunch. Perhaps I just didn't care enough about Vince Matulionis 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 Homelessness Planners. I'm talking about their Governing Board. I'm talking about the Interagency Council.

Who are these suits? Why am I always finding 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.