With No Direction Home Analysis

With No Direction Home: Homeless Youth on the Road and in the Streets by anthropologist Marni Finkelstein, is an ethnography that studies 50 “street kids” between the ages of 15 and 20, living on the streets of East Village, New York, in Tompkins Square Park, during two consecutive summers. Finkelstein chooses to interview homeless kids on their own territory; the streets. To be able to see what they do in their everyday life, see the world as the way they see it, what they have experienced and their life choices in terms of survival, violence, drugs and alcohol. Finkelstein studied kids between the age of 15 and 20 who lives on the street of East Village mainly in Tomkins Square Park, and her being an anthropologist who was conducting a …show more content…
However amongst the “street kids”, their definition of family is “someone who going to pick you up, call the police when you overdose, someone who going to be there for” (Jimmy in Finkelstein, 2005, p. 44) For street kids it is not blood that makes up a family, it is the people the who lift up when you are down, you help during your worst hours, it is those who will support you no matter what, who will have your back, who will protect you. For some their “street family” holds more meaning than the family they left. (Finkelstein, 2005, p. 44). This ethnography shows that family is not only blood or marriage, but your support system, it is those you would trust your life with. For kids to survive on the street, they need to find ways to make money, to eat, they need a place to sleep and “street kids” have many creative ways for finding all those things. Their main source of money comes from panhandling or “spanging” is often not their favorite way to make money but it is the most common and easiest way to make money. Another way for “street kids” to make money is by doing jobs such as a house painter, picking blueberries, construction work. The kids often feel much better when they work for their money then panhandling for it, but due to lack of identification and not staying in one location long enough they cannot obtain a permanent and lawful employment, so when they get a …show more content…
For example Pegasus’ she committed suicide and her mom got mad at her because she lost sleep or Tory who father said he was going to treat her like Hitler treated the Jews. Or Andy whose father chocked him till he blacked out. (Finkelstein, 2005, Chapter 3). This ethnography really makes you think, that we should not take things for granted. Another reason why I enjoyed this ethnography is that get to see how a “street kid” lives, you see the world from their point of view, it’s not facts but true stories, someone’s actual life, which is what Finkelstein wanted to show in this ethnography. The one thing I did not enjoy about this ethnography, is that you could not get a clear picture of each kid since it was separated in chapters, it was difficult to understand who the kids were, why that one kid was on the street. A couple things shocked me while reading this ethnography, first how cruel a parent can be to their child, how disgusting some people can be towards street kids, all those kids that been raped of some sort, that out of the 50 kids studied in this ethnography only one had not done any drugs. I do think that the data is valid, because must of this kids who partake in the study what’s to tell the story could they have lied or not admitted to everything yes for sure, so some areas that are more sensitive like being raped,