Anthropological perspective sheds new light on Occupy Wall Street

While many college courses create excitement and valuable information and experience for students, one course has created the opportunity for students to present a research paper at a national conference and to write a book.

Anthropology Professor Linda Watts and a team of six of her students began a project in Anthropology 3500, Ethnographic Methods and Theory, that examines unemployment through many different lenses.

The project has now yielded a research article accepted for presentation at the Society for Applied Anthropology, a prestigious conference for the social and behavioral sciences taking place in Baltimore at the end of March 2012.

After the conference, the group intends to start writing the book, titled "New Hope for American Dreamers: Prolonged Unemployment as a Call in the Dark for Cultural Renewal."

Both of the projects stem from work done during the course, when the group conducted interviews with dozens of unemployed people at the Pikes Peak Work Force Center.

According to Watts, one of the lenses used to explore unemployment included what are called rites of passage – life stages that all individuals in society pass through, such as adolescence, adulthood, marriage and death.

Viewing unemployment in these terms inspired the team to focus their research on themes relating to rites of passage, such as an individual's history of unemployment, the effects on his or her health, possible patterns of substance abuse and the methods by which the individual either escaped unemployment or remained unemployed.

"The interviews included demographic background and open-ended qualitative questions," explained Watts; the results were then loaded into a program that isolates specific responses and the frequency at which they occur, enabling quantitative analysis of the data.

As Watts and her students analyzed the data, they began to see response patterns suggestive of traditional rites of passage, stages such as periods of rest and unrest, crises, revitalization and returns to rest.

UCCS senior John Palka, a student attending the Baltimore conference with Watts, said of the project, "We saw several fascinating things; many respondents were clearly stuck in a liminal stage after a prolonged period of unemployment."

In societal terms, individuals who become unemployed are thrown into a state of crisis, entering what Watts calls a "liminal stage," or an intermediate stage between two different states of being. Responses that indicated a feeling of misplacement or exile from or within a society led to their classification as being in a liminal stage.

During unemployment, "individuals are thrown into a state of despair…What we found was that people lost hope immediately," said Watts, noting that, "after about 12 months of unemployment, people either became more hopeful, or they dropped out completely – they gave up – but some people maintained a middle ground."

While the team was conducting its research, the Occupy Wall Street movement began to form, and the team "wasn't surprised by it. We can fit it into the theory nicely," said Watts, who noted, "Society is experiencing the problem of structural unemployment, job loss that will not be replaced, [and as a result] people are calling for renewal. If we hold onto the old values of self-reliance and individualism, then those locked out of the system will bear the brunt of social stigma."

She noted that some members of society are labeling the unemployed as "lazy" and asking them, "why can't you get a job? So rather than lay that trip on them, [the research team is] looking toward more positive values … [so we can help the unemployed] regain a sense of identity."