House for the Homeless

In “Houses for the Homeless,” I think that Ivana has a much more objective position towards the group she is studying than Cintron does in his chapter from “Angels’ Town.”  She even points out when she is not being objective enough with statements such as, “I allowed myself to base my opinions on what I heard from other people, without ever trying to hear the stories of the homeless themselves…But I felt ashamed.”  Cintron was extremely subjective in his portrayal of Angels’ Town; however, he did not preface his subjectivity.  Also, I prefer Ivana’s placement of her self-descriptions to Cintron’s.  Interweaving self-descriptions where they apply in the text seems a more appropriate method than putting the entire description at the beginning where the reader would need to flip between that and the body of the text.  The only positioning aspect of Cintron’s paper that I preferred was his textual positioning.  I found the language of his paper much more sophisticated and interesting that that of Ivana’s article.

Question:  Does Ivana’s recognition of her subjectivity make her ethnography more objective?