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More About DR. SIDNEY M. GREENFIELD

Working abstract for Article:

Why the Love Affair with Work and the Cultural Values that Sustain It
Prevents the Adoption of Policies that Could Avoid Periodic Economic
Downturns.

Sidney M. Greenfield
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

"Capitalism’s most recent crash is contributing to the most devastating
worldwide economic downturn in three-quarters-of-a-century. A primary
factor this time was the crisis in subprime mortgages. Those at the
bottom of the income scale, who at other times would have been unable
to borrow money to purchase homes, were unable to keep up payments on
their loans. It was not that they should not have been permitted to
make loans to buy homes, as most analysts have (implicitly) maintained,
but that they did not have earnings sufficient to keep up their
payments. There certainly was enough money in the system to avoid so
many people loosing their homes and precipitating the collapse. The
basis of the problem was capitalism’s way of distributing wealth. For
several decades the fruits of increased productivity went
disproportionately to those at the upper end of the earnings scale with
the incomes of those at the middle and lower end remaining flat or
declining. A long-term solution to the problem, that would have
prevented the crash, would have been a more equitable system of
distribution. In the short term the entire system could have been saved
if funds had been made available to the many homeowners who lost their
jobs or whose wages were not sufficient to enable them to pay their
mortgages. This paper presents some policy proposals made over the past
50 years that would have made it possible to avoid the crisis and
subsequent crash while making life better for the majority. More
importantly it examines the reasons found in the culture as to why they
were not and still cannot be implemented."

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SIDNEY M. GREENFIELD is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has conducted ethnographic research in the West Indies, New Bedford, Massachusetts and Brazil, and ethnohistorical and historical research in Portugal and the Atlantic Islands on problems ranging from family and kinship, patronage and politics, the history of plantations and plantation slavery and entrepreneurship to Spiritist surgery and healing and syncretized religions in Brazil. He is presently engaged in a study of the participation of Evangelical Protestants in politics in Brazil. Author and/or editor of seven books, producer, director and author of five video documentaries, he has published some 120 articles and reviews in books and professional journals. Among his more recent works are Cirurgias do Além: Pesquisas Antropológicas Sobre Curas Espirituais. (Petrópolis, RJ: Editora Vozes, 1999) -- a book in Portuguese about his studies of Spiritist healing -- Argeu: A Construção de um Santo Popular (São Paulo: Tercera Margim, 2000 [Second Edition University of Ceará Press 2003]) -- a book also in Portuguese about the making of a popular saint co-authored with Antonio Mourão Cavalcante -- Reinventing Religions: Syncretism in Africa and the Americas (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) -- co-edited with André Droogers;  "The Pragmatics of Conversion in the Brazilian Religious MarketPlace," In Dwight B. Heath, ed., Contemporary Culture and Society in Latin America, (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2002); “Can Supernatruals Really Heal? A View of Science that Shows How They Might,” Anthropological Forum, Vol. 13(2): 151-158;  “Treating the Sick with a Morality Play: The Kardecist-Spiritist Disobsession in Brazil,” In Don Handelman and Galina Lindquest, eds, Ritual in it Own Right. (NY: Berghahn Books, 2004, pp. 174-194);  “Trance States and Accessing Implicit Memories: A Psychosocial Genomic Approach to Reconstituting Social Memory During Religious Rituals,” Current Sociology, March 2005, Vol. 53(2): 275-291; and Spirits, Medicine, and Charity: A Brazilian Woman's Cure for Cancer  (Media Resource Department of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1995, 39.36 Min.) a video documentary.  He has recently completed a book manuscript tentatively title: “Spirits with Scalpels: The Culturalbiology of Spirit Healing in Brazil.” E-mail address is: EGreenf222@aol.com