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Based on 30 months of collaborative fieldwork in a poor neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this paper scrutinises the multiple uses of violence among residents and the concatenations between private and public forms of physical aggression. Much of the violence reported here resembles that which has been dissected by students of street violence in the United States – that is, it is the product of interpersonal retaliation and remains encapsulated in dyadic exchanges. However, by casting a wider net to include other forms of aggression (not only criminal but also sexual, domestic and intimate) that take place inside and outside the home, and that intensely shape the course of poor people's daily lives, the paper argues that diverse forms of violence among the urban poor (a) serve more than just retaliatory purposes, and (b) link with one another beyond dyadic relationships.

Since its inception in March 2000, the South African National Lottery has been treated as both a developmental boon and a dangerously exploitative new consumer product. In both discourses the poor feature prominently: as recipients of Lotto largesse and as its most frequent victims. Both academics and the National Responsible Gambling Programme have traced the poor's participation in the Lottery to their financial illiteracy and to their extraordinary millennial hopes. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town's townships in 2008–10, this article puts paid to such interpretations by looking at the economic realities and lottery participation of ‘the poor’. I contend that poor people in these areas have adapted enormously flexible ways of dealing with the multiple contingencies that mark their lives. This flexibility often translates into very modest investments in the Lottery, both financially and in terms of hope. As such, playing the Lottery is just one of a range of ways in which people ‘make a plan’ and ‘tata ma chance’ (take a chance).

This paper reflects on a decade and a half of ethnographic research on five different topics: patronage politics, the intricate relationship between clientelism and collective action, the role of clandestine connections in politics, urban marginality and environmental suffering, and poor people's waiting as a way of experiencing political domination. The paper examines the contributions that political ethnography can make to a better understanding of these themes and highlights areas for further empirical and theoretical work.

King and Tomkins (2002) in their study of the ‘economy of makeshifts’1 of the poor in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries identify a network of different ‘sources and benefits’ from which ‘poor households cobbled together incomes’.2 Poor people, they argue, used complementary resources which included wages, self-help and family support, as well as charity and parish benefits and research has not yet adequately explored the strategies by which these resources were combined. More needs to be known, they argue, about the effects on these strategies of a variety of factors, which include different gender roles, and more use needs to be made of a wide variety of sources whose ‘full potential has yet to be explored’,3 such as parish minutes, begging letters, wage accounts, and the records of pawnbrokers. The paper examines the role played in the makeshift economy by workingclass women’s use of the savings banks that were founded in Britain as resources for the poor at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It begins with a brief survey of the history of savings banks and of their relationship with working-class and women savers, and an overview of previous studies of UK savings banks, before outlining the results of surveys of two Yorkshire banks: the Sheffield and Hallamshire Savings bank and the Huddersfield Penny Savings Bank.

Why has the American political landscape grown more partisan since the 1970s? This article provides a novel account of the determinants of partisanship. The author argues that partisanship is not only shaped by the traditionally suggested socio-economic factors, but also by the uncertainty of future income (risk exposure): rich individuals facing a high degree of risk exposure (or poor people facing low risk exposure) are ‘cross-pressured’; while their income suggests that they should identify with the Republicans, their income prospects make them sympathize with the Democrats. These two traits have overlapped increasingly since the 1970s. Those with lower incomes tend to be also those with higher risk exposure (risk inequality increased). This has led to a sorting of the American electorate: more citizens have become ‘natural’ partisans.

On July 17, 1539, the evangelical preachers in the free imperial city Augsburg petitioned the town council to thoroughly evangelize the surrounding countryside. The clerics bemoaned the treatment of “the poor peasantry, which has been lamentably misled and left to flounder without the word of God. The peasants are very confused, for they recognize papal teachings as deceptive yet are robbed of the Gospel's healthy teaching.” It was unnatural that “so many subjects in the countryside are separated, divided, and alienated from their divinely established magistracy in matters of faith.” To remedy the situation, the pastors exhorted Augsburg's councilors to provide the villagers “with fatherly care” through “the preaching of the Gospel.” They followed this injunction with a warning. If it took no action, “then truly the honorable council will have to answer before God, since the council collects tithes and taxes (zins und gult) from the poor people as its subjects, but it does not supply them with the food of souls.”

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

Sany reviews, citations, and tests of hypotheses using varied methods testify to the status of Poor People's Movements as an enduring classic. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's analysis has received support from serious empirical tests, but critics often do not appreciate the complexity of the model. Reviewing empirical tests-and retrieving a more elaborate model from the text-highlights the success of PPMin explaining why movements succeed, when they emerge, and why they decline.

This article uses court records, overseers' accounts, pauper examinations and other records from several counties, including Huntingdonshire and Staffordshire, to look at the experiences of poor relief in early modern England. It shows the varied circumstances under which the poor ‘encountered’ the poor law in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, highlighting the often contradictory attitudes that poor people encountered. More than this, it argues that there were many sorts of ‘poor’ people with very different capacities to negotiate about relief and to help themselves and each other. These features compounded enduring regional differences in the nature and extent of relief to generate a complex patchwork of experiences for the poor in early modern England.

In 1995, over 100 countries signed up to this statement in the Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action at the UN World Summit for Social Development. The second section of this article reflects on an initiative in the UK, which aims to make a reality of the Copenhagen commitment around the demand for the involvement of people in poverty in decision making that affects their lives. The first, longer, section makes a normative theoretical case for such action.

Although research on survival strategies is still at a relatively early stage, there are clearly some areas where there is considerable difference in emphasis placed by historians on the relative importance of particular “expedients” deployed by the poorin extremisThere is, for example, uncertainty regarding the amount of support given by neighbours as opposed to relatives. There is some historical contention, too, over the importance to the elderly of care by their children, as opposed to alternative sources of maintenance such as earnings, charity and especially the formal institutions of poor relief. After all, in the early modern period the principle source for a study of the survival strategies of poor people is always likely to be the records of poor relief or charitable agencies and institutions. The obvious danger here is that historians of poor relief consistently overestimate the importance of such relief to the poor. Both Richard Wall and Pat Thane, using evidence from nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, for example, have demonstrated that the elderly received far more support from relatives than has been realized. Professor Thane has argued that this situation is unlikely t o have been new. Other historians, however, are much more sceptical over the value of intergenerational flows of wealth from children to elderly parents.

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.

In Juchitán, Mexico, a poor people's movement has challenged the local and national authorities of the Mexican government, withstood violent repression and military occupation, and succeeded in winning municipal elections and becoming a permanent leftist force in regional politics. This movement, the Coalition of Workers, Peasants, and Students of the Isthmus (COCEI), is one of the strongest and most militant grassroots movements in Mexico, in large part because Zapotec Indians in Juchitán transformed their courtyards and fiestas into fora for intense political discussion, gathered in the streets in massive demonstrations, and, in the course of the past two decades, redefined the activites, meanings and alliancesof therie culture.

Van de Vliert's findings may be explained by the psychology of threat and bargaining. Poor people facing extreme threats must cope by surrendering individual freedom in service of shared group needs. Wealthier people are more able to flee from threats and/or resist authoritarianism, so their leaders must concede greater freedom. Incorporating these factors (plus inequality) can sharpen researchers' predictions.

At a Democratic Leadership Council meeting in the summer of 2002, centrist leaders of the Democratic Party took Al Gore to task for his use of populist rhetoric during the 2000 presidential campaign. Ed Rendell, the current governor of Pennsylvania and the former Democratic National Committee Chairman, bemoaned: “We wish Al had refined the message and not used the ‘poor people versus the rich’.” Striking a similar note, Joseph Lieberman charged that Gore's populist language made it difficult for the Democratic ticket to gain the support of middle-class, independent voters who did not see America as “us versus them,” and that these verbal attacks were to blame for Gore's failure to win the popular vote by a more convincing margin. The apparent backlash against Gore's use of populism is the latest manifestation of a transformation that has characterized presidential rhetoric over the past several decades. Put simply, the language of populism, which in the nineteenth century constituted one of the most formidable rhetorical weapons in the arsenal of Democratic presidents, has faded and been displaced by a more consensual language. This trend contrasts with the striking, though limited, embrace of populism by such Republicans as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

John L. Jackson, Jr., Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001, 285 pages, ISBN 0-226-38998-7, $30.00.Omar M. McRoberts, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Neighborhood. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003, 178 pages, ISBN 0-226-56216-6, $25.00.Katherine S. Newman, A Different Shade of Gray: Midlife and Beyond in the Inner City. New York: The New Press, 2003, 306 pages, ISBN 1-56584-615-X, $26.95.

In several NT passages an audience is urged to be ready for the parousia of Christ, which will come upon them ‘like a thief in the night’. This image plays upon a common stock of cultural lore regarding the nocturnal activities of house burglars. A review of the evidence suggests that poor people and women had the most to fear from burglars. For them, the idea of Jesus coming ‘like a thief in the night’ might have induced feelings of fear rather than anticipation. In the case of women, the image may have functioned as a means of social control.

Hospitality was an important feature of all religious orders and for this purpose there was generally provided accommodation for distinguished visitors, ordinary travellers, and poor people, in all the larger houses. The distinguished guest was the direct responsibility of the superior, and in all the greater Benedictine monasteries he was provided with an independent house for his own lodging and for the entertainment of such guests.