Research Paper on:
Minorities and Dysfunction from 2 Perspectives

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
Love, the Destruction of an Ojibwa Community,1985) both deal with the topic of social dysfunction in their texts. An examination of their work shows the Kelley and Shkilnyk and rather  like two sides of the same coin when it comes to this topic. Kellys principal point is that any culture on the globe will appear to be "dysfunctional," if  sample populations that are studied to any depth from within those cultures happen to be that particular cultures most extreme and damaged members. Rather then locating the problem with the  people, per se, Kelly views dysfunction as a reaction to environmental forces for a certain percentage of inner city populations. Mostly, however, Kelly argues that "dysfunction" lies in the eye  of the beholder. Anastasia Shkilnyk holds similar views regarding the way that the word "dysfunction" is banded about in scholarly literature. In  her book, Shkilnyk draws a devastating picture of the increasing dysfunction within a Native American community, the Ojibwa of Ottawa. However, rather than seeing this dysfunction as being a  function of the people within the community, Shkilnyk shows that the precipitating cause of this downward decline came from the influences of outsiders, in particular the poisoning of the  river that had gained religious significance in the life of the tribe. As this indicates, while Shkilnyk does not put her theme into words in precisely the same manner as  Kelly, she basically says the same thing and makes the same criticism of social science in doing so. This is because she shows that that dysfunction in the  Ojibwa community is not something intrinsic to that society or people, but rather is a result of environmental influences. Kelly (1998) points out that ghetto ethnographers tend to formulate theories