ABSTRACT
Ninth Ward residents and other stakeholders have developed effective strategies for action by complementing a pronounced sense of place with the strongly held belief that a divine plan is directing their efforts. By investigating the process by which pre-articulate mental models get transformed into cultural tools and are combined with other complementary social resources, we understand better how people are able to carve out a sphere of effective agency in an otherwise highly constrained social structure. As will be argued, this iterative play between structure and agency represents an important piece of the social learning process, as it has the potential to link individual action with broader patterns of social change. As with the other community case studies examined previously, I am not suggesting that only collective narratives matter in the recovery process. The lack of material wealth in the Ninth Ward clearly is a factor in how, when, and if people are able to return. Further, political economy issues which will be examined in Chapters 7 and 8 have tended to undermine the recovery process in New Orleans generally, and the Ninth Ward in particular. But this is exactly the point-if we can understand how it is that people have deployed socially embedded resources in the absence of abundant material resources and in the face of such inhospitable circumstances, we understand better how effective agency and wider patterns of social learning unfold in environments of extreme constraint. Below I will discuss the scholarly literatures in which such an investigation is best situated: the literatures examining the tension between the constraints imposed by social structure (such as poverty and race) and cultural patterns that define a limited range of potential choice, and the possibility for effective agency to emerge in contexts defined by such constraints. In Section 3, I address this question in the context of people who have returned to their Ninth Ward community.
