Why do people keep fighting for social causes in the face of consistent
failure? Why do they risk their physical, emotional, and financial
safety on behalf of strangers? How do these groups survive high turnover
and emotional burnout?
To explore these questions, Erika Summers Effler undertook three years
of ethnographic fieldwork with two groups: anti-death penalty activists
STOP and the Catholic Workers, who strive to alleviate poverty. In both
communities, members must contend with problems that range from the
broad to the intimately personal. Adverse political conditions, internal
conflict, and fluctuations in financial resources create a backdrop of
daily frustration--but watching an addict relapse or an inmate's
execution are much more devastating setbacks. Summers Effler finds that
overcoming these obstacles, recovering from failure, and maintaining the
integrity of the group require a constant process of emotional
fine-tuning, and she demonstrates how activists do this through
thoughtful analysis and a lucid rendering of their deeply affecting
stories.