Welcome to my revamped website which remains under construction!  I am a sociologist/anthropologist who has been studying race, class, and gender in the American southwest and along the Mexican border since 1976.  My newest book is Hungry Oklahoma: Confronting Poverty and Food Insecurity.  It is available in mid-March @oupress.com. 

My co-researcher, Jayme Tanner, and I will be presenting an overview of this new research at the Annual Meetings of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Albuquerque, March 19^th.  

After the Applied Anthro meetings I will be returning to Oklahoma to visit with all those interested in the various topics having to do with food insecurity in my home state.  I am available at this time to discuss with all those interested the public policy implications of my study.  This includes an agenda to address the wide variety of issues raised. 

In May I will also be Oklahoma to discuss my research findings. When I have the exact dates, I will post them.

In several months I also will begin blogging about some of the most important new data in Oklahoma having to do with hunger, poverty, and children.  I welcome all feedback and comments about my blog.  My email is marilr@ecu.edu. 

This new website soon will also include my other research I have published about the American southwest and Mexican border including Patrolling Chaos: The U.S. Border Patrol in Deep South Texas and The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.-Mexico Border.  This research remains the only ethnography to date about U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. 

Hungry Oklahoma: Confronting Poverty and Food Insecurity

In Oklahoma, one out of every six residents is poor. One in five children lives in poverty and faces food insecurity. In Hungry Oklahoma, native son and sociologist Robert Lee Maril follows in the tradition of the national bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Evicted to illuminate the lived experience of poverty and food insecurity in communities across the state.

Maril’s account is immediately personal. He begins with “guests,” as shoppers are called by volunteers, waiting in line in the sweltering heat one summer for “Thy Will Be Done,” a food pantry, to open. Unable to afford air conditioning, some guests don’t buy foods that would spoil on the counter. One woman, Norma, carefully places only canned vegetables in her cart. When she returns to her twenty-year-old pickup, in the truck bed are lawn chairs, blankets, and pans—everything she owns. “The landlord told us this morning we was homeless,” Norma says. “I’m not thinking straight.”

Drawing on interviews and participant-observation data from his volunteer work at a food pantry, as well as census and sociological data, Maril documents in rich ethnographic detail the status of poverty and low-wage workers in the state today and within historical context. He explores how institutions—such as faith-based organizations, government, and food pantries—structure and shape experiences of poverty. While Maril celebrates the nonprofit and faith-based efforts that make a difference, this book also is critical of conditions and stereotypes that have entrenched poverty in the state.

Hungry Oklahoma ultimately suggests that persistent and pervasive poverty can be eliminated. Its moving accounts of real Oklahomans and their experiences make it a clarion call for not only those interested in policy issues but all Oklahomans who want a better today and tomorrow for those who call the state home.