Urban Ethnography Reading Group #5
For our latest session, we read Colin Jerolmack’s The Global Pigeon (2013). At first glance, a study of pigeons might seem a distant from our research on food charities in Palermo, Kyoto, and Rotterdam. Rather than focusing on the birds themselves, our conversation cantered on how a singular object, the pigeon in this book, serves as a lens to reveal the complex social networks of the city.
We started the discussion with how Jerolmack uses the pigeon as a metaphor and a tool to understand society at large. What is particularly useful for our own research is the approach he took: focusing on a specific thing (the pigeon) not just to study the bird, but to study the relationships in which people are embedded. This resonates deeply with our study of food charities. Just as Jerolmack sees the city through the pigeon, we see the broader urban and social structures through the network and field of food charities, which is often a missing piece in existing food charity research.
Next, comparing Jerolmack’s work and our research, we discussed about difference in identifiability of objects between Jerolmack’s work and ours. On the one hand, in Jerolmack’s work, pigeon is an easy object to address because the practices around it (feeding, flying, racing) is visible and concrete. On the other hand, in our Food Charities project, the object is much harder to identify. Involvement in a food charity does not have a clear-cut boundary. It includes non-material stuffs, such as getting subscriptions or vouchers. This led us to a reflection that how do we identify the involvement of our participants when it is not always a physical presence at a food bank?
Lastly, we discussed the differences of multi-sited ethnography, which is the one used in this book, and the comparative ethnography, which is the one we are using in our project. We explored the idea of comparative ethnography if it is a bottom-up or as a top-down framework. While it includes a bottom-up aspects, we can explain our approach by top-down framework. The project looks at the food charities field from Agri-food, Civil Society, and Welfare. This framework helps us categorize what we are seeing in the field.
Next up is Marr, M. D. (2015). Better must come: Exiting homelessness in two global cities. Cornell University Press.
Jerolmack, C. (2019). The global pigeon. University of Chicago Press.
