Urban Ethnography Reading Group #1

Last week, we met for our biweekly reading group on urban ethnography to discuss some foundational works and their review. 

We read Sidewalk, by Mitchell Duneier (1999), Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City, by Elijah Anderson (1999), No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City, by Katherine Newman (1999), and Loïc Wacquant’s review (2002) on these books. These are seminal ethnographic works on urban poverty in U.S. inner cities. 

While these books explore different specific aspects of urban poverty emerging in each of these fields – informal vending, moral codes, and the dynamics of the working poor, respectively – they all stimulated a discussion on survival strategies of people in poverty. Themes around the role of structural factors in constituting culture and social order emerged in different ways: from the sidewalk as a structuring social order, to the decent and street people categorization, to the “deserving” working poor. 

Furthermore, encouraged by the points made by Wacquant, we reflected on the modes of conducting and writing ethnography: what is a good balance between presenting data and providing analysis? How to integrate theory without losing proximity to the field? One key point we questioned was the use of either the author’s or subjects’ common sense without acknowledging its socially constructed nature, which is really what makes it significant. We concluded that, especially in ethnographies, it is inevitable to deal with common sense, so we should reflect on how we will approach it in our work.  

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Sidewalk. By Mitchell Duneier. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999.

Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. By Elijah Anderson. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. 

No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City. By Katherine Newman. New York: Russell Sage Foundation and Knopf,1999. 

Wacquant, L. (2002). Scrutinizing the street: Poverty, morality, and the pitfalls of urban ethnography. American journal of sociology, 107(6), 1468-1532.