Ethnography of high-energy physics

Science proceeds through research communities whose participants share important and often distinctive features of thought and method. This is one of the key insights of the “historical turn” in the philosophy of science initiated in the 1970s (link, link), and it underlies much work within the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies. But what more specifically goes into the “denkkollectiv” (Ludwik Fleck), “research programme” (Imre Lakatos), or “disciplinary matrix” (Thomas Kuhn) of a specific scientific field? One way of gaining knowledge about those features of thinking and experimenting in specific research communities is through immersive study by ethnographers and micro-sociologists. Paul Rabinow offered an especially fruitful example of this kind of investigation in Making PCR (link). Rabinow was specifically interested in discovering the mental and material worlds of biotechnology researchers.

This book focuses on the emergence of biotechnology, circa 1980, as a distinctive configuration of scientific, technical, cultural, social, economic, political, and legal elements, each of which had its own separate trajectory over the preceding decades. It examines the “style of life” or form of “life regulation” fashioned by the young scientists who chose to work in this new industry rather than pursue promising careers in the university world…. In sum, it shows how a contingently assembled practice emerged, composed of distinctive subjects, the site in which they worked, and the object they invented. (Making PCR, 2)

And what about the most esoteric of contemporary scientific research, high-energy particle physics (link)? How does this extended network of researchers think and work as this community seeks out further features of fundamental physics? Peter Galison’s Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics is a brilliant, clear, and extensive exposition of the interface between theory and experiment in physics. Galison thinks of contemporary physics as an overlapping set of three kinds of activity: experimentation, instrumentation, and theorizing. In this book he looks at instrumentation and the machines of physical investigation as a realm that requires its own careful study — from a historical-sociological point of view as well as from an epistemic one.

These machines have a past. To walk through the laboratories of the twentieth century is to peruse an expanse of history in which physics has played many parts. Over here, film for atomic physics, X-ray film out of boxes destined for medicine; over there, a converted television camera rewired as part of a spark chamber. In this corner a piece of preparatory apparatus for a hydrogen bomb, in that a cannibalized bit of computer. Around you in the 1950s the structure of mutable, industrial-style laboratories introduced to physics in the wartime scramble to ready nuclear weapons and radar. Shaped by the exigencies of industry and war, but also shaping the practices of both, the machines of physics are part of a wider technological material culture—neither below it, nor above it. (xviii)

And Galison emphasizes that the realm of “the practice of physics” encompasses many forms of activity: institutions, social networks, extended working groups, peer-reviewed journals, and specialized forms of knowledge developed in industrial, military, and corporate spaces.

Even this penciled sketch is but a partial presentation of the multitude of worlds within physics; there were other worlds beyond. Left out are the different university and national groups participating in large experiments, not to speak of the theorists, phenomenologists, administrators, and industrialists; there are computer programmers simulating runs and figuring out how to acquire, store, and sort the data; there are postdocs running shifts. Somehow, out of it all, comes an argument. This picture of science fits badly into the narrowly construed rationality of the algorithmic, and equally badly into the image of an unreasoned struggle by opposing forces to divvy up the territory of knowledge. Physics as a whole is always in a state of incomplete coordination between extraordinarily diverse pieces of its culture: work, machines, evidence, and argument. That these messy pieces come together as much as they do reveals the presence, not of a constricted calculus of rationality, but of an expanded sense of reason. (xxii)

Moreover, Galison suggests that laboratory machines have “meaning”, in a fairly specific sense: they have been designed and adapted by intentional agents with specific explanatory goals in mind.

I will argue that laboratory machines can command our attention if they are understood as dense with meaning, not only laden with their direct functions, but also embodying strategies of demonstration, work relationships in the laboratory, and material and symbolic connections to the outside cultures in which these machines have roots. (2)

This point amounts to a denial of technological determinism — the idea that technologies (machines) have a specific and inherent logic of development. Against this view, Galison puts forward an “agentic” view of the group processes of instrumentation and experimentation. Individuals and teams make informed guesses about what kinds of probes and instruments will illuminate particular problems, and they design instruments to carry out those investigations. And we can also look at this as a “social embeddedness” conception of the physics laboratory: the physicist (theorist, experimenter, instrument designer) brings with him or her assumptions and mental frameworks drawn from the broader society in which they emerge.

Another important insight Galison offers has to do with the “logic of experimentation” itself. In the empiricist tradition there is the idea that experiments are the means through which observation enforces the constraints of evidence on theory. But Galison emphasizes throughout the book that the nature of “experiment” and “experimenter” has changed dramatically over the past two centuries — perhaps most radically in the past fifty years. “Big science” at CERN or the Fermi Laboratory necessarily involves the extended and collaborative work of thousands of experts and technicians; so who is the experimenter there? Rather, it is necessary to interpret and reinterpret the results of the data collected after high-energy collisions, and these data do not speak univocally for themselves. “It is amid these intimate bits of machines, data, and interpretations that the categories of experiment and experimenter are embodied: defined, dismantled, and reassembled” (7).

Galison offers a novel approach to the problem of “scientific incommensurability”. Introduced by Thomas Kuhn as “incommensurable paradigms” guiding related research communities, the idea has proven elusive. Galison approaches the problem from the point of view of small differences in language and vocabulary across closely related laboratory communities; he uses the anthropologist’s ideas of creoles and pidgins to capture the differences in meaning that he identifies (48). He writes:

Because the picture of physics sketched here is one of distinct but coordinated subcultures, the notion of an interlanguage is a useful decentered metaphor. In different forms the same kind of question arises; How should we think about the relation of theorists to theorists, of theorists to experimenters, of physicists to engineers, of chemists to physicists, of image instrument makers to logic instrument makers, and of the myriad of detector subgroups within a hybrid experiment one to the other? To homogenize these various groups artificially is to miss their distinct ways of going about their craft; to represent them as participating in isolated conceptual schemes “translating” back and forth is to shut our eyes to the productive, awkward, local coordination by which communities, machines, and knowledge get built. Consider three aspects of the interlanguage. (49)

Through these “interlanguages”, Galison suggests, the separate subcultures are able to communicate about the terms and procedures of their collaborations. And this suggests a practical response to W.V.O. Quine’s hypothetical worries about the “indeterminacy of translation” that he believes confronts all inter-linguistic encounters. This is an interesting and clearly formulated framework for seeking to understand the micro-level transactions across research communities in a large research project like the activities conducted at CERN or the Fermi Laboratory. Galison writes:

In many different ways this book is a working out of the following observation: pieces of devices, fragments of theories, and bits of language connect disparate groups of practitioners even when these practitioners disagree about their global significance. Experimenters like to call their extractive moves “cannibalizing” a device. (54)

There is a further point to emphasize in Galison’s approach: his consistent avoidance of the idea that “the experimental method” exists as a general and uniform exercise in empirical science. Against this idea, he emphasizes the contingency and capacity for change that historical studies of scientific episodes display — if we are alert to the fallacy of over-generalization. For this reason he explicitly denies that the episodes he considers in this book point to a common model of “experimentation” that might be incorporated into the philosophy of science or general statements about scientific method:

The chapters of this book, like the Medieval and Renaissance histories I have cited, are grounded in the local. But I resist the designation “case study” because I do not believe that there is a set of defining precepts that can be abstracted from these or other studies to “experiment in general” (or, for that matter, “theory in general” or “instruments in general”). (62)

Rather:

My question is not how different scientific communities pass like ships in the night. It is rather how, given the extraordinary diversity of the participants in physics—cryogenic engineers, radio chemists, algebraic topologists, prototype tinkerers, computer wizards, quantum field theorists—they speak to each other at all. And the picture (to the extent one simplifies and flattens it) is one of different areas changing over time with complex border zones that sometimes vanish, coalesce, and even burgeon into quasi-autonomous regions in their own right. (63)

This is history of science at its best: attuned to the contingency and heterogeneity of various scientific research practices, sensitive to the powerful influence of context (political, ideological, economic, military) on the conduct of science, and respectful as well of the quality and rigor of scientific work when it is done well.

Anthropologist Arpita Roy took up some of these questions through an extended period of field work at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) beginning in 2007, during which she interacted intellectually and practically with dozens of physicists as they performed their scientific work. The primary result of Roy’s ethnography is her recent book, Unfinished Nature: Particle Physics at CERN. The book is most interesting when the author reports and discusses specific conversations and topics that came up with a range of specialists during her field work (theorists, experimentalists, instrumentalists, engineers, computer analysts). These conversations offer the reader a basis for reaching his or her own conclusions about the micro-culture of the CERN technical environment. Also useful is her discussion of the explosion that occurred in the accelerator tunnel in September 2008 and that interrupted work for about fourteen months. And the stated goal of the book is valuable as well:

In that vein, it is not my intention to offer an exhaustive description of a science nor a prescription for a better science but to look closely at some of the presuppositions that serve in an interesting way to connect the technical procedures of a laboratory with wider principles of intellectual classification…. By presuppositions, I mean the class of beliefs that is collectively and unconsciously held by participants and of which they are unaware but that informs every aspect of scientific thinking and activity. (5)

The book is less convincing when the author turns to reflections drawn from Marx, post-modern thinkers, and other areas of philosophy. It is unclear, for example, how Marx’s conception of the division of labor is genuinely illuminating when it comes to understanding the workings of a large laboratory complex. There is a division of labor in this institution, of course; but Marx’s delineation seems to shed little light on this fact (any more than Durkheim’s discussion might have done).

Detailed inquiries into the concrete practices and mentalities found in “big science” laboratories and research institutes are important contributions to both the sociology of science and eventually to our understanding of the epistemic standing of physics. Realist philosophers of science are confident in one of the dualities criticized by Arpita Roy — the distinction between the knower and the properties of the physical world, or the distinction between subject and object — but the cognitive and social practices involved in the scientific enterprise are deeply interesting in their own right, and ethnographic studies of the ways in which scientists and engineers go about their work are deeply interesting. Ludwik Fleck attempted such studies in the 1930s, and this tradition of investigation of “science in the making” has proven to be profoundly insightful (link, link). And emphasis on extra-scientific features of “context”, including gender, race, business interests, and national security pressures is plainly relevant to the conduct of big science — the military-industrial complex described by President Eisenhower almost 75 years ago.

Development ethnography and the life of the poor

Indian economists V. K. Ramachandran and Madhura Swaminathan have edited a highly interesting volume, Telling the Truth, Taking Sides: Essays for N. Ram, that will be of interest to anyone concerned with the progress of India in recent years. The book is a set of essays dedicated to the impact and progressive legacy of N Ram, journalist, writer, and important voice of the Left in India, and all the essays are very good.

Ramachandran's own contribution is a piece of what we might call "development ethnography", a pair of interviews (link) with the Tamil Nadu landless worker Gabriel Selvam. This case study is a valuable document for anyone interested in poverty and global justice. Ramachandran conducted interviews with Selvam at both ends of Selvam's working life, in 1977 and 2017, and the experiences that Selvam describes are emblematic of the extreme poor in India and elsewhere throughout that forty-year period. Selvam has lived most of his life in rural Tamil Nadu, near the town of Gokilapuram. And Selvam's life history illustrates many of the deep themes of enduring poverty and inequality in rural India -- debt, bonded labor, inadequate access to land, caste, and extremely limited opportunities for collective action.

Usury involving a sum of only 100 rupees forced Selvam into a form of debt bondage to a landlord: "Selvam attached himself as a farm servant for a remuneration of Rs 65 per month, plus one sheet, a dhoti, a shirt and a thunda (towel-cloth) a year." He worked 13 hours a day for the salary of Rs 65 per month. After four years the salary increased to Rs 100 per month. (At the 2000 exchange rate of Rs 45 / dollar this is about $2.22 / month.)

Debt bondage has been formally illegal in India since 1976. But Selvam's condition is clearly one of debt bondage: "There is no choice, I can't leave my mudalali [employer, landlord] unless I can clear my debt of Rs 300. I would certainly like to leave."

Largescale eviction from farm land is also a part of Selvam's story. Green Revolution seeds and techniques made farm land more profitable, and landlords had an interest in evicting poor farmers from the land they had previously rented at low rents. Poor farmers became landless workers.

The persistent and debilitating disadvantages of caste in rural India are evident in this story as well. Selvam is of a scheduled caste, and it seems apparent that the wage differentials that he experienced throughout his working life had much to do with his dalit status.

Destitution-level housing is also a striking part of the story that Selvam tells. In 1977: "As for his home, Selvam cannot afford to erect a complete hut. When he gets a small amount of money, he adds a row of bricks to the hut. Some months ago, he bought a door-frame. Now, there is a door-frame, fixed with mud into a few rows of country-made brick, with no wall around it or roof above. The single room in the hut is 8 feet by 6 feet." In 2017, the time of the second interview, the hut has been completed: "it is completed and expanded now: a neat, whitewashed structure that has the meagre furniture and appurtenances of a house that is still, after all, the house of a full-time rural manual worker."

In 2017 Selvam's wage has also improved; he now earns Rs 4000 per month for hard agricultural labor -- in today's exchange rate, about $40 / month. As Selvam says, they are better off. And yet it is clear -- "better off" in Selvam's village still means poor access to education and healthcare, limited nutrition, an extremely low income, and a life of toil that few Americans can even imagine.

I hope that you will read the whole interview. It is a more powerful testament to the depth of poverty and inequality in rural India than any set of economic statistics could ever convey.

Here is a World Bank report that makes for excellent parallel reading alongside Ramachandran's case history (Raji Jayaraman and Peter Lanjouw, "The Evolution of Poverty and Inequality in Indian Villages"; link).

Guest post by Paul Draus and Juliette Roddy

Paul Draus and Juliette Roddy have been involved in street-level sociological research in Detroit for over ten years. Roddy is an economist and a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Ojibwe Indians. She studies substance use, recovery and re-entry in the city of Detroit and teaches health policy and health economics in the Health and Human Services Department at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Draus is professor of sociology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. His research resides at the intersection of health and urban ethnography, and is especially focused on the life of marginalized populations in post-industrial cities. His research with Juliette Roddy, Mark Greenwald and other co-authors has integrated ethnographic and economic data to examine the everyday lives of Detroit heroin users, street sex workers, and other residents of forsaken neighborhoods. 

I invited Paul and Julie to provide a short example of their ethnographic work in Detroit for Understanding Society. Thanks, Paul and Julie!

Scraping Black Bottom: Linking Memory, Identity and Community in Detroit
Paul Draus and Juliette Roddy

We have been traipsing up and down Detroit streets for a number of years, in the course of carrying out various research projects and sometimes just out of curiosity. Like any other city, Detroit reveals more on foot than it does to the casual windshield or media-based observer. This being the Motor City, and the automobile being one of the main vehicles of both its early 20th-century prosperity and its late 20th-century deconstruction, it seems particularly appropriate to abandon one’s car in order to explore the remnants of the city left behind.

We use the word remnant rather than ruin deliberately, to counter the impression that Detroit is abandoned, empty or vacant, that it is simply a blank slate waiting to be rebuilt or reimagined by entrepreneurial newcomers or self-styled urban pioneers. While Detroit’s open spaces and ghostly buildings with their empty eyes do invite one’s imagination to wander, our on the ground encounters and interviews reveal a city that not only still lives, but struggles and asserts itself even more vigorously against the tide of withdrawn resources that has sucked its neighborhoods in a tightening spiral of disinvestment, neglect, escape and despair. These individuals express a powerful sense of pride in what Detroit has been, as well as a belief in its future potential, though tempered by that weary skepticism borne of hard experience and past disappointments.

Here we focus on one mobile interview, with a man we call “Mack,” a lifelong resident of the city’s once vibrant and now desolate-seeming East Side. Theoretically we draw upon the ideas of Deleuze, Guattari, and DeLanda, as well as the concepts of Yi-Fu Tuan, who wrote that, “Space and place are basic components of the lived world; we take them for granted. When we think about them, however, they may assume unexpected meanings and raise questions we have not thought to ask” (Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, p. 3).  The form of this interview was a movement across the landscape, involving the three of us, and a digital recorder. As he led us on a walk through this territory that he knew intimately, we invited him to share whatever thoughts and observations came to mind, while occasionally asking questions to clarify what he said or understand what we were seeing.

This movement and these traces call to mind Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a line of flight, illustrated in A Thousand Plateaus with the image of a wolf life, which appears as nothing more than a set of tracks across a field of snow. The line of flight represents a departure from regularity, a kind of disruption of fixed status, like a deer leaping over a fence, which contains possibility but also implies a return to regularity.

The line of flight is closely connected to the concept of the rhizome, which is described by Deleuze and Guattari using spatial terminology, “Unlike the graphic arts, drawing or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entranceways and exits and its own lines of flight" (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1987, p. 21).

We can’t claim to understand all of D-G’s thought, which is somewhat elliptical and enigmatic by design (1,000 plateaus representing non-hierarchical levels of thought, a multiplicity, in direct contrast to traditional concepts of structure as a set of nested layers or arguments building toward a single thesis), but we also can’t help seeing the connection between the Wolf Line and the traces we see in Detroit’s shifting landscape. D-G write:

Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes… Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion and breakout.

In this sense a neighborhood is also a clearly a rhizome, not a unitary, static reality, but a multiplicity of paths, trajectories, histories, structures, and potentials. Consider for example the following two images, one representing the stability of residence on the East Side, the other its transience:

Interviewee: Now, I wanted to take a picture of that. This where the Polacks stay at. 

Interviewer: Is there somebody stayin’ there now?

Interviewee: He been—yeah! Yeah. The Polack. Uh, he owned this building, and he owned this. You know? I mean, he owned this house and this right here.

Interviewer: Do you know him? 

Interviewee: Huh? I’m aware of him.

For Mack, the continued presence of “The Polack” is a reminder of the neighborhood’s persistence.  Even though his actual connection to him is tenuous, it retains an importance. It is something to be recorded with a photograph.

It is harder to take a picture of what has been materially and socially lost. A related photograph below was taken across the street from the house pictured above, but one struggles to place it.  The fragmented sidewalk gives an indication that this is a residential area, and the presence of the invasive species phragmites australis in the foreground provides an indication of a high water table, but aside from the hands of the speaker in the lower right hander corner of the photograph there are few clues as to the social character of this space.  Mack comments on this active absence, which is not a nothingness, a non-thing, but more like a memory, a ghost or a wound.

Interviewee: When you see all the empty fields out here like that, that’s why we—they called it—they called it black bottom, but it ain’t no such thing as a black bottom. Black bottom to us is like a poor neighborhood, because empty fields are empty fields. You know? Nobody—ain’t no stores out here. You have to go a mile away to go to a store, a grocery store. Ain’t no good foods out here. You got little small stores, get some hot dogs or canned foods. Somethin’ like that. Now, I’m only take you— 

Interviewer: So who calls, uh—you said, uh, people call this area black bottom? 

Interviewee: They call the whole black—um, the whole neighborhood black bottom now.

Interviewer: Okay. 

Interviewee: Because it a poor neighborhood.

Through his narration of these adjoining spaces Mack is tracing the neighborhood’s trajectory from a Polish-dominated enclave of homes and businesses to a majority-Black community, now dominated as much by the plant population as the current human residents.  Here we see a home surrounded by green growth, facing a field where the evidence of past density may be difficult to see.  For Mack, the empty lot contains within it the past human occupants as well as the plants now flourishing there.

Another lot contained what might be an unremarkable monument—a single concrete planter.  However, this object’s persistence rendered it worthy of remark.

Interviewee: Now, while we walkin’ and when you see things, now, this right here was Chuck house right here. See that? This right here was—yep. A black man owned this, but his momma had died and things that happened. And I see that his momma sick, got the stone. And you can look. You can look. When we partied here in the ‘80s—and this right here. I don’t know why, and I wasn’t nothin’ but four years old, and this still standin’ here, and I’m 54. Right here?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Interviewee: Still standin'.

Interviewer: Wow. 

Interviewee: Still standin’. Right here. Still—old though, but it still standin’. This right here was in the ‘80s. This was—it’s so old. It’s like, uh. It’s like, boom. It’s still standing. Nobody ain’t take it.

According to Tuan, “A neighborhood is at first a confusion of images to the new resident; it is blurred space, ‘out there.’ Learning to know the neighborhood requires the identification of significant localities, such as street corners and architectural landmarks, within the neighborhood space…” (Tuan 1977, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, p. 17).

This passage reveals the constant tension between permanence and transience, between blurred space and significant localities, or using the D-G terms, between territorialization and de-territorialization. As Mack has noted, this single inconspicuous icon is significant simply because “Boom! It’s still there.” 

Detroit’s fascination as a city lies not in its ruin, or reconstruction, but in the degree of play that exists between these ever-present potentialities, the struggles over identity and interpretation within these shifting fields, and the perhaps fruitless search for tipping points, clues to its ultimate outcome or meaning. Thus Detroit itself may be seen as a line of flight, unsettling because it seems so continually unsettled, a disruption of expectation, like the pheasant taking flight before our meandering feet. 

In that sense, Detroit is not so different from any other city, always becoming, yet constrained by the path lain by its past, distinctive only in degree.

Photo by Tomek Zerek, taken while stomping through Detroit fields with first author

(Can you see the pheasant?)

(For more on the Deleuzian perspective, see Manuel Delanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity.)

Shaping of inner-city African-American experience

It is recognized by ethnographers that place and history mean a great deal in the everyday experience that people have in their neighborhoods — villages, industrial towns, universities. The ways that we perceive the world and the patterns of action and reaction that we bring to it are profoundly shaped by the histories and practices of the communities in which we live. Current-day social reality is a path-dependent consequence of our pasts.

Elijah Anderson provides a striking exploration of this basic insight in Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City, his 1999 ethnographic reflection on inner-city Philadelphia. Anderson wants to understand the content of the "code of the street" -- the values around which young inner-city men and women orient their actions and aspirations. And, in the urban world of the late 1990s in America, a lot of that code circles around violence and aggression. Anderson wants to know how inner-city youth think about violence, and he wants to understand why impoverished urban neighborhoods have become so much more violent than their counterparts were when W.E.B. Dubois studied them early in the twentieth century.

Here I take up more directly the theme of interpersonal violence, particularly between and among inner-city youths. While youth violence has become a problem of national scope, involving young people of various classes and races, in this book I am concerned with why it is that so many inner-city young people are inclined to commit aggression and violence toward one another. (preface)

Here is a strong description of the underculture of violence that Anderson identifies on Germantown Avenue:

The inclination to violence springs from the circumstances of life among the ghetto poor—the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, limited basic public services (police response in emergencies, building maintenance, trash pickup, lighting, and other services that middle-class neighborhoods take for granted), the stigma of race, the fallout from rampant drug use and drug trafficking, and the resulting alienation and absence of hope for the future. (kl 430)

Consistent with the basis ethnographic insight mentioned above, Anderson wants to understand two things: what is the "code of the street"; what are those norms of behavior and masculinity that come together in inner-city Philadelphia (or Detroit, Miami, or Chicago)? And second, what were the historical and social circumstances that shaped the emergence of this set of norms?

Here is Anderson's preliminary answer to the first question:

At the heart of this code is a set of prescriptions and proscriptions, or informal rules, of behavior organized around a desperate search for respect that governs public social relations, especially violence, among so many residents, particularly young men and women. Possession of respect -- and the credible threat of vengeance -- is highly valued for shielding the ordinary person from the interpersonal violence of the street. (kl 74)

The answer to the second question is more complex. A part of Anderson's answer has to do with widespread alienation among urban young people from the legitimacy of basic social institutions, including the criminal justice system. But the more general historical cause that he explores is the history of racial discrimination and impoverishment that American cities have almost always witnessed. Racism and almost insurmountable segregation have created a thoroughly disaffected underclass in American cities.

Anderson's framing of his topic is very similar to the perspective argued above about situated knowledge. Here Anderson highlights the links that exist between social cognition, conceptual frames, and behavior:

How do the people of the setting perceive their situation? What assumptions do they bring to their decision making? What behavioral patterns result from these actions? What are the social implications and consequences of these behaviors? (kl 106)

A particularly powerful part of the book is Anderson's extensive use of individual stories -- decent people, crack addicts, young mothers, working poor, and others. The long story of John Turner, the final chapter in the book, is particularly powerful. These stories serve to document Anderson's key lines of interpretation -- the meaning of the street code, the way the violence of the street is experienced and accommodated, the ways that these men and women think about the world they inhabit. This use of detailed personal stories from field notes means that the reader has at least a degree of independence from Anderson's narrative, since there is always the possibility of interpreting these vignettes differently from Anderson.

Here Anderson quotes an older man at the funeral of a young man from the neighborhood:

I knew the boy well. I always warned him about these drugs, but he couldn’t resist. He knew. I told him I’d come to his funeral. And this is what I’m doing. It is a shame. But you know, it is the system. It is the system. No jobs. No education. And the drugs are all about. You realize what amount of drugs come in here [the neighborhood]. That’s not us. It is them. The white people. They bring the drugs in here. They don’t want us to have nothing. But this is what they give us. All this death and destruction. I know a boy did shoot him, but it was really the system. The system. (kl 2276)

It is striking to compare the ethnography that Anderson constructs with that presented by Al Young in The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances. The topics of violence, the drug trade, and a culture of fundamental disaffection are distinctly not the focus of Young's research or his central findings. In conversation Young takes the view that these themes are over-emphasized in media presentations of urban problems, and often sensationalized. Instead, Young seeks to uncover the thought processes through which the young men he studies think about work and life aspiration. And yet the housing projects of Chicago are not very different from the lower reaches of Germantown Avenue. Are these ethnographers contradictory, or are they simply separate threads in the complex social and personal realities of inner-city American cities?

(Readers will note that there are many points of convergence between Anderson's cultural sociology in this book and the intricate drama of the streets expressed in The Wire. Here is a nice piece by John Skrentny on culture and race that address some of the same issues; link.)