What Kind of Combat Sport Is Sociology

Bibliographic Data

ID2214616
AuthorsMitchell Duneier (University of Wisconsin–Madison, corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume107
Issue6
Pages1551-1576
Publication date2002-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Journal of Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-9602 • E-ISSN: 1537-5390
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/342925
OpenAlexW2150700140
LanguageEN
Citations received51
References cited12

Criticism is not merely a good thing; the discipline requires it to advance. Precisely because it is so important, criticism must be held to high schol-arly standards. As I will show, Wacquant’s review of Sidewalk quotes selectively and misleadingly and systematically misrepresents the work as a whole. The review is thoroughly inaccurate and unreliable. Forty years after Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great Amer-ican Cities (1961), a work that represented Greenwich Village sidewalk interaction as the ideal for what makes up a “great ” American city, I went back to the neighborhood and revisited Jacobs’s principles. On the side-walk, I came to know the unhoused vendors, scavengers, and panhandlers. These are people who Hakim Hasan, one of the book’s key subjects, says are “hidden in public space. ” On the streets, I found a world filled with illegality, personal defect, and shame and also a world of mutual support, struggles for respectability, ingenuity, and resilience. A core issue of my agenda was to understand the ways in which “moral ” behavior and “de-cency ” are and are not constructed within settings seemingly unfavorable to such behavior. I also found that the sidewalk was in some ways quite different than it was when Jacobs described it, when “eyes and ears upon the street ” were presumed to make sidewalk life safe and comfortable. In Sidewalk, I enter into a dialogue with her theories of public space under the new conditions of social inequality and cultural difference. My method was participant observation, and I worked as a magazine scavenger and street vendor on and off during more than five years. I developed and systematically employed an extended place method for expanding the boundaries of the traditional neighborhood study by fo-cusing on how institutions of various sorts—especially institutions that 1 I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for reading or discussing

Agency (philosophy) · Ethnic group · Ethnography · Library science · Media studies · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Sociology and Norbert Elias · Sports, Gender, and Society