Qual Sociol (2008) 31:199–202 DOI 10.1007/s11133-008-9095-z SYMPOSIUM ON SUDHIR VENKATESH’S OFF THE BOOKS

Reply to Critics Sudhir Venkatesh

Published online: 19 April 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008

Traditionally, ethnographic books signal closure. The fieldwork has ended and authors have most likely discovered new social scientific questions and field sites. For me, Off the Books is as much a beginning as it is resolution. For this reason, the two thoughtful criticisms of Professors Zelizer and Kornblum are even more valuable—i.e., in addition to raising significant questions and concerns about the book itself, they have enabled me to consider future lines of inquiry. Zelizer and Kornblum’s comments highlight the twin challenges of ethnographic analysis: namely, developing an analytic framework suitable for the object of study and identifying a narrative structure through which findings, discoveries, and arguments may be presented. It is important to link representation with analysis. Indeed, scholarly understanding of inner city dynamics has been limited in no small part because of the extant, largely impoverished modes of social scientific narratives that are in play. Most notably, since the mid 1980s it has become nearly impossible to discuss the urban poor outside the lens of social problems and behavioral pathologies. When was the last time we looked to the ghetto to learn about deliberative democracy—or other practices that one might self-evidently link to “mainstream” society? To cite an example closer to the subject matter of Off the Books, economic sociologists, as Zelizer notes, are more likely to see the poor as living in the sphere of “disorganized sentimentality” rather than “organized rationality”—the latter which is usually reserved for whites in the corporate sector. My book followed the pioneering ethnographies of Mitchell Duneier (Sidewalk) and Philippe Bourgois (In Search of Respect) in its attempt to correct this view. If the weight of scholarly attention has been placed on rooting out problems and deficits among the urban poor, then it is not surprising that the accompanying narratives have been wed to eager recitations of remedy, rectification, and solution. In other words: by the need to frame analysis in the rubric of “policy.” The cloak of technocratic pragmatism covers— and, ultimately over-determines—the presentation of evidence and findings on the ghetto. There has been little space for other modes of writing. S. Venkatesh (*) Dept. of Sociology, Columbia University, 413 Fayerweather Hall, 1180 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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The unfortunate consequence is that all narratives on the urban poor not only end up looking like think-tank briefings, but, more importantly, the narrative frames cloud judgment and stultify the capacity to look creatively into the worlds being studied. Perhaps the greatest evidence of this lies in the growing similarity of ethnographic and quantitative studies of the urban poor: both now deal with large samples, both build primarily on interviews (as opposed to studies of practice or un-structured conversation) and, both feel the need to proffer policy recommendations—as if this is the only way to be relevant or responsible as a researcher. The beginning of Zelizer’s comment points to of the limitations of a problems-oriented approach. Those who live and labor in environments shaped by entrenched poverty do not necessarily view themselves as problems or pathologies in need of remedy—indeed, who does? Consider Zelizer’s description of Manuel—the “cartonero, literally a cardboard gatherer,” who appears intent on preserving dignity and building on his aspirations and dreams. He is hardly asking for pity, despite living amidst hardship and more importantly, his life cannot be neatly summed up by his structural position with respect to the mainstream labor market. Off the Books was my attempt at providing an analytic framework to re-think and re-present the “criminal” or law-breaking side of American poverty. My premise was that the underground economy—like any system of trade—is a regulated structure of exchange. Social scientists who study underground economies in advanced industrialized societies tend to focus primarily on exchange—investment, tax evasion, wages, labor force relations—while ignoring the normative and juridical structures in place. By contrast, I hoped to uncover the structure of ‘law’ that effectively provides an architecture for underground trading. Each chapter focused on the structural foundations that regulated particular kinds of shady hustles. And, so, by using the shady economic sphere to link material culture with correlate forms of cognition—values, attitudes, aspirations, etc., my aim was to find an alternative means to discuss criminality—namely, as both a material and legal practice, not just survival. But, this meant working outside current ethnographic conventions. And here, as Kornblum perceptively observes, the trouble began. Off the Books, Kornblum concludes sharply, is neither a complete “scholarly contribution,” nor is it a well-composed trade book. Where character development begins, an analytic thrust interrupts; where analysis begs certain questions, I become impotent by resorting to concrete practices for answers. Guilty as charged…sort of. The writing is certainly schizophrenic. Some of the repetition and inadequate theorizing, as Kornblum rightly suggests, could have been avoided. But the narrative architecture in the book emerged from the need to develop abstractions imminently, as Marx counseled— namely through the muck and beauty of lived practice. And, here the frenetic narrative mirrors the structural contradiction in place among those living and laboring underground. To elaborate, the subjects in my study experience an economic identity in both statesanctioned and underground economic spheres. These are not reconcilable because the regulatory apparatus that sustains them are two-fold and separate (though interrelated): one emerges from the government, the other from the historically constituted world of the black ghetto in which an indigenous sphere of justice arose to shape expectations, possibilities of investment, codes of conduct, and orientations to a future. It is difficult to isolate subjects’ experiences to one or another world, which is exactly what conventional academic theorizing—resting as it does on simplistic moral dichotomies “law abiding” v. “criminal” and “decent” v. “street”—asks us to do. Individuals simultaneously experience a dual/ double identity, rooted as they are in twin political–economic spheres.

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My sense is that the writing mostly disturbed Kornblum because he wishes to read about a world he recognizes—failing to understand the theoretical distinction above, things seem out of place. For example, he writes that “Census data shows that there are indeed thousands of people at work at paying jobs.” This leads him to criticize me for not taking into account the formal “cash” economy, and for not providing a “systematic labor market analysis.” But, what would “systematic” mean in this social context? What labor market is he alluding to? Kornblum writes as if we all share his bourgeois notions. First, we cannot conceptualize “cash” from the point of view of mainstream, but instead we must understand its location in the underground economy as one of several forms of currency. These forms of currency are associated with particular social relationships—that is, specific circuits of resource exchange, indebtedness, and codes of conduct regarding proper behavior whilst trading. A “systematic labor market analysis” of the underground would have to pay attention to all of these distinctive realms where currency and correlate forms of regulation manifest— none of which can be circumscribed by the census data, analysis of existing businesses, and much of the other available data which offers a one-sided bourgeois view. In other words, we cannot simply privilege the “cash economy” self evidently—it may be largest economy, but this doesn’t make it the most significant. After having read this book, I wonder if he would critique studies of mainstream labor markets for their failure to theorize non-cash based economies and indigenous form of regulation—would they be labeled un-systematic? Zelizer criticism’s that I could have turned to other analytic concepts in place helps us to situate Kornblum’s displeasure in a more productive light. Her notion of “circuits” would certainly have moved by book into more productive analytic waters by pointing to the fluidity of material flows and the malleability of social relations. From this premise, the ways in which I fail to discuss the complexity of “cash” takes on a new light. Consider, for example, her observation that I repeatedly claim that the source of a given chunk of money does not affect how people use the money. That claim runs counter to the widespread observation of two related monetary practices: first, the earmarking of expenditures according to the source of income, and second, the use of ritual to transfer money from one category to another. It would be interesting to hear whether such practices simply disappear in the hard circumstances of Maquis Park. As she notes, I could have explicated with greater precision the ways in which cash and other forms of currency are wed to concrete relationships—never ‘lifting upward,’ as it were, to function as a general equivalent. I adopted a narrative structure in Off the Books that presented the shady world in Maquis Park as a series of acts. I had hoped that a dramaturgical framework, in which we begin with a local resident leader’s death and work back to this event, could incorporate a key temporal dimension of the underground, namely, the disjuncture between short-term inevitability and long-term aspirations. The poor are continually hoping for long-term solutions—often framed in dreams and diffuse aspirations—while taking refuge in immediate adaptive strategies. Events, like deaths or conflicts, offer them the possibility to re-imagine (by re-inventing) a future, even if the likelihood of improving one’s circumstances appreciably is objectively minimal. Because at any point in time, individuals are struggling to bridge the possible with the probable, my subjects take on the form of characters that are living out a drama that is at once rooted in reality but also in myth and dream. The presentation of their lives does not occur as facts on a page, but as interpolated narratives, highly contingent and open-ended. Contemporary ethnographic conventions— particularly the over-determined narratives of urban poverty—offer us little possibility for presenting this contingent and agentive dimension of daily experience.

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Finally, let me say that the characters in study are real beings who live in Chicago, but they are embodiments of institutionalized social roles. For this epistemological reason, and because of the pragmatic promise I made to them (and to my university’s Institutional Review Board) to protect their anonymity, I altered the names of individuals and locations. Kornblum misperceives these choices for “fictionalizing.” The neighborhood is real and I take care to specify the wider region, located in Chicago’s Southside (Greater Grand Boulevard), in which Maquis Park is situated. It would not be hard to find demographic information on Chicago’s Southside. More important, however, contemporary ethnographers seem to conflate the use of real names with accountability and a proper adherence to the scientific enterprise. Anyone can study the Greater Grand Boulevard region—and many have done so. In the context of low income populations, it is not so clear that naming subjects and locations either shifts the balance of power toward the subjects of research or offers greater opportunities for replication. More often, it is a convenient means by which ethnographers can claim a responsible scholarly posture.

Sudhir Venkatesh is Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies, Columbia University. He is the author of Gang Leader for a Day (Penguin Press, 2008).