Dissecting the Ethnographic Unconscious

Abstract This chapter draws an analytic tableau of 100 years of urban ethnography, from the founding works of the Chicago school to key monographs of the 1960s to contemporary field studies of the state as manager of poverty (covering welfare, housing, and penal policy). It extracts the key principles, favorite objects, and the methodological virtues and flaws of each wave of urban ethnography. Urban ethnographers have focused narrowly on “problem populations” in the city and thus have made invisible the city of the rich and powerful; have postulated but not explicated a link between territory and culture; have concentrated on the public world of men, with an obsession for poor young black men in the street; have failed to embed their observations in macro-structures of power; and are deeply atheoretical, leading to a reified opposition between theory and ethnography.