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Goffman Alice , On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City , New York : Picador USA , 2015, 304 pages, ISBN 978-1-250-06566-7. $16.00
Rios Victor M. , Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys , New York : NYU Press , 2011, 237 pages, ISBN 978-0-814-77638-4. $24.00
State of the Discourse
Ethnography is a colonial enterprise. It sprouted its wings from nineteenth century travel diaries in which bold adventurers embarked on a perilous journey, straight into "the heart of darkness," and emerged to tell the tale.1Within these ethnographies, the idea of the "savage" helped constitute the notion of "civilization" that these adventurers took for granted (Trouillot 1991). Ultimately, in these fable-esque stories, the adventurer realizes that the exotic inhabitants are more similar to people in the West than different, and therefore argues that their culture should be seen as legitimate. This revelation, in turn, leads the adventurer to reflect upon his or her own society. Such is a prominent strand of ethnographic research in the traditional sense.
But while notable nineteenth century ethnographers imagined themselves embarking on a journey to "discover" tribes and medicine men, some twentieth century ethnographers examined the "modern" world, focusing on latter-day "hobos" of the American city (Anderson 1923) instead of "primitive" tribes of the African hinterland. Today, twenty-first century scholars have tinkered further with these tropes in ways that redefine traditional approaches. In the wake of the critiques of ethnography delivered forcefully in the 1980s and 1990s by feminist and postcolonial scholars, urban ethnographers are frequently compelled to position their projects against antiquated tropes of the lone ethnographer, making his or her way amongst the "savages" (c.f. Asad 1973; Behar 1996; Fabian 1983; Geertz 1988; Spivak 1988). Instead of "hobos," contemporary ethnographers study Wall Street brokers who remake society in their image (Ho 2009); they explore the sex industry as a microcosm of the global economy, a critical space where business deals are hashed out in Vietnamese brothels as opposed to boardrooms (Hoang 2015); and they examine the historical legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois through Black "city makers" who find a way to mobilize against the structural violence of gentrification (Hunter 2013). These recent ethnographies are remarkable for the way they force...