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Dreadful Enclosures: Detoxifying an Urban Myth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

E. V. Walter
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Extract

Urban ethnographers can explore spaces forgotten or given up for lost, replacing illusions with maps of social reality. The city is filled with milieux that remain scarcely known to the inhabitants of other spaces. Paradoxically, as the rationalization of urban life continues, boundaries enclose some lives more tightly, isolating and making them more vulnerable. By re-discovering the lives of people in those spaces, by replacing stereotypes about them with descriptions that convey their vitality, dignity and humanity, ethnographers may restore some lost relationships in urban milieux, and in a modest way reduce the isolation.

Type
Contre Courants
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , June 1977 , pp. 150 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1977

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References

(1) Damer, Seán, Alley, Wine: the sociology of a dreadful enclosure, The Sociological Review, XXII (1974), 221–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(2) My research team included Bodil Bjerring, a Danish anthropologist, Rachel Forman and June Austin, post-graduate students in sociology, and Barbara Wolf, a student in psychology. The field work was conducted as part of the Metropolitan Studies Project of the Laboratory of Community Psychiatry in the Harvard Medical School, and supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, MH 15428. Boston University also provided funds to support the field work.

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(15) I intend to develop this concept in another essay, ‘The Abuses of Diversity: a theory of impacted networks’, to be published later.

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