URBS 3308: Introduction to Urban Ethnographies

Anton Chekhov is revered as a boldly innovative playwright and short story writer--but he wrote more than just plays and stories. In Alive in the Writing--an intriguing hybrid of writing guide, biography, and literary analysis--anthropologist and novelist Kirin Narayan introduces readers to some other sides of Chekhov: his pithy, witty observations on the writing process, his life as a writer through accounts by his friends, family, and lovers, and his venture into nonfiction through his book Sakhalin Island. By closely attending to the people who lived under the appalling conditions of the Russian penal colony on Sakhalin, Chekhov showed how empirical details combined with a literary flair can bring readers face to face with distant, different lives, enlarging a sense of human responsibility. Highlighting this balance of the empirical and the literary, Narayan calls on Chekhov to bring new energy to the writing of ethnography and creative nonfiction alike. Weaving together selections from writing by and about him with examples from other talented ethnographers and memoirists, she offers practical exercises and advice on topics such as story, theory, place, person, voice, and self. A new and lively exploration of ethnography, Alive in the Writing shows how the genre's attentive, sustained connection with the lives of others can become a powerful tool for any writer.

Challenges and Solutions in Ethnographic Research: Ethnography with a Twist seeks to rethink ethnography 'outside the box' of its previous tradition and to develop ethnographic methods by critically discussing the process, ethics, impact and knowledge production in ethnographic research. This interdisciplinary edited volume argues for a 'twist' that supports openness, courage, and creativity to develop and test innovative and unconventional ways of thinking and doing ethnography. 'Ethnography with a twist' means both an intentional aim to conduct ethnographic research with novel approaches and methods but also sensitivity to recognize and creativity to utilize different kinds of 'twist moments' that ethnographic research may create for the researcher.　 This edited volume critically evaluates new and old methodological tools and their ability to engage with questions of power difference. It proposes new collaborative methods that allow for co-production and co-creation of research material as well as shared conceptual work and wider distribution of knowledge. The book will be of use to ethnographers in humanities and social science disciplines including sociology, anthropology and communication studies.

What is critical ethnography? How do we use theory to interpret research data? What is performance ethnography? You can find answers to these fundamental questions in D. Soyini Madison's engaging and highly multidisciplinary Third Edition of Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics, and Performance. The book presents a fresh new look at critical ethnography by emphasizing the significance of ethics and performance in the art and politics of fieldwork. The productive links between theory and method are celebrated in this title. Theoretical concepts range from queer theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory to Marxism and phenomenology. The methodological techniques range from designing and asking in-depth interview questions and developing rapport to coding and interpreting data. The various theories and methods culminate in three fictional ethnographic case studies that "enact" the interdependence between theory and method and the significance of social theory, ethics, and performance.

The coauthors of Decolonizing Ethnography integrate ethnography with activist work in a New Jersey center for undocumented workers, showing how anthropology can function as a vehicle for activism and as a tool for marginalized people to theorize their own experiences.

To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory. This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being. Now in its eagerly awaited second edition, this bestselling book has been substantially revised, with new case-studies and examples and important additions on new indigenous literature, the role of research in indigenous struggles for social justice, which brings this essential volume urgently up-to-date.

Feminist Ethnography, Second Edition, is a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary text that employs a problem-based approach to guide readers through the methods, challenges, and possibilities of feminist ethnography. Dána-Ain Davis and Christa Craven tease out the influences of feminist ethnography across a variety of disciplines including women's and gender studies, critical race studies, ethnic studies, education, communications, psychology, sociology, urban studies, and American studies. Feature elements of the text include Essentials (excerpts from key texts in the field), Spotlights (interviews with feminist ethnographers), and suggested assignments and readings. The text concludes with a "conversation" among contemporary feminist ethnographers about what feminist ethnography looks like today and into the future.

One of the twentieth century's most influential books, this classic work of anthropology offers a groundbreaking exploration of what culture is With The Interpretation of Cultures, the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz developed the concept of thick description, and in so doing, he virtually rewrote the rules of his field. Culture, Geertz argues, does not drive human behavior. Rather, it is a web of symbols that can help us better understand what that behavior means. A thick description explains not only the behavior, but the context in which it occurs, and to describe something thickly, Geertz argues, is the fundamental role of the anthropologist. Named one of the 100 most important books published since World War II by the Times Literary Supplement, The Interpretation of Cultures transformed how we think about others' cultures and our own.

Learning how to carry out research projects using participant observation and in-depth interviews has become a priority for scholars in a wide range of fields, including anthropology, sociology, education, social work, nursing, and psychology. This book, a collection of well-known fieldwork accounts covering the qualitative research process, aims to help undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars in the social sciences understand common problems in the research process and learn strategies for resolving them.Unlike methods books that treat research issues in a superficial or prescriptive fashion, this book realistically portrays, through researchers own accounts, the process of discovery and resolution of conflicts involved in fieldwork. It also shows the costs involved in the choice of solutions. Students and seasoned scholars alike will find the collection a source of knowledge, inspiration, and comfort concerning the complexity of conducting fieldwork.

Reflexive Ethnography is a unique guide to ethnographic research for students of anthropology and related disciplines. It provides practical and comprehensive guidance to ethnographic research methods, but also encourages students to develop a critical understanding of the philosophical basis of ethnographic authority. Davies examines why reflexivity, at both personal and broader cultural levels, should be integrated into ethnographic research and discusses how this can be accomplished for a variety of research methods. This revised and updated second edition includes: anbsp;new chapter on internet-based research and 'interethnography' chapters on selection of topics and methods, data collection and analysis, and ethics and politics of research practical advice on writing up ethnographic study new and updated research examples. Postmodernist relativism can lead to an over-emphasis on reflexivity that denies the possibility of social research. Reflexive Ethnography utilises postmodernist insights - incorporation of different standpoints, exposure of the intellectual tyranny of meta-narratives - but proposes that reflexive ethnographic research be undertaken from a realist perspective. Reflexive Ethnography will help students to use and understand ethnographic research practices that fully incorporate reflexivity without abandoning claims to develop valid knowledge of social reality.

In a compelling exploration of an oft-hidden aspect of qualitative field research, Women Fielding Danger shows how identity performances can facilitate or block field research outcomes. The book asks questions that are crucial for all women engaged in field research. Do researchers enter their field site with a totally neutral identity? Can a researcher's own identity be at odds with how interviewees see her? Could a researcher be of the "wrong" gender, sexuality, nationality, or religion for those being studied? Must some of a researcher's identities be subsumed in certain research settings? How much identity disguise is possible before a researcher violates research ethics or loses herself? Together, these questions inform the book's themes of the centrality of gender, social and political danger, the negotiation of identities, and on-site ethics. Focusing on ethnographic research across a wide range of disciplines and world regions, this deeply informed book presents practical "to-dos" and technical research strategies. In addition, it offers unique illustrations of how the political, geographic, and organizational realities of field sites shape identity negotiations and research outcomes. Understanding these dynamics, the authors show, is key to surviving the ethnographic field.

The Ethnographic Interview is a practical, self-teaching handbook which guides students step by step through interview techniques commonly used to research ethnography and culture. The text also teaches students how to analyze the data they collect, and how to write an ethnography. The appendices include research questions and writing tasks.

The authors present a series of guidelines, suggestions, and practical advice for creating useful fieldnotes in a variety of settings, demystifying a process that is often assumed to be intuitive and impossible to teach.

This text is a follow up to Spradley's earlier ethographic research handbook, The Ethnographic Interview, and guides students through the technique of participant observation to research ethnography and culture. Spradley also teaches students how to analyze the data they collect, and write an ethnography. The appendices include research questions and writing tasks.

Doing Ethnographies is an introductory and applied guide to ethnographic methods. It focuses on those methods - participant observation, interviewing, focus groups, and video/photographic work - that allow us to understand the lived, everyday world 'out there.' In five chapters it presents a systematic overview of: first principles, preparing for fieldwork, constructing ethnographic information, analyzing field materials, and writing. This is a guide to the issues and methods which have to be considered when doing an ethnography. Informed by the authors fieldwork experience, it demonstrates how methods work in the field and prepares the first-time ethnographer for the loss of control and direction often experienced. This is a practical guide to methods in the field, to the relation between theory, practice, and writing.

Doing Ethnography is invaluable reading for anyone collecting data through observation. Innovative and thought provoking, it is a refreshing take on ethnography stressing both academic rigor and practical necessity. It combines theoretical perspective with tangible action plans and walks you step-by-step through designing, conducting, and evaluating ethnographic research.The book skilfully introduces the varied tasks and decisions you need to consider before entering the field, helping you to avoid common mistakes and to conduct safe, ethical research.The redesigned Second Edition has cutting edge case studies and examples from across the social sciences and has an embedded awareness of the importance of digital research tools and social media. It also includes a detailed discussion of: Autoethnography, Digital Ethnography, Visual Ethnography. Feminist Ethnography, Managing and Analysing data. This is an ideal companion for every novice researcher.

Collaboration between ethnographers and subjects has long been a product of the close, intimate relationships that define ethnographic research. But increasingly, collaboration is no longer viewed as merely a consequence of fieldwork; instead collaboration now preconditions and shapes research design as well as its dissemination. As a result, ethnographic subjects are shifting from being informants to being consultants. The emergence of collaborative ethnography highlights this relationship between consultant and ethnographer, moving it to center stage as a calculated part not only of fieldwork but also of the writing process itself. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography presents a historical, theoretical, and practice-oriented road map for this shift from incidental collaboration to a more conscious and explicit collaborative strategy. Luke Eric Lassiter charts the history of collaborative ethnography from its earliest implementation to its contemporary emergence in fields such as feminism, humanistic anthropology, and critical ethnography. On this historical and theoretical base, Lassiter outlines concrete steps for achieving a more deliberate and overt collaborative practice throughout the processes of fieldwork and writing. As a participatory action situated in the ethical commitments between ethnographers and consultants and focused on the co-construction of texts, collaborative ethnography, argues Lassiter, is among the most powerful ways to press ethnographic fieldwork and writing into the service of an applied and public scholarship. A comprehensive and highly accessible handbook for ethnographers of all stripes, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography will become a fixture in the development of a critical practice of anthropology, invaluable to both undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty alike.

Savvy, witty, and sensible, this unique book is both a handbook for defining and completing a research project, and an astute introduction to the neglected history and changeable philosophy of modern social science. See in particular Chapter 8, "Field (and Other) Methods".

Studying Cities and City Life is a textbook designed to provide an introduction to the major methods of obtaining data for use when analysing cities and social life in cities. See in particular Chapter 2, " 2. Ethnographic field studies".

In Black on the Block, Mary Pattillo uses the historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic renewal of Chicago's North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary urban America. There was a time when North Kenwood-Oakland was plagued by gangs, drugs, violence, and the font of poverty from which they sprang. But in the late 1980s, activists rose up to tackle the social problems that had plagued the area for decades. Black on the Block tells the remarkable story of how these residents laid the groundwork for a revitalized and self-consciously black neighborhood that continues to flourish today. But theirs is not a tale of easy consensus and political unity, and here Pattillo teases out the divergent class interests that have come to define black communities like North Kenwood-Oakland. She explores the often heated battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old-timers as they clash over the social implications of gentrification. Along the way, Pattillo highlights the conflicted but crucial role that middle-class blacks play in transforming such districts as they negotiate between established centers of white economic and political power and the needs of their less fortunate black neighbors.

The only collection of its kind on the market, this reader gathers the work of some of the most esteemed urban ethnographers in sociology and anthropology. Broken down into sections that cover key aspects of ethnographic research, Ethnography and the City will expose readers to important works in the field, while also guiding students to the study of method as they embark on their own work.

In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America's most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.

You know the scene: amateur soccer players battling over the ball, spectators cheering from the sidelines, vendors selling their wares from carts. Over the past half century, immigration from Latin America has transformed the public landscape in the United States, and numerous communities are witnessing one of the hallmarks of this transformation: the emergence of park soccer. In Fútbol in the Park, David Trouille takes us into the world of Latino soccer players who regularly play in an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood where they are not always welcome. Together on the soccer field, sharing beers after the games, and occasionally exchanging taunts or blows, the men build relationships and a sense of who they are. Through these engrossing, revealing, and at times immortalizing activities, they forge new identities, friendships, and job opportunities, giving themselves a renewed sense of self-worth and community. As the United States becomes increasingly polarized over issues of immigration and culture, Fútbol in the Park offers a close look at the individual lives and experiences of migrants.  

A vivid portrait of African American life in today's urban South that uses food to explore the complex interactions of race and class Getting Something to Eat in Jackson uses food--what people eat and how--to explore the interaction of race and class in the lives of African Americans in the contemporary urban South. Joseph Ewoodzie Jr. examines how "foodways"--food availability, choice, and consumption--vary greatly between classes of African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi, and how this reflects and shapes their very different experiences of a shared racial identity. Ewoodzie spent more than a year following a group of socioeconomically diverse African Americans--from upper-middle-class patrons of the city's fine-dining restaurants to men experiencing homelessness who must organize their days around the schedules of soup kitchens. Ewoodzie goes food shopping, cooks, and eats with a young mother living in poverty and a grandmother working two jobs. He works in a Black-owned BBQ restaurant, and he meets a man who decides to become a vegan for health reasons but who must drive across town to get tofu and quinoa. Ewoodzie also learns about how soul food is changing and why it is no longer a staple survival food. Throughout, he shows how food choices influence, and are influenced by, the racial and class identities of Black Jacksonians. By tracing these contemporary African American foodways, Getting Something to Eat in Jackson offers new insights into the lives of Black Southerners and helps challenge the persistent homogenization of blackness in American life.

"Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools."   That's how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt.   But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures--they're an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together.   Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike?   Ewing's answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools--schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs--as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.

Chicago is home to the third-largest concentration of Puerto Ricans in the United States, but scholarship on the city rarely accounts for their presence. This book is part of an effort to include Puerto Ricans in Chicago's history. Rúa traces Puerto Ricans' construction of identity in a narrative that begins in 1945, when a small group of University of Puerto Rico graduates earned scholarships to attend the University of Chicago and a private employment agency recruited Puerto Rican domestics and foundry workers. They arrived from an island colony where they had held U.S. citizenship and where most thought of themselves as "white." But in Chicago, Puerto Ricans were considered "colored" and their citizenship was second class. They seemed to share few of the rights other Chicagoans took for granted. In her analysis of the following six decades--during which Chicago witnessed urban renewal, loss of neighborhoods, emergence of multiracial coalitions, waves of protest movements, and everyday commemorations of death and life--Rúa explores the ways in which Puerto Ricans have negotiated their identity as Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and U.S. citizens. Through a variety of sources, including oral history interviews, ethnographic observation, archival research, and textual criticism, A Grounded Identidad attempts to redress this oversight of traditional scholarship on Chicago by presenting not only Puerto Ricans' reconstitution from colonial subjects to second-class citizens, but also by examining the implications of this political reality on the ways in which Puerto Ricans have been racially imagined and positioned in comparison to blacks, whites, and Mexicans over time.

Financial collapses--whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market--are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In Liquidated, Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed. Through an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, Ho describes how a financially dominant but highly unstable market system is understood, justified, and produced through the restructuring of corporations and the larger economy. Ho, who worked at an investment bank herself, argues that bankers' approaches to financial markets and corporate America are inseparable from the structures and strategies of their workplaces. Her ethnographic analysis of those workplaces is filled with the voices of stressed first-year associates, overworked and alienated analysts, undergraduates eager to be hired, and seasoned managing directors. Recruited from elite universities as "the best and the brightest," investment bankers are socialized into a world of high risk and high reward. They are paid handsomely, with the understanding that they may be let go at any time. Their workplace culture and networks of privilege create the perception that job insecurity builds character, and employee liquidity results in smart, efficient business. Based on this culture of liquidity and compensation practices tied to profligate deal-making, Wall Street investment bankers reshape corporate America in their own image. Their mission is the creation of shareholder value, but Ho demonstrates that their practices and assumptions often produce crises instead. By connecting the values and actions of investment bankers to the construction of markets and the restructuring of U.S. corporations, Liquidated reveals the particular culture of Wall Street often obscured by triumphalist readings of capitalist globalization.

The world of Argentine tango presents a glamorous façade of music and movement. Yet the immigrant artists whose livelihoods depend on the US tango industry receive little attention beyond their enigmatic public personas. More Than Two to Tango offers a detailed portrait of Argentine immigrants for whom tango is both an art form and a means of survival.   Based on a highly visible group of performers within the almost hidden population of Argentines in the United States, More than Two to Tango addresses broader questions on the understudied role of informal webs in the entertainment field. Through the voices of both early generations of immigrants and the latest wave of newcomers, Anahí Viladrich explores how the dancers, musicians, and singers utilize their complex social networks to survive as artists and immigrants. She reveals a diverse community navigating issues of identity, class, and race as they struggle with practical concerns, such as the high cost of living in New York City and affordable health care.   Argentina's social history serves as the compelling backdrop for understanding the trajectory of tango performers, and Viladrich uses these foundations to explore their current unified front to keep tango as their own "authentic" expression. Yet social ties are no panacea for struggling immigrants. Even as More Than Two to Tango offers the notion that each person is truly conceived and transformed by their journeys around the globe, it challenges rosy portraits of Argentine tango artists by uncovering how their glamorous representations veil their difficulties to make ends meet in the global entertainment industry. In the end, the portrait of Argentine tango performers' diverse career paths contributes to our larger understanding of who may attain the "American Dream," and redefines what that means for tango artists.

San Francisco is the endgame of gentrification, where racialized displacement means that the Black population of the city hovers at just over 3 percent. The Robeson Justice Academy opened to serve the few remaining low-income neighborhoods of the city, with the mission of offering liberatory, social justice--themed education to youth of color. While it features a progressive curriculum including Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde, the majority Latinx school also has the district's highest suspension rates for Black students. In Progressive Dystopia Savannah Shange explores the potential for reconciling the school's marginalization of Black students with its sincere pursuit of multiracial uplift and solidarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and six years of experience teaching at the school, Shange outlines how the school fails its students and the community because it operates within a space predicated on antiblackness. Seeing San Francisco as a social laboratory for how Black communities survive the end of their worlds, Shange argues for abolition over revolution or progressive reform as the needed path toward Black freedom.

For the last decade a dozen people have worked as street vendors on the Avenue of the Americas in Greenwich Village. All but one are black men. Hakim sells "Black Books" & mentors young men who come to his table. Marvin, who sells recycled magazines, gave up drinking & drugging & is now encouraging Ron to turn his life around. Ishmael is homeless; the police throw his property in the back of a garbage truck when he leaves the block to relieve himself. Joe Garbage "lays shit out" to earn his few dollars a day. To write Sidewalk, the author spent five years with these men as a "participant-observer." In that time, street people have become pawns in "quality of life" campaigns nation-wide. Mayors attack them. Businesses want them off the streets. Even liberal whites are uneasy in their presence. But in this affecting group portrait, the author shows that these men live complex moral lives, working hard to earn some money, stay within the law, & survive. He addresses the most pressing question in city life today: Are street people a detriment to the quality of life, or are they essential to the diversity & independence that city dwellers have always prized? The author is one of our most gifted writers on urban life, & Sidewalk gives us a clear, sharp picture of city life today-as it is, & as it might be.

Unsettled Belonging tells the stories of young Palestinian Americans as they navigate and construct lives as American citizens. Following these youth throughout their school days, Thea Abu El-Haj examines citizenship as lived experience, dependent on various social, cultural, and political memberships. For them, she shows, life is characterized by a fundamental schism between their sense of transnational belonging and the exclusionary politics of routine American nationalism that ultimately cast them as impossible subjects.             Abu El-Haj explores the school as the primary site where young people from immigrant communities encounter the central discourses about what it means to be American. She illustrates the complex ways social identities are bound up with questions of belonging and citizenship, and she details the processes through which immigrant youth are racialized via everyday nationalistic practices. Finally, she raises a series of crucial questions about how we educate for active citizenship in contemporary times, when more and more people's lives are shaped within transnational contexts. A compelling account of post-9/11 immigrant life, Unsettled Belonging is a steadfast look at the disjunctures of modern citizenship. 

Bike messengers are familiar figures in the downtown cores of major cities. Tasked with delivering time-sensitive materials within, at most, a few hours--and sometimes in as little as fifteen minutes--these couriers ride in all types of weather, weave in and out of dense traffic, dodging (or sometimes failing to dodge) taxis and pedestrians alike in order to meet their clients' tight deadlines. Riding through midtown traffic at breakneck speeds is dangerous work, and most riders do it for very little pay and few benefits. As the courier industry has felt the pressures of first fax machines, then e-mails, and finally increased opportunities for electronic filing of legal "paperwork," many of those who remain in the business are devoted to their job. For these couriers, messengering is the foundation for an all-encompassing lifestyle, an essential part of their identity. In Urban Flow, Jeffrey L. Kidder (a sociologist who spent several years working as a bike messenger) introduces readers to this fascinating subculture, exploring its appeal as well as its uncertainties and dangers. Through interviews with and observation of messengers at work and play, Kidder shows how many become acclimated to the fast-paced, death-defying nature of the job, often continuing to ride with the same sense of purpose off the clock. In chaotic bike races called alleycats, messengers careen through the city in hopes of beating their peers to the finish line. Some messengers travel the world to take part in these events, and the top prizes are often little more than bragging rights. Taken together, the occupation and the messengers' after-hours pursuits highlight a creative subculture inextricably linked to the urban environment. The work of bike messengers is intense and physically difficult. It requires split-second reflexes, an intimate knowledge of street maps and traffic patterns, and a significant measure of courage in the face of both bodily harm and job insecurity. In Urban Flow, Kidder gives readers a rare opportunity to catch more than a fleeting glimpse of these habitués of city streets.

For decades now, scholars and politicians alike have argued that the concentration of poverty in city housing projects would produce distrust, alienation, apathy, and social isolation--the disappearance of what sociologists call social capital. But relatively few have examined precisely how such poverty affects social capital or have considered for what reasons living in a poor neighborhood results in such undesirable effects. This book examines a neglected Puerto Rican enclave in Boston to consider the pros and cons of social scientific thinking about the true nature of ghettos in America. Mario Luis Small dismantles the theory that poor urban neighborhoods are inevitably deprived of social capital. He shows that the conditions specified in this theory are vaguely defined and variable among poor communities. According to Small, structural conditions such as unemployment or a failed system of familial relations must be acknowledged as affecting the urban poor, but individual motivations and the importance of timing must be considered as well. Brimming with fresh theoretical insights, Villa Victoria is an elegant work of sociology that will be essential to students of urban poverty.