Gang Leader for a Day

Couldn't come along to the meeting yesterday (endless lecture writing these past weeks), but just had to share this with you: a book by Sudhir Venkatesh called Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Crosses the Line. Published last month. In the same vein as the reading for Contemporary Debates on illegal organ donorship, this is a naive south Asian man who walks into the projects in Chicago with a questionnaire asking the inhabitants: "What does it feel like to be young, poor and black?". He then gets taken hostage overnight, and then becomes a confidante to the leader, and understands the social structures and strange economics of crack gangs in the projects. Absolutely riveting. And from that naive start he is now Professor of Sociology at Columbia. 

Here is the New York Times review of the book. So riveting it kept me up til 4am. And a strange entry into the 'mainstream' for ethnography: on the one hand we are complicit in voyeurism, on the other hand we have a complete first-person point of view of the trials and tribulations of qualitative 'hanging out', where the gang leader himself takes one look at the proffered questionnaire and says "Sh*t. That's not how you find out that information - you have to hang out with the people, get to know them..."