Abstract
Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy is one of the most daring books that I have read in some time. In aspiring to tell a New York City story, author Sudhir Venkatesh weaves together an analysis of aspects of that city's underworld, its above–world (comprised of emerging elites in business and the arts), and himself. The relevant part about him is that he is a transplant from southern California who has come to New York to build upon a promising career in sociology that was established by his prior studies of the underworld and low–income African Americans in Chicago. Consequently, he appears in this work as much more than a self–reflective ethnographer taking stock of the field and the people that he is studying. Instead, and more provocatively, Venkatesh incorporates autobiography into his explication of how a research agenda unfolded for him in what has become his second city.
Floating City does not take the form of a standard academic book. There is no extensive commentary about research methods and design, nor any elaborate commentary on the scholarly intent of the project underlying this material. Venkatesh can negate those projects, fall back on his stature as a well–established sociologist, and venture into a strong story–telling effort predicated upon the reader accepting that he is a skilled interviewer, field note collector, and analyst of the urban scenario. The work begins with an introduction of a handful of seemingly archetypical New York City residents, including Ivy–League graduates, a drug dealer, and the dealer's cousin (who is a partner of sorts in that trade). The graduates stand at an opposing point on the social class spectrum from the other two, yet they all happen to be in attendance at the same private social event in Manhattan. Why and how they came to be there, and what they ultimately have to do with each other, is a central point of the book. That point is conveyed in nearly suspenseful fashion throughout its eight chapters.
Across those chapters, Venkatesh elucidates the connections between the underworld (the Harlem–based drug dealer being just one example) and the above–world (the Ivy League–educated twenty–somethings being just a few examples). The connections are fostered by drug distribution and consumption, participation in escort services and prostitution, and other formally organized means of indulgence. In the book, we learn much about the complex feelings, attitudes, commitments, and values of these and other actors: prostitutes, financiers, pimps, elite club–goers, drug dealers, and the ethnographer who is studying them. In placing his story in the midst of these others, Venkatesh informs about how he became a New Yorker, a Columbia University sociologist, and a divorcee after achieving extreme professional success since being a graduate student at the University of Chicago, an ethnographer of that city's disadvantaged, and a partner in a marriage that did not last.
It may appear that telling all of these stories makes for a messy, if not a thoroughly self–absorbed, commentary. This is far from the case. Instead, readers are taken on a journey that illustrates how a researcher creates a new project in a new city, encounters and addresses bumps along the road in pursuing that agenda, tries to secure a new professional status in the midst of doing so, and handles the challenges that come with trying to work out developing a career and a personal life at the same time. The writing is lively and the narrative is intriguing. It reveals how virtually every actor in the book, including Venkatesh, appears sometimes as sensitive and benevolent, and at others callous or self–centered.
In the midst of presenting these portraits, Floating City provides an analysis of socioeconomic exchange that shows how the rich and poor, Black and White (and other ethnics), and Harlem and downtown Manhattan are much more interconnected than most urban sociology would allow us to believe. The connection is not only facilitated by the provision and access to underground services, but also reflected by how the various people that Venkatesh meets and encounters have similar goals and personal qualities. The similarities include the quest to establish publicly respectable and enamored social statuses and to have enough material resources to achieve long–term economic security and access the good life in New York City. As importantly, Venkatesh does not let readers forget that differences in social power are of great importance, not solely for whether people can achieve their goals, but how they evaluate others and are evaluated by each other.
In positioning so many people as both flawed and virtuous, Venkatesh urges us to reconsider how social power and status may prevent us from ever seeing the poor as virtuous even if we see the rich as flawed. He decisively ruptures the notion that people can be so easily or consistently divided into good and bad, saints and sinners, or street and decent (to draw from a popular disciplinary framing of lower–income urban residents). Indeed, he especially well demonstrates that the privileged can be quite indecent not solely because of involvement in drug consumption and prostitution, but in what they think of and how they act toward those (less financially secure) others who are embedded in those engagements with them.
This work will serve as a classroom complement to more formal sociological studies of race, class, and informal economies in the urban community. As it is not designed to be a text book in the traditional sense, it will require some explaining in the classroom if used as a foundational text for introducing undergraduates to the tools and concepts of urban sociology. For more advanced students, or for instructors prepared to engage the urban sphere in less traditional ways (that is, for those who can skillfully bring formal sociology into the conversation around this book) it will be a joy to utilize in the classroom. For people prepared to re–think their understanding of the values and outlooks of the rich and the poor in the urban community, and well as those who seek a more nuanced and sophisticated reflection on the practice ethnography, Floating City is an eye opener and a must–read.