What Kind of Combat Sport Is Sociology?

Criticism is not merely a good thing; the discipline requires it to advance. Precisely because it is so important, criticism must be held to high scholarly standards. As I will show, Wacquant’s review of Sidewalk quotes selectively and misleadingly and systematically misrepresents the work as a whole. The review is thoroughly inaccurate and unreliable. Forty years after Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a work that represented Greenwich Village sidewalk interaction as the ideal for what makes up a “great” American city, I went back to the neighborhood and revisited Jacobs’s principles. On the sidewalk, I came to know the unhoused vendors, scavengers, and panhandlers. These are people who Hakim Hasan, one of the book’s key subjects, says are “hidden in public space.” On the streets, I found a world filled with illegality, personal defect, and shame and also a world of mutual support, struggles for respectability, ingenuity, and resilience. A core issue of my agenda was to understand the ways in which “moral” behavior and “decency” are and are not constructed within settings seemingly unfavorable to such behavior. I also found that the sidewalk was in some ways quite different than it was when Jacobs described it, when “eyes and ears upon the street” were presumed to make sidewalk life safe and comfortable. In Sidewalk, I enter into a dialogue with her theories of public space under the new conditions of social inequality and cultural difference. My method was participant observation, and I worked as a magazine scavenger and street vendor on and off during more than five years. I developed and systematically employed an extended place method for expanding the boundaries of the traditional neighborhood study by focusing on how institutions of various sorts—especially institutions that