Li Wenshuo (Department of World History, Shanghai Normal University)
If there is one place that embodies both human creativity and human greed, it is probably Wall Street. This narrow road in Lower Manhattan, New York City, although it only stretches from Trinity Church on Broadway to the East River, is home to some of the most influential financial institutions in the United States and around the world. The three words "Wall Street" have long since transcended its towering physical image and become synonymous with money, desire, and capitalism. Especially since the 2007-2008 financial crisis, in the eyes of the world, "greed here has no bottom line." Wall Street was once again transformed into a wall (in fact, the former wall built by the Dutch to defend the Indians) guarding the ill-gotten gains swallowed up by capital. Perhaps it was the curiosity to find out, and the intellectuals' sense of economic and social justice, that prompted the anthropologist Ho Rou-wan to try to penetrate the wall.
Liquidation: Everyday Life on Wall Street (East China Normal University Press, 2018) is an ethnography about Wall Street financial institutions written by Ho Rou-wan from Taiwan, who took a leave of absence to work at a bank in the first year of his Ph.D. at Princeton University to learn what was going on. When anthropology is mentioned, we often think of the unknown life and culture in the wilderness, but this book focuses on the nerves and bloodlines in the world's financial heart, a power that affects the contemporary world but is difficult for outsiders to understand. Regarding the operation of financial institutions, there are laws and customs to regulate, but the circulation of wealth and the exercise of power are all human behaviors, and behind these "hard" conditions is a soft culture, which is precisely where the value of anthropology lies. In addition to personally participating in the bank's work, the author has accumulated a large amount of perceptual information through interviews and observations, focusing on the world view, creed and behavior of bankers from the perspective of witnesses. In their world, making public companies profitable is always a top priority, but at the same time, they must also fill their own pots. From time to time, their adventurous actions bring disasters, and such disasters cannot fail to jeopardize the company's earnings. This book tells us that this is the culture that is unique to Wall Street—huge profits drive Wall Street to gamble at great risks, and huge power that makes Wall Street think that its intelligence, diligence, and connection with global finance have reached a risk-averse level. This culture has led Wall Street to construct a self-reinforcing mechanism — financial institutions recruiting people from the top universities and giving them enviable jobs and high salaries; this in turn has convinced the latter that it is at the top of power, and that Wall Street, with so many talented people, can't make mistakes. Grand banquets, elaborate offices, the visibility that continues to make headlines and the social status of practitioners all serve as rituals that sustain and reinforce this culture. In this way, Wall Street culture allows bankers, employees and society to reach a sense of "complicity", step by step in self-absorption to approach the crisis without knowing it. This book is a seminal work that opens a new window into the world of finance with anthropology. Mitchell Abolafia, an economist at the State University of New York at Albany, commented that "this book of a greedy financial institution, with its participatory approach, must have been unsurpassed for a long time." Although the day-to-day work of financial institutions makes outsiders feel like a cloud, the Wall Street culture distilled by the author's ethnographic approach helps us understand the logic behind the operation of financial power on Wall Street. Along the lines of the author's thinking, it may be asserted that wall Street, the heart of capitalist finance, is driven not so much by voluminous financial regulations as by a self-obsession with wealth and greed.
On the other side of the spectrum of power are the poor and weak in the dark streets and alleys, who live in the shadow of urban glitz, who have difficulty making their voices heard, whose identity, status and culture are constantly defined and redefined by the power elite. Middle-class reformers saw them as the root causes of urban problems, and modernist planners saw slums as a symptom of urban disease. But what exactly is poverty, and what it means to the poor, is the question Oscar Lewis is trying to answer in his life in Mexico City.
Lewis grew up in a small town in upstate New York and received a bachelor's degree in history from the City College of New York. Dissatisfied with the methods of American historiography at the time, he went to Columbia University to study anthropology at columbia at the suggestion of psychologist Abraham Maslow, where he studied under Ruth Benedict, author of "Chrysanthemum and the Knife," and his doctoral dissertation explored the effects of contact with white society on blackfeet Indians in Montana. But what really made Lewis famous was his study of Casa Grande, a large slum in downtown Mexico City, where he wrote about his life in Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family, New York: Vintage, 2011. The Sanchez family, the protagonist of the book, has lived in Casagrande for more than twenty years, they are not the poorest family, and the father, Jesús Sanchez, earns enough to support four children, not only does not have to worry about food and clothing, but also hires people to do housework. Why did the author choose such a home of middle-aged people as a model for poverty research? In fact, Lewis found that poverty was not entirely material deprivation for the inhabitants here, and Sanchez-style families were not uncommon in this large slum. By observing and participating in the life of the Sanchez family, Lewis once again emphasizes the concept of "culture of poverty", that is, poverty is a way of life, a way of life that can be passed down from generation to generation, thus becoming a state that lasts for generations. In this era of rapid industrialization and urbanization in Latin American countries, the "culture of poverty" has stubbornly taken root and firmly grasped most of Casagrande's families. But poverty is more than a face, in addition to the hardships of material life and the low status of society, but also includes the persistence in freedom, the fascination with the present and the open-mindedness to the future that people have developed in a long-term unstable life. This book is also two faces, and the praise is also constantly controversial. Its biggest controversy is Lewis's "multiple autobiographical approach," a new path he has tried to refute the mainstream approach of measurement and seeking universal explanation. In his view, even in the ethnographic approach, the individual is still static and aphasia, and what they think and do is divided into various conceptual frameworks by anthropologists, and thus dissolved by seemingly fair and objective academic research. Lewis chose to let the Sanchez family make their voices heard, and he was like a recorder, knocking on the door of the Sanchez family, becoming their friend and integrating into their lives. The author shows us a colourful picture of life in an urban slum, with deceit and even street violence in order to survive, but also a strong appeal to kindness and warmth, as well as a desire to love and be loved. If the basic approach to modern governance is to divide the rulers into distinct, easily identifiable categories, Lewis, through the Sanchez family, tells us that the "poor" should not be treated as a type of governance because they are also human beings.
Although "The Children of the Sanchez Family" studied Mexico City, the response in Latin America was mediocre, but it attracted lasting attention in the United States. Perhaps this is because poverty and slums are more visible and older in American cities, embedded in all aspects of urban life through mechanisms of spatial-social segregation. There are countless studies on isolation, and efforts to break it are not uncommon. But have U.S. cities developed informal mechanisms to regulate segregation? Elijah Anderson answered the question. Anderson's parents were slaves on plantations in the Southern United States, and his family moved to Indiana in the Midwest after World War II, where Anderson grew up in a multi-ethnic, working-class neighborhood. Perhaps as an influence of his early childhood experiences, Anderson remained interested in racial contradictions and spatial segregation, and the use of anthropological and cultural theories to study inequality and exclusion in cities was always his academic ambition. Unlike sociologists who have devoted themselves to developing and validating explanatory theories, Anderson is more interested in understanding the daily lives of the earthly people and understanding the world of their meaning from real experience.
Elijah Anderson, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (New York: Norton & Company, 2011) is a masterpiece of Anthropological research by Anderson that focuses on urban inequality, a persistent disease of American society, and although it has been published for more than a decade, it is still full of inspiration. In MacKenzie's model of concentric circles, transition zones are considered to be focal points for social problems. But postwar American cities faced not industrialization but in deindustrialization, accompanied by the suburbanization of the middle class and the affluent population, and the influx of minorities into the big cities of the North, racially based segregation projected on all aspects of urban society, in the corners and corners of fragmented urban space. Ethnic groups are clustered in different spaces according to their socioeconomic status, and the likes of Richard Alba and John Logan have found that this hierarchical order, once established and ordered, will continue, even if segregation is abolished, it will not be eliminated at the societal level. As a result, U.S. urban space is highly fragmented with isolation. Ethnic minorities, predominantly African-American, are trapped in the decaying belts of central cities, disparities with white societies in terms of intellectual, wealth, and access to social services. In American cities, where you live determines your socioeconomic status and vice versa. By using Philadelphia as the object of fieldwork, Anderson identified the interaction under isolation, that is, the public space of the city provides an opportunity for the encounter of isolated groups. Here, distinct ethnic boundaries in cities are obscured, and socio-economic hierarchies are masquerade as equals. He calls such public spaces "cosmopolitan umbrellas," a near-idealized strip of space between ghetto, suburban and urban middle-income neighborhoods. But the "metropolitan umbrella" can only envelop people of different ethnicities under the mask of respect and friendship, making a black and white city look really cosmopolitan (the term means that a place with a population from all over the world is cosmopolitan and cosmopolitan). While such recognition and respect is precious to minority residents who have to swagger through a variety of segregations, the "metropolitan umbrella" makes inequality more insidious and less perceptible. More importantly, even the public spaces that serve as "metropolitan umbrellas" are becoming increasingly private, criticized by some scholars as undermining the rights and interests of legitimate users.
Ubiquitous segregation not only divides cities into ethnic-physical spaces that are difficult to interact with, but also artificially tears apart urban communities socially and psychologically. Space is easy to bridge, but wounds are difficult to heal, which is an important reason why white police officers in American cities frequently violently treat black "suspects" - in the former's view, minorities are naturally criminals, at least potential criminals; in the latter, the police always punch and kick themselves without asking whether it is right or wrong, and petty crimes are also severely punished. Such a dilemma, of course, is not only the result of psychological factors. Indeed, in recent years, many scholars have discussed the rise of the Mass Incarceration in the United States, including Elizabeth Hinton's study of the "incarceration turn" of the Lyndon Johnson administration, Michelle Alexander's "New Jim Crow," or Richard Rosstein's "The Color of Law." （Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Liveright, 2018）。 As assistance to urban minorities shifts from welfare policies to harsh punishments, we can't help but wonder how the criminal justice system can intervene in poor minority communities in American cities, wondering if there is still a way for those who live here to escape. Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City ,New York: Picador, 2015) makes up for this shortcoming. This book explores how the judiciary lives in the shadow of the possibility of touching judicial red lines at any time as the justice system becomes more deeply involved in the daily lives of urban minorities. To that end, Goldman lived in a black neighborhood on Sixth Street in Philadelphia for six years, documenting violent cases, police dispatches, and the arrest of suspects, making friends with young people in the community who had embarked on criminal paths, and even his roommate Mike peddled cocaine on the streets from time to time. This book records that the inhabitants here not only have to deal with the headache of chai rice oil and salt, but also skillfully maneuver between the police who come to interrogate them from time to time. The authors find that "the police and the community have established mechanisms for work, friendship, and family life for young people here, but such mechanisms surround them like traps in the possibility of imprisonment." As the number of inmates in the United States expands, and especially the proportion of blacks among them continues to rise, Goldman's research is timely. She tells her readers that going to college and going to prison in the same society is not entirely the result of personal choice; for many, the real horror is that there is no way to choose. But what stands out more than the book's subject matter is the author's attitude toward the survey and the approach to writing. Her investigation targets include felons, but the author works with them to evade police pursuit. One needs not only ask, in the face of the wrongdoing that is just in front of them, do researchers just have to report it faithfully? To what extent does this book record the details of the escape of criminal youth, and the text is vivid and beautiful, the content is full of tension and drama, to what extent does this remain true? The richness of the details inevitably deviates from the theme, and even "On the Road to Death" seems to be two books under a rough reading: one is an analysis of the American judicial system, and the other is almost a guide to criminal escape. This is partly because the book faces an academic ethical conundrum similar to That of The Children of the Sanchez Family, namely how to maintain a balance between getting marginalized groups to make their voices heard and maintaining academic objectivity and accuracy.
Cities touch on different aspects of social life, and urban studies is a highly interdisciplinary interdisciplinary field. Even though biographical research has re-emerged in recent years, urban history research often feels cold because of the distance between time and space. In contrast, the ethnographic approach of anthropology relies on the author's long-term immersion in observation, in response to unexpected situations, when entangled in ethical dilemmas, and with vivid human experience, to inject new vitality into certain seemingly conclusive questions and areas of convergence.
Editor-in-Charge: Yu Shujuan
Proofreader: Yan Zhang