Floating City Read Online Free PDF

people stayed in neighborhoods segregated by race and class, blacks with blacks and whites with whites, poor separated from rich, and their children living in the same way, the patterns passed down through generations. Now
that
was a setting handmade for a sociologist. All an eager, aspiring young ethnographer had to do was hang out long enough for the locals to let you into their lives. Shine had been telling me since our very first meeting to get a car and drive around the city and get afeeling for the immensity of it—the huge variety of communities and peoples and neighborhoods—but I’d dismissed it as the usual boilerplate advice people give tourists. The truth was, despite all my own concerns about the transition from Chicago and my tentative steps into the rich variety of worlds contained in the city of New York, broad and shallow was just not my style. I really did believe in immersion. Find a place, hang out, get to know the people, and keep coming back. But Shine kept pushing me. “You need to move around more, you understand? I keep telling you, but you don’t listen.” Now I was realizing that Shine and Analise were teaching me the same thing. So were many of the other New Yorkers I had met and studied. They were all pointing me away from the idea of static, unchanging lives to the themes of movement and change. Instead of drawing boundaries, they were crossing them. Instead of looking for places to anchor their work, they were constantly pulling their anchors up and putting them down elsewhere, wherever a new opportunity arose. My challenge was similar. New York was different and it needed its own kind of sociology. It required new concepts beyond
neighborhood
and a new method of immersion that wasn’t fixed in place. These people were on the move. That was the defining fact about them, and their true community seemed to be the sum of all the relationships they were forging, the many social ties that they formed as they crossed the terrain of the city. So losing the notion of geographic areas as primordial urban units of socialization was my first step.
    But what did it mean to frame “community” as a network? Especially in the underground economy, a dangerous place by definition, where patterns of life were fragile and elusive? And these New Yorkers were moving not just in physical space; they were also reaching beyond their preordained lot in life. Capturing this might mean setting aside other equally tried-and-true sociological principles, such as
Where we come from defines who we are
or
Education isthe key predictor of success
. Those truisms weren’t going to explain why a crack dealer was going to art shows or why the daughter of a wealthy financier was moonlighting as a madam. I was watching entrepreneurship in its truest and fullest sense, risk taking for both material gain and personal transformation. Since New York’s underground economy gave its residents a chance to reinvent themselves across worlds—since it was the chance encounter across predictable boundaries that could bring people like Shine and Analise more dollars or stature—I needed a sociology built less on neighborhoods and more on the networks anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “webs of significance.” By watching the underground economy’s hidden strivers, I could record a form of social mobility that had little to do with college degrees or handshakes at corporate boardrooms. And though the pursuits of the underground were the timeless essence of New York, money and success, they also spoke to what the city was becoming in the twenty-first century: global in feel and increasingly fast paced, its people endlessly shuttling across familiar social landscapes and tribal boundaries as they wove new patterns in the world. This was the future being made, and I was there to document it.
    My excitement began to rise.
    At the same time, so did a queasy feeling. None of these