Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Life and Culture

The Main Argument

This is the cultural analysis of the life style, values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of those blacks living in the "ghetto" - the rundown slums associated with the horde of social problems as crimes, drugs, unemployment and dissolution of family. One of the central gist of the argument developed here has to do with the conception of the term culture itself. That is, against the "hard" view of culture that posits a conception of culture as the determining force of people's behavior independent of the situations they are located in, Hannerz argues that culture is largely situational and is fundamentally about the adaptation of behavior to certain environmental and situational conditions people find themselves in. Further, culture is interactional. It is transmitted through the interaction processes people are engaged in, and its transmission is partly a matter of statistical frequency - more people are exposed to certain behaviors, more likely that these behaviors come to be established as part of the repertoire of cultural behavior. Yet, individuals are not merely cultural dopes. Rather, in accordance with the general "soft" view of culture in that it sees people as capable of adjusting to the situational context they are in, culture is here conceived as fairly malleable. Then, somewhat in a similar fashion to the stance later adopted by Swidler, individuals are seen as actors capable of choosing desired sets of behaviors from cultural "repertoire" they are endowed with with their own will. Because of this conception of culture, the important conclusion drawn is that "ghetto dwellers" are probably capable of adjusting to the new situation quickly once structural barriers that preclude their advancement into the successful life in the mainstream American culture has been removed. So in the end, policies aiming to remove these structural barriers, rather than those social-work solutions that attempt to alter the lifestyles of people forcibly.

That conclusion is rendered more convincing when we look at how Hannerz talks of in discussing what constitutes the "cultural repertoire" for the ghetto dwellers. That is, these repertoire does not consist of elements solely specific to the ghetto culture only, but rather in large part this repertoire consists of the elements adopted from the main stream American culture that penetrates the ghetto life from many different angles - be that mass media, social workers, police and other public officers, etc. Obviously, there would be many discrepancies between the ghetto specific form of culture and the main stream culture. Here, Hannerz talks of the "ghetto-specific public imagery" that bridges the gap between these two modes of actions. In other word, this ghetto-specific public imagery is a legitimation mechanism that give some sense of legitimacy and validity to the ghetto-specific form of behavior, often in terms of the main stream culture values and beliefs. So again, the key idea here is that of the adaptation. Yet, adaptation is meaningful for Hannerz only in the context of social interaction. That is, how different forms of adaptation are adopted by different people are largely the results of their social interactions they are situated in. So, for instance, those facing the stronger peer pressure may not be able to act according to the main stream values even if the chance to do so arises, whereas that same adaptation to the main stream culture would be easier for those without such strong peer pressure. It is precisely this sort of complex interplay of the ghetto specific culture and main stream culture that is making the lives of ghetto dwellers rather precarious and difficult.
 

Other, More Minor Points.

Chapter 1 mentions of the several advantages of using an anthropological, ethnographic approach in studying the ghetto life - that of providing for the grass root description of the daily life of people not necessarily focusing on the "social problems" other social scientists tend to more narrowly focus on. In the beginning part of chapter 9, notice of the summary on the development of ideas regarding the two conflicting views on the role of culture - one "hard" cultural assertion, and the other "situational" view which Hannerz favors. At the last section, "The Likelihood for Change", while the main assertion here is again the aforementioned optimism that ghetto dwellers may be quite amenable to change once structural barriers are removed, it is interesting that Hannerz mentions of the difficulty of mobilizing black population under the distant and now perhaps largely irrelevant idealization of past African achievements. Yet there is a good deal of lesson here, and I would think that the lack of "heroes" for the African American population - unlike in the white population - may have a profound psychological effect as children go through the "main stream" education.

Finally, one meritorious contribution of this article in more general terms. Insofar as showing how the conceptualization of the notion of "culture" can have a profound impact on how we conceive of the possibility of change in the ghetto life, it points out nicely the need for social scientists to be aware of the social and political implications of what they say and write about.