I Am A Promise Keeper

But not in a creepy way. I am just returning to blog posts long promised, that's all.

While we were on vacation at the loveliest beach house I've ever been allowed to enter, I actually got to read a couple of books. I read Gang Leader for A Day by Sudhir Venkatesh and I read Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer, by Warren St. John. Good books both but I preferred Rammer Jammer. Which is hard to admit, since its about a topic I hate nearly more than any other: college football. It's not quite as good as Moneyball, which actually caused me to become a baseball fan, but it made me a fan of fans. At least Bama fans. But maybe I was already a fan of those folks.

Gang Leader, on the other hand, did not make me a fan of sociologists. I had hoped it would be a Wire-esque expose of leadership of a drug organization, but it was really more about the central conflict of sociology. Should it be more centered on statistics and scientific methods, which are very poor at capturing "true" or "real" stories of people (in this case poor people), or should it rely on ethnography, where the sociologist "lives among" his subjects to fully appreciate their way of life?

The biggest problem, made very clear by this book, is the so-called Heiseberg principle effect on the research. Venkatesh is aware of the problem. He relates several instances where his subject misuse him, sometimes while simultaneously warning him that he might be used, and the uncertainty that introduces into his research. But he relates it all in this faux naif voice, as though it never occurred to him that the problems he encounters or witnesses existed. To paraphrase (and mock) one particular example, he'd say something like, "What did I know? I was just a middle class Indian kid from Southern California. I didn't realize ghettos were considered dangerous." In an effort to avoid sounding like an academic (he teaches at Columbia), he comes across like Gomer Pyle.