Sidewalk

Duneier dives into the methodological challenges he’s faced in the course of writing Sidewalk and details how those challenges have shaped the book. The first obstacle comes about when he provides an initial manuscript to Hakim, who notes a “major limitation” in the book’s scope: it only focuses on Hakim and gives little attention to the other Sixth Avenue vendors. So he proposes that he and Hakim lecture a class together so they can workshop the book together with the input of undergraduate students at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He invites vendors Alice and Marvin to lecture as well for two weeks. As part of his efforts to expand the scope of research, Duneier decides to work for Marvin the coming summer, in 1996. Marvin initially has reservations but decides to give it a go.

Duneier dresses the same as if he were lecturing in a university hall: in a button-down shirt. He describes his research method of working for Marvin as a form of participant-observation, which entails participating in the work of his subjects directly so that he can observe details that others might dismiss as unimportant. Although some sociologists would enter the field with specific questions in mind, Duneier keeps an open mind as to what will guide his research. Some aspects of Duneier’s methodology are easier than others. He fact-checks details of the men’s lives by speaking with their family members, who are usually happy to comply. He fact-checks to avoid the so-called “ethnography fallacy,” which involves taking subjects at their word instead of verifying their statements (343).

More challenging is Duneier’s commitment to reading to the men the details he will include about them in the manuscript and getting their confirmation of whether they are okay to include prior to publication. For example, Duneier reads back the manuscript to Keith, who gets impatient with the time required to verify information. Keith, however, seems to appreciate how Duneier portrays him: “Yo! Those are my words! Verbatim. You got me good, Mitch. You got the realness out. Does it say ‘Fuck’ in the book?” (350). Keith’s appreciation here also brings to mind the importance of using a tape recorder to keep accurate conversations, which Duneier also tackles in this section.

The most challenging roadblock may be Duneier’s differing racial and class background from his subjects, which has come up in the book numerous times thus far. However, a conversation between two anonymous individuals, X and Y, in the appendix highlights these divides further. Y states that “a regular black person” should be doing this fieldwork instead of Duneier; they also discuss stereotypes of Jewish people exploiting other people for profit (336). Duneier keeps the conversation anonymous because they did not know they were being recorded at the time. Some vendors also falsely perceive Duneier as rich due to stereotypes of Jewish affluence, which poses another problem: given Duneier’s relatively-privileged position compared to the men, when is he allowed to intervene to give them aid and when is he not? He asks: “Could I show my deep appreciation for their struggles and gain their appreciation for my purposes without paying for some simulacrum of it?” (355). But Duneier does eventually learn to say no when the men ask for money, though he later decides to give the participating individuals royalties from the book’s eventual proceeds.

He concludes by stating:

I would like to think that whatever respect I will get will be based not on what I did or didn’t give in the way of resources but on whether the people working and/or living on Sixth Avenue think the work I did has integrity, by whatever yardstick they use to measure (357).

The Notes section delves further into Duneier’s research and fact-checking methods, which involve requesting Hakim’s Rutgers University transcript; paying a trip to Ron’s old apartment; conversations with a University of South Carolina professor about lynching; statistics about illiteracy in the black versus white community; and a discussion of how vending space in Peru compares to New York. He also crunches some data and provides a discussion of recent changes in welfare laws, though it’s too early to say how these policies will impact the poor in America, including street vendors. Duneier uses the notes as another opportunity to challenge sociologists’ unquestioning belief in Jane Jacobs’s “eyes on the street” perspective by presenting the case of Kitty Genovese, a New York woman who was stabbed to death while more than thirty people watched and failed to intervene.

Lastly, Duneier also dissects the “Fuck it!” mentality by assessing Robert K. Merton’s theory of the five different types of individuals in American society: conformists, innovators, ritualists, retreatists and rebels. People who say “Fuck it!” are—according to Duneier’s assessment of Merton’s argument—ultimately retreatists who “reject the goals and means” of American culture as a way to “‘escape’ from the requirements of society” (364). But Sidewalk illustrates the ways in which vendors manage to interact with society regardless of this kind of informal retreat.