Essay on Sidewalks of New York City - 1395 Words

Mitchell Duneier, a sociologist with a rather impressive curriculum vitae to his credit, spent five years of his otherwise privileged life keeping company with drunks, derelicts, drug addicts and the homeless on the sidewalks of New Yorks Greenwich Village. His purpose was not to exploit the individuals whose reason for being on these streets is to drum up whatever income they can by selling books and magazines; rather, it was to learn and understand why they were there. In the process of doing so, Duneier drew his arguments and methods mostly upon symbolic interactionism perspectives theories; his focus on shared meanings, deviant, `laws, individual (and social) interactions flourish throughout Sidewalk. The first†¦show more content†¦In maintaining their existences in sidewalk, those men must also continually create [more] meanings and devise ways to fit their actions together (Hughes, Michael et al. 23). This notion is best portrayed in sidewalk lifes jobs list. As lifes going on, they gradually invent numerous ways to sustain their habits, from magazine vendor, book vendor to panhandler, place holder, table watcher, mover, storage provider and laying shit out, each interweaves with others to form a concrete structure, in which ones function play a supporting role for the rest (81-108). However, no matter how tangled and distinct the jobs are, they all have one same function, to provide the sidewalk men a trade-off between crimes, the worthy enterprise and honest earning, the unworthy one (85). In that sense, its not so hard to see that the men of sidewalk have shared the same meaning of decency, which is, in this case, legal and moral earning. Similar to those living on the streets, members of higher social class have their own set of meanings. In pointing out the differences, and sometime conflicts between the two norms frames, common meaning set of middle (and higher) class members (Set 1) and sidewalk mens one (Set 2), Duneier emphasized deviant using interactionist perspective. The common deviant behaviors that pedestrian often used to accuse the men on sidewalk, according to the author, are: sidewalk sleeping, public urinating,Show MoreRelatedThe Concrete Garbage Heap : New York City940 Words   |  4 PagesThe Concrete Garbage Heap New York City is the centerpoint of thousands of films and pieces of literature, a city whose charm can be felt through words or pictures. Lights, brighter than life itself, blend with a cacophony of car horns and shouts to create an addictive mix of chaos. The glamour and sparkle of New York City is dramaticized to be an all encompassing feeling of wonder that one keeps with them for the rest of their lives. 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