used the phrase talk is cheap earlier. Why do I conclude by saying that the principle is that talk may be cheap? Well, the reason is that ethnographers are not only interested in comparing what people say and what they do or bringing people's statements into an articulation or a dialogue with the things that they take for granted. But we're also interested in the meaning that stories have in telling us about the kind of people that we're spending time with and getting to know. Sometimes whether or not a story is true or false is really not important. What matters a lot more is that the story that somebody tells us can be an index to the kind of person that they are or the kind of life that they lived. in Sidewalk. Some of you may remember the section on Mudri telling me that the reason that he ended up not being able to read and write was because he had seen lynchings in the South. In a footnote toward the end of the book, I analyze the historical facts associated with lynchings in South Carolina. And I conclude that while it may be improbable that there were people hanging from trees every day when Mudrick went to school or on a regular basis as he may have remembered, what was important was that the story that he told me whether or not it was exactly accur accurate factually was an index to the kind of life that he had lived. Only a certain kind of person who had lived a certain kind of life, who had had certain kinds of experiences, would have even thought to tell me the story and explain his literacy in the way that he did. And so what we're trying to do when we think of the things that people tell us, when we think of talk in general, is bring a complex lens to it to look at it in terms of its factual basis, but also in terms of the kind of truth that it represents whether a factual truth or some other truth or index into the character or the kind of people that we are actually writing and thinking about. The second principle that I try to do my work by as an ethnographer is that context is crucial. What I'm trying to do is to take the interactions and the things that I see on the street every day and to put them in a framework that connects them up with the society and the social life that is driving them and making them what they are. So, I start the film out at the beginning with a reference to local law 33 in which the city councilman, Ed, the former city councilman, Ed Wallace, is explaining how he had passed this local law in order to help a poet sell his poetry, a poet that had been discriminated against by the police. And we then see one of the vendors explain that when they had found out about this local law back in 1982, they were surprised to discover that actually they could also be out on the street with that under that local law selling written matter. That this was a written matter exemption under the local vending ordinances. For the entire city of New York, there's only about 800 vendors licenses and people who wanted to sell general merchandise of any kind had no right to be out there. But now suddenly there was this loophole in the law that made it possible for people to sell written matter. And the homeless took advantage of this loophole and were able to create an entire entrepreneurial activity on the streets to support themselves. Before introducing you to any of the men in the film, Barry and I decided to start out with that snippet of interviews to give the context for how it is that these men are out there in the first place. And then the next thing that we do is we go to Greenwich Village itself and we have Hakee take us on a tour of the neighborhood and the village. Once again, trying to provide the context for the activity that is going to be displayed in the film. The context is the neighborhood context, the place that these people live and work and which makes it possible for them to do this kind of thing. Hakeim describes it as a literary neighborhood. And what he means by that is that this is a neighborhood with lots of readers. And he shows that it's a place not only where many writers have been, but it's also the kind of place where people come out of the subways looking for books and magazines. Not any neighborhood would support activity of this kind. And so it's important to understand that context as well. Those are the local contexts. Those are the things that are obvious from being out there and being among the men as they talk about their lives. But then there are more distant contexts as well. There are more distant phenomena that we have to also understand if we're understand the contextual factors. And so we spend a good deal of time in the film focusing on things like the labor market, the criminal justice system, the impact of drug laws, and a range of other phenomena. the housing market that are much further distant from the lives of these men in terms of what you can see with your naked eye when you're out there as an observer, but which you find out and you have to figure out through searching and through studying and through interviewing and through looking in every possible direction to understand what the contextual connections and the contextual links are. The job of a of an ethnographer is not to allow him or herself to be blinded by the things that are so close in front of them and the things that people tell him at close hand that he or she forgets the more distant factors and the more distant phenomena that are driving the local scene. To forget those things and to be blinded um by the things that are only close at hand is to engage in what we call in the methodological appendix the ethnographic fallacy. And the ethnographic fallacy is the idea that you can understand a world simply by the things that you see in front of your eyes. What we're trying to do in Sidewalk in believing and working as if context is crucial is to place all of the things that we see at close range in a more distant context. The third principle that I try to work by when I do this kind of work is to show the people and to show the situations to actually bring them to life in a vivid way. Ethnographers are essentially the frontline workers of sociology. We are the people who go out into the world into the everyday lives of human beings in their natural context and we take the abstract theories of our discipline and we counterpose them to what is going on in the real world and we see whether or not we can actually find living breathing human beings and actual situations which conform to the theories or whether in fact we find discrepancies. disease with which we can take back news to our colleagues in the field of sociology and say you know what you have a problem your theory doesn't apply exactly the way that you think that it does I'll give you an example of one of the ways in which I had to deal with that in this particular um in this particular film and that was in trying to find out what had happened to the men and how some of them had dealt with their lives since the book had been written I was interested in some of the transformations that some of them made. I went into the field and went back to the blocks with some of the received wisdom of sociology um which is based on a tremendous number of very careful studies which suggest that people tend to make transformations out of drug use, out of alcoholism um into the labor market after prison by going through programs and that these programs and also the family ties and the friendship ties that they have are absolutely essential in the transformations that they're going to make. And yet, as you know from the end of the film, there were a number of people like Butterroll who made transformations without any help from anybody. And it wasn't simply a matter of them making these claims and but in fact they had gone through a program where they were trying to take credit for it. It was in fact the case that there were some men who were just simply agents of their own destiny and had done it without the help of the programs. And even though it went against the received wisdom of my field in some sense and it went against in some sense my own political prejudices which is I would like to provide data that provides support for bringing about more of these programs. It was absolutely essential that I show these people and that I show that there were some people who made it without those programs. At the same time, we saw that there was a range and variation, including Ishmael, who made it into the Chelsea Piers job after going coming out of prison by going through a very special program. And we'll talk more about Ishmamail in a little while. But the point of all of this is that when we do this kind of work, we have to find the living, breathing human beings. We can't just go around telling everyone that this is the way the world works and not have some members of our discipline, in this case the ethnographers, going out there and finding out whether or not we can actually meet people that conform with what's going on. Now, in addition to showing the people, I'm also a firm believer when I work in trying to show the situations. The situations that we see on a daily basis out on the street are also a very important thing to be able to confront against the theories that sociology has for explaining the world. And as you know, a big part of sidewalk which I was encouraged by Hakee was to look at the work of Jane Jacobs. Hakee was originally the one who suggested that I read the death and life of great American cities. And when I read that book, a book carefully, a book which I certainly knew about and I knew had been very influential in sociology, I discovered that Jacobs argued that eyes and ears upon the street make a street safe and comfortable. And yet, when I went out onto the street and looked at those situations on 6th Avenue, I noticed that eyes and ears on the street over 30 years after Jacobs had written her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, were not making people feel safe and comfortable. Now, unlike in Jacob's era, we had a period of tremendous inequality and cultural difference where there were large numbers of a poor African-American men um living out on 6th Avenue. And suddenly these eyes and ears weren't making the streets safe and comfortable for middle class whites or blacks or Asians or Latinos that were walking down the street. And so part of my job was to go back to the discipline of sociology with my findings and say, you know what, we need to revise this theory a little bit for the era in which we're living. And so it's by showing the situations in detail and showing the people that we can confront the abstract theories and give a sense for how people live. Now, when we present rounded when we present characters in our in our work, when we show the people, we're not really presenting rounded characters in the way that a novelist would. A novelist is interested in the most rounded version perhaps of a human being, the sing the most complex version. What we're interested in when we do our work as ethnographers is looking at people as incumbents in roles and situations. And so we tend to show a much more uh narrow version of an individual person. We try to show them for their relevance to the account that we are writing. A good example of this is the case of Andrew Manshelle, the head of the business improvement district, the lawyer for it, who is um shown in the film giving his opinions about the vendors. He's a very influential person in this account because he's somebody involved in writing local laws that are going to ultimately restrict some of the vending space um for the men on 6th Avenue and other parts of the city. And Mr. Manshelle, when I went and found him in the interview, expressed that these men are not paying rent, that they were um that they were creating a certain kind of disorder, and that it wasn't good for them or for the city to have them out there. that that that's not an appropriate life choice. His opinion was important because it was an opinion that these men live with every day and that influences the life of the street. From my perspective, we could infer the existence of this opinion and never find Mr. Manchelle. We could infer the existence of this opinion because people wouldn't be living like this if some people didn't believe that. Um but at the same time we there in other words there wouldn't be pressure for them to leave the streets. There wouldn't be pressure on the police to remove them. There wouldn't be pressure to cut down on local laws if there weren't some people who believe that. But at the same time I didn't feel and I don't feel that it's my job as an ethnographer to just assume the existence of such people. My goal is to actually find them and to see what they think. And so I interviewed him for this film. However, he no more than anyone else is presented as a fully rounded character in those few snippets of film that comes ac that come across in the film. He comes across as in a fairly narrow way um as an incumbent of a role. The interesting thing is that he came across to me in everyday life as I got to know him beyond the film as a very very decent and upstanding person and he was one of the few people um who I got to know in the process that was part of the business community who took an interest in getting to know some of the vendors and came to know Hakee as well. So it shows that some people are more complex than they come across necessarily in a film of this kind. Likewise, the Christmas tree sellers on Jane Street are presented in the film in a pretty simple way. They're not presented as fully rounded characters, but as incumbents in a role, um the role of white people who are selling Christmas trees for a limited period of time on the street. Now, we could have presented them in a much more complex way, and had we done an entire film about them, we would have done that. In fact, these people who whose names are the romps are a wonderful family who have their own book out called A Christmas on Jane Street. And this book is a fully rounded portrait of themselves as a family and the work that they do selling Christmas trees during this one month of the year. Now, a lot of people have asked me when they've seen the film whether or not I'm trying to draw a very strict comparison between the black men on the street and the white Christmas tree sellers to suggest that the black men are not allowed inside of these establishments because they are poor and black whereas these other people are white. And the answer is no. As those of you who have read the book know, there I argue that the comparison must be much more complex. That the Christmas tree sellers are there for only a month a year. That they are a family. That they are known in the community having been there for a very long time and for limited stretch stretches of time. Whereas the um black men in sidewalk are out on the streets all the time in the in their communities and have a very different relationship to the people surrounding them. However, whiteness does enter into it in some ways and this is something that I am able to explore in more detail in the book. So if a fundamental thing that we're trying to do is to show the people and to show the situations at the same time I want to say that there's another thing that is just as important to me as that and that is the importance of trying not to insulate myself from the data that comes that is in front of me. I believe that one of the things that makes ethnography rigorous is as the sociologist Howard Becker once wrote is that it is an open method. It is a method that does not close it off to data but keeps itself open to all possibilities all the time. What distinguishes us as ethnographers from survey researchers and from interviewers is that people who do survey research and interviewing know the basic topics and the basic things that they are going to find out about in advance. In a sense, they cannot possibly be as open-minded as the ethnographer who goes out into the natural worlds of people and has no idea what he or she is going to confront. And when I was out on 6th Avenue, one of the hallmarks of what I tried to do was to be open to the wide variety of people that I met and to be open to the wide variety of situations that I confronted. When you first go out into a field situation, you frequently can be taken in by the first person that you meet. In this case, it was Hakee. And in part, because of his own encouragement, I ended up meeting a lot of other kinds of people. But if the first person that you meet drives your agenda and becomes the basis of the kinds of questions that you ask, there are going to be many other kinds of subjectivities that are out there that you're not going to have any knowledge of or any information about and that the reader in the end is not going to be able to give you to really learn about. It's very convenient for a researcher to present a very limited view of any social situation because it makes it easier for the researcher to present a particular point of view. The more complexity and the more people's perspectives that we gain, the more difficult it is to say any one particular thing about a place or an institution or an organization. And so one of the things that I was trying to do here was to show the widest range of people and situations. And in the beginning of the film, you saw that we started out with about seven or eight different people. And each one of them came to the blocks in a very different way. I could have started out by showing just a few men who came out of prison or just a a few people that were laid off or Hakee who came from the corporate world, but it was really only the multiplicity of those views that of those ways of coming to the street that really showed me um the the diver the diversity of paths to sidewalk life. And at the end of the film, it was the same with the endings. There was a a wide variety of endings and no one of them could have summarized what was going on there. When I first started out on the blocks, I had no idea that it was going to be so complicated and I constantly searched for variation. One of the things that I try to do when I do field work of this kind is because I can't engage in a probabilistic sample and go out and search at random and do random samples of who I'm going to pick out of a hat. What I try to do is I ask myself as I'm doing my fieldwork, if I had conducted a random sample, who might have made it into the account that's not currently in the account right now? And by asking myself that question, I always push myself to find additional people, additional points of view, and additional perspectives that will give me a more complex sense of what is happening.