Urban Ethnology: Chicago Style and French Touch
Résumé
Comparing research in American urban ethnology on white/non white encounters to French political sociology on the specificity of the “banlieues” (the suburban areas of metropolitan communities) reveals several resemblances and many differences. The latter may stem either from methodological gaps or from the populations observed, or a combination of both. Where Americans focus mainly on microscopic interactions at street level, French scholars tend to address the same issue from the top (the policies and institutions dedicated to the welfare of poor citizens whose parents recently arrived in France), and they do it in a macroscopic way (the structural relations between every stakeholders of a metropolitan area). But different people may opt for different behavior, which in turn leads to alternative explanations: black people in the US and Arab/Islamic people in France do not have the same memories, and do not behave seemingly on every occasion. Historical and cultural factors help explain why their respective strategies differ in everyday life, and why academic knowledge varies from one bank of the Atlantic to the other.
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