No Way Out by Waverly Duck

Author:Waverly Duck [Duck, Waverly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226298238
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

While I was saying all that, Fred and Dave were laughing so hard that they began to tear up. Two hours later, Dave drove me back to my car at the gym and agreed to be interviewed about growing up in Bristol Hill. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that Fred told me the threat was directed toward me: if I turned out to be a cop, I would end up in a ditch. The degree of trust involved in acting like his friend, sitting at his table, and meeting members of his family meant that Dave needed me to know that if I betrayed him there would be consequences. In telling the story about Javier, Dave was trying to gauge my response to see both whether I might be an undercover police officer and whether I would lie, knowing that we shared similar experiences with Javier. I passed the test because instead of accepting Dave’s account, I pointed out its implausibility.

Since as an ethnographer I ask questions very similar to those posed by police investigators, our informal interviews made Dave uncomfortable. Once he even showed up with his girlfriend at the community college where I worked to see whether I was telling the truth about my job. Fred said that Dave genuinely liked me, however, and we began to spend time together without Fred. Dave soon became one of my most valued sources of information, and I considered him a friend. In many ways Fred protected me by vouching for my credibility; indeed, without him I would have been unable to complete this research.

Roger Gould (2003) pointed out that violent conflict is likely to occur in symmetrical relationships among friends and within families. With regard to retaliation, he emphasized that violence tends to be local and that violence in places like Bristol Hill has an order to it that seems to be defined by the rules of those in the know. In the Lyford Street community, there are very few anonymous actors. Tracing the source of information leaks requires the reproduction of an account with details that only a witness or someone who heard their testimony could produce.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.