A Place on the Corner, Second Edition by Elijah Anderson

Author:Elijah Anderson [Anderson, Elijah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226019598
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2003-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

6

Social Order and Sociability

Men come to Jelly’s to socialize and “to see what’s happenin’.” The members of the extended primary group exhibit status attributes during such social interaction, drawing upon whatever supports they can use to gain esteem and identity among peers. Their personal characteristics and resources for social regard help put the men “in the running” to be “somebody” in the group at Jelly’s, somewhat independently of how these characteristics and resources are regarded in the wider society.1 It is here at Jelly’s, among peers from similar backgrounds, that a member of the extended primary group feels he has a chance to be “somebody,” and the men care how other group members see them. Jelly’s affords them a chance to be known and to know others intimately during sociability, and this is the primary reason many of them regularly come to Jelly’s.

By their long-term involvements at Jelly’s, the men make a social investment in the extended primary group and in the particular social order they create. Each group member gains a sense of place in this social order, however precarious and open to negotiation it may be, that emerges through social interaction. A person’s place within the group is always situationally sensitive and needs public demonstration from time to time. Indeed, what each man’s conception of place at Jelly’s is is shaped situationally by what liberties other group members allow him and take with him. Others’ conceptions of the man’s place depend in part on what group members have seen him demonstrate in the past, what they “know” him to be capable of, and what all this might mean for their own sense of who they are. In this socially competitive and precarious context, each man’s sense of place is affected by what these others can allow him while still maintaining their presuppositions of “the order” and their places within it. The character of this negotiation affects their collective judgments. The social estimation of the person is communicated to him and others by the way others treat him or attempt to treat him. His reactions to this treatment help define his place within the social order of Jelly’s.

Accordingly, a place in the group requires continued association among the men who make a habit of Jelly’s. It depends in large measure on some long-term and intimate involvement with a group whose members’ social identities depend on one another. Thus status, as achieved in the hierarchies at Jelly’s, is not transferable to just any street corner. Street-corner groups do not typically allow a stranger an automatic sense of place, a comfortable feeling of fitting in. With all its different kinds of people, each one having some sense of his own place in the group, Jelly’s serves as a source of personal identity.

Group members, regardless of rank, feel that others care for them; they belong to the corner group at Jelly’s. This caring is expressed in many different circumstances, most often when a crisis arises in which one person seems to be suffering more than others and more than is expected of his role in the group.

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