The cosmopolitan canopy

An ethnography of one market hall where people who avoid each other everywhere else behave well, and what the room is doing to make that happen.

Elijah Anderson (2004). The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 595(1), 14–31. Read it.

Primary reading — read it before the lecture that sets it.

Anderson spent years watching Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, a place where a racially divided city mixes and mostly manages it. He calls it a canopy: a setting under which people practise civility with strangers, watch each other do it, and take the practice elsewhere. The market is not neutral by accident — the food stalls, the shared seating and the sheer density of eyes all do work. Nor is the canopy reliable, and he records it failing; a place that held nobody at arm’s length would be the first this course had found.

This is the model for your own fieldwork, so read it twice: once for the argument, once for how he writes down what he saw. Notice how much of the paper is description before it is theory. Week 5 is the chair — the barbershop, the salon — where you are a captive audience for forty minutes and conversation is not optional.