In this tote was some material she had forgotten about: unpaid bills, bail receipts, letters from prison and a few extant fragments of hastily scrawled in situ field notes. ‘‘I’m so happy,’’ she said with visible and somewhat exaggerated relief, ‘‘that I didn’t give you this to take through security yourself.’’ Over the course of our correspondence, I had asked her from time to time if she had any book artifacts that escaped destruction. All those records had now been burned: Even before the controversy began, Goffman felt as though their ritual incineration was the only way she could protect her friend-informers from police scrutiny after her book was published.Īt the gate in Newark, Goffman unshouldered a bulky zippered tote bag. She had to spend more than a year chopping up and organizing these notes by theme for her book: the rituals of court dates and bail hearings relationships with women and children experiences of betrayal and abandonment. Her field notes, which she kept with obsessive fidelity - often transcribing hourslong conversations as they happened in real time - ran to thousands of pages. While most ethnographic projects are completed over a year and a half, Goffman spent more than six years working in the neighborhood, which evolved from a field site into what she still basically considers her home. She began the project as a 20-year-old undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania eventually she moved to be closer to the neighborhood, which in the book she calls ‘‘Sixth Street,’’ and even took in two of her subjects as roommates. The object of dispute was Goffman’s debut book, ‘‘On the Run,’’ which chronicles the social world of a group of young black men in a mixed-income neighborhood in West Philadelphia, some of them low-level drug dealers who live under constant threat of arrest and cycle in and out of prison. Now, though, she was returning to Madison for a four-day visit, to deliver a lecture and catch up with her graduate students. A 34-year-old untenured professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Goffman had just begun a year of leave at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which she hoped she might use to escape her critics and get back to work. But in the previous months, amid a widening controversy both inside and outside the academy over her research, she and I had developed a regular email correspondence, and she greeted me at the gate as if I were an old friend. Before the morning last September when I joined her at Newark Airport, I had met Alice Goffman only twice.
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