I walked into the local dive bar and observed the unchanging scene I did every Friday night. The same young soldiers were pushing each other around and sloshing alcohol down each other’s throats. The bartenders were once again serving the locals all the while ignoring the flood of advances being thrown their way by baby booming grandfather like patrons. The usual hustlers were lined up alongside the pool table. They were scanning the crowd and scouting out their mark, ultimately deciding to play within their own pack; each coming out even at the games end. Faces and names vary from week to week but the roles and characters played do not. All who strut, saunter, or slink through that door do so to escape one thing. To escape what they considered to be their life before entering the little hole in the wall they are now indigenous to. We were no different. My friends and I settled on a small table in the back corner of this little box that would serve as our distraction for the night. From my chair I watch the waitresses take turns evading people like dogs in the street dodge cars....
Harding, D. J. (2010). Living the Drame: Community, Conflict, and Culture Among Inner-City Boys. Chicago, IL: The University Of Chicago Press.
To define the groups of pool players, I studied a pool hall in Waterford, Michigan. This pool hall is located on the Waterford border with Pontiac, right off the main highway, in a collapsing business district. This area has seen its better days; it is now falling down the economic ladder. Now it resembles many inner cities of America. The hall is tucked back in off the highway, next ...
8-Ball Chicks: A Year in the Violent World of Girl Gangsters is a compelling glimpse into the lives of females in gangs. The book highlights two things: these women do exist, and they are screaming for help. The book's author, Gini Sikes, is a New York-based journalist who spent two years chronicling the worlds of these girls and women in three cities--Los Angeles, San Antonio and Milwaukee. Through her travels she became immersed in the lifestyles of each gang. What she found on her journey through backyards, living rooms and housing-projects was startling. There are perhaps thousands of girl gang members across the nation, and yes, many of them are violent. Sikes' portrait of female gangs in America will both shock and move you. She delves far beyond the usual clichés and shows a depth to her subjects that are rarely seen. These girls carry razor blades in their mouths and get into fights just like their male counterparts, but many of them overcome tremendous adversity to get out of their gangs and change their lives. Sikes reports on these girl gangsters with compassion and honesty, compellingly raising the issue of our troubled urban youth without posturing or preaching. Sikes details the girl's reactions to her as well as to their own environment. 8-Ball Chicks describes everything from gang members' stories of dangerous initiation rites (girls knowingly having sex with an AIDS infected boy; gang rape initiations; gang wannabes allowing a dozen girls to beat them up at once) to the conditions that drive these young women to join gangs in the first place. Most of these girls she discovered entered the gangs for power and belonging. They did not care if they were hurt because survival became their most significant recourse. If they survived the abuse and the poverty, then they felt powerful. In 8 Ball Chicks, we discover the fear and desperate desire for respect and status that drive girls into gangs in the first place--and the dreams and ambitions that occasionally help them to escape the catch-22 of their existence.
The presence of activity and sport is found within cultures and societies all over the world, and throughout history. Activity in the form of sport can often be the purest form of expression for a society or individual. The sporting world is often thought to be a microcosm of the actual world with the problems and issues of society still being ever present in the sporting community. Since sport can be used as an expression of self, it is no wonder that sport is often a reflection of the society that it occupies. One such society that was deeply impacted by the role of sport is that of Native American boarding school students in the 1800’s and 1900’s. These students lived tough lives but just like how it had helped other cultural societies, sport was able to provide these students with basic needs of autonomy and pride.
On September 12, 2014, I observed two people; Person A and Person B. The observation took place at Applebee’s, a local restaurant, beginning at 7:21 p.m. and ending observation at 8:06 p.m. I was serving their table for the evening, enabling myself to observe them closely. The restaurant had died down from the dinner rush, leaving them one of three tables in the smoking section, normally filled with eight. Along with the outside light fading, the lighting indoors was dim, making the dining experience feel more quiet and intimate. The background noise was filled with a light roar of other group’s conversations, and a jazz station played quietly from the speakers overhead.
In The Sport of the Gods, Paul Laurence Dunbar presents a naturalistic look at African American life during turn of the century. This novel is centered on the “Great Migration” which was the decided shift of the black community from the rural South to the urban North beginning in the early 1900s. Dunbar uses the Hamilton family to represent the false sense of agency African Americans possessed within the post-Reconstruction society. The characters within the family are constantly attempting to better their conditions through appearance, relationships, and eventually treachery, but they are powerless in the strict social confines of the Rural South, and even more so to the tumultuousness of the Urban North. In the end of the story, the family is destroyed but their unfortunate dissolution can then implicate readers and become a catalyst for change and unification within the African American community.
Society has developed this standard way of leaving and when one is put out of this inner circle, they are left to look at life in a whole new perspective, challenging themselves against the norms in order to survive. No group of people knows this better than the “Mole people” introduced in Jennifer Toth’s book, The Mole people, where life is a constant struggle against others, police and what lurks in the abyss of the New York City tunnel system. The sociological concepts of accommodation, alienation, and culture play a key role in how we view and understand the lives of this counterculture based off of various sociological theories. These sociological tools will provide us with the ability to understand the lives of this group of people and
Social exchange theory. What is real is real in its consequences, per W.I. Thomas. If residents in close proximity to a casino perceive themselves as benefitting from gaming then they are likely to view the casino as positive on their environment, if they perceive themselves as incurring costs or being victim to crime they are likely to view it as negative. Some communities report two-fold increase in the social worker case loads, and an ongoing demand existing f...
For nearly half of a century, fragments of our society have continually made outward attempts to create and popularize movements that try to ‘go against’, ‘take over’ or ‘change’ popular culture; in even more far-fetched examples, ‘change’ society as a whole. This idea, as referred to by Roszak in the 1960’s, is commonly known as “counterculture”. A counterculture movement takes one or multiple social norms from established culture that it is in opposition to, and fights said norms. This idea of “culture jamming”, a term coined by the San Franciso area band Negativland, is built on a hope that a counterculture movement can reshape the norms it tries to destroy, into ones which suit its’ needs and ideologies. In the vast majority of cases, the objective of counterculture has not even remotely been reached; in fact, most attempts have failed miserably, unable to attract even the most minute amount of noteworthy attention or following.
Bissinger creates empathy in the reader by narrating the lives of once Permian heros. Charlie Billingsley, a Permian football player, “was somewhere at the top” while he was playing. It was hard for the football town of Odessa to forget “how that son of a bitch played the game in the late sixties”(80). While in Odessa, Permian players receive praise unmatched by even professional football. This unmatchable praise becomes something Permian players like Billingsley become accustomed to, and when he “found out that...you were a lot more expendable in college(80). This lack of appreciation that is equivalent to the one that they have received their whole life makes them go from “a hero one day to a broken down nobody the next”(81). With the realization of this reality, Billingsley becomes one of the many to spend life as a wastrel, living in his memory of playing for the Permian Panthers. The reader becomes empathetic towards how the once likely to succeed Billingsley, becomes another Odessan wastrel due to the over emphasis and extreme praise the Odessan football team receives. Bissinger does not stop with a classic riches to rags story to spur the reader’s empathy but talks about the effect the Odessan attitude toward football has on the health of its players. Just like in many parts of the world, in Odessa, sports equates to manliness and manliness equates to not showing signs of pain. Philip, an eighth grade boy aspiring to one day be a Permian Panther is lauded by his stepfather as he “broke his arm during the first demonstrative series of a game ...[but] managed to set it back in” and continued playing for the rest of the game. It is noted that Philip’s arm “swelled considerably, to the point the forearm pads...had to be cut off”(43). By adding details such as these, Bissinger
Perhaps one of the biggest issues foreigners will come upon is to maintain a strong identity within the temptations and traditions from other cultures. Novelist Frank Delaney’s image of the search for identity is one of the best, quoting that one must “understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors . . . to build our identities”. For one, to maintain a firm identity, elderly characters often implement Chinese traditions to avoid younger generations veering toward different traditions, such as the Western culture. As well, the Chinese-Canadians of the novel sustain a superior identity because of their own cultural village in Vancouver, known as Chinatown, to implement firm beliefs, heritage, and pride. Thus in Wayson Choy’s, The Jade Peony, the novel discusses the challenge for different characters to maintain a firm and sole identity in the midst of a new environment with different temptations and influences. Ultimately, the characters of this novel rely upon different influences to form an identity, one of which being a strong and wide elderly personal
Setting: That was Then…This is Now, had multiple settings but it was mainly placed in either Charlie the bartenders Bar, or in Bryon’s house in Tusla, Oklahoma. In Charlie’s Bar, there is a set of pool tables, lounge chairs and booths, and a long bar. It’s centered near an alley and has a big neon “Charlie’s Bar” outside of the building. Bryon and Mark usually go there to relax for a while, get a couple free cokes from Charlie, and hustle people into playing pool. Though Bryon and Mark are still underage to be in the bar, Charlie keeps a safe guard watching over the two, just in case one or two police come in for a drink. Bryon has a growing I.O.U fund for Charlie since he’s been getting about two cokes every time they go to the bar, but Charlie lets it slide because they two are good friends. The other main setting of the story is Bryon’s house. It is a two-story house, which resides Bryon’s mother, brother, and Mark. Mark lives there because Bryon’s mother had adopted Mark. Bryon’s house is located in the low-income area, where the ruffians live. Though there are a lot of gang-related people there, Mark and Bryon are good friends with everyone, and nothing bad usually happens in there presence.
I glanced around the dimly lit dining room of our neighborhood Jack-In-The-Box at the collection of adolescent girls and boys gossiping about their absent friends, urban families enjoying their weekly treat of chicken fingers with exotic dipping sauces, and a teenage employee attempting to grasp a carpet sweeper with her fry-greased hands. As each of their gazes wandered the room curiously observing the quaint surroundings, their eyes conveniently skipped over the socially unacceptable figure in the corner, but I saw him clearly.
Cohen focuses on criminality and delinquency in lower-class boys, or ‘corner boys’ as he labels them, and the strain that they suffer and how that can lead them to form or join subcultures. The ‘Corner boys’ form their delinquent groups over a mutual feeling of status frustration from their middle-class counter parts and the level of culture that they inhabit. They form the basis of their values on rejecting the middle class culture’s requirements and needs. (Tierney, 2010: 111) However, theorists Cloward and Ohlin take a broader approach to the subject. They argue that there are three different types of subcultures, all based on the concept of status frustration. Cloward and Ohlin outline the three subcultures types as Criminal, Violent and Retreatist (Tierney, 2010: 115). Criminal subcultures are highly represented as ‘mafia’ subcultures, they are deeply rooted in criminal activity; often prostitution, drug dealing and arms trading. Since the members of these subcultures failed in the legitimate system, they had the opportunity due to geographical means to join a criminal subculture where they succeeded. Violent or Conflict subcultures also fail in the legitimate system, however, are not geographically close to a criminal subculture, so for smaller more violent and less organised subcultures, these can be seen in ‘hoodies’ or street gangs. Finally, retreatist gangs failed both in the legitimate and the illegitimate systems and are heavily associated with drug abuse, leading them to commit utilitarian crimes, such as burglary and prostitution to finance their drug
I walked out into my dinning room where I had been mulling over the table all day. I wanted everything to be just so. I glanced at the place settings for the hundredth time, trying to decide if I should sit Alfred Zingale and Matthias Arndt next to each other. It wasn’t that I was worried about conflicting views, actually it was quiet the contrary, and I didn’t want them to be able to double team the other guests. Finally I decided that just because they have essentially the same opinions, I wouldn’t separate them. In my mind they come as a unit because they had co-authored a book. The place cards had been set and I made up my mind that I would do no more rearranging. I bent over the table in my grey sleeveless dress and lit the deep red candles that were extending upward out of the floral arrangement. The guests would be arriving soon and I began to think over the whole situation. Each person has written a book about the dot com industry, how they can be successful as well as how to invest wisely in one. I was hoping to learn a lot of information so I could make a good decision on whether my company would benefit from being online. These thoughts drifted through my head until the doorbell rang.