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On Hobos and Homelessness
NELS ANDERSON (RAFFAELE RAUTY (Ed.)), 1998 Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 299 pp.; 39.95/US$50.00 hardback; 14.501 US$18.00 paperback
ISBN 0 226 01966 7 hardback; 0 226 01967 5 paperback
Originally published in 1923, Nels Anderson's The Hobo: The Sociology of a Homeless Man remains a seminal text, essential reading not only for those concerned with the problems of homelessness but also for anyone interested in the development of the modem sociological imagination. This book was the first in a series of studies to emerge out of the work of the Chicago School-the closely observed ethnographies of working-class life in early to mid 20th-century Chicago produced by the graduate students of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s-studies that were to have a profound impact upon an emergent ethnographic tradition. Indeed, even whilst the writings on city form and urban ecology by their mentors Burgess and Park slipped from the urban canon-dismissed for a tacit Social Darwinism and an "uncritical stance towards the specific conditions of laissez-faire capitalism which produced the distinctive form of the city which they regarded as a universal 'natural order"' (Jackson, 1985, p. 160)-the work of Anderson (1923), Cressey (1932) and others continued to shape the development of an ethnographic approach for the next 60 years and to retain a unique position in the history of urban ethnography (Jackson, 1985). If for no other reason, a detailed reappraisal of their work and of the work of Nels Anderson in particular is therefore long overdue, and not least as Anderson's other work remains far less well known.
In this respect, the current edition which includes both The Hobo and a range of Anderson's other writings-notably excerpts from Men on the Move, originally published in 1940, as well as essays from Trends in American Sociology (1929), The Urban Community (1959) and Work and Leisure (1961)-is to be widely welcomed. Whilst offering the opportunity to read again Anderson's classic study, as important perhaps is the opportunity the collection affords to place that study in the wider context of Anderson's later writings; so as to trace the development of his thinking about the world of the hobo and migrant labour and changes in his...