The ethnographic narration of a marriage in Chicago's ghetto serves to uncover some of the principles and forms of sociability specific to the contemporary Afro-American (sub)proletariat and to reflect on the social conditions of construction of an object reviled in both social reality and social science. Rendered redundant by the twofold transformation of the labor market and of the political field, the residents of America's urban Bantustans have to make do with degraded imitations and inferior substitutes of the goods, rites, and values sanctified by the encompassing society. The profane millenarism that suffuses their everyday life is the vehicle, not of resistance, as certain populist sociology would have it, but of mere existence within the cracks of the dominant institutions. It affords an opportunity for stressing the virtues of ethnographic observation of the longue duree (over three years in this case). The latter allows one to imbibe the specific temporality of the social world under examination and to elaborate one's hypothesis in situ, but also to eschew the logic of the trial by explicating the knowledge interest guiding the researcher, an interest particularly incongruous in a universe as strongly subjected to the press of material urgency as is the Afro-American ghetto. Within such universe, friendship turns out to be an indispensible precondition for the production of non-artefactual data in that it alone permits the clarification of the social relation that ties the sociologist to his informant-friends, and this in both direction, so as to make this relation function as a permanent pre-analyzer and to minimize the weight of symbolic violence necessarily entailed by such unequal exchange.
