Scrutinising the reflexive ethnography of Urban Outcasts

The core of Bourdieu and Wacquant’s ‘epistemic reflexivity’ demands an embodied reflexivity which takes up the point of view of the practice and the social problems under study via a reflection and reconstruction of the point of view of the ethnographer as an agent embedded in a scientific practice in the scientific field. This must be done to cast light over the social conditions and conditionings that have a possible effect on the construction of the given scientific object under study. However, measured by these standards, Urban Outcasts remains not as pedagogical as one might wish. Despite all the qualities of this neo classic, it makes the critical assessment of its core results more difficult than necessary and tends to impede the possible transfer of the underlying propositions which were intended to ‘invigorate the comparative sociology of polarization from below’.