Elijah Anderson

Elijah Anderson (* 1943 in Hermondale , Missouri ) is an American sociologist and criminologist . He is the Sterling Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Yale University .

Life

Anderson studied at Indiana University Bloomington up to his BA degree in 1969, received an MA from the University of Chicago in 1972 and received his Ph.D. in 1976. from Northwestern University in Evanston , Illinois . He then taught at the University of Pennsylvania . Anderson has been Professor of Sociology at Yale University since 2007 .

Anderson became internationally known through his ethnographic studies of violence and social order in the slums of large American cities, in particular through his scientific examination of the term respect . According to Anderson, this term is not used in the traditional way for consideration. In the code of the street , respect means fear and submission in the sense of: Whoever has respect for me is afraid of me. If fear or submission is not shown, this is considered disrespect ( dissing ) and is a cause for immediate violence.

This explanatory approach for street and youth violence is more helpful for the criminologist Joachim Kersten than the disintegration theory of many violence researchers. According to Hans Joachim Schneider , Anderson modified the criminological neutralization mechanism with his Inner-City Street Code Theory : In order to assert oneself, the urban street culture requires learning a willingness to use violence that controls the social interaction of delinquent young people.

Fonts (selection)

• Streetwise: Race, Class, And Change In An Urban Community , University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1990, ISBN 0-226-01815-6 .
• Code of the street. Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city , WW Norton, New York 1999, ISBN 0-393-04023-2 .
• A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men , 2nd Edition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2003, ISBN 0-226-01959-4 .
• Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black, and Male , University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2008, ISBN 0-8122-4097-9 (editor).
• The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life , WW Norton & Company, New York 2011, ISBN 0-393-07163-4 .

Web links

• Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale University
• Elijah Anderson: Urban Ethnographer , Personal Homepage.
• Anderson interview on Code of the Street , The Atlantic , August 18, 1999.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Joachim Kersten on Elijah Anderson, The currency is called respect . In: taz , January 4, 2008, accessed on March 11, 2018.
2. ↑ Hans Joachim Schneider : Criminology. De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-024826-5 , p. 214.