Jelly’s Place: An Ethnographic Memoir

Abstract

This is a report of a field experience in retrospect. An ethnographic study of black streetcorner men, it was conducted in the early 1970s among the patrons of Jelly’s Place, a bar and liquor store on the South Side of Chicago. The 55 men came repeatedly to Jelly’s corner and created a local social stratification system. The focus of the study was the way in which they made and remade their local status system in everyday life. This document describes the field work experience which led me to focus on this particular sociological issue and to represent the social dynamics of the group.