“The Wire meets academia” is how Slate describes Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, the fascinating new book by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. Here’s Emily Bazelon’s summary:

Venkatesh, who is now a professor of sociology and African-American studies at Columbia, spent 1995 to 2003 following the money in 10 square blocks of the Chicago ghetto. He finds an intricate underground web. In it are dealers and prostitutes—and also pastors who take their money, nannies who don’t report income, unlicensed cab drivers, off-the-books car mechanics, purveyors of home-cooked soul food, and homeless men paid to sleep outside stores. Venkatesh’s insight is that the neighborhood doesn’t divide between “decent” and “street”—almost everyone has a foot in both worlds.

Readers of Freakonomics will remember Venkatesh as the University of Chicago graduate student whose fieldwork in the ghetto led him to realize why, for instance, drug dealers still live with their mothers. But his really important previous credit is his first book, American Project (2000), which intricately described the life within, and the social and physical disintegration of, several large blocks of South Side housing projects. Like Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalk (1999), which investigated the social and economic life of the brothers who sell used books and miscellany on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, Venkatesh’s projects are urban sociology of the most compelling type, and well written to boot.

Yesterday Sudhir was on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC [disclosure: I work for WNYC] and you can hear the conversation, punctuated by some interesting listener calls, here. But all y’all macacas might also enjoy taking a look at the prologue and first chapter of the book, which Harvard University Press makes available on its website. Here’s a quick excerpt from the prologue that points out, among other things, a desi angle:

Simultaneously, I must admit that I benefited greatly from my involvement as a broker in underground dealings. Many people perceived me as a disinterested mediator—a characterization that helped open doors and allay concerns. For example, some people told me that they were hesitant to speak with me until they saw me settle a dispute and realized I was not a police officer or a friend of any particular hustler in the neighborhood. As important, I was neither white nor black, so I was not immediately identified with the police (white) or as a resident of the community (black) who might have a reason to monitor the behavior of others in public space. My South Asian identity gave me an indeterminate and unthreatening presence, and I was known more for my status as a university student interested in the historical experiences of black Chicagoans. Over time and in this way, even though I tried to limit my direct involvement, I came to be like those residents who tended to perform similar adjudicative and diplomatic functions. Many people viewed me as part of a class of brokers and mediators who could solve a problem.

Residents still viewed me skeptically, however, when I would not accept payment for helping to mediate a conflict. And rumors expectedly followed: I was working with gangs to move drugs in Asian neighborhoods; I was bringing college students to local prostitutes for a fee; I was a police informant. In other words, despite my claims to the contrary, many felt that I was like the local mediators who carried a brokerage fee and that I was also a hustler. And if I, an absolute outsider and utter anomaly to the world of Maquis Park, could become a part of that shady world, we can see how enormous, and ever-growing, this world truly is.

There are plenty more important points to be made about this work, but it’s nice to see a macaca who has found a way to use the accident of his race and origin as an advantage in generating knowledge about our society that everyone can use.