Ghetto

Abstract

Although the social sciences have made extensive use of the term “ghetto” as a descriptive term, they have failed to forge a robust analytical concept of the same, relying instead on the folk notions taken for granted at each epoch in the society under examination. This article constructs a relational concept of the ghetto as a Janus-faced instrument of ethnoracial closure and control by drawing on the historiography of the Jewish diaspora in Renaissance Europe, the sociology of the black American experience in the Fordist metropolis, and the anthropology of ethnic outcasts in East Asia. This reveals that a ghetto is a social-organizational device composed of four elements (stigma, constraint, spatial confinement, and institutional encasement) that employs space to reconcile the two antinomic purposes of economic exploitation and social ostr! acization. The ghetto is not a “natural area” coterminous with ‘the history of migration’ (as Louis Wirth argued), but a special form of collective violence concretized in urban space. Articulating the concept of ghetto makes it possible to disentangle the relationship between ghettoization, urban poverty, and segregation, and to clarify the structural and functional differences between ghettos and ethnic clusters. It also enables us to spotlight the role of the ghetto as symbolic incubator and matrix for the production of a spoiled identity, and suggests that it should be studied by analogy with other institutions for the forced confinement of dispossessed and dishonored groups such as the reservation, the refugee camp, and the prison.