On the ethnographic touch

Abstract

I heard the pounding of the basketball echo off the boarded-up school building. Three high school boys played on an abandoned pad of concrete. There was no net for the rim and sometimes the ball seemed to fall through the hoop so cleanly there was the illusion it had missed altogether. I stopped and watched and felt like playing, partly because they could use another man to make opposing teams with two each. I asked if I could play and one of them said, Yeah. So he and I were one of the teams. I was staying in a youth hostel in Fairmount Park, the large expanse of grass and trees that lies on either side of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River. I had just hauled part of my library and household goods to Philadelphia from Madison, Wisconsin. Through the University of Pennsylvania I had received a dissertation grant to study the everyday life of Afro Americans, and I was walking through an old section of city along Lombard Street where black people had historically lived. My wife, Karen, was to come out on the next trip. Now, on a warm September Saturday, I was dribbling the ball and was either going to pass off or drive in for layup. My teammate and the other two were playing at playing ball; I was caught up in a double game. My partner might try an impossible move and lose the ball, or try the same daring feint and succeed. Either way the three of them laughed and commented on it and talked to one another and I had trouble picking up what they were saying. Some of the moves they were trying were so exaggerated and risky none of us had any hope they would work. I was alert to differences between the way I had grown up playing in the white American middle class of small midwestern towns and urban, black Philadelphia. The first difference was a big one. At home we had always gone by the rule that if your team makes a basket, the other team gets the ball. In Philadelphia it was just the opposite. I passed off to my teammate, he made the shot, and we kept the ball. This game, new to me, was called, Make it, take it. With those rules the team that started making their shots, could get on a roll and win without ever losing the ball. The rule was disconcerting to me and had the effect of making the game more intense you had to be better on defense to block the other team's shot, and get the ball in order to stop their momentum and start your own. At the same time there was all that incentive to make your own shot because the reward was you had the ball again immediately. They were playing at playing and I could not quite push myself into the style of what they were saying and doing. One of the main things they did was obscure the real score so no one could keep track of the amount by which a team was winning or losing. The margin of difference between scores in that little byplay always kept the two teams close, although my man and I were winning by a good bit I was pretty sure. Playing basketball while growing up, I had learned how to work on my shots. We used to practice a jump shot from the keyhole, then stand and pump in free throws, then two Dan Rose is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania