Sex, drugs, and sociology: one scholar's deep dive into the black markets of the Big Apple.

• Author: Tuccille, J.D.
• Position: Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy - Book review

Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy, by Sudhir Venkatesh, 304 pages, Penguin Press, $27.93

SUDHIR VENKATESH, a sociologist at Columbia University, has made a name for himself as an ethnographer--a scholar who spends time with his subjects, getting to know them, participating in their lives, and skating along the edges of journalism in the process of gathering data. Much of his attention has been focused on underground economic activity, including drug dealing and prostitution. His most recent book, Floating City, is a memoir of his years spent penetrating New York City's vast underground economy, with an emphasis on cocaine and sex.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The hard data is mostly published elsewhere, though there are enough numbers here to reveal that if prohibitionist efforts against drugs and prostitution ever came close to success, New York's economy would be devastated. Floating City is primarily of interest, though, for its insights into the culture and people of New York's illicit markets--a group that includes Venkatesh himself, whose observer status is colored by moralistic biases and a shambolic personal life, and is compromised by his close interactions with his subjects.

Underground activity comprises 20 to 40 percent of most urban economies, Venkatesh reports, but that doesn't mean it's identical from city to city. In Chicago, his previous stomping ground, illicit activity was based around tightly knit neighborhoods, but in New York it functions through networks that transcend geography and social barriers, with access controlled by cultural markers. Venkatesh suggests that this is a glimpse of the evolving future everywhere. "In the new world," he writes, "culture rules. How you act, how you dress and how you think are part of your tool kit for success."

The strivers in this world, including the entrepreneurial black coke dealer, Shine, and the equally ambitious Latina prostitute, Carla, continually seek access to the "white world" of higher-income, better-paying customers. But to gain access to this market, it's not their skin color they change, but their social signifiers. Shine studies GQ, and Esquire for clues to proper attire in SoHo bars and artsy parties, and he deliberately reins in his black mannerisms. Margot, a madame, creates a "finishing school for hot young black and brown women" where she teaches young prostitutes basic tricks of the trade, flattery, and more...