Taxi dancers, Chinese laundrymen, and Peking prisoners: Strangers in the city

Abstract

This paper points out that the concept of the “marginal man”, derived from Simmel’s concept of the “stranger”, embodies a fusion of formal sociology and American pragmatism in early Chicago School theory. This kind of theoretical fusion gave birth to a research method that focuses on life history and, at the same time, an investigation of the objective “new” and “old” life stages of the individual and the individual’s subjective grasp of the conflict between the new and the old life, which served as the predecessor of the later “career approach” of the Chicago School. In the early 20th century, some Chicago School ethnographers studied three types of urban strangers: “taxi dancers” (female dancers hired to dance with clients), Chinese laundrymen in the US, and prisoners in Peking. These studies revealed profoundly different images of old life–new life conflicts. Taxi dancers were able to “move on” from their old lives, Chinese laundrymen firmly held on to the traditions of their home country and their families in order to cope with the new challenges, and prisoners in Peking had failed to adapt and turned to crime after being uprooted from their old lives. This paper concludes that neither the Chinese laundrymen nor Peking prisoners were able to adapt to the new urban life by “moving on” from their old family and village life. Thus, their paths to modernity differed fundamentally from those of the marginal man. Finally, this paper applies Robert Park’s views on “civilization” to explain these different Chinese and Western individuals’ paths to urban life.