Migrant as a Naïve Ethnographer: Mastering New Cultural Urban Space
This paper considers the limited nature of the repertory of research positions in sociological urban studies. In spite of the diversity of actors engaged in urban social space it is either sociologists in themselves or "average native city-dwellers" that are traditionally recognized as legitimate "experts" in its description. The author adverts to one of the alternative urban narratives: to the individual stories of new cultural space mastering reconstructed in in-depth interviews with inner migrants. Resting upon the materials of her field study devoted to migrants from different parts of Russia in St. Petersburg she discovers a number of parallels between the positions of a professional ethnographer investigating the urban space and a newcomer that has to master this space: the asperities of resocialization; the techniques of competence presentation; the "othering" of one's own culture, etc. Correspondingly, this migration narrative is understood as a kind of "naпve ethnography" of the city that felicitously combines the lack of routinized knowledge of the city and the diversity and intensity of encounters with urban everyday life.