Buskers of New Orleans: Transgressive Sociology in the Urban Underbelly

Abstract

This article is based on extensive ethnographic research involving living and working on the urban fringes of the postindustrial, tourist-intensive economy of New Orleans. As this late modern metropolis has experienced great structural transformations, and as new urban dwellers have emerged with their own unique cultural solutions to the structural problems posed in late modernity, this work captures the culture of urban dwellers living on the social periphery of New Orleans. The analysis reveals the less-seen spaces of New Orleans, intimately depicting the social life of the new creative urban buskers through sociological analysis and reflexive ethnographic interpretation. Revealing the underbelly of New Orleans requires not only traditional interviews and participant observation but also full immersion into the subcultures of buskers through my performing on the streets with buskers in the tourist economy as they carve out creative and transgressive lives on the urban fringes.