芝加哥舞女、中国洗衣工与北平囚犯:都市中的陌生人

Taxi-Dancers,Chinese Laundrymen,and Peking Prisoners:Strangers in the City

本文指出,受齐美尔“陌生人”命题启发的“边缘人”概念,体现了形式社会学与美国实用主义在芝加哥学派理论中的交融,并催生了以考察个体生命史为核心的研究方法。通过比较二十世纪初芝加哥学派的学者运用生命史的视角对三类都市陌生人(芝加哥舞女、中国洗衣工与北平囚犯)的研究,本文考察不同人群的新旧历程及其进入都市新生活的不同状态。研究发现,无论是身处异国的中国洗衣工,还是背井离乡进入城市生活并沦为罪犯的中国农民,都不能以“边缘人”抛弃乡土与家族的个体化方式进入都市生活。文章最后尝试以帕克对“文明”的讨论来解释现代个体进入都市生活时呈现的不同状态。

This paper points out that the concept of“marginal man”,derived from Simmel’s concept of“stranger”,embodies a fusion of formal sociology and American pragmatism in the early Chicago School theory.This kind of theoretical fusion gave birth to the research method focusing on life history,and at the same time,the investigation of the objective new and old life stage of the individual and the individual’s subjective grasp of the conflict between the new and the old life served as the predecessor of the later“career approach”of the Chicago School.In the early 20 th century,some Chicago School ethnographers studied three types of urban“strangers”of taxi-dancers,Chinese laundrymen in America and Peking prisoners.These studies showed profoundly different images of old to new life conflicts.Taxi-dancers were able to“move on”from their old life,while Chinese laundrymen firmly held on to tradition and family of their home country in order to cope with the new challenges and Peking prisoners were those who failed to adapt and turned to crimes after being uprooted from their old life.This paper concludes that neither Chinese laundrymen nor Peking prisoners were able to adapt to the new urban life by“moving on”from their previous family and village life.Thus,their paths to modernity is fundamentally different from that of the“marginal man”.Finally,the paper applies Park’s views on“civilization”to explain these different Chinese and Western individuals’paths to urban life.