Ghetto

Abstract

It is a paradox that, while the social sciences have made extensive use of the “ghetto” as a descriptive term, they have failed to forge a robust analytical concept of the same. In the historiography of the Jewish diaspora in early modern Europe and under Nazism, the sociology of the black American experience in the twentieth-century metropolis, and the anthropology of ethnic outcasts in Africa and East Asia, its three traditional domains of application, the term “ghetto” variously denotes a bounded urban ward, a web of group-specific institutions, and a cultural and cognitive constellation (values, mind-set, or mentality) entailing the sociomoral isolation of a stigmatized category as well as the systematic truncation of the life space and life chances of its members. But none of these strands of research has taken the trouble to specify what makes a ghetto qua social form, which of its features are constitutive and which derivative, as they have, at each epoch, taken for granted and adopted the folk concept extant in the society under examination—which explains that the notion, appearing self-evident, does not figure in most dictionaries of social science, including previous publications of this encyclopedia.