Paper short abstract:

'Complicity' (GE Marcus) is proposed as an analytical tool that 1) accounts ethnographically for the situational construction of a social group, and 2) accounts for specific conditions of urban space/culture. It helps to question the inclusiveness/exclusiveness of social interaction in a diversified urban setting.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents research conducted within a group of entrepreneurs planning to open an alternative shopping centre situated in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. At the very heart of the symbolically highly charged neighbourhood (its images ranging from "eldorado of squatters" in the 1980s to "Klein Istanbul") the group saw an opportunity to bring together like-minded individuals interested in setting up business. These were meant to be all kinds of "creative ideas", presented in small-scale shops within the mall (based on Affleck's Palace in Manchester).

Starting fieldwork examining the cultural logic and "urban qualities" of this economic initiative the site transformed into a "neighbourhood initiative" concerned with the living conditions in a social housing complex: Trying to rent space for the mall there the entrepreneurs had discovered an economic scandal concerning the funding of the social housing complex. Thus, besides the initiators of the mall-project and the possible participant shop tenants (all relating to a kind fo alternative, creative culture) my fieldsite had diversified: now it consisted of tenants and local shop owners of all kinds who have lived there for a long time, neighbourhood organisations (representing the city governement and migrant organisations) as well as a growing number of academics all relating to what became understood as "the case" - the sdancal.

Although the participants of the "neighbourhood initiatve" were far from being politically "on the same side", they were situationally acting on the same ground. Thus, tenants and shop owners of different national or ethnic background, living within different trans-/national and local social networks regularly met with social workers, representatives of neighbourhood organisations, journalists, politicians and researchers and became informants about their everyday life. Doing so, they were creating a space that represented "the case" and not their individual life as such. They did so by complicity with respect to the case. Nevertheless, in certain situations they were acting with respect to their national, ethnic or religious background. Then the common ground built of complicity between members of the action group had to be rebuilt carefully.

The paper will argue that the term "complicity" may 1. point to the potentials (and limits) of constructing common grounds within socially diversified fields in urban space. 2. As an analytical tool the same term "complicity" as it was introduced by George E Marcus to reflect on methodological questions of ethnography (Marcus 1997: 102) points to the ambivalence of being related to the fieldsite through qualitative research methods like ethnography; it refers to the shared ground between research object and subject which may lie outside the fieldsite "as such". 3. This form of situational complicity known from ethnographic practice seems to correspond, in this specific case, to what might be called the "habitus" of urban space (see Lindner), e.g. Berlin Kreuzberg where I was conducting fieldwork. As such "complicity" may serve as an analytical tool that on the one hand accounts ethnographically for the (situational) construction of a social group and on the other for the specific conditions related to urban space and culture and helps to question the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of social interaction in diversified urban setting.