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■ The Greek roots for the word symbol are sým (thrown) and bolon (together). In the recent idealized and abstract turn of the social sciences towards ‘discourse’, it has been forgotten how in their production meanings carried by symbols are precisely thrown together with material, social, and interactive circumstances. Urban ethnographers are well equipped to see the signifier not as ‘free-floating’ but as always engaged — through its intransigent opacities as well as its transparent relevancies — in socially situated context and social action as it finds its signified. Utilizing examples from my own ethnographic work, this article presents an urban and class-specific view of how symbols are thrown together with the circumstances of material want, social pressure, and ideological abjection suffered by young people at the bottom of social space in deprived urban areas. The struggle for survival here produces cultural forms and meanings which are no less creative and complex than the recognized formal creations of ‘art’ but are formed in quite different ways under pressure and compression, rather than in ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’.

This is an open manifesto welcoming readers, writers, and researchers. Do not think of this manifesto as “a law,” a set of rules to be followed, a collection of recipes to be applied, a system to be adopted. In no sense is our aim to construct a grand, systematic, waterproof, “ready-made” theory/methodology counterposed to other scholastic “ready-mades.” Instead, we hope that this manifesto will be read as enabling and “sensitizing,” theoretically and methodologically, approaches to lived culture, worldly experiences, and practical sense making. That is, we hope this manifesto is “put to work” in helping to produce a wide range of ethnographies, thereby being developed, refined, and criticized without ever being locked up as a given system of thought. What is ethnography for us? Most important, it is a family of methods involving direct and sustained social contact with agents and of richly writing up the encounter, respecting, recording, representing at least partly in its own terms the irreducibility of human experience. Ethnography is the disciplined and deliberate witness-cum-recording of human events. As arguably the first ethnographer Herodotus (1987) said in arguably the first ethnography, The History, “so far it is my eyes, my judgement, and my searching that speaks these words to you” (p. 171). “This-ness” and “lived-out-ness” are essential to the ethnographic account: a unique sense of embodied existence and consciousness captured, for instance, in the last line of Gerald Manley Hopkins’s poem “As Kingfishers”: “What I do is me: for that I came.” The social body is the site of this experience engaging “a corporeal knowledge that provides a practical comprehension of the world quite different from the act of conscious decoding that is normally designated by the idea of comprehension” (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 135). The understanding and representation of experience are then quite central, both empirically and theoretically. As William James (1978) said, “Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over [italics added], and making us correct our