Elijah Anderson

Elijah Anderson (* 1943 in Hermondale, Missouri) is an American sociologist and criminologist.

He studied up to BA degree in 1969 at Indiana University in Bloomington, acquired in 1972 the MA at the University of Chicago and his doctorate in 1976 for Ph.D. at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He then taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2007, Anderson is Professor of Sociology at Yale University.

Through his ethnographic studies of violence and social order in the slums of U.S. cities Anderson became internationally known, especially by his scientific analysis of the concept of respect. This term is not used according to Anderson in the conventional manner for consideration. The code of the street meant respect fear and servility in the sense of who has respect for me, is afraid of me. If there is no fear or submissiveness is shown, this will seen as disrespect ( dissing ) and is grounds for immediate violence.

This explanation for road and youth violence is more helpful for the criminologists Joachim Kersten as the disintegration theory of many violence researchers.

Writings (selection )

• Streetwise: Race, Class, And Change In An Urban Community (1990 )
• The Code Of The Street: Decency, Violence, And The Moral Life Of The Inner City (1999)
• A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men, 2nd Edition (2004)
• Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black, and Male, Penn Press ( 2008)
• The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life, WW Norton & Company ( 2011).