What have we learned (Week 2)

We are told that one of the authors of our textbook and his wife have led Gmelch & Gmelch ("Student Fieldworkers in  Village and City") student fieldwork trips for thirty years and that this is a comparison between the rural and urban fieldwork experience.  What should we take away from this article?

  

In Barbados students lived in villages of 200-800, furthest removed from the capital; in Tasmania students lived in the capital city, Hobart.  Secondly, when students in Barbados left their homes they rarely encountered someone who was not a potential informant; in Tasmania they rarely ran into someone who could be an informant.  Hobart students were always having to explain themselves to people they met—who they were, why they were there—interviews were set up by phone and required traveling; in Barbados they could fall out the door and find someone who could potentially have useful information.  To no one's surprise the Barbadian students had an average of thirty informants, where the Hobart students had fifteen; that Hobart students had far fewer field notes from observation—the students had far more difficulty identifying a “neighborhood” or a “community” in which to work.  They most easily met other students and went to bars/clubs to meet folks of the same age as them, whereas the Barbadian informants skewed to the older spectrum of age.  The Gmelch's solution: to offset the fieldwork difficulties each student in Hobart volunteered & conducted research for an organization.

"Urbanism as a Way of Life" is a 73 year-old landmark article by Louis Wirth.  According to him, urban life is characterized by relations between strangers--key terms: anonymity, transient & impersonality.  He definitely approaches this as a sociologist—it’s all numbers & things & quantification, not about people.  The sociological “definition of the city seeks to select those elements of urbanism which mark it as a distinctive mode of human life” (103).  So, in 1938 one of the defining features was a census count of 2,500+ as urban and anything smaller is rural.  Additionally, whether the density has to be 10,000 or 1,000 persons/sq mi. it is still arbitrarily dependent upon the characteristics of the population involved.  So, he says a city may be defined as a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous people.  In his

Theory of Urbanism he identifies what he see as the primary characteristics of the city—size of population, density, heterogeneity, etc.  The result once again: depersonalization.

So when he defines the distinctive features of urbanism as form of social organization: substitution of secondary for primary contacts, weakening of bonds of kinship, declining social significance of family, disappearance of neighborhoods, and undermining of traditional bases of solidarity, I have to say that this is far too dark for me.  Perhaps the data are 73 years old. Perhaps there are some dark sides to the urban environment.  But, I cannot agree that there are no positive aspects of living in an urban environment.

What have we learned (Week 1)

From Foster & Kemper (“Anthropological Fieldwork in Cities”) the first thing we learn is that urban anthropology is really a post WWII phenomenon.  Previous to that anthropologists were concerned first with “primitives” and later (1940s), with “peasants.”  Influenced by Malinowski and the British school 1950s/60s, Americans began staying in communities for longer periods, learned the languages instead of relying on translators, and brought improved (and more compact) equipment to the field.  All throughout these times (influenced by Boaz et. al.), the methodology remained consistent--ethnographic fieldwork.  1^st step, “establishing rapport;” 2^nd step, the “in-depth” interviews over time. With few restrictions on travel and the portability of equipment, combined with web 2.0 tools, there is really no place we cannot reach. 

So, when talking about the ethnographic experience, we learn that the urban environments are very different from those bounded, homogeneous communities of yore.  Now, anthropologists might define the population by social group—a religious sect or an occupation.  Drawbacks to conducting urban fieldwork?: You can’t live with the people you study and they see you on their time/schedule.  The good news is that you don’t have to see your informants if you don’t want to—added privacy, more time for r&r.  No matter what, urban anthropology is a thing of the future. This point was also emphasized by Gemelch & Gmelch in their study on placing students in two different fieldwork envrionments: rural Barbados and urban Hobart (Tazmania). [More on them in the Week 2 post]  

I thought the article by Ted Bestor ("Networks, Neighborhoods and Markets: Fieldwork in Tokyo") is really important for what it has to teach us about "doing" ethnography in the field.  Instead of participant observation he prefers the term "inquisitive observation."  He gives us a blow-by-blow account of how to find a "community" in an urban landscape; how to identify "key informants" who can then lead you to the next level of interviewing; and finally, how to maximize your efficiency in narrowing down the information you uncover.  In short, his advice is "choose a network, not a neighborhood."

To refine this concept he gives the example of how he began with the seafood distribution system and branched out until he had a repertoire of informants from several different area of the marketplace, what he calls "parachuting," or dropping in from multiple entry points.  As a result he began to see little, but very important ethnographic details that would be invisible to someone who had not taken the time to build a foundation--colors of baseball caps to designate specific jobs, for example, or, pins on executives at trade show and union meetings. He also talks about chance encounters, such as the janitor who became a key informant.  The single most important point he makes is that we are often interested in what most people would consider "mundane" bits of  information.  Our challenge is to make them see how interesting it is so they will share it with us.

Welcome to Urban Anthropology (6858)!

Welcome!

This will be the space where you post your weekly writing samples for the readings in your text.