Ethnography in Chicago

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Chicago has been a distinctive site of ethnographic study for nearly 90 years, due to the focused efforts of sociologists and anthropologists at its universities. Though available space hardly allows for a thorough overview, I can at least hit some highlights.

The Chicago school of sociology (or urban ecology and later criminology) involved the works of scholars at several Chicago institutions, and was most famously connected to the University of Chicago where Robert Park and Ernest Burgess established the study of urban sociology in the 1920s, publishing The City in 1925. They and their colleagues and students took an empirical approach to urban life, focusing on gemeinschaft-structured, often race, ethnic and class-ordered communities of participants linked through shared networks, many of which were typically ignored or disvalued by dominant norms. In doing so, they also set the stage for what in later decades became urban anthropology. Early Chicago school works include: Nels Anderson’s 1923 The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man, Frederic Milton Thrasher’s and James F. Short’s 1927 The gang: a study of 1,313 gangs in Chicago, Louis Wirth’s 1928 The Ghetto, Harvey Warren Zorbaugh’s 1929 The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side, Paul Goalby Cressey’s 1932 The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life. Chicago school work examined the role of community business institutions (Morris Janowitz’s 1952 The Community Press in an Urban Setting, Everett Hughes’1979 The Chicago Real Estate Board: The Growth of an Institution), territorial ordering and land use (Gerald Suttles’s 1968 The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City and his 1990 The Man-Made City: The Land-Use Confidence Game in Chicago), and politics (Harold Foote Gosnell’s 1935 Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago). Some of this research was published years after it was done; some was never published, including that of Charlotte Gower, a graduate student in the newly independent anthropology department, studying Chicago Sicilian migrant memory culture as a prologue to her dissertation fieldwork in Sicily (eventually published in 1971 as Milocca: A Sicilian Village).

Of particular importance are studies of black Chicago by African American social scientists, including University of Chicago students Edward Franklin Frazier, John Gibbs St Clair Drake and Horace Cayton Jr. Frazier’s 1932 The Negro Family in Chicago was based on his 1931 sociology doctoral dissertation. In 1945, St Clair Drake and Cayton published Black Metropolis, a comprehensive study of Chicago African American social structures. Cayton also did interview research with black officers on Chicago’s police force. St Clair Drake was a student of William Boyd Allison Davis, a 1942 PhD in anthropology and the first black faculty member (in the department of education) at the University of Chicago; St Clair Drake received his PhD in anthropology in 1953. He spent his career (1945–67) teaching at Chicago’s Roosevelt University, itself an important institution in the history of racially inclusive higher education.

Chicago anthropology includes David Schneider’s 1968 classic American Kinship: A Cultural Account and Esther Newton’s 1972 Mother Camp. Chicago blues is examined in Charles Keil’s 1966 Urban Blues and David Grazian’s 2003 Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs. Gangs are revisited in Lincoln Keiser’s 1969 Vice Lords and Sudhir Venkatesh’s 2008 Gang Leader for a Day. A sizeable literature on Latino Chicago has emerged, including Felix Padilla’s 1985 Latino Ethnic Consciousness: The Case of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago, Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas’ 2003 National Performances: Class, Race and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago, Nicholas De Genova’s 2005 Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago and Gina Perez’ 2004 The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement and Puerto Rican Families. Chicago’s South Side is the setting for Mitchell Duneier’s 1992 Slim’s Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity and Loïc Wacquant’s 2004 Body and Soul: Ethnographic Notebooks of An Apprentice-Boxer. Ethnolinguistic concerns are addressed in Gloria Nardini’s 1999 Che Bella Figura!: The Power of Performance in an Italian Ladies’ Club in Chicago, and by Marcia Farr in Ethnolinguistic Chicago: Language and Literacy in the City’s Neighborhoods (2004), Latino Language and Literacy in Ethnolinguistic Chicago (2005), and Rancheros in Chicagoacán: Language and Identity in a Transnational Community (2006).

Given ongoing research projects, this list will grow a lot longer in years to come!

Dana-Ain Davis and Alaka Wali are the chairs of the 2013 AAA Annual Meeting and the contributing editors of the Chicago Beckons column. They may be contacted at 2013aaaprogramchairs@gmail.com

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/02/27/ethnography-in-chicago/