Ethnography concepts and applications

Ethnography

Claude S. Fischer's to Dwell Among Friends

Claude S. Fischer's ethnographic study to Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City attempts to evaluate the findings of earlier sociologists who felt that urban life had detrimental effects on the well being of the vast majority of citizens in the United States. In the course of his study, Fischer attempts to find an answer to the following questions:

Do people residing in more and in less urban places differ systematically in their personal networks and social worlds? Does urbanism itself affect those networks and worlds, or do any differences between city and small-town residents reflect only self-selection, the tendency for people to sort themselves out among communities according to personal background and taste? And if urbanism does contribute to differences in networks and worlds, what about urbanism explains the contribution it makes - population concentration itself, or corollary factors such as population composition and housing stock (255)?

Fischer sharply disagrees with earlier findings on the detrimental effects that urban life has on its inhabitants. Based on his research, he draws the conclusion that whereas urban life may have once been distinguishable from rural life, at the time of his writing (the early 1980s), those differences had been nearly erased. There was no longer any such thing as "urban life" or "rural life," Fischer concludes - just a national life. The extent to which people in American society differed from one another was not rooted in where they lived, but in other factors - particularly their level of education and income, as it is these two factors that seem to have the biggest influence on the extent of one's social network. From Fischer's perspective, those with the largest social networks tend to be the happiest and most well-adjusted members of society.

Fischer's essential argument is that urbanism produces a different style of life, but has no visible effect on one's quality of life (260). It should be noted that, in attempting to generate a random sampling of individuals for the purpose of his methodological research, Fischer omitted those denizens living in predominantly African-American neighborhoods. As ethnic minorities tend to make up a significant portion of the population in urban settings, it is somewhat curious that Fischer chose to omit this group from his study.

It may be that Fischer wished to focus his research on what he perceived to be the "mainstream" of American life during the period that his study was conducted. But by omitting the key issue of racial relations from his study, Fischer neglects one of the key issues of the day, which has a detrimental effect on his methodological approach. Instead of attempting to study the ways in which different ethnic groups interact with one another in urban environments, Fischer instead studies these groups in isolation from the mainstream - via his notion of subcultures.

Much of Fischer's theoretical perspective is rooted in a defiance of the so-called Chicago School of Sociology of the first half of the 20th century. It was the Chicago School who were the major proponents of the theory that "urban life, in sum, is socially, mentally, and morally unhealthy" (9). These are the kind of vague generalizations Fischer wishes to challenge with his study - in particular the idea that urbanism has innately alienating effects on the individual subject. For this reason, Fischer focuses on his research subjects' vast social networks. He also expounds upon his theory of subcultures to show that urban environments offer more varieties of opportunities of social exchange and networking than more rural environments.

Fischer's theoretical approach is less rigorous than that of Marx and post-Marxist Frankfurt School theorists such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Horkheimer and Adorno's theoretical exegesis is almost entirely rooted in an analysis of the urban milieu, despite the fact that it is not always specified as such. For Horkheimer, Adorno, and other post-Marxists, the city does play a role in alienating individuals through an exposure to constant mediation, which provides people with the illusion that they are producing when they are actually mostly consuming. In this model of culture, the bourgeois urban man or woman of leisure is unable to play a contributing role in the production of culture; he or she must merely accept what has been manufactured for their individual social type. The culture industry, which is centered in cities, thus robs the individual of their freedom to participate in the culture-at-large, forcing them into the role of pure consumer. The unity of style as it manifests itself in cultural products is an expression of social power. The greatest artists thus have a mistrust of style, as the hierarchies of power have constructed it; their greatness thus lies in their inherent flaws, which are truer to life. By suggesting that the forms of real life are fulfilled via their aesthetic derivatives, art and culture thus position themselves on the same platform as ideology. Those who fall victim to the ideology of the culture industry are inevitably the poor and working-class; and as the ideology of the culture industry is contingent on the capitalist myth of success and failure, it is those same individuals who are enslaved by such an ideology who subscribe to and insist upon its supremacy above and beyond those who have actually benefited from the exploitative system. Culture is thus equated with advertising; under a system of advanced capitalism, one cannot disentangle one from the other, as they are both representations of social power, contingent upon one another for survival and sustenance by the masses.

Marxist critique is keen on emphasizing the history of class struggle in analyzing social relations. As such, Marx focuses much of his writing on the urban milieu, which he views as being the primary setting for the marginalization of the poor and working-class from bourgeois society, which does not exist outside of the urban milieu. Marx would hardly be surprised by Fischer's discoveries that lower income rural individuals tended to have a much higher quality of life than lower income individuals dwelling in large cities.