Ethnography in Today's World: Color Full Before Color Blind

Preface

P r e f a c e This book might have been titled For Ethnography! or, alternatively, Ethnography for What? Throughout, it aims to affirm the value of ethnography in engaging contemporary issues of race, migration, political activism, and an urbanizing globe. It includes as well essays examining this distinctive anthropological fieldwork method—ethnography, or participant observation —which its practitioners use to understand particular groups and places. And last, it asserts that ethnography is inescapably lodged in the social worlds of those who use it: first, as they decide what to study; then, how to do it; and finally, how to engage various publics with their findings. The essays, now revised, were originally composed during the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. They build upon and extend ideas and arguments contained in my books Fieldnotes : The Makings of Anthropology (1990), The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City (1998), and Gray Panthers (2009). They also reflect the journey of an anthropologist who entered the field when it was undergoing tumultuous change in the 1960s, who moved from fieldwork abroad in Brazil and Ghana to long-term engagements in his own society, and who, after weathering theoretical storms in ensuing decades, now values ethnography even more than when he began.1 Engaging Ethnography The book’s first part, Engaging Ethnography, contains three chapters about fieldwork in New York City’s Elmhurst-Corona district. Chapter 1, ‘‘Color Full before Color Blind: The Emergence of Multiracial Neighborhood Politics in Queens, New York City,’’ summarizes the major findings and arguments about this fieldwork arena in my book The Future of Us All. It was x Preface first presented as a talk to a multidisciplinary scholarly audience at the Russell Sage Foundation (which included sociologist Robert Merton, who, gratifyingly, told me that he enjoyed it). It was later published in the American Anthropologist, and here all demographic figures and projections are updated with more recent information. This essay illustrates the ‘‘doing’’ of ethnography as this process is defined and historicized in Chapter 4 (‘‘Ethnography’’). Chapter 1 also exemplifies what ‘‘an ethnography of the present’’ with ‘‘a concern about the outcome,’’ as advocated in Chapter 6 (‘‘The Ethnographic Present’’), might be, in this case in ‘‘perhaps the most ethnically mixed community in the world.’’ The background sections about Elmhurst-Corona in the 1970s, before my fieldwork began in 1983, illustrate the importance of historical contextualization (more of this occurs in The Future of Us All). The significance of women leaders in these neighborhoods is what I found there ‘‘on the ground,’’ although a feminist perspective no doubt ensured that I deliberately paid attention to both men and women (as I had in earlier fieldwork in Ghana and did from the 1970s onward as a Gray Panther participant). The lesson I draw about the importance of inclusive ‘‘color full before color blind’’ political action is also a fieldwork-derived conclusion. Indeed, had I done my fieldwork in this neighborhood ten years earlier, my findings on both scores would have been quite different. Chapter 2, ‘‘The Organization of Festivals and Ceremonies among Americans and Immigrants in Queens, New York,’’ was also written for a multidisciplinary academic audience, this time in Sweden, and halfway through my 1983–1996 Elmhurst-Corona fieldwork. The framework of four contrasting categories of local ritual events emerged while I was sitting in a Houston airport in 1988—a fieldwork-derived ‘‘theory of significance’’ that then led me to attend as many of these events as I could. I had not anticipated the range and degree of public ritual activity I encountered, and my Queens College students who later read this essay, most from similar or even these same neighborhoods, were surprised as well. This chapter also illustrates the comparative and theoretical side of Chapter 4’s ‘‘anthropological triangle’’ of ethnography, comparison, and contextualization. I enjoyed reflecting on Meyer Fortes’s classic approach to the interlocking cycle of Talis and Namoos rituals and on Stanley Tambiah’s similar portrayal of rituals in a Thai village. I also found helpful more recent thinking about ritual by Tambiah and Fredrik Barth. Bits of this analysis reappeared in The Future of Us All, but Chapter 2 here examines the public Preface xi ritual efflorescence following racial change, immigration, and fiscal crisis in Queens with greater focus and coherence. Chapter 3, ‘‘What Ethnographies Leave Out,’’ answered a request...