(January, February and March)
for Jay Ruby's Oak Park Research Project
The Oak Park contingent at the Chicago Gay Pride Parade in the early '90s. Rebekah Levin is kneeling on the left of the banner.
Finding a publisher - Some progress.
The Taylor Family Portrait, the first of the Oak Park Stories, is now being considered by the University of Chicago Press. As this press has an excellent anthropology catalog and has been publishing ethnographies about Chicago for over 50 years, it would be an ideal publisher. My editor at Chicago has expressed initial interest but as many of you know academic publishing is a slow and complex affair. The CD is now out for review by qualified academics. Should it get favorable comments it would then be presented to the press' board. If they pass it then the CD goes to a copy editor for fine tuning. I would assume the earliest it would appear would be in the Spring, 2005 catalog. I have some funds left from a grant by Temple University that I will use this summer to design the cover materials for the CD. My hope is that I can thereby keep the selling price as low as possible.
Rebekah and Sophie - A Lesbian Family Portrait - Reading and Writing.
Dylan was correct but several decades off - "The Times Really Are a Changin."
I am on leave from my university this term and will officially retire in June. This change has provided me with more time to devote to the second family portrait. I have completed transcribing all of the video interviews and will begin "paper editing" them as the first step to video editing. As the video materials are slightly different from those I used in the Taylor family portrait the structure of this family portrait will be slightly different. I have spent most of the time this quarter gathering together and editing the materials I collected relevant to Rebekah and Sophie's family portrait - scholarly articles, newspaper articles, materials from the gay and lesbian press. As I intend to contextualize this family with a larger arena, I am trying to keep up with the debate about gay and lesbian marriage and other civil rights issues. As the controversy over same sex unions is a daily event both in the national press and in gay and lesbian publications, it is a daunting task to keep current. I realize that no matter how hard I try some of what I say will be outdated by the time it is published. As I am not someone well versed in the literature about gay and lesbian culture, I find the reading I am doing fascinating as some of it goes to the heart of important anthropological concerns about what constitutes a family and what is "normal." My plan is to complete this family portrait by the fall and begin "Helena's Story" - the next family portrait by the end of this year. Being in Oak Park for the summer will surely expedite the process.
Hometown Ethnographies
When I started this project I did not know of any other anthropologists who had studied their hometown, The received wisdom of the profession was that one should be able to have some distance from the object of study and studying where you were born was therefore impossible. That is changing, a bit. A colleague recently point out that Douglas Foley had written The Heartland Chronicles in 1995 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Foley returned to his place of birth in Iowa to explore Euro-American and Native American relations. He does so in a most reflexive way. I certainly resonate with his conclusions about the nature of ethnography. “May be"social science" boils down to one person trying to understand him- or herself enough to understand other people. Maybe social science storytellers are not all that different from literary storytellers. Perhaps knowing Mom better was absolutely crucial for understanding abandoned Mesquaki mothers and grieving Mesquaki men (The Native Americans in Iowa). Of course, understanding another culture takes much more than simple empathy. It takes endless hours of listening to people and observing, constant recording and reflecting, a grab-bag of theories to ply. But knowing yourself always seems like the biggest part of understanding others. In this case, exploring my memories and missing past probably influenced greatly the stories I chose to tell." p. 220
I had known about Sherry Ortner's long term ethnographic exploration of her high school class but only recently obtained the book she produced from it - New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58 (Durham: Duke University Press 2003). Three studies do not a trend make but it does suggest that my profession might be making a slight adjustment to the world in which we live and abandoning some outworn notions of what constitutes an "anthropological subject."
As always I welcome and encourage your comments, suggestions and criticisms. Email them to me at ruby@ascworld.com.