Oxford/Joensuu Talk

Digital Oak Park - An Experimental Ethnography

A Talk Given at the RAI Film Festival, Oxford, September 20, 2005 and again at the Festival of Visual Culture,, Joensuu, Finland on September 27, 2005

Note - This is a work in progress. Do not cite without asking.

I want to discuss a research project of mine that has resulted in the production of some digital ethnographies on CD-ROMs. I will first talk about the ethnographic and anthropological problems I addressed and then provide some background about the community I studied and the methods I employed. Some of this talk has been lifted from the text of these CDs. Finally I will show some samples from two of the four CDs. While I will be reading, I would like to be as informal as possible. Should you have any questions or comments, please fell free to chime in at any time rather than wait until the end. I love to debate ideas.

Let me now discuss some of the issues I wished to explore.

A Reflexive Interlude: Being at Home while in the field or "Bringing It All Back Home." Let me begin on a personal note. As I reached my mid-sixties I became afflicted with a common academic aliment. I thought I might write an autobiography. There is an unfortunate tendency for academics when they reach a certain age to think that their reflections on their lives would be of interest to a sufficient number of people to warrant publishing them. They seldom are. Fortunately for all concerned I disabused myself of that cliché and instead considered developing a research project that was sufficiently reflexive to satisfy my needs.

Two factors aided in my search. I started by exploring what literature existed about my home town, Oak Park, Illinois, in the hopes that I could combine my autobiographical needs with an ethnographic film project. One of the first discoveries was Carol Goodwin's book, The Oak Park Strategy (1976). To my amazement, I learned that my home town had transformed itself into a liberal integrated place - virtually the opposite of my childhood memories of an upright all white republican bastion. I became fascinated with gaining an understanding of how this happened. Secondly, in the process of editing a collection of my essays on film and anthropology which was later published by the University of Chicago press as Picturing Culture, I decided that it was time to explore my ideas in the field. This was aided by the actions of an extremely aggressive graduate student who kept demanding that I put my thoughts into actions.

So five years ago I started to study my hometown, Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, which gave me a chance to pursue a long-term interest in the advantages and limits of reflexive ethnography and push the limits of being reflexive . I wanted to understand what happens when the anthropologist is both native and researcher. I studied some people I have known most of my life. I am intrigued with the advantages and disadvantages. I already knew the language, customs and even nuances of the place. Limitations are of course present. I have little distance from what I experience. I have strong opinions about everything that can influence the outcome.

Unlike many social scientists, I cannot separate myself from the object of my analysis. Moreover, I do not wish do to so. One of the reasons I decided to undertake this research was to discover some things about myself and to explore the advantages and limits of studies in which the researcher is both analyst and native. I therefore must reveal as much of myself as is relevant and will aid the reader/viewer in understanding the work. I do not know how much of myself to present and I cannot locate a model that suits my purpose. Reflexivity is often discussed but rarely accomplished. To say too much is to be self indulgent and to say too little is to hide important bits of information. While researching a community with which I share much cultural knowledge and linguistic competence has many advantages, the research can also suffer from the myopia of the "insider."

There can be no question that the results of any social research have to be a consequence of who the researcher is. I have a huge stake in the outcome of a study of my hometown. I hope that I have factored into this work knowledge about how my position causes the work to be formed. Such an approach allows me to enhance my understanding of my own life in a unique way. Instead of producing a conventional autobiography, which was the original impetus of this study, in which I rely completely upon my own recollections, I have at my disposal ethnographic insights together with the perceptions of those interviewed to challenge and broaden my own remembrances. I am therefore able to combine the autobiographical with the historical and ethnographic. This exploration of the personal and the professional will in turn offer the opportunity to examine the limits and benefits of reflexive ethnography.

Studying Sideways . Studies of functioning middle class communities are few and far between in spite of Laura Nader's suggestion that we should study sideways. I am intrigued with the application of ethnographic methods in the exploration of an affluent middle-class suburban community. Social scientists have too often concentrated on the exotic, the oppressed and the pathological and assumed that all U.S. suburbs emerged after World War II and suffer from sprawl, malls, out of control growth and boring conformist architecture. They have tended to study people from the lower socio-cultural classes - people often with little political or economic power; people who live in communities that exhibit serious social pathologies like high crime, drug abuse and unemployment. Even studies of middle-class suburbs often concentrate on problems like sprawl. While anthropologist Laura Nader's admonition to "study up" has resulted in some studies of the power elite, few have produced an ethnography of an apparently successful community populated primarily by advantaged upper-middle-class college educated people. Oak Park is one of the more interesting social experiments in the U.S. It is regarded internationally as a model of successful ethnic integration. It is a community convinced that it can self-consciously construct itself. How it maintains its ideals and the impact of this experiment on the everyday lives of its citizens is the focus of my study.

The Internet . I exploited the community's affluence, educational levels and high level of computer literacy to explore how the internet might serve as an ethnographic research tool. I have established a web site where I offer regular updates via a listserv designed to encourage residents' comments and criticisms. I get both on a frequent basis. In one case discussed later, I am in more or less constant email contact.

Multi-media Ethnography . I have for some time been critical of a genre of film called ethnographic. I have called repeatedly for anthropologists to assume control of this field and to produce their own films. It became clear to me that it was time to make my own visual product as an example of what I had been advocating. Oak Park Stories are the result - a series of experimental, reflexive and digital ethnographies. They are experimental in that I have not followed the traditional method of producing a book or a film but instead made an interactive and nonlinear work that has video clips, still photographs, and text. It is reflexive in that the subject of my research is my hometown. It is digital in its form of delivery - on a CD-ROM using Quicktime movies and html text and jpeg photos. I have constructed these Stories in a nonlinear fashion, that is, unlike a book or a film, there is no defined beginning, middle or end. Viewers/Readers are free to begin anywhere. They can ignore anything that doesn't interest them. I have provided links to materials that will allow anyone interested to pursue a topic in more depth. I found writing in a nonlinear fashion to be amazingly freeing. I did not have to worry about some editor telling me that I was going off on too many tangents and that the work lacked coherence. Because I cannot know which paths a reader/viewer will take, I decided to say the same thing in a somewhat different manner in different places, that is, to be redundant on purpose.

Methods . I employed ethnographic field methods of observation and participation as well as interviewed numerous people in this study. I lived in the community for several summers and one entire year. In short, I utilized a relatively traditional ethnographic approach. The application of these methods to a middle-class U.S. suburb is a bit unusual in that most ethnographies deal with cultures exotic to the researcher. It should be noted that Oak Park is a community with clearly marked geographical and cultural boundaries. At the moment, anthropologists have become majorly concerned with issues revolving around globalization and transnationalism and studying people who inhabit in more than one community. These so-called "multi-sited" ethnographies directly contrast with my work in Oak Park, which looks positively old-fashioned in comparison. In other words, I am being both traditional and avant garde at the same time.

If there is anything really innovative here, it is in my use of the internet and videotaping during my field work and the manner in which I choose to communicate my findings. As I mentioned earlier, I created a web site and email listserv. In addition to traditional field notes, I videotaped over 120 hours of observation and interviews.

Oak Park . Now let me tell you something about this community. Oak Park is a small Chicago suburb (4.7 square miles with a population around 50,000). It is nine miles from downtown Chicago. Two El train systems offer a quick ride to the Chicago loop or to eight universities and a huge medical center. There is an often clogged expressway. Founded in the late 1800s, it grew rapidly. Fifty percent of its housing stock was built prior to World War II. It is highly regarded for its architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright lived and worked here, building over 36 homes and the Unity Temple. It is the birthplace of Prairie Style - one of the key elements of modern architecture. The place claims an unusually large number of illustrious residents - novelists Ernest Hemingway and Carol Shields, dancer Doris Humphrey, chemist Percy Julian, drummer Dave Tough and MacDonald's founder, Ray Kroc to name a few. The look and feel of the place is more urban than suburban. Sixty percent of the village is contained within three national historic districts with large houses and mature trees forming a canopy over the wide streets. From its inception in the nineteenth century until the 1970s, Oak Park was a community of Republican white Protestant conservatives who were tempered slightly by progressive ladies involved in the reform movement and social welfare.

Before I discuss the questions that caused me to use Oak Park as a research site, I should provide some additional historical context. For the past fifty years, people in the U.S. have struggled with the civil rights of minority citizens. Among the most difficult were the attempts to integrate and provide equal opportunities for black Americans. While the playing field has been more or less leveled in education, business and access to services, my society remains geographically segregated. While living with your own kind is not unusual or necessarily a bad thing, blacks, even those educated and middle class, find themselves in communities where basic services and decent schools are often lacking. This is a complex problem that cannot possible be adequately discussed here but must be stated as it is relevant to what happened to Oak Park.

In the 1950s when the modern suburb was invented in the U.S. millions of middle-class whites fled the cities and in places like Chicago they were replaced by black residents. Large areas of Chicago were transformed from all white to all black almost overnight. As this resegregation progressed neighborhoods lost essential services like banks and grocery stores and schools markedly detieriated - new black ghettos were formed. A black tidal wave moved westward toward Oak Park's eastern border.

By the late 1960s, Oak Park was faced with what appeared to be an inevitable move of a large number of African Americans into a then all white suburb that would have "re-segregated" the community into an almost all black place. In Chicago this process had meant a disinvestment in the community with a major loss of all services. As fifty percent of the housing stock was apartments that mainly abutted Chicago, they were the first affected. Some residents decided to proactively attempt to control the transition so that would not destroy the fabric of the community. They had many bad examples of how not to react in the rapidly re-segregating communities on the West Side of Chicago including Austin, Oak Park's immediate neighbor.

In order to realize their goals of integration and stability, Oak Parkers marketed their community initially to African Americans to demonstrate that they really did intend to enforce their own fair housing ordinance, and then, to middle-class liberal whites to counterbalance the loss caused by the white flighters who fled when blacks started to purchase houses. It worked. Today there is a black population of about twenty-five percent that is more or less distributed throughout the village. But the battle for stability has remained constant. Once blacks in Chicago realized that Oak Park was safe, had good schools and was welcoming they came in droves - in excess to what this small community could handle. At the same time some whites had to be convinced that even tho Oak Park was gaining a black population it was not becoming an unsafe ghetto. A complex of village ordinances, non-profit organizations and government programs has thus far ensured fair treatment for blacks and a balanced population.

Probably because the community gained a reputation for tolerance, a publicly active gay and lesbian community also emerged. Recently, a poll by planetout.com voted Oak Park one of the most gay friendly small towns in the U.S. A colleague active in gay politics has termed it the straightest gay community in the U.S.

Oak Park is amazingly ambitious in its attempt to be diverse. Many of the residents who replaced those unable to accommodate these changes are employed in social services, the medical professions and universities. Oak Park has been transformed into a haven for liberal whites - gay and straight - seeking a place to act out their political and ethical values and for middle-class blacks looking for a safe place with stable property values, good schools and decent services.

Methods . Participant Observation

Ethnography is founded upon a relatively simple idea - the ethnographer lives in the community under study and attempts to both observe and participate in relevant aspects of community. As Oak Park is my hometown, I did not have to spend months learning the language or the customs of the people I studied. I was able to begin the ethnography immediately upon arriving. While I concentrated my work on the need to produce three family-portraits and an examination of an organization involved in maintaining diversity in the village, I also tried to become familiar with other aspects of village life that broadened my understanding of what it is like to live there. I attended meetings of the Diversity Task Force, the Black-White Dialogue and also organizations and events like a gay-straight men's group and the activities of the Village Managers' Association (the non-partisan organization that produces slates for the election of Village president, clerk and trustees), to name a few. I also talked informally with many Oak Parkers to deepen my understanding of this place. For example, I felt that my knowledge of the perspective of African Americans on Oak Park and its policies of managed diversity was not adequate. I sought out those African Americans who are community leaders and who constitute an elite to discuss their points of view. I also tried to contact "rank and file" African Americans (those who do not participate in the public life of Oak Park) with limited success. In practical terms I went out every night to a meeting or event and spent my days having informal conversations and formal videotaped interviews. Like most ethnographers, even my recreation was part of the research. I was "in the field" all of the time.

Community Involvement

I was concerned with giving the community under study a chance to actively participate in the construction of this ethnography and to have access to and critique the results. I established an email listserv and a web page where I placed quarterly progress reports. I activated a dialogue among community members as well as with me that will continue after the research is completed. Whenever asked, I provided information about the workings of various organizations I studied. I gave talks in a number of places and wrote articles for the Wednesday Journal , a local newspaper. I am committed to a long-term relationship with the community for both professional and personal reasons. Many Oak Park residents are convinced that their social experiment in diversity can only succeed if there is a continual discussion about how to maintain that diversity. Some believe that the moment they stop working on this experiment the community will begin to resegregate. I hope I have assisted their already existing dialogue with this study. Some of the material I used in publications I first wrote as progress reports and circulated them among as many Oak Parkers as I could for their comments.

Making Ethnographic Videos

For thirty-plus years I have been writing about the role of film in anthropology. As a historian, critic, and theorist of this genre, I have repeatedly voiced my discontent about how ethnographic films are made and their relationship to anthropology. It is my contention that anthropologists should view film/video making as a way to disseminate their research findings. They should not defer to professional documentary filmmakers nor produce work that is primarily designed to satisfy the marketplace demands of the educational world or of public television. These works should be scholarly communications designed for people with a serious interest in the subject matter.

While I have participated in the making of many films as a consultant and had the major responsibility for two, I had not explored these ideas by attempting to make work that would exemplify my theories. There are several reasons why this is so. I am, by nature, more of a historian, critic, and theorist than a practitioner. Perhaps as important was the limitations of technology and funding. 16mm films - once the standard for ethnographic film - and even non-digital videomaking required expensive equipment, large budgets and people with extensive technical competence. Within the last few years, the world of the mini-dv digital cameras and digital editing software that is within the budgets of most academics has emerged. The "prosumer" level three chip cameras produce an image of exceptional quality and, with the addition of a mini-shotgun microphone, excellent sound. The editing systems are also relatively easy to learn and use. Video production systems can be acquired for less than $10,000, reducing the cost of production to the cost of the videotapes. For those of you that are technically minded, I used a Sony minidv DCR-TRV900 digital camera with a Sennheiser Mini-shotgun microphone and edited with Final Cut Pro on a Macintosh computer. Scholars can now afford to experiment without the necessity of obtaining large grants that require the production of materials designed either for the classroom or public television, nor must they hire professional crews whose goals are often at odds with those of a scholar. Professional filmmakers cannot afford the luxury of being experimental.

In 1999 I proceeded to put my money where my mouth was and embarked upon this ethnography armed with a digital video camera. My assumption was that I would come back with the raw materials to produce something resembling what I had been calling a filmic ethnography. I was wrong. After seriously contemplating how I might produce a pictorial ethnography, I decided that what I wished to accomplish could not be realized as a film or videotape. I am not suggesting that a film can never be an expression of anthropological knowledge. I am saying that I cannot personally find ways to overcome the position most viewers assume when they watch a film.

For centuries, the role of a theater audience has been a passive one. Attempts to engage audiences, to get them to interact with the actors and the scenes, are few and far between and not very successful. While experimental theater is filled with interesting attempts, mainstream theatrical productions continue on as before. Movies have traditionally been seen in "theatres" - dark and silent places with little chance for spectators to do anything but watch. Consequently, viewers came to television with a several-thousand-year-old theatrical/filmic tradition of passive attention. Television changed that a bit. It is not always seen in a darkened room. Talking is commonplace. You really do not have to pay much attention to understand most television programs. It was assumed by some optimistic media critics that the advent of the VCR would create more active viewers as they could stop and start and rewind at will. I see no evidence of that sort of active viewing or an increase in the visual sophistication on the part of the "television generation." These two passive traditions (theater and film/television) make it hard to ask viewers to pay active and critical attention to anything on a screen. There might be an alternative. Sitting in front of a computer is an different experience. You are in an office chair in a room in which you work. You must pay constant attention as the computer requires you to make decisions on a regular basis. It sounded to me like a good environment for my work.

There are several disadvantages to this plan. I was only marginally competent with this technology and with ways to shoot material that reflect what I learned and what I want to say. I experimented and learned as I went. I was continually anxious that I was not able to shoot material I needed or that I would do something technically incompetent and ruin the shot. Even formal interviews that should be the easiest became complicated as I was wedded to deferring technical considerations to the needs of the subject. I was determined to make people as comfortable as possible and not create the artificial environment commonly associated with a filmed interview where the technical needs of filming dominate all decisions. The subject's comfort determined the place of the interview. The result was that they were taped in less than perfect situations - sometimes the subject was backlit and often their face is in shadows with both natural and artificial light in the same scene. I did not light interviews. I believe lighting creates such an artificial atmosphere that it defeats my purpose. Sound was also a problem in the summer when most people had fans or air conditioners turned on. I accepted the quality that results. I cannot be certain my viewers will.

In terms of the logistics of the interview itself, I simply placed the camera on a tripod and attempt to maintain eye contact, engaging the subject in a conversation. We talked in a manner that resembled an interaction more than an interview. I shot no cutaways and did not create the wholly artificial action-reaction interview sequences common to the documentary. The camera was fixed with only a few minor adjustments in framing. Once it began, I tried to concentrate completely on engaging the subject in a useful dialogue. Even with these technical limits, being able to see and hear someone talk about their life remains an engaging experience providing a strong sense of the person that more than makes up for any technical limits and, I feel, superior to reading a printed interview.

A one-person crew that consists of an anthropologist like myself with little formal training cannot possibly produce work that has the look of a professionally made product. I was willing to give up the technical advantages that come with a professional production because I believe being a one-person crew is essential to accomplish the task I have defined for myself. Audiences will have to learn to alter their expectations. Viewing instructions have been incorporated into the work itself. I must deliberately frustrate audiences' need to suspend their disbelief and to get lost in the pleasure of the narrative. If viewers cannot go beyond their normal expectations, this work will be dismissed as hopelessly amateur if not incompetent. For me this is the crux of the matter. Audiences must be trained to examine the quality of the ideas portrayed and to regard the intellectual contribution of a work as being primary and to stop assuming that pretty pictures are the most important element. I truly believe that ethnographers cannot produce what the film industry calls a "good film" and also produce a work that is good anthropology.

As important as these technical considerations were, I had a much more important concern. There were and still are no precedents for what I did. I could not look to other people and their experiences for advice. There have been multi-part films or television series like the 1970s PBS series, An American Family , but that work tended simply to deal with the development of the characters of the various family members and the drama of a divorce and its impact on the family. For each of the portraits I made, I dealt with complicated situations and very complex and layered ideas that took a lot of screen time to present. I acknowledge that the Oak Park Stories are very demanding of viewers who are not used to being challenged in this manner.

While it took me a long time, I finally realized Peter Biella was correct in 1994 about the inherent limitations of film as a mechanism for conveying ethnographic knowledge. I now understand the audience for this work has to be sitting in front of a computer - an audience of one - and assume the activist stance that is the norm for people working with a computer and not passively waiting to be amused by the television. In other words, this presentation is not an ideal setting for this work.

Theory. I am basically not interested in exploring "grand" theories that explain everything, the way academic Marxists try to. To some that may be an almost heretical statement. Some of my students who read this work in draft form thought me to be positively irresponsible because I did not address the underlying theoretical basis of my work. Perhaps I do need to elaborate. I find social philosophical theories of Marx or Foucault or the other "social" theorists that are so popular these days not to be useful. I am not interested in supporting or denying the ideas of these thinkers. Their ideas are seldom grounded in any empirical studies, that is, they sat in their studies and imagined what the social lives of people were like. Such an approach seems to me to be antithetical to the basic premises of anthropology. I am interested in being able to use my knowledge of culture as developed by anthropologists to critically describe aspects of the social life of some Oak Parkers. I employ what might be called commonsense or the taken-for-granted assumptions that most cultural anthropologists use. We live in a symbolic world that constructs our reality. I wished to partially describe that world for each of the three families I portrayed. In addition, I wanted to critically describe the complex of agencies and ordinances that developed over time with no apparent underlying philosophical support and that made Oak Park able to manage its version of diversity. To do so requires long-term personal involvement with the community, that is, participant observation. I believe that there is more merit in this approach than to develop some hypothesis based upon some abstract theory and then to use Oak Park to test that idea. The only anthropology that interests me is the ethnographies that provide a window into someone else's world. I have stopped reading theoretical abstractions.

While this anti-theoretical approach may place me at the margins of anthropology, I am still interested in adding to the collective knowledge of my profession. I wish to remind my colleagues that as exciting as studying multi-sited imaginary communities that are greatly impacted by globalization and transnationalism may be, it is still possible to produce an ethnography of people living in a geographically and symbolically bounded community where these all too fashionable theories are not very useful. One of the advantages of being at the end of my career is that I am free to do as I please and not worry about my publication record or tenure or promotion or even the response of my colleagues. Like my French colleagues are fond of saying, I did this because it pleases me to do so. In some ways, this work is conservative if not old-fashioned. It is a community study where participant observation was the dominant method. In other ways, it is experimental. From my point of view, the most important contribution of this work is a formal one. I have produced something that is not a film or a book, something that is non-linear and which gives readers/viewers some freedom as to how the navigate through the work

Result . My intention is to produce three family portraits and one institutional portrait. I explored several aspects of this community in terms of how some of its core values have remained the same while others have been modified to accommodate planned diversity. Let me briefly describe the subjects of these Oak Park Stories. In one, I explore how this community devised ways to maintain the desired diversity. I concentrated on the Oak Park Regional Housing Center, a non-profit organization, designed to prevent resegregation by affirmatively marketing apartments so as to distribute whites and blacks throughout the community and to avoid having any apartment building contain a predominance of one ethnic group. The Housing Center is part of a complex of village ordinances, other nonprofit and governmental agencies striving to keep the housing market healthy and integrated.

There other three Oak Park Stories are family portraits designed to take a look at how this experiment works itself out in the lives of its citizens. It is hoped that through their lives I can reveal some of Oak Park's core values and how the transformation of the community impacts on the people who live there. Each family reveals different aspects of the community. The Taylor family is solidly middle-class African American who moved to Oak Park because they wanted their children to attend good schools and be in a neighborhood where they could ride their bikes in the streets. They wanted them exposed to children of different ethnicities and from different economic strata. They are able to realize their goals because of decades of work to make Oak Park a welcoming place. Through their lives I explore the historical and contemporary roles of African Americans in Oak Park as well as the values of a middle-class black family.

The next Oak Park Story concerns a lesbian family, Rebecca Levin and Sophie Kaluziak and their children Ariel and Ben. Rebecca is a long-term Oak Park resident, community activist, and instrumental in the formation of the local gay and lesbian organization. Their engagement with the schools and other aspects of the community illuminates a number of important issues concerning the integration of gay people in Oak Park - a community with a lesbian village president, a gay village trustee and a gay man on the school board. As the openly gay population ages, the character of the community changes with it. Gays and lesbians are becoming more and more middle class and suburban and less likely to live in a gay-identified neighborhood. Many are home owners with children. Increasingly these gay suburban families are indistinguishable from their heterosexual neighbors. It is this ordinariness that is often overlooked in favor of the more sensational aspects of single gay life.

The final Oak Park Story is about Helena and some of her family. Helena Gervais McCullough is the matriarch of a family who has lived in Oak Park for four generations. She is at once a part of the old WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) aristocracy and an active participant in the New Oak Park. Helena is in her nineties and displays all of the most traditional Oak Park values. Yet she is able to accept a bisexual son-in-law who is a retired public school teacher active in the local politically powerful gay and lesbian organization and local politics, and an African American daughter-in-law. Exploring her world provides us with a guide through this remarkable part of the community's history. I am currently completing this CD. It is the most difficult. As this family espouses values that are similar to mine I see myself in their lives. But more important, I have become a close personal friend of Helena's son-in-law, Bob. To further complicate the picture Helena is my aunt's best friend. From the beginning Bob has served as an active collaborator. He introduced me to the Taylors and has been a constant source of information and introductions. As I started editing his family portrait this summer while living in Oak Park, we were in daily contact and socialized on a constant basis. For me this situation pushes the boundaries of doing reflexive ethnography as far as it is possible.

With these three family portraits, I hope to show how some middle-class Oak Parkers cope with living in the most interesting social experiment in the U.S. It would be impossible to tell all of the stories that make up a community like Oak Park, but through these four we can gain some insight into this place.

Usefulness. Apart from the introduction of a new format for communicating ethnography, I believe this study can satisfy a number of needs from the most personal to a larger public one. Let me concentrate on the largest and most public. Living in harmony in diverse communities may be one of the most pressing problems humanity faces in the twenty-first century. We live in a time when the luxury of living only with people like ourselves is over. Catholics must learn to live with Jews and Protestants and Muslims, the rich with the poor and Europeans with people of color. Everyone must overcome their natural inclination to surround themselves with people who share their ethnic, religious, and socio-economic identity. We no longer have the luxury of living in homogenous societies. This will not be easy as the tragedies of Northern Ireland and Serbia attest. We need to learn from examples of communities that successfully maintain diversity, like Oak Park. My goal is to provide insight into a community that has been able to maintain itself as a stable and diverse place -- a community devoted to the social experiment of tolerating difference. Oak Park is a model of the diverse and tolerant community in which many residents are actively engaged in maintaining this character. It appears to be a kind of place that most people aspire to live in. Can we learn something from this place that will ease the ethnic and religious tensions in other places that appear to be worsening through time? Can Oak Park serve as a model of the tolerance and heterogeneity that other communities can use? I thought so when I started the research and am less certain at the conclusion. Oak Park is small - 4.5 square miles -- relatively affluent - average income is close to $100,000 -- and most important, politically independent. With money and independence it is relatively easy to become proactive in the manner that Oak Parkers did. I am uncertain how many other communities have the luxury of quick and decisive action to counteract a perceived problem.

Additional Information can be found at http://www.der.org/films/oak-park-stories.html