I believe this study can satisfy a number of needs from the most personal to a larger public one. Let me start with the largest and most public. We live in a time when the luxury of only living with people like ourselves is over. Catholics must learn to live with Jews and Protestants and Muslins, the rich with the poor and Europeans with people of color. 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 residences 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 believe so.
Now for the personal - I have reached an age where I want to try to understand my life - make some sense out of who I am and what I have done. Rather than explore that need by writing an autobiography or memoir that would interest almost no one, I have decided to discover some things about myself through an ethnographic study of the place where I was born and spent the first eighteen years of my life. I will discuss the anthropological implications to trying to do this sort of ethnography later. Perhaps a few words about myself might be useful to the reader. I was born in 1935 in Oak Park. My parents' families were from a rural section of Southern Indiana-Kentucky. My mothers' family moved to Oak Park around World War I because I grandmother wanted to settle down in a temperance community and my grandfather found job opportunities in the construction business. My father came to Chicago with his mother from Kentucky. He became a bricklayer. My mother was a housewife until she became an executive secretary when I was in high school. We lived mainly in a South Oak Park apartment, the least affluent part of the village. While I was not particularly aware of it, we occupied the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. I was a rebellious child/teenager and felt Oak Park to be too narrow minded and intolerant for my taste. I left in 1954 harboring ill feelings towards my birthplace and with no desire to return. I went to Los Angeles when I received all three of my degrees - B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. In 1967 I took a faculty appointment at Temple University where I have remained. It was not until much later that I "discovered" that Oak Park was a truly beautiful place with its Wright Prairie style houses and Victorian painted ladies and parks etc. Even more recently I learned that Oak Park had transformed itself into a liberal tolerant place that was in the midst of one of the more ambitious social experiments of any community in the U.S. Since beginning this study I have grown to admire and enjoy Oak Park. I am not in the midst of trying to temper a somewhat romantic admiration of the village and settle into a more balanced ethnographer's role. I am looking forward to being able to understand more about myself during my first eighteen years in the process. I am certain that many of my autobiographical needs will be met in a number of why through the construction of the ethnography I plan to produce. The more I learn about Oak Park. the more I learn about myself.
On a more professional note, the study
will also enable me to pursue a number of anthropological interests.
Among them are: the limits of reflexive methods, the value of
ethnography in studying a contemporary U. S. community, how an
ethnographer can visualize culture and make a film about it. All
of these questions will be explored elsewhere.