The Community and the World

Abstract

It's getting hard to remember that there was a time, not too long ago, when urban community studies, and urban ethnography in general, were on the margins of U.S. sociology. Streetwise multimethod studies of the urban communities were one of the founding traditions of U.S. social science, yet by the time I entered graduate school at the end of the 1970s, this sort of work was decidedly on the outs. Of course, we all read the classic urban community studies. And the leading practitioners of the fieldworker's craft were much honored as elder statesmen and states women. Yet few ambitious young scholars were encouraged to follow in their footsteps. Ethnography was at the height of its postmodern crisis of confidence, and what had begun as admirable reflexivity was fast turning into the paralysis of autoethnographic self-absorption. Cutting-edge urban social theory assured us that the very notion of community was a myth, and insisted our focus should be on global processes of production, accu mulation, and consumption. And for sociology's then increasingly quanti tative mainstream, community-based field work seemed as quaint as the counter-sorter. Not bad for its day, perhaps, but a prescientific blend of insight, hunches, and slow-paced journalism that, in light of advances in quantitative technique, was decidedly outmoded. Things have changed. Starting in the mid 1980s, mainstream sociol ogy began to pay renewed attention to poverty and the role urban borhoods played in it. Shortly thereafter, the growth of immigrant communities burst onto the agenda. Many of the researchers engaging these topics had backgrounds in quantitative or policy-oriented research, yet they were frustrated that the questions they were asking about neigh borhood effects and other local processes could not really be addressed using quantitative techniques alone. Soon we were hearing calls for a