COMMUNITY ACTIVISM IN OAK PARK: COMPETING AGENDAS ...

known about the residents who are likely to participate in neighborhood organizations
(1982:180).
Prior Research
Anthropologists traditionally have conducted fieldwork in small-scale societies
and peasant communities in order to observe and document the lifeways of small groups
of people and have concerned themselves with the fundamental issues of the maintenance
of life and society (Ulin 1991:8-9). These analyses of small communities have generally
focused on the social or political structure of a group within agricultural environments
and have emphasized interaction between society and nature and the ways in which social
groups have organized themselves in relation to their environment (Jones et al.
1992:100). Jones explains that although these analyses are “obscured by the complexity
of modern city life, an understanding of these processes is central to social analyses”
(Jones et al. 1992:100). While research on small communities attempts to explain a
group’s social and cultural construction as bounded by kinship, customs, and ritual
practices, “research in urban society will usually focus on social constructs such as
community, class, race, and gender” (Tonkiss 2005:1).
Urban ethnography has undergone many changes since it evolved out of the
Chicago School of Sociology in the 1940s and 50s. The early Chicago School taught that
“one cannot understand social life without understanding the arrangements of particular
social actors in particular social times and places—Social facts are located” (Abbott
1997:1152). Traditional urban sociology was concerned with such activities as how
social groups formed communities, created subcultures, and avoided anomie, which all
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