COMMUNITY ACTIVISM IN OAK PARK: COMPETING AGENDAS ...

in city environments is exposed in the form of social constructs, such as community
(Krauss 1989), class (Freidenberg 1998), race (Williams 1992), and gender (Spain 1992).
Elijah Anderson (2002:1537) further elaborates on urban ethnography and states,
Of particular interest is how residents meet the exigencies of life,
how they group themselves socially, and how they arrive at their
shared understandings of the local system of rules of everyday
life—the codes they live by. Direct observation of key events and
people’s reactions to them can alert the ethnographer to the subtle
expectations and norms of the subjects—and thus, to their culture.
Collecting large scale qualitative data in urban contexts once seemed almost impossible
to do, but anthropologists have successfully negotiated cultural and institutional barriers
and produced detailed ethnographic descriptions (Susser 1982b:7).
“The practice of intensive fieldwork has been central to the definition of modern
social anthropology as a discipline—to the extent of being the single distinctive feature of
the anthropological method” (Jenkins 1994:433). Anthropologists’ knowledge is gained
by close and repeated interaction with specific individuals, who provide information
about different cultures and different ways of being. “The main technique for
constructing knowledge about a putative ‘other’ is participant observation, blending
oneself within the lives of others by sharing time with them in their own space”
(Freidenberg 1998:170). “In participant-observation studies, the observer occupies a role
in a social context, which is the subject of study” (Bositis 1988:334).
Much urban ethnographic research has been conducted in lower-income
neighborhoods (Marks 1991:461-462), where inequalities are exposed at the level of the
“community” and reveal how residents perceive their community environment. The term
community implies something “geographic and psychologic” and “geographically it
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