Local Conflict, Global Forces: Fighting for Public Education in a New York Suburb
Author(s)
Scandlyn, Jean N.
Abstract
This study addresses two points raised by Gupta and Ferguson in their essay on fieldwork in contemporary anthropology. First, studying Mayfield, USA, reveals that home, too, can be a place of difference, a suitable field for anthropological inquiry and that distance from one’s field site can have many meanings. It is taking seriously the idea that “we” have culture, too. Thus the differences at home might not be what we expect them to be. In Mayfield, the real “newcomers” were the middle-class parents who moved out from the city and challenged the local political power of the senior citizens whose lives were firmly rooted in the town and its institutions. Although ethnic and racial conflict existed and could be fairly dramatic at times, class conflict was ultimately more instrumental in maintaining the town’s character. However, because social class remains invisible and coded by ethnicity and race, the public dialogue functions primarily to release long-standing tension rather than to resolve or address it. Thus the school board debates and elections resemble the “mechanism to cloak fundamental disharmonies” that occur in small communities described by anthropologists in Wales and Africa. Second, the community study illustrates the importance of studying “shifting locations,” and “forging links between different knowledges”. Looking at these issues in a small community highlights the need to trace local problems to the regional, national, and global forces, both economic and political, that affect their emergence. In a world where national borders are increasingly porous, it becomes critical to examine the borders within our communities, those invisible fences with which we police and maintain local distinctions among old-timer and newcomer, family and outsider, native and immigrant. These are the mechanisms that will determine on a local level what transnationalism looks like. “Natives” are not going to actively and meaningfully incorporate new immigrants into their communities as long as ethnic identity trumps social class distinctions and interests in pubic dialogue.
