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Invited Speaker on Nels Anderson and the Chicago School
Professor, Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Humboldt University, Berlin Professor Lindner is an expert on urban cultural anthropology and has written widely on the image and culture of the city. In The Reportage of Urban Culture he argues that the field research method associated with the Chicago school of sociology was indebted to the tradition of urban reportage as well as to methods borrowed from anthropology. The leader of the Chicago school method, Robert Ezra Park, is described as imagining himself as a captain of inquiry, leading a team of investigators in much the same way that city editors of newspapers did at the time. A key aspect of this orientation to the world was the effort to convey a picture of reality untainted by moral assumptions. The archetype of this unsentimental disposition was the turn-of-the-century reporter, a figure who approached social reality with an attitude of disinterested interest. It was the attitude of the reporter, one based on the wish for a new experience unfiltered by moral assumptions, which proved to be the key link between journalism and the pragmatic ethnographic method. This predilection for observation led both reporters and Chicago school ethnologists to embrace a sense of themselves as marginal men existing between two cultures: that of reporting or academia, and that of the people they observed. In this way, reporting functioned as a kind of reservoir for cultural dissidents, individuals who were dissatisfied with the narrowness and sterility of genteel US culture. What emerged out of this sensibility was a new understanding of the social role of the intelligentsia, one connected to new communication technologies and publication media, and one imbued with a sense of mission to enlighten the public about the reality of its situation.
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