ABSTRACT

The empirical research undertaken takes the form of an ethnographic study of multiple generations in both urban and suburban settings within Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese American communities. Ethnography is practiced through participant observation and in-depth description by anthropologists who are from outside the research community. Ethnographers, as professional strangers, approach their studies from the native's point of view. Ethnography is thus conceived as a reflexive process, which involves the ongoing dialogue between the observer and the observed, both of who are equally defined by the context and relations of research and who are constantly engaging in the construction of social reality. The task of maintaining the balance is difficult because fieldwork is based on different assumptions and perceptions of social reality between researcher and research subjects. The fieldwork in the Korean American community was conducted as a part of museum exhibition of Korean Americans in Philadelphia at the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies.