ABSTRACT
Sociologist Georg Simmel explained that even in the earliest stages of modernization, cities provided unique "psychological conditions" indicative of a particular type of lived urban experience that manifested "with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life" that comprise the metropolis. During the last 20 years, scholarship on physical culture has slowly begun to make use of ethnographic inquiry as a research approach to the issues and problems of contemporary urbanism. Contributing to the politics of representation is the role and presence of theory within the ethnographer's process of interpretation. Building from an embodied reflexive position, the kinds of framing and thinking ethnographers bring to bear on a project necessarily consider that much of it is done so a priori. It is necessary to encourage urban ethnographies of physical culture to broaden beyond well-delimited spaces, peoples, and initiatives into the uncertainty of everyday, embodied urban life.
