ABSTRACT
Two decades ago my first graduate classes at the University of Chicago were taken under Ernest Burgess, Louis Wirth, Herbert Blumer, and, memorably, Everett C. Hughes. Hughes, with anthropologist Sol Tax experimentally co-teaching, was directing a field studies course built around census tract analysis. Each student was assigned his own tract, the nearest thing to an ethnographic unit, and was expected to spend every available moment on site, observing, interviewing, and participating if possible in the ongoing society there, all the while entering copious notes in his field diary.
