ABSTRACT
Hannah Baneth was known as an ageing woman who turned up at meetings armed with her carrier bags full of documents, quick with a sharp question for the flak-catchers of local bureaucracy. In the post-war era, social science in Britain turned the lens of urban community on to the urban minority ethnic populations. Ethnographies developed along the formula of the X community in Y', from early studies of West Indians in the coloured quarters' of Stepney or Brixton. This ethnic twist in the ecological model again drew on the American metropolis and its observers in the Chicago School. The multiplication of axes of identification makes older notions of multiculturalism, based on the idea of several cultures, obsolete: the term multiculture' is better, conveying the sense of the irrevocably multiple nature of culture. Ethnography is often framed in terms of an individual researcher building up personal relationships collaboratively, as in the Portrait Project, enables the building of relationships.
