ABSTRACT

There is among sociologists a conventional, perhaps notorious reluctance to acknowledge art as an aspect of culture consequential to their researches. Some urban studies have been done in the style of a higher zoology, describing the spectacle of an organism which grows and decays as it consumes and transforms its natural surroundings. But others have turned away from such faceless plotting of biological (or metabolical) movements to chronicle the ethnology of streets and neighborhoods and to portray the folk singularities and stubborn provincialisms which racial and cultural communities are able to keep alive within the larger metropolitan creature. One usually thinks of impressionism as a supremely pictorial display, as a marvelous aesthetic sport, void of content, for which the world is only a dappled, bursting, tremulous mass of light, where color palpitates in the waters and rustles in the leafery, and even cathedrals are engulfed and vanish in the sunlight and shadow of the changing day.