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An Anthropologist Brings 'Ethnography of Daily Life' to a Small Midwestern Town

by DAVID L. WHEELER


Sometimes Tom Fricke's two worlds connect. In one, he's a six-day walk from Kathmandu, in a Nepalese town where he has to warm himself in a sleeping bag inside a stone hut filled with juniper smoke. In the other, he's an hour's drive west of Bismarck, N.D., staying at the Ray-Bern Motel, a six-room establishment named after the owners, Ray and Bernetta Glick. Cash only, no phones in the rooms.

In Timling, Nepal, Mr. Fricke speaks Tamang, but in this small North Dakota town, he uses English. At the moment, he is talking in C.J.'s Pub to a man with a faint German accent who has had too much to drink. The front of the man's white cowboy hat is so grimy, it looks as if it has been dipped in motor oil, and his muscular arms poke out of a flannel shirt that has had the sleeves cut off. The man brags that even with an outdated tractor, he can harvest 190 acres of wheat in a day. But, he says, his main job is welding.

"Where is your blacksmith shop?" asks Mr. Fricke. Then, after a pause, he realizes he is using a word more appropriate for Timling than for Richardton. He corrects himself, and finds out the shop's location.

After two months of fieldwork here, Mr. Fricke, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, is often struck by similarities between the town in Nepal, which he still visits, and the town in North Dakota. To start with, they are the same size -- about 650 people.

Mr. Fricke has been studying Timling since 1981, when as a graduate student he got a Fulbright fellowship to go there. He decided to study Richardton last year, after searching for a typical Midwestern small town facing common rural problems.

Mr. Fricke would like other anthropologists to turn their attention homeward. He has written in the American Anthropological Association's Anthropology Newsletter that the discipline should "bring the ethnography of everyday life to the U.S. where it promises to add desperately needed concreteness to public debates around the changes in cultures of work and family."

Last year, Mr. Fricke established a Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life at the University of Michigan with a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He hopes the center will be a base for social scientists who will fan out across the Midwest and visit homes, day-care centers, schools, and workplaces in a search for clues on how changes in employment patterns are affecting families.

Mr. Fricke doesn't claim to be the first anthropologist to consider his native country worth studying. But he says that too often, anthropologists have viewed the United States as a training ground for graduate students or a subject fit only for senior researchers seeking a retirement project. When anthropologists have studied Americans, he says, they have often chosen populations viewed as exotic foreigners in the country's midst: the homeless, crack addicts, bikers.

Mr. Fricke was first drawn to Richardton by a demographic map of the United States that displayed regional variations in the proportion of the population over 65 years old. On the map, he was struck by a dark band going down through the Great Plains, from North Dakota to Texas. The band indicated a region where the population over age 65 was much higher than in the rest of the country, with the exception of retirement destinations such as Florida and parts of the Southwest. Mr. Fricke thought he knew exactly what was happening. "Young people are leaving," he says, "and older people are staying behind."

After searching among small towns in North Dakota, his home state, Mr. Fricke settled on Richardton as a good case study of the demographic trend. The town still had a senior citizens' center, a clinic, and a school, and other institutions he could use to gain entry into residents' lives.

Mr. Fricke learned that Richardton had been established in 1883, shortly after the Northern Pacific Railroad was built. The prairie near the town is uninterrupted by mountains, with the exception of a peak known as Young Man's Butte. Although the area receives only about 13 inches of rainfall a year, the first settlers may well have thought the open prairie would be ideal for farming.

C.B. Richard, a company based in New York City, bought up the land, named the town, and then sold lots to German immigrants, often luring them with advertising of questionable veracity. The nearby Dickinson Press claimed to be quoting an East Coast newspaper when it reported that "It is only a question of time when the Capital of the United States, yea, the source and residence of the world's power and wisdom, will sit on top of Young Man's Butte."

Historical records and Mr. Fricke's interviews reveal that the last 25 years have been a less than triumphant period for the town. Once it had three gas stations, but now it has one. The town used to have three dances a year that served as civic fund raisers; now it has none. The old Ford dealership is a thrift shop. "There's a lot of stories of decline and dashed hopes," says Mr. Fricke.

The town shares an elementary school and a high school with the nearby town of Taylor, population 270, but the declining number of students in the elementary school makes the towns' school boards worry that one day they may have to close both schools. That step is always a death knell for small towns, Mr. Fricke says, because young families with children have to depart.

Mr. Fricke leaves the Ray-Bern Motel at about 7:30 each morning, to make way for the woman who cleans the rooms. He drives 23 miles to Dickinson, a city of more than 16,000 people, and fills up three Thermos bottles at a coffee shop he favors. Then he drives back to Richardton, pausing at a highway rest area that he calls his office to use a pay phone to set up interviews.

Mr. Fricke often visits Assumption Abbey, a community of 30 Benedictine monks here, and has copied 2,254 pages of records from the abbey's archives. Today, he joins the monks for late-morning prayers and lunch. The monks, some in black robes and others in T-shirts and jeans, file into choir pews in a church that they share with the local parish. The monks sing a hymn, listen to a reading about monastic life, and chant a psalm: "My eyes yearn to see your promise. When will you console me?"

The monastery has the same problem as the rest of the town: Young people are not replacing the old people who are dying off. "Catholic parents used to promote religious vocations," says Brother Basil Kirsch in the abbey's gift shop. "They don't anymore."

Brother Victor Frankenhauser, who has spent all of his 79 years in town, is in charge at the abbey's information desk, a first stop for tourists who come to visit the "cathedral of the prairies," as the monks' church is called. Brother Victor was the fifth of 10 children in a family of Germans who came here from Russia. He attended the abbey's school, now closed, and has been a monk for 60 years.

In town, he says some people don't know their neighbors, and even he feels like a stranger. "It used to be all German names in the phone book," he says. "Now I see a lot of Scandinavians."

After lunch at the abbey, Mr. Fricke visits the high-school principal and town historian, John H. Gengler, who talks about the virtues of a small school. "We've never cut a kid from an athletics team in the 30 years I've been here," says Mr. Gengler. "We might joke about them, but we don't cut them."

Mr. Fricke asks Mr. Gengler if it makes him feel odd that he is preparing his best students to leave town, because they are likely to attend college or seek employment elsewhere. "Graduation is my hardest time," says Mr. Gengler.

As he winds up his summer of research, Mr. Fricke cruises the streets, thinking about what the town might be like in 30 years. He knows he will visit then, when he is 74. He gets a feeling he once had in Nepal, when he watched villagers build a funeral pyre with stones, listened to the keening of mourners, and joined the local lamas in a round of barley beer drunk from wooden flasks.

He thinks that the book he will write about Richardton will be similar to the one he has written about Timling. I will be writing an elegy for a way of life.

Copyright 1999 The Chronicle of Higher Education

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