Danyelle Hershkopf
Professor Karen Williams
MCHC
May 22nd, 2016
Reflection on Ethnography
I came into this project thinking that I for the most part, knew Flatbush. Part of my family
had lived there for decades, and I had visited it many times. Through research, I have found out
that Flatbush is, in general, muchbigger than expected. The diversity is larger than I thought.
The actual area is larger than I thought. That said, I through my research online and through my
field notes, I found that Flatbush has a distinct culture.
When I used to visit Flatbush, I mostly stayed in Lenox Road. This is one out of two
reasons as to why I included it in the project. Lenox Road and the immediate surrounding area is
a mostly Caribbean-American neighborhood. Thus, I used to see Flatbush as being just that, and
I believed that my trips to other parts of Flatbush Avenue would not change this view. But
according to our sources, Flatbush was also a place for immigrants of many different parts of the
world: Europeans, Southeast Asians, and Middle Easterners, (Brooklyn Based). In retrospect,
given the overall diversity of Brooklyn, this shouldn’t have been surprising. But Brooklyn’s
“melting pot-ness” works in strange ways. Some neighborhoods are filled with many different
ethnicities. Others are heavily mono-ethnic. Those places aren’t so much of melting pots, but
more like different foods in different sections of the same tray. I used to assume that Flatbush
was like that, and to and extent, it is. However, unlike what I shall refer to as Tray
Neighborhoods, the tray isa metaphor for Brooklyn as a whole. Yet I came to find that Flatbush
was also a tray—a tray within a tray.
My research also helped me understand Flatbush better, in terms of its desirability. The
interviewees for the New York Times reported how convenient the place is—how they saved
money, how happy they were that they could do many things. How the place is not just diverse in
people, but opportunity. I thus recalled our first outing into the field. The store Weekend
certainly was made for those with the free time to spend out. Ironically, the store next to it, Get
Set, had clothes so expensive that I’m not sure if one could afford the night out. It was quite
interesting to actually see what was out there. Church Avenue offered more practical things,
namely clothes and food. Yet because the size of Flatbush is large, there are, of course, many
things to shop for. I remember a store that only sold caps. One store had signs written in Spanish,
that way Spanish-speaking customers could find a place to go to. In other words, I found that
whatever one’s tastes were, one had something.
Flatbush seemed to have its own quirks. I noticed that there were few dogs there,
especially compared to Park Slope or Besonhurst, where one cannot go at most five blocks
without coming across a dog. Also, for such a busy area, there was only one food vendor, a lone
hot dog salesman. I originally thought that this was due to two factors: the weather, as it was a
snowy March day, and the wide range of restaurants and food chains. Grocery stores, Checkers,
McDonalds, Kennedy Fried, etc., were all available, and indoors. Yet despite that, the hot dog
salesman was doing surprisingly good business, as one person was being served as another
waited for their turn. I’m not sure what to make of that—people giving up the warm indoors for a
hot dog. I assume that these people were on the go, showing the busy-body nature of the
neighborhood.
I will admit that prior to my research, I thought I knew Flatbush. Yet I soon realized that I
only saw Flatbush, but didn’t know it. For example, I knew that there was on Church, there was a
church, with a small graveyard. The headstones were all thin and eroded, so much so that I
wasn’t able to make out names. This was something I had always noticed, but for once I stopped
and wondered about the priest inside the church, and the volunteers that were helping with the
thrift sale that the church advertised. Did they have a record of the people buried there? Did they
lay down roses for the people? How much did they know about the people there?
I also noticed how close the community was, especially after reading about the low crime
rate, and the mom-and-pop stores. Our research showed that Flatbush became a more suburban
area in the 1800s, so I suppose some of those values were kept, despite the area becoming more
urban, (Ditmas Park Historical District Designation Report).In that sense, perhaps the priest and
the volunteers do know about the people in those graves. When we went to Church Avenue,
people, like in many other areas of the borough (and of this part of New York in general), no one
stopped to chat with others. Everyone kept going, kept moving. Thus the close-knit-ness might
vary, but as someone who doesn’t live in Flatbush, I can’t say. That’s the limit to ethnography:
you can only assume so much.
The ethnographic work and actual research of the area was fascinating, and reminded me
of sonder (the realization that the strangers one sees have their own complex life, such as your
own), and thus I practiced that with my observation of a mother and her daughter in a salon.
Though to be honest, it’s unlikely that I’d do ethnography again. I might do it on a smaller scale,
such as looking into the history of places like Greenwood Cemetery. That said, I will keep what
I learned from my experience in ethnography in mind. I will understand how each neighborhood
has a history, how each person has a story. How each street is one small part of a larger tale, a
larger culture, much like veins in the body.