Studying a local Monoculture... any ideas on what to study?

Question

My anthro. class has an assignment to study some monoculture locally. So far we have thought of a coffee shop, an office on campus, and the animal shelter in town. We need to have a few more ideas to run by him, any suggestions?

Answer 1

I would say a elementary school playground at recess is a good place for "light" monoculture observing.  Yes, children come from various backgrounds, but they blend together quite well at playtime on the playground--they become a definite "group" with their games.  You could observe the "soccer players" the "4 square players", the girls, the boys, the children on the equipment.  There are rules, there are rituals, there are sayings, there are group identifiers.  This is also true of a preschool environment and the littler children, too.

Answer 2

Those are sites, not cultures.  You need to ask yourself: who would you be seeing there?  Would they be there because culturally they are the same or becuase they happen to have business there (unless you're coffee house is the sort that some group of people - homeless, hippies, poets/artists - hang out at all day, you're looking at the latter and not at a monoculture).  While you could make a study of office culture, I think you'd probably have more fun and get better results if you chose a subculture that's more different, particularly if you haven't done fieldwork before.  Are there any dance clubs in your area for g**s and lesbians? (please ask around and make sure that if there is one, it isn't a s*x club or otherwise seedy.  You cannot, for the purpose of a course assignment, engage in fieldwork requiring an ethical review board so you need to avoid illegal activities which may or may not happen at the worst g*y clubs, depending on the local scene).  What about g*y books stores?  Are there goth dance clubs?  Is there a sports team, musical group, or theater troupe?  What about a business organization or a hobby club (a quilt guild, an art society, a historical reenactment group, a medical association, a nurse's union, etc)?  Is there a place in a park where people meet to play chess?  Is there a part of town where homeless people hang out?  Those are the sorts of subcultures you could study.  You need a place that the people spend time at, where they know each other and interact on a regular basis and, above all, where they have some fundamental commonality that defines them as belonging to a society you are studying - g**s, goths, quilters, artists, amateur historians, homeless people, etc.  A monoculture must have that.  If they are not expressing some common feature which defines part of their identity in the situation you are studying them in, they are not a monoculture.  If you ask them, "What is your role here?" it cannot be "Err, I'm just stopping in for a coffee on my way to work."  If you want to make it a hard project, you could do a study of prospective pet adopters or university office workers but you'll have a harder time finding cultural elements becuase it will be largely familiar to you and you will take some things for granted and may consider others quite boring unless you have an applied anthropology question to answer (like What makes people want to adopt pets from the shelter?) and are willing to work for the concept of monoculture.  Save yourself the trouble and keep your assignment as simple as possible.