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Books like "Plainville," "Street Corner Society," "The Gang," "The Irish Countrymen," and a series of others, were part of a kind of sociology done in the U.S. mainly twenty five to thirty years ago. It's associated with the University of Chicago and also with Harvard. At that time those fellows were trying to build ethnographic studies in a tradition that had been developed largely in England in social anthropology largely by studying tribal societies. But in recent years, anthropologists are again returning to detailed ethnographic work, and the term "ethnographer" which had fallen into considerable disrepute. This recent work is of a new sort, in a way. Where much of the early work was criticized as being impressionistic, casual, not hard, that is, not reproduceable, not stating hypotheses, etcetera, the new ethnographic work-which is calling itself things like "ethno-cognitive studies," "ethnocultural studies," "ethno-science" and the like-is attempting to proceed without being subject to those criticisms. There are several bases for this renaissance. But the most important one is the development of very strong tools by linguists.

This article focuses on the findings of several studies on social science and the U.S. citizen. In a survey by George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, people were asked how comforting would certain kinds of support be if they were dying. The survey also asked people what it was that would worry them most as death approached. Although majorities of respondents said they worried about personal pain or how loved ones would fare, when people were asked which overall area they were most concerned about, 38 percent said it was spiritual matters. 21 percent cited practical matters. Men in a swath of South Dakota as well as in the eastern cities of Baltimore and Washington live about as long as men in such developing countries as India and Bolivia, according to a 1997 study by Harvard scientist Christopher Murray. He also said women in some countries die around age 83, while men in a south-central position of South Dakota that contains two Indian reservations have life expectancies of only 61 years. The three major minority groups are purchasing homes, starting businesses and attaining college degrees at such a rapid pace they could reach partly with whites over the next 10 years, according to initial findings of an October 1997 study. The survey also found that whites still have substantially greater household income than African Americans and Hispanics, although less than the third minority group, Asian Americans, and that the annual rate at which minorities are increasing their incomes is virtually equal to that of whites. Although median family income rose in 1995 and 1996, it has yet to recover from the declines suffered in the current decade. For men, the boom has been a bust. Men working full-time jobs suffered, on average, 0.9 percent decline in income in 1996 and currently earn about 10 percent less in real terms than they did at the end of the eighties.