Still, it seems like a stretch to go from studying working families in an obscure Himalayan village to studying working families on the Great Plains. "Even though the topography is radically different in Nepal and North Dakota," says Fricke, "the human situation is strangely similar." A marginalized community in one of the poorest, most inaccessible countries on earth, Timling has been going through a period of dramatic social change. Its economy has gone from a village agrarian to an urban industrial model, triggering an exodus of young workers to the cities. "Many small towns in the Midwest are similarly marginalized and isolated," Fricke notes. For decades, young workers and their families have been leaving, moving to Minneapolis, Columbus and Bismarck or out of the region entirely. So a lot of towns in the middle of the country arc filled with people who raised big families and now find themselves growing old alone. The Census Bureau estimated in 1996 that the elderly make up 20 to 25 percent of the population in many rural Midwestern counties.

Fricke's parents are among them. His father's family farmed around Baldwin, North Dakota, population 39, in the center of the state. Grandfather Fricke lost the family farm in the early 50s, just before Tom was born. The second of six brothers, he grew up in Bismarck, riding his bike around the Great Plains, exploring abandoned Mandan Indian villages and the nearby ghost town of Sanger, population one. When he was 19, Fricke wrote a poem, "Driving Toward Sanger: Prophecy Fulfilled" about that last resident. It includes these lines:

And there is the last man in Sanger
once a farmer
corn shaman dreaming the future
until the medicine ran out and the land was gone
banks and mortgages all that's left.

He gets drunk alone
Growing older in his house on the hill,
Burial scaffold etched against sun.
. . . .It is fall
Leaves
The colors of Armageddon

Tom Fricke worked in the field long before becoming an anthropologist, baling hay at his uncle's farm and driving farm machinery. Then, like so many others of his generation, he moved away to get an education, studying poetry with Tom McGrath at Moorhead State University on the Minnesota-North Dakota border before attending graduate school in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. "It was time to broaden my horizons," he says. "It's hard not to think about horizons when you live in North Dakota." Fricke's new focus on Midwestern families may yield results that influence 21st century public policy debates about everything from childcare subsidies to Social Security benefits.

But it also invites a certain scorn for the inhabitants of "fly-over" country, the flat bread-basket between the coasts. Colleagues experienced in large-scale survey research warn Fricke how hard it is to get taciturn Midwesterners to open up and talk about anything. But he's convinced their reticence is partly self-protection against mockery by outside "experts." "I noticed the same thing in Nepal," he says. "When a government official from Katmandu would show up to ask questions, people in Timling would clam up. A lot of people who don't know farmers have a certain attitude about them. They think they're bumpkins."

Soon after Fricke came to Michigan, a long time after he left Dakota and learned not to talk like a character from the movie Fargo, he got a fresh taste of what this feels like. He was reading a book written by a respected East Coast anthropologist about the contentious abortion debate in a small North Dakota town. "It was an eerie feeling" he remembers, "seeing people like my own family portrayed as 'others.' The account wasn't exactly wrong, but it was grotesquely incomplete. The people were presented as cardboard characters." Through his own research, which will examine the changing culture of work and family from the perspective of older Americans, and through other ethnographic studies sponsored by the new center, Fricke hopes to present a fully rounded view of the lives of everyday, mainstream, Midwestern families "at a level of concreteness and complexity that shatters existing stereotypes."

"I don't think you have to come from a place to get it right," he says. But sometimes before you can go back home again, you have to go thousands of miles away.

Studying Everyday Life

The U-M Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life is the fourth center on working families to be established by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Others are affiliated with the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Chicago and Cornell University. The match between Fricke, the U-M and the Sloan Foundation was made last spring by U-M anthropologist Sharon Stephens through a Scandinavian colleague. Three days after receiving word that the Center would be funded, Stephens died of cancer. "Her sudden death at age 46 is a tragedy we're all still dealing with," Fricke says.

U-M researchers who form the core faculty of the Center include Frank Stafford, Abigail Stewart, Jennifer Robertson, Conrad Kottak, Sandra Hofferth, Arland Thornton, Leslie Perlow and Lawrence Root.