"An expert is someone who's fifty miles from home."
--Anonymous, quoted by Kathleen Norris in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.

Trapped behind a desk for the last 12 months, Tom Fricke is dressed for the field. His hiking boots are broken in, his jeans are worn and faded. For much of his career as an anthropologist, Fricke (Pronounced Frick-ee) has worked in a remote Himalayan village, on a narrow shelf of land 7,500 feet high near the Nepal-Tibet border. Soon he'll be heading off to stranger territory for his profession: a remote town on the Great Plains in North Dakota, near his hometown.

Fricke, 43, is an associate professor in the top-ranked anthropology department in the nation. He recently founded and now directs the Michigan Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and based at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). Writing the proposal that attracted nearly $3 million in funding, refining an ambitious research agenda and attending to all the details involved in starting up a new research center have kept him in Ann Arbor for more than a year now. "I feel claustrophobic here," he says, "with all these trees around me."

Fricke is one of a new breed of anthropologists who are ready to test the discipline's power to illuminate the familiar, mundane and prosaic as well as it always has the exotic. Over the years, with veteran colleagues at ISR and elsewhere, he has refined a fresh approach to fieldwork called "microdemography." It combines the scope of demographics with the scrupulous statistical protocols that are the hallmark of Michigan survey projects and the classical technique used by cultural anthropologists, ethnography. His work on Himalayan households is praised for being at once individual and representative, rich in personal detail and cultural context. The approach also makes it difficult to exploit anthropological subjects, partly because it demands "total immersion" by researchers. For the last two decades, Fricke has spent years in the field, six months at a stretch, living among the Tamang, the ethnic group who live in the Nepalese village of Timling, population 650. To get there, he walks for six days through rugged mountain passes, then sleeps in a hut and shares the meals of boiled potatoes, beer and porridge the villagers have to offer.

Now he's ready to use the same approach to document the wrenching changes in the rituals, culture and daily lives of middle-class, mainstream families who live in the 12 states defined by the U.S. Bureau of the Census as the Midwest: Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin. He's picked out his first field site--the town of Richardton, North Dakota, near the Heart River, population 650, the same as Timling. "It's time for anthropology to bring the ethnography of everyday life to the United States where it promises to add desperately needed concreteness to public debates about work and family life," Fricke writes in the October issue of the American Anthropological Association Newsletter.

Up until now, acceptable Americanist research in cultural anthropology has been consigned to one of two categories: either it's concerned with the eddies and margins where a purported "other" exists--the homeless, the drug culture, outsiders, past civilizations--or it's engaged in "studying up" the power chain, examining dominant social groups. Any work that's left is thought to be second-rate--either training projects for graduate students or close-to-home projects for senior researchers who've run out of energy or funding. Even more than most academics, anthropologists like to travel, and tend to discount fieldwork done too close to home.

Since the establishment of the Michigan Center challenges these assumptions, it's probably fitting that its founding director is a blue-collar intellectual and onetime farmer-poet who enjoys breaking new ground on the borders of his field. Anthropologists always see others in comparison to themselves, the argument goes, transposing an obverse image of themselves onto others. "Going home to study your own people is really just acknowledging this in a direct, open way," Fricke says.