Loudoun Square: A Community Survey-I (An Aspect of Race Relations in English Society)

Loudoun Square: A Community Survey-I (An Aspect of Race Relations in English Society)

The Sociological Review
Volume a34, Issue 1-2 (January 1942)
pages 12–33
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1942.tb02744.x

K. L. Little

Recent research in North America has brought more clearly to light certain facets of urban and contemporary social life, more particularly in the shape of the urban community, which have been ascribed and limited hitherto to the much smaller and less complicated social configuration, such as the village, or even the so-called primitive folk society. The Coloured community of Cardiff, of whose anthropology this paper offers a preliminary description, certainly brings to the quarter of the town which it inhabits something of that distinctive quality which Park finds in different areas of the modern city.But the interest the anthropologist has in this community lies not only in its uniqueness in terms of racial hybridity, and its manifold diversity of language, religion, and even of culture, but in the curious reflection it throws on “normal” English society, and on the wider cultural values which appertain to the latter.

The account of these anthropological investigations in the dockland of Cardiff durring August and September 1941 has been styled a “community-survey.” By convention the social survey, or survey of a community, is concerned exclusively with modern civilized and usually urban society. Ideally, it may be defined as a study of the sociology, i.e. of the social institutions and activities, of people living in a particular locality. On the other hand, as Ginsberg has pointed out, the study of contemporary social conditions in this country, at any rate, has been inspired by direct interest in practical reform, and has not in general been guided by…

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