Urban anthropology

Emergence and history

The emergence of urban anthropology resulted from the consequences of the WW2
and the processes of decolonization, with the introduction of industrialization to
every place and society.
Its roots lie more in the sociological study of industrial societies than in traditional
anthropology.
1930s-1950s: cultural anthropologist’s interest in the study of peasants and the
impact of cities on their lives increased.
Unnoticed until the 1960s, when traditional groups became increasingly integrated
into the urbanized world.
1960s: rural-urban migration, urban adaptation, ethnicity, poverty
1970s

Early urban sociology

Ferdinand Tönnies, 1887: gemeinschaft (impersonal, contractual bonds
characterize the capitalist society) vs. gesellschaft (intimate relationships and
collective activities of the feudal community) society
Emile Durkheim, 1987: anomic suicide is characteristic of those who live in
isolated, impersonal worlds.
Both concepts are rooted in the theoretical assumptions about what constitutes
the essence of urban and non-urban life.
Louis Wirth, Urbanism as a way of life, 1938: urban life is marked by impersonal,
instrumental contacts which tend to free individuals from the strong controls of
such primary groups as the extended family; but this freedom of individual action
would be accompanied by the loss of collective security.
Robert Redfield, 1947: folk-urban continuum or the folk as the pole consisting of
small, homogeneous, isolated and traditional communities, economically sufficient
and with a rudimentary division of labor; Little tradition (of local villages) vs. great
tradition (of cities).

The Chicago school of urban ecology

Robert E. Park: focus on demographic and census information, interviews and
historical data and emphasized cities’ social problems rather than an abstract
theory of urban life. Cities were viewed as ecosystems that were segmented into
natural areas: slums, neighborhoods and vice areas, and were subject to laws of
residential succession.

The community study approach

It developed in reaction to the abstract empiricism of the later Chicago school.
Caroline Ware, Greenwich Village 1920-1930: examined the incorporation of GV
into NY through the expansion of the metropolis and the process by which it
maintained its distinctive character.
W. Lloyd Warner, Yankee city: merged an ethnographic perspective gained in
fieldwork among Australian aborigines with information gathered from formal
interviews for his social study of a New England city, Yankee City.
William Foote Whyte, Street corner society: ethnography of an Italian slum,
Cornerville

Interactionism
It also developed in reaction to the abstract empiricism of the later Chicago school.
Erving Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life, 1959: human interaction as
dramaturgical metaphor through an analysis of human behavior as a series of
performances of parts.
Value for anthropology: the element of subtle play in human interaction

Archeology
Gordon Childe, 1950: urban revolution or a shift in economic productivity, which
seems to occur independently in several areas in he world but with come underlying
regularities: classes of full-time specialists and elites exempt from subsistence tasks,
mechanisms such as taxes or tributes by which the social surplus could be
concentrated in the hand of the elites, monumental public buildings, a writing
system, extensive foreign trade and the emergence of political organization.

Definition and aims

Kemper, 1996: urban anthropology involves the study of the cultural systems of
cities as well as the linkages of cities to larger and smaller places and populations as
part of the worldwide urban system.

Methodology
The large-scale societies studied encourage the reconsideration of traditional
anthropological methodology, the participant observation. It becomes difficult to
create a close rapport with a small number of informants in urban context.
Limits of the participant observation: the loss of the holistic perspective and the risk
of a fragmentary picture of urban reality (and thus of a urban mosaic).

Research traditions (of traditional anthropology, which maintain continuity in

urban anthropology by not focusing on urbanism itself but on smaller units within
cities)
Anthropology of urban poverty
Oscar Lewis, 1959: culture of poverty as a form of life that exists independently of
economical and political deprivation

Network research (household, family and social networks)

Network analysis roots in the study of rural communities and was transferred to
cities with the publication of Elizabeth Bott Family and social network, 1957:
relation between the internal structure of the family and the pattern of its external
contacts (the connectedness of the family’s networks within a community).

Anthropology of urbanization
Study the rural-urban migration; especially in African research, by British
anthropology, and in Latin American studies, by American anthropology. Emphasis
in large-scale physical movements of rural people to cities; question of how
immigrant populations adapt to their environments (alteration of the social
structure, impersonal tis, collective identities within the city)

Anthropology in cities vs. an of cities

- Anthropology that does research in a city but without much concern for the
urban context
- Anthropology concerned with the structure of city life and its impact on
human behavior locally or cross-culturally
- Anthropology concerned with the development of international urban
systems through time and space as distinctive social-cultural and political-
economic domains

To see
- On the difficulties of fieldwork in urban context:
Foster and Kemper, 1974
- On what is a city
Fox, 1977