Contents
Global,
Transnational and Translocal Spaces
The methodological and
theoretical use of spatiality within anthropology began with ethnographies that
examined the relationship of architecture and culture. The concepts of space
and place emerged in urban ethnographies through the collective work of
anthropologists who employed material space as a strategy for interrogating the
city (Bestor 2004; Cooper 1994; Holston 1989; Low 1999, 2000; Pellow 1996;
Rotenberg and McDonogh 1993). Their work was directly influenced by French
social theorists who theorized space in terms of the power dynamics of spatial
relations and the meaning of everyday places and practices.
Drawing upon Foucault (1977),
Paul Rabinow (1989) was one of the first anthropologists to link the growth of
modern forms of political power with the evolution of aesthetic theories, and
to analyze how French colonists in North Africa exploited architectural and
urban planning principles to reflect their cultural superiority. James Holston
(1989) also examined the state-sponsored architecture and master planning of
Brasilia as a new form of spatial domination through which daily life became
the target for state intervention.
Lefebvre’s (1991) well-known
argument that space is never transparent, but must be queried through an analysis
of spatial representations, spatial practices, and spaces of representation
also became the basis of many anthropological
analyses. Nancy Munn (1996), and Stuart Rockefeller (2010) draw upon Lefebvre to link conceptual space to the
tangible by arguing that social space is both a field of action and a basis for
action.
Other anthropological efforts
started with Bourdieu (1977) and focused on how meaning and action interact in
interdependent ways to inculcate and reinforce cultural knowledge and behavior.
Bourdieu’s theory of practice provides the point of departure for Henrietta
Moore (1986) who concurs that space only acquires meaning when actors invoke
it. She argues that spaces are subject to multiple interpretations, such that
Endo men and women may share the same conceptual structure but enter into it in
different positions and therefore subject it to different interpretations
(Moore 1986: 163). Margaret Rodman (1992) and Miles Richardson (1982), on the
other hand, relied on Merleau-Ponty’s theories of phenomenology and lived space
to focus attention on how different actors construct, contest, and ground their personal
experience. Alberto Corsín Jiménez (2003) goes even further and insists that
“space is no longer a category of fixed and ontological attributes, but a
becoming, an emergent property of social relationship. Put somewhat
differently, social relationships are inherently spatial, and space an
instrument and dimension of space’s sociality” (2003: 140).
Ethnographic approaches to urban
space are an important strategy for studying contestation and resistance in the
city. When the appropriation of land for urban redevelopment threatens to limit
access to or exclude certain groups from using public spaces, these plans may
be contested by local segments of the population whose identity is variously
bound to the site (Cooper 1994).
Racialized Space
The processes of racialization
have been studied primarily in US and South African cites, focused on different
aspects of racism and racial segregation In the United States, the displacement
of Blacks through redlining and other real estate activities, analyses of
gentrification in African American neighborhoods, and studies of housing
abandonment by the city and federal government provide ethnographic
explanations of American residential apartheid (Gregory 1998).
Landscapes of Fear:
Landscapes of fear have become a
central focus in the spatialities research within urban anthropology, producing
considerable debate about the nature of the fear and how it is produced. For
example, Washington, DC’s and New York City’s emerging landscapes of fear are
being produced by new defensive spatial designs, the erosion of public space
through privatization and securitization, and memorials that constitute and
reinforce affective responses to the built environment. Hoffman goes so far as
to suggest that post-colonial African cities such as Freetown or Monrovia are
organized according to a “logic of barracks” creating “spaces of the
organization and deployment of violent labor.” For example, Bourgois (1995)
describes the fear and sense of vulnerability experienced by El Barrio
residents and by anthropologists faced with the everyday violence of those who
sell crack in East Harlem, New York City.
Global, Transnational and Translocal Spaces
Within urban anthropology,
transnational processes are defined by Ulf Hannerz (1992) based on cultural
flows organized by nations, markets, and movements. He criticizes world-systems
analyses as being too simplified to reflect the complexity and fluidity of the
“creolization” of postcolonial culture. From this perspective, global space is
conceived of as the flow of goods, people, and services – as well as capital,
technology, and ideas – across national borders and geographic regions,
resulting in the deterritorialization of space; that is space detached from
local places. Within anthropology, the term “transnational,” was first used to
describe the way that immigrants “live their lives across borders and maintain
their ties to home, even when their countries of origin and settlement are
geographically distant” (Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992: ix). Part of
this effort was to understand the implications of a multiplicity of social
relations and involvements that span borders. Eric Wolf (1982) laid the
theoretical groundwork in his landmark history of how the movement of capital
and labor has transformed global relations since the 1400s, dispelling the myth
that globalization is a recent phenomenon. However, while Wolf’s approach to
the issue of global connections is seminal, it deals primarily with issues of
power and its allocation, and only indirectly with the spaces of daily life. It
is much later, through the detailed ethnographies of the rhythms of daily life
in transnational migrant communities, that a sense of transnational urban space
emerges.
Translocal spaces are also produced by
other forms of cultural deterritorialization such as travel, tourism, and
religious diaspora. Marc Augé (1995) considers the airport a non-place, a space
of supermodernity, where customers,
passengers, and other users are identified by names, occupation, place of
birth, and address, but only upon entering and leaving. Airports along with
superstores and railways stations are non-places that “do not contain any
organic society” (1995: 112); social relations are suspended and this non-place
becomes a site of coming and going. Studies of migration and translocality
emphasize the role of diaspora communities within the new geography of
globalization. The technologies of time– space compression – such as the use of
international cellphones, the internet, and bargain airfares – enable diaspora
communities to survive, even at the margins of the global economy. The power of
the internet to mediate transnational urbanism is a key element in the
continuity of culture and social relationships between less developed parts of
Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with developed regions of North America and
Asia, but also between the metropole and the periphery. Secondary and mid-size
cities are becoming more important as
urban processes are seen as spaces of flows of information, labor, and capital.
It is in these studies that urban anthropology returns to some of its earliest concerns
with the urban to rural and migration circuits, but now drawing upon a new
arsenal of theory and bolstered by a critical perspective based on political
economic analysis and a spatialities framework as well as ethnographic sophistication.
Zoom class lecture on Spatial turn in urban anthropology (bilingual, meant for my students)
Part I: https://youtu.be/1fnSMZtumtk
Part II: https://youtu.be/2P5K_5rkT7o
