Definition:
Urban Anthropology examines the
social organization of the city, looking at the kinds of social relationship
and pattern of social life unique to cities and comparing their different
cultural and historical contexts. It emerged as a separate subdiscipline of
sociocultural anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to earlier
studies of urbanism, urban anthropology applied anthropological concepts and
field research methods to urban populations where the city was the context of
the research rather than the phenomenon under study.
Historical Genesis:
This focus is most readily
apparent in the tendency of urban anthropologists to examine the social
organization of small social worlds within the city, analyzing their social
life in terms of larger institutional structures of power. Some of these
studies are based on territorial units such as neighborhoods; others examine
social networks, webs of relationships linking people who may or may not live
nearby. Social networks in cities are frequently nonlocalized, stretching from
rural areas of origin to larger ethnic settlements in the cities (Boissevain
1974; Gmelch & Zenner 1995).
Urban anthropology also examines
social problems characteristic of large cities such as crime, social disorder,
poverty, homelessness, and transience. These studies examine the social
organization and cultural practices of distinct groups within the city such as
gangs (Suttles 1968), ethnic villagers (H. Gans 1962), kinship networks (Stack
1974), homeless alcoholics (Spradley 1970), and criminals and prostitutes
(Merry 1981). These studies usually include the systems of bureaucratic
regulation, urban politics, welfare administration, urban renewal, and economic
conditions that shape local communities. Other research focuses on systems of
formal social control such as police, courts, and prisons.
Despite the concentration of
research on the United States and Great Britain, urban anthropology is a
comparative field. Studies of kinship and neighborhood in British (Michael D.
Young & Willmott 1957) and American cities (Liebow 1967; Lamphere 1987) are
paralleled by similar studies in India (Lynch 1969), South Africa (Philip Mayer
1961), Japan (Bestor 1989), and many other parts of the world. Some
anthropologists explore the changing nature of work and union movements in
urban centers in developing countries (Epstein 1958). Others examine the
disproportionate growth of primate cities at the expense of regional towns as a
result of economic development in Third World countries.
Urban anthropologists have worked
extensively on the migration of rural peasants to the cities. This research has
challenged the proposition that as rural migrants settle in cities their social
order and cultural life disintegrates, an argument fundamental to the theory of
urbanism as a way of life. Studies of the squatter settlements that grew up as
a result of rural migrants flooding into the cities of developing countries
during the 1960s and 1970s revealed not anarchy, but emerging forms of social
order, planning, and institutional structure (Peattie 1968; Mangin 1970; B.
Roberts 1978).
Urban anthropology has always
focused particularly on the plight of the urban poor. In his controversial
work, Oscar Lewis (1966) argued that there was a culture of poverty, a uniform way of life that emerged among the poorest
groups in a variety of urban environments such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, and New
York. Although this concept has been extensively criticized, it was an
important effort to theorize the social impacts of living on the economic
fringes of a large industrial city (Valentine 1968). More recent research views
local communities in large industrial cities as the product of late-capitalist
development and the progressive impoverishment of the poor. Susser (1982), for
example, explored how the changing political economy of the city shapes the
life situations of poor people. D. Harvey (1989b) examined changes in urban
life as a result of global capital and labor flows. Anthropologists examine
political and economic forces that transform urban neighborhoods such as urban
renewal, gentrification, disinvestment in cities, the flight of jobs from the
city, racial discrimination in the private housing market, public housing
policies, and the creation of new towns. Some work explores the way features of
architectural design and urban planning shape social life or foster criminal
behavior (J. Jacobs 1961; Merry 1981). There has been considerably less
published on the way postmodernity is redefining urban life.
Race, ethnic group, class, and
gender as forms of differentiation and exclusion are fundamental to the field,
and studies frequently examine how categories of race and ethnicity shape
migration and settlement patterns, job opportunities, voluntary organizations,
community institutions, access to work and leisure, and the maintenance of
kinship relationships (Philip Mayer 1961; Mullings 1987). Ethnicity, in
particular, persists in urban areas in the form of ethnic neighborhoods or in
such voluntary associations as rotating credit associations and burial societies
(Hannerz 1980). Thus, urban anthropology, although inspired in its earlier
years by theories of urbanism, now examines social life in the city as it
exists for the people who live in it, rather than the city itself.
Contemporary situation:
There was a death and rebirth of
urban anthropology in the 1990s and 2000s through the addition of spatial
theories drawn from geography and a fuller understanding of the political
economy of place. This transition, often referred to as the “spatial turn” or
in this volume “spatialities,” is discussed by tracing the methodology,
history, and substance of urban anthropology with an emphasis on works that
employed spatial theory and privileged the built environment. With its origins
in traditional ethnography, urban anthropology initially focused on small
groups of culturally distinct people living in urban enclaves, leaving the
study of urban space to geographers, sociologists, and urban planning. However,
during the 1980s a transition occurred, the so-called “death and rebirth of
urban anthropology” based on linking macro and micro analyses of urban
processes through re-thinking the city as a space of flows, that is, circuits
of labor, capital, goods, and services moving ever more rapidly through space,
time, and the internet; and a space of places, that is, the physical locations
of social reproduction, recreation, and the home. This discussion reviews both
the components of the spatialities approach and highlights how this important
change in theory and method occurred within urban anthropology. Briefly, the
death of urban anthropology was occasioned by a rejection of traditional
ethnography strategies as inadequate for dealing with the complexities of
modern cities. The so-called rebirth was then stimulated by theoretical work on
urban systems, labor flows, and social networks by Anthony Leeds (1973), the
incorporation of political economic approaches drawn from geography, sociology,
and political science (Mullings 1987; Susser 1982), and the emergence of the
anthropology of space and place that examined the city as a material and spatial
as well as cultural form (Low 1999; Pellow 1996; Rotenberg and McDonogh 1993).
Theories of transnational and translocal anthropology, also emerging at that
time, played a dominant role in conceptualization of the city as a nexus of
local and global relationships.
Methodology for Urban Anthropology:
The most distinctive aspect of an
anthropological approach to the study of the city is the centrality of
ethnography and the production of urban ethnographies of groups of people in
urban settings, called “anthropology in the city.” An ethnography is a
methodology for describing, analyzing, and theorizing about a group of people
from a sociocultural perspective as well as the written text of the results
produced by this methodology. There has been lengthy discussion as to what
constitutes an adequate ethnography, but for the purpose of this chapter, I
refer to urban ethnography as the cultural anthropological study of cities, urban
peoples, networks, systems, and environments. Ethnographies are generally
characterized by participant observation, a qualitative method that relies on
the anthropologist as a recorder and interpreter living among the people
studied within their cultural setting, and the process by which he/ she learns
about local social, political, and economic life. Most ethnographers, however,
use a wide range of methods, including quantitative surveys and maps as well as
qualitative interviews, life histories, and personal documents. An urban ethnography
offers an intimate glimpse of city life through the eyes of its residents as
seen and understood by the anthropologist. It differs from other methodologies
because of its emphasis on what has been called “thick description” and
narrative explanation of the rich details of everyday social life. Yet the
death of urban anthropology occurred because of a widespread disenchantment with
some aspects of small-scale urban ethnography and the anthropology in the city
model. The critique was based on the inability of traditional ethnographic
methods to conceptualize the city as a whole – as a system of symbols, process,
networks, or relationships – that was necessary to understand rapid
transformations in the global economy and urban landscape. Urban
anthropologists retained the use of culture as a theoretical construct, but at
the same time challenged its essentialized nature and deconstructed the concept
to produce a more fluid and complex notion. At the same time, urban ethnography
expanded to encompass historical, political, and economic as well as spatial
analyses advocating an anthropology of the city, rather than in the city. The
“urban,” then, became re-conceived of as a set of processes rather than a
setting, and its material and spatial form integrated into the study of social
relationships. While ethnography still plays an important role in defining an
urban anthropological approach, it is more likely to be a “multi-sited”
ethnography. Bestor’s (2001) study of tuna trade traces the circuits of
fishing, marketing, trading, and consuming of tuna as it occurs throughout the
world. The “ethnography” includes data
collected at all of these sites, including a fishing village in Spain, the
central Tokyo fish market, and a high-end sushi restaurant in New York City. He
argues that to understand the tuna trade the flow of capital, labor, and commodities
needs to be examined and researched. Low, Taplin, and Scheld (2005) argue in a
similar vein that to produce an adequate park ethnography, a variety of sites,
activities, parks, and neighborhoods must be considered. The point of
multi-sited ethnography is that the phenomena studied should be tracked through
its local and/or global landscape, following the actors and social processes
involved without artificially capturing them within a predetermined location.
The production of urban space and
the social construction of urban places and their contestation also have become
central in anthropological, not just geographical, analyses. Space has become
an analytic tool that complements traditional ethnography, particularly in
studies of the consequences of architectural
and urban planning projects and embodied analyses of the use of urban space.
These spatial analyses require new techniques such as behavioral mapping, transect
walks (journeys or tours with informants), physical traces mapping, movement
maps, and population counts that complement traditional ethnographic participant
observation and in-depth interviewing. The overall strength of urban
anthropology methodologies lies in their ability to provide empirical in-depth
and embodied understandings of everyday life and individual practices
inextricably embedded in and contingent to global socioeconomic and political
forces. The link between social forces and global capital with local politics
and practices is especially clear in studies that examine grassroots organizing
in response to urban transformations, and power dynamics, both local and
global, in a variety of community contexts. The linking of the macro political
economic analysis with the micro ethnographic reality of individuals provides
an integrated social science and humanistic perspective for urban design,
planning and policy decisions, and a solid intellectual framework for future
urban anthropological endeavors.
