Throughout history, cities have been important places of associated life, human diversity, and interaction. However, while twentieth-century sociologists have been at the forefront of urban studies, social and cultural anthropologists have long neglected the city as a relevant field of research. In the late 1930s a few anthropologists, such as Robert Redfield (1897-1958), shifted their attention from tribal and rural communities to peasant city-dwellers. Influenced by the Chicago school, some American anthropologists engaged in problem-centered studies that focused on poverty, ecology, and minorities; they developed such concepts as the "culture of poverty," cited by Oscar Lewis in Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959). Many of these studies examined rural-urban migration in slums and shanty towns in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Meanwhile, a group of anthropologists led by the South African Max Gluckman at the Rhodes Livingston Institute of Northern Rhodesia studied the effects of urbanization on tribal economy and social relations, particularly in the Copperbelt area of central Africa. Research in African cities, however, was not really considered urban research, according to Ralph D. Grillo in Ideologies and Institutions in Urban France: The Representation of Immigrants (1985). Although such pioneering work was later criticized for its functionalist approach, it did contribute to the development of new anthropological methods, such as case and network analysis.
More generally, anthropologists seemed to consider the city a new laboratory in which to carry out traditional studies on kinship, small-group dynamics, and belief and value systems. This trend continued throughout the 1960s, prompting Ulf Hannerz in Exploring the City; Inquiries toward an Urban Anthropology (1980) to question whether urban anthropology had a specific subject of study.
A more eclectic and regionally diversified urban anthropology emerged during the 1970s as field research was conducted in Japan, India, and Indonesia, and across Africa and South America. Such socioeconomic and geopolitical variety raised some confusion in precisely defining the term urban. For some, urban referred to population aggregates of a certain size. Others defined urban in terms of occupations other than agricultural or subsistence production. Still others defined urban as the density of social interaction rather than just demographic or physical density. From a Marxist perspective, it was argued that class struggle constituted the essence of urban life. Two main positions eventually emerged. One regarded the city as a totality that should be studied in itself. The other argued that the city could not be studied as an isolated unit separated from the wider national and international context. Richard G. Fox in Urban Anthropology: Cities in Their Cultural Setting (1977) expanded on this position by including historical analysis in the locally significant global context.
By the early 1980s anthropologists appeared to be divided between those who focused on so-called third-world societies—continuing to address town-country relations, rural migration, and urban adaptation—and those with an interest in industrial societies. The latter were mainly native anthropologists.
In Euro-American societies, urban anthropology grew in parallel to the study of the anthropologist’s own society. However, many European anthropologists, especially in Britain, regarded the study of one’s own society as not "distant" enough to be fit for anthropological research. In contrast, American anthropologists had a long tradition of domestic interest. Their so-called exotic subjects were American Indians, urban migrants, and immigrant ethnic communities. Hannerz, who had carried out a pioneering study of "ghetto" culture and community in Soulside (1969), later criticized this approach for viewing the city as a mosaic in which each piece presented different problems. In his later work, Exploring the City (1980), he saw the failure to bring together the various pieces as a major limitation of earlier urban research. Criticism aside, American anthropologists such as Ida Susser (1982) and Leith Mullings (1997) have produced in-depth analyses on such issues as urban poverty, ethnicity, and gender.
RELUCTANCE TURNED TO NEW METHODS
Anthropologists’ reluctance to engage in urban research originated in the fear of losing their disciplinary identity and in the view that the disciplinary paradigm, which had been developed for the study of village and tribal communities, could not be applied to larger, more complex communities. This debate developed into an advocacy for new methods.
While urban geographers such as Doreen Massey (1999) and sociologists such as Herbert J. Gans (1967) have become increasingly interested in the ethnographic methodology, anthropologists such as Sandra Wallman have doubted the applicability of participant observation in metropolitan areas. In her research in East London, published in Eight London Households (1984), Wallman applied research methods borrowed from other disciplines, calling it "anthropology by proxy." In contrast, Italo Pardo’s research in Naples in the mid-1980s, presented in Managing Existence in Naples (1996), eminently proved that not only was participant observation possible, but that a holistic study in the anthropological tradition could productively be done in urban Europe. Key points of Pardo’s work are a focus on the agency-system relationship, on the link between micro- and macro-level analysis, and on the sociological relevance of "strong continuous interaction" (Pardo 1996, pp. 11-12) between the material and the nonmaterial in people’s rational choices. New urban research followed, including that of Giuliana B. Prato (2000), on the interactions among economic, political, and cultural aspects of urban life, which contextual-ized local dynamics and change in national historical processes. Later works, such as that of Manos Spyridakis (2006), have used such an approach to examine the relationships between local and national processes and global restructuring.
The diversity of the societies studied by anthropologists inevitably led to different forms of urban anthropology worldwide. In the 1980s a new trend emerged in the United States. Apart from studying the poor, the marginal, and ethnic minorities, anthropologists began to examine such topics as inherited wealth, congressional patronage, and transnational migrants. Ethnographies on African societies moved to new grounds, examining the dramaturgy of power and status symbolism, the economic role of women, informal activities, ethnic conflict, the reemergence of witchcraft, and new urban segregation. Work, class, gender, religion, and bureaucracy, along with urban planning, became major topics of urban research in Asia. Many urban ethnographies on Latin America focused on economic policies, local politics, women’s work, urban development and planning, and indigenous rights.
Urban research in Europe appeared more geographically diversified in the early years of the twenty-first century. Sweden was at the forefront of urban research, addressing welfare institutions, class, and culture in relation to ethnicity. In Britain, apart from a few exceptions, urban research mainly focused on ethnic groups from Commonwealth countries. Urban France attracted the attention of both British and native anthropologists. In spite of a slow start, more urban research was carried out in southern and eastern Europe.
The fields of study mentioned thus far are by no means exhaustive of urban anthropological research. They represent major trends that have developed over the years. Throughout the 1990s, new developments in urban anthropology—notably those of Pardo (2000, 2004)— have investigated the relationships among elite groups, those between ordinary people and the ruling elite, and the legitimacy of governance. In the early twenty-first century—marked by transnationalism, globalization, the reemergence of localism, and the project of multicultural-ism—this trend addressed the urgent need to understand the city as a crucial arena in which citizenship, democracy, and, by extension, belonging are critically renegotiated and the morality of law and politics are increasingly questioned and scrutinized.
