A Companion to Urban Anthropology

Donald M. Nonini

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781444330106
• eBook ISBN: 9781118378656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A Companion to Urban Anthropology

BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY

A Companion to Urban Anthropology

"The city is becoming the basic currency of human – and non-human – life: a pile of interconnections which makes a series of difficult wholes. This volume navigates the anthropology of this medium with the greatest aplomb."
Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick

A Companion to Urban Anthropology presents original essays on central concepts in urban anthropology and ethnography. Featuring contributions from more than 25 leading international scholars in urban studies, the readings cover a wide variety of topics. Each essay explores a key phenomenon and is grounded in the author's original research along with findings of other urbanists. Classic issues such as built structures and urban planning, community, markets, and race lead to emergent areas of study including borders, sexualities, nature, extralegality, and resilience and sustainability. A Companion to Urban Anthropology offers revealing insights into the complex forces that continue to shape the urban experience.

PART I
Foundational Concepts: Affirmed and Contested

CHAPTER 1
Spatialities: The Rebirth of Urban Anthropology through Studies of Urban Space

Setha M. Low

Introduction

This chapter addresses the 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 (see Chapter 2, “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 (see Chapter 17, “Transnationality”).

Methodology

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.

History and Theoretical Background

The roots of traditional urban anthropology grew out of what has been called the rural–urban transition of peasant cultures when agriculturalists leaving rural villages encounter the city and adapt to urban life. This history continues to influence anthropologists who study migrants and migration, secondary cities, and transnational communities although now reconfigured as revolving circuits of migration and capital flow. Many urban ethnographers, however, have struggled to free themselves from the confines of this rural to urban development model and focus on translocality as a way of understanding an urbanism where residents and migrants live simultaneously in multiple urban and rural worlds (Low forthcoming).

The theoretical trajectory of urban anthropology drew upon the work of the Chicago School in the 1920s and 1930s and the development of an urban ecological perspective. The city was theorized as made up of adjacent ecological niches occupied by human groups in a series of concentric rings surrounding the central core. Class, occupation, world view, and life experiences are coterminous with an inhabitant's location within this human ecology (see Chapter 9, “Class”). Social change was thought to occur through socioeconomic transitions of these areas in an ever downward spiral toward the inner city. Research strategies focused on participant observation as a method of uncovering and explaining the adaptations and accommodations of urban populations to these micro-environments.

Another major influence was a series of community studies undertaken as part of the Institute of Community Studies program of policy and planning research on the slum clearance and replacement of housing in London, England and Lagos, Nigeria. These studies, beginning in the 1950s, theorized the city as made up of a series of urban “communities,” based on extended family relations and kinship networks (see Chapter 3, “Community”). Coincidentally, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations published Bott's (1957) study of the social networks of middle-class English families that drew upon discussions with anthropologists at the University of Manchester. The methodological contribution of network analysis as the basis for studying the social organization of city residents was widely used to understand the rapidly urbanizing populations of Latin America, as well as by North American researchers interested in the interconnections and interdependencies of family and household relationships among the urban poor. Network studies have become more elaborate and quantitative, but still provide an important methodological strategy and paradigm for urban anthropological researchers.

Early studies of planned physical and social change in Latin American low-income residential neighborhoods, as well as studies of the planning and design of new towns such as Ciudad Guayana (Peattie 1972) provided further ethnographic examples of local conflict over national and international planning goals. These studies identified foreign capital investment and the power/knowledge of the technologies of planning and architecture (Rabinow 1989) as antithetical to producing a humane environment for local populations and workers (see Chapter 5, “Built Structures and Planning”). Studies of urban renewal and community rebuilding after natural disasters further contributed to understanding how the dynamics of redevelopment processes often exclude the needs and meanings of residents. These studies, although focused on the local, set the stage for later poststructuralist studies of urban struggle for land tenure rights and adequate housing, as well as for studies of planning and architecture as instruments of social control.

The cumulative theoretical writings of Anthony Leeds (1973) were the beginning of a major shift in theoretical focus and meth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: Foundational Concepts: Affirmed and Contested
• PART II: Materializations and Their Imaginaries
• PART III: Dividing Processes, Bases of Solidarity
• PART IV: Abstractions of Consequence
• PART V: Experiencing/Knowing the City in Everyday Life
• PART VI: Nature and the City
• PART VII: Challenging the Present, Anticipating Urban Futures
• Index
• End User License Agreement