\n<\/p>\n
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Urban Anthropology examines the This focus is most readily Urban anthropology also examines Despite the concentration of Urban anthropologists have worked Urban anthropology has always Race, ethnic group, class, and There was a death and rebirth of
\nsocial organization of the city, looking at the kinds of social relationship
\nand pattern of social life unique to cities and comparing their different
\ncultural and historical contexts. It emerged as a separate subdiscipline of
\nsociocultural anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to earlier
\nstudies of urbanism, urban anthropology applied anthropological concepts and
\nfield research methods to urban populations where the city was the context of
\nthe research rather than the phenomenon under study.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\nHistorical Genesis:<\/h2>\n
\napparent in the tendency of urban anthropologists to examine the social
\norganization of small social worlds within the city, analyzing their social
\nlife in terms of larger institutional structures of power. Some of these
\nstudies are based on territorial units such as neighborhoods; others examine
\nsocial networks, webs of relationships linking people who may or may not live
\nnearby. Social networks in cities are frequently nonlocalized, stretching from
\nrural areas of origin to larger ethnic settlements in the cities (Boissevain
\n1974; Gmelch &\u00a0 <\/span>Zenner 1995).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n
\nsocial problems characteristic of large cities such as crime, social disorder,
\npoverty, homelessness, and transience. These studies examine the social
\norganization and cultural practices of distinct groups within the city such as
\ngangs (Suttles 1968), ethnic villagers (H. Gans 1962), kinship networks (Stack
\n1974), homeless alcoholics (Spradley 1970), and criminals and prostitutes
\n(Merry 1981). These studies usually include the systems of bureaucratic
\nregulation, urban politics, welfare administration, urban renewal, and economic
\nconditions that shape local communities. Other research focuses on systems of
\nformal social control such as police, courts, and prisons.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n
\nresearch on the United States and Great Britain, urban anthropology is a
\ncomparative field. Studies of kinship and neighborhood in British (Michael D.
\nYoung & Willmott 1957) and American cities (Liebow 1967; Lamphere 1987) are
\nparalleled by similar studies in India (Lynch 1969), South Africa (Philip Mayer
\n1961), Japan (Bestor 1989), and many other parts of the world. Some
\nanthropologists explore the changing nature of work and union movements in
\nurban centers in developing countries (Epstein 1958). Others examine the
\ndisproportionate growth of primate cities at the expense of regional towns as a
\nresult of economic development in Third World countries.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n
\nextensively on the migration of rural peasants to the cities. This research has
\nchallenged the proposition that as rural migrants settle in cities their social
\norder and cultural life disintegrates, an argument fundamental to the theory of
\nurbanism as a way of life. Studies of the squatter settlements that grew up as
\na result of rural migrants flooding into the cities of developing countries
\nduring the 1960s and 1970s revealed not anarchy, but emerging forms of social
\norder, planning, and institutional structure (Peattie 1968; Mangin 1970; B.
\nRoberts 1978).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n
\nfocused particularly on the plight of the urban poor. In his controversial
\nwork, Oscar Lewis (1966) argued that there was a culture of poverty<\/i>, a uniform way of life that emerged among the poorest
\ngroups in a variety of urban environments such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, and New
\nYork. Although this concept has been extensively criticized, it was an
\nimportant effort to theorize the social impacts of living on the economic
\nfringes of a large industrial city (Valentine 1968). More recent research views
\nlocal communities in large industrial cities as the product of late-capitalist
\ndevelopment and the progressive impoverishment of the poor. Susser (1982), for
\nexample, explored how the changing political economy of the city shapes the
\nlife situations of poor people. D. Harvey (1989b) examined changes in urban
\nlife as a result of global capital and labor flows. Anthropologists examine
\npolitical and economic forces that transform urban neighborhoods such as urban
\nrenewal, gentrification, disinvestment in cities, the flight of jobs from the
\ncity, racial discrimination in the private housing market, public housing
\npolicies, and the creation of new towns. Some work explores the way features of
\narchitectural design and urban planning shape social life or foster criminal
\nbehavior (J. Jacobs 1961; Merry 1981). There has been considerably less
\npublished on the way postmodernity is redefining urban life.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n
\ngender as forms of differentiation and exclusion are fundamental to the field,
\nand studies frequently examine how categories of race and ethnicity shape
\nmigration and settlement patterns, job opportunities, voluntary organizations,
\ncommunity institutions, access to work and leisure, and the maintenance of
\nkinship relationships (Philip Mayer 1961; Mullings 1987). Ethnicity, in
\nparticular, persists in urban areas in the form of ethnic neighborhoods or in
\nsuch voluntary associations as rotating credit associations and burial societies
\n(Hannerz 1980). Thus, urban anthropology, although inspired in its earlier
\nyears by theories of urbanism, now examines social life in the city as it
\nexists for the people who live in it, rather than the city itself.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\nContemporary situation:<\/h2>\n
\nurban anthropology in the 1990s and 2000s through the addition of spatial
\ntheories drawn from geography and a fuller understanding of the political
\neconomy of place. This transition, often referred to as the \u201cspatial turn\u201d or
\nin this volume \u201cspatialities,\u201d is discussed by tracing the methodology,
\nhistory, and substance of urban anthropology with an emphasis on works that
\nemployed spatial theory and privileged the built environment. With its origins
\nin traditional ethnography, urban anthropology initially focused on small
\ngroups of culturally distinct people living in urban enclaves, leaving the
\nstudy of urban space to geographers, sociologists, and urban planning. However,
\nduring the 1980s a transition occurred, the so-called \u201cdeath and rebirth of
\nurban anthropology\u201d based on linking macro and micro analyses of urban
\nprocesses through re-thinking the city as a space of flows, that is, circuits
\nof labor, capital, goods, and services moving ever more rapidly through space,
\ntime, and the internet; and a space of places, that is, the physical locations
\nof social reproduction, recreation, and the home. This discussion reviews both
\nthe components of the spatialities approach and highlights how this important
\nchange in theory and method occurred within urban anthropology. Briefly, the
\ndeath of urban anthropology was occasioned by a rejection of traditional
\nethnography strategies as inadequate for dealing with the complexities of
\nmodern cities. The so-called rebirth was then stimulated by theoretical work on
\nurban systems, labor flows, and social networks by Anthony Leeds (1973), the
\nincorporation of political economic approaches drawn from geography, sociology,
\nand political science (Mullings 1987; Susser 1982), and the emergence of the
\nanthropology of space and place that examined the city as a material and spatial
\nas well as cultural form (Low 1999; Pellow 1996; Rotenberg and McDonogh 1993).
\nTheories of transnational and translocal anthropology, also emerging at that
\ntime, played a dominant role in conceptualization of the city as a nexus of
\nlocal and global relationships.\u00a0<\/p>\n