Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
100
As in the twenty-first century the world continues to grow urbanized, urban dynamics are
increasingly central to global processes. At the same time, globalization and the contemporary
scale of human mobility (virtual, through communication, and actual, through geographical
movements) affects significantly, and in different ways, the social spectrum. Anthropology
remains fundamental to our understanding of these processes for it offers a unique, empirically-
based approach to studying both the micro-level in its broader context and the effects that global
processes have on the life of the single individual and of whole communities.
Cities are hubs of cultural and ethnic interaction as well as challenging settings for future
sustainable development. In studying the complexity of the world in which we live,
interdisciplinary work – in the sense of cooperation and exchange of research findings – has
proved to be of critical importance in gaining an informed, adequately articulated understanding
of human beings and society; at the same time, it is
a sine qua non
to avoid the disciplinary
fragmentation risked in the 1980s. True, the complexity of life somehow compels anthropologists
to specialize in a specific field; however, there is absolutely no need for such a complexity to
translate into academic complication and disciplinary insecurity. Bearing in mind that the a great
part of the world population lives in cities and that urbanization will inevitably grow further, it
could be argued that contemporary urban anthropology
is
Anthropology. Urban research can
definitely contribute to achieving the kind of holistic understanding on which the discipline is
based.
