Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
111
COMMENTS AND REFLECTIONS
Stephan Feuchtwang, Ph.D
.
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science
The survey provided by Giuliana Prato and Italo Pardo is an extremely useful history and
orientation of urban anthropology as a subject and an institution. I will offer three comments, one
leading into the other. The first is, from my perspective as an anthropologist of China, to make
good an omission from their survey. The second is to note some that much anthropology
impinges on and is relevant to ‘urban anthropology’. The third is to broach the problem of what
might the theoretical object of urban anthropology be, in order to judge whether or when such
other anthropological topics are part of it.
The omission is the work of the anthropologist G. William Skinner, first on marketing and
administrative hierarchies in imperial China and their transformation in the process of
modernisation (1964), second on the city in late imperial China (1977). Skinner combined
historical documentary research with geography (principally central place theory) and
demography in his anthropology of cities as parts of regional systems in China. His studies did
not rely on a typology, but had empirically to distinguish between two kinds of hierarchy, that of
the nested hierarchy of administrative cities in a centralised state and that of the ramified
hierarchies of central places of social and economic interaction leading from the centres of
standard market areas through greater areas and their central cities up to regional economies, each
region with its city cores and remote peripheries. These were systems of the co-variation of
variables of population density, mortality rates, spheres of inter-marriage, mediation and élites,
increasing specialisation of occupation, and accumulation of wealth. Transport and topography
are the keys to the formation of these hierarchies, whose formation could be traced from the first
great commercialisation of the Chinese economy and the emergence of cities with populations of
one million or more in the 9
th
-11
th
centuries until the twentieth century when road, rail and
steamship reduced the intermediate levels of the central place hierarchy. Skinner’s (1977)
The
City in Late Imperial China
is one of three volumes on the city in China that he and his close
colleagues, Mark Elvin and John B. Lewis edited. The chapters in them covered their internal
social, economic and political institutions and culture, adding these to Skinner’s regional
analyses. They did not seek to demonstrate a uniquely Chinese quality in contradistinction to
colonial biases as in the anthropology of Indian cities. Instead they offered studies of Chinese
cities in critical response to classical urban sociologists and for comparison, which may indeed
have indicated peculiarly Chinese characteristics. Unfortunately they were never taken up by
anthropologists of other parts of the world. Nevertheless, they exemplify first a spatial approach
and second an historical anthropology of cities, their emergence and transformation.
