Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
112
An even longer-term historical anthropology of cities is of course that which relies on
archaeology, a curious omission from ‘Urban anthropology’. It raises one of the issues
confronting the anthropology of cities, which is to question the old equation of state, city and
civilisation.
At the other end of the long-term historical view, the anthropology of industrialisation and
work relations, including those of agro-industry, is an entirely distinct topic from the
anthropology of the urban, though the two may of course overlap. Prato and Pardo only partially
acknowledge this because they want to claim anything that is in ‘cities’ for ‘urban anthropology’.
For both, capitalist relations of production may well be a common denominator, but that does not
make them the same anthropological topic. This brings me to a smaller omission from their
survey but one that raises a big question.
It is the article by Liu Xin (2002) on the emergence of a so-called urban anthropology in
and of China, which questions whether there is a theoretical object at stake. In the course of this
important article he brings into question the whole of urban anthropology. Before coming back to
this question, I want to draw attention to something that Prato and Pardo write at the beginning of
their conclusions: ‘most anthropologists prefer to define their field of study as anthropological
research in urban settings, rather than “urban anthropology”’ (p. 18). Previously in their survey
they take this as a slight upon ‘urban anthropology’ or an avoidance that they take to be based on
scorn. To me, it seems to be quite natural and no slight to urban anthropology that, as the world’s
population increasingly resides in cities, all anthropological and sociological topics are continued
in urban settings. That they are often situated in city settings does not make them – for instance
the anthropology of kinship or of religion – urban anthropology.
When extension of those topics begins, as it often does, to bring to notice how the topic is
affected by urban residence, only then do we begin to note or at least to face the challenge of
saying something about the urban as such. So, for instance, we are driven to ask what and why do
family and kinship relations change under conditions of residence in cities. Raymond Firth’s and
his colleagues’ studies of families in London did ask whether there was something specific about
family life in London, as later Sandra Wallman did. But those changes are as much or more to do
with changed sources of income, information from mass media, women’s work, or everything
placed under the imprecise label of modernisation as a world revolution, first systematically
outlined by the sociologist William Goode in 1963. As Chinese studies have shown, these
changes in kinship and family form are general, not just urban.
So, can we be more specific in designating the urban as an object of anthropological or
sociological study? Like so many others have done, Liu Xin refers us to Henri Lefebvre’s
conception of capitalist production of space, a specific political economy of spatial formation that
is the ‘urban’ of our times. Liu Xin notes that a spatialisation of social relations has taken place
with the market reforms and the kind of state-led capitalism that has occurred in China and has
generated the greatest urban expansion over the last thirty years. And he adds that with this
spatialisation has also come a new temporality of short-term presents. It is aided by the
