Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
114
Skinner, G.William (ed.) (1977).
The City in Late Imperial China
. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Weszkalnys, Gisa (2010).
Berlin, Alexanderplatz; transforming place in a unified Germany
.
New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Michael Fischer, Ph.D.
Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Kent, U.K.
and
Maria Kokolaki, Ph.D.
Institute of Educational Policy, Athens and Honorary Research Fellow, University of Kent, U.K.
This excellent account by Prato and Pardo of the historical developments that underlie the
dynamic of the current state of urban anthropology is a good starting point for moving forward.
The theoretical innovations that have emerged from urban anthropology are, as they conclude,
becoming a driver for anthropological innovation.
One of the difficulties in this story that Prato and Pardo relate is how long it has taken
anthropologists to come to grips with fulfilling the mission of anthropology to describe and
conceptualise urban social formations in a way that relates external holistic viewpoints to the
composite holographic views of individual people. Each person experiences an urban place
differently but in a manner partially compatible with others, a compatibility that increases or
decreases depending on the extent to which they share pathways, networks and experiences.
People construct a composite of cities and places, communities and groups in cities that is their
own. Even at the level of communities, there is only partial agreement between direct neighbours
about the boundaries of the composite of the community each holds (Henig 2012, Fischer 1994).
This likewise applies to social networks, where the aperture on the network for each person in the
network reveals a different conception of the whole of the network (White and Johansen 2004).
In villages anthropologists can imagine they are chipping away at these issues by use of
brute force in detailed accounts of peoples’ perceptions and conceptions; they can work with
almost everyone they think relevant to a particular case study. Thus they feel they have related
individual experiences to the ‘reality’ of the situation. In urban contexts it is clear one has to use
samples in the form of cases studies, surveys and selective participant observation. The best one
can do is to collect fragments of experience, social relations and the city itself.
One of the reasons that more anthropologists may be amenable to urban anthropology, in
addition to the prevalence of urban population that Prato and Pardo allude to, is that one outcome
of the past thirty years of social and cultural anthropology is the acknowledgement that even
village life is far more complex in ways not before imagined. This was the initial stimulation for
