Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
117
White, D. R.and Johansen, U. (2004).
Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems: Process
Models of a Turkish Nomad Clan.
Oxford: Lexington Books.
Rosemary Harris, Ph.D.
Emeritus Reader in Social Anthropology, University College London
This well-constructed, excellently written essay is likely to establish itself as
the
definitive
statement on the subject. It covers the existing literature in a comprehensive way and presents
cogent arguments for its criticisms and conclusions. Prato and Pardo deal with the paradox that
urban research has included ‘significant contributions from anthropologists and yet mainstream
anthropologists have long been reluctant to recognize industrial urban settings as legitimate fields
of enquiry’. The roots of this attitude are traced to the ways in which the two disciplines of
sociology and social anthropology developed and diverged from the late nineteenth century. An
‘unquestioned academic division’ was created between these disciplines so that ‘folk’ societies
and ‘urban societies’ were opposed as ideal types. Prato and Pardo trace the ways in which this
rigid division began to break down in North American studies, but they argue that British
Anthropologists, approaching the ‘urban’ through focusing on the development of South/Central
African mining towns, dependant on migrant labour, assumed that urban research should deal
essentially with the processes of social transformation of the immigrant worker. This did lead to
the development of new research methods, particularly to the focusing on networks of social
relations rather than on the structure of groups, but virtually precluded the study by
anthropologists of ‘the urban’ in Europe, as opposed to studies of aspects of urban ethnography
arising out of a continuing interest in rural-urban migration. Prato and Pardo nevertheless stress
that such studies laid the foundation of the development of urban anthropology.
The 1970s saw an interesting development in British ‘urban’ anthropology in that work
on Indian cities pointed up the contrast between them and the essentially Colonial model that
formed the African towns that were the previous focus of study. And this was a development that
led to a realisation that urban phenomena should be contextualized in the global system rather
than seen essentially as mere subordinate units in distinct centralised states. Trenchantly,
moreover, the sheer physical fact that in the post-colonial era the anthropologist was unwelcome,
or ill funded, or both, turned the attention of British anthropologists to ‘anthropology at home’.
This did not immediately lead to a focus on the urban. There was a digression through the
Mediterranean world, essentially seen as composed of rural communities studied independently
of the national context. And when the urban was studied ‘the Western metropolis constituted a
breeding field of the society’s problems.’ The city was a mosaic in which each piece presented
different problems, to be studied separately.
Prato and Pardo show how, from this time, although there were many studies of what
might be called aspects of urban anthropology, in urban anthropology as such there was precious
