Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
118
little interest. There was, however, a new methodological approach to the discipline (of
anthropology) as a whole; instead of the concentration on ‘isolated’ communities, there was
increasing concern with the relationship between micro-processes and macro-processes– the
regional and the national. The common attitude seemed to be, however, that a classical
anthropological study of Western urban settings was impossible. The contrary view rested on the
belief that even in extremely complex urban environments, the quintessential anthropological tool
of participant observation, the ethnographic method, allows anthropologists to focus on a specific
topic while remaining holistic in their analyses. In short, it permits the study of the links between
micro- and macro-level analyses in ways that expose the fallacies of Marxist and post-modernist
fashions that seek to rubbish fieldwork as a tool for urban studies. The participant observer who
follows the informant through the city demonstrates the local people’s links through the city and
beyond.
Prato and Pardo argue that since the 1990s urban anthropological research has recognised
the various ways in which regional diversity affects urban life. Fresh ideas have been stimulated
and there have been forward-looking analyses on the problems and complexity of urban
environments in today’s global set up.
As Pardo and Prato note, most anthropologists prefer to define their field of study as
anthropological research in urban settings rather than ‘urban anthropology’. They argue that in
the early twenty-first century the City stands out as a crucial arena in which citizenship, identity
and belonging, the democratic process and human and civil rights are constantly renegotiated,
and the morality of law and politics are increasingly questioned. Above all they argue that
‘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.’
So I end where I began. This is an exceptional essay and I believe it will become a core
text for students of urban anthropology.
Michael Herzfeld, Ph.D.
Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Anthropology, Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA
Prato and Pardo offer a remarkably useful and comprehensive overview of the emergence of a
distinctive subfield of urban anthropology. Following hints of nervousness on their own part
about such an enterprise, and building on Hirschon’s (1989: 233) much earlier and trenchant
critique, however, I would like to dissolve the category of urban anthropology into a shared
concern with what constitutes good anthropological method. We clearly agree on recognizing
ethnography as the discipline’s diagnostic methodology and in rejecting efforts to exchange
intensive fieldwork for other methods. The latter stance parallels a growing discomfort with the
