Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
119
expropriation of the term ‘ethnography’ by scholars unwilling to invest in it the time and intense
dedication that our version requires. This recognition of ethnography’s distinctiveness transcends
any urban-rural distinction. Silverman’s (1975) study of an Umbrian rural community, for
example, was a study of the urban (and urbane) ideal known in Italian as
civiltà
, while my
discussion of the same phenomenon in the Italian capital was designed in part to demonstrate
how so historically important a city could be considered culturally marginal precisely for its
inhabitants’ tendency to pit (socially and morally) civil against (politically and ethically) civic
values (Herzfeld 2009). In tackling a city that vaunts its own seemingly paradoxical marginality,
moreover, was I departing so far from the preoccupations of earlier generations of
anthropologists?
While it may be true that ‘urban anthropology’ may have sprung from a desire to find the
exotic in the familiar, much as Davis (1977: 7) argued was the case for the anthropology of the
Mediterranean, that parallel – heralded by the Kenny and Kertzer (1983) volume on
Mediterranean urban life – is instructive. The conceptualization of a Mediterranean cultural area,
characterized in part by a complex and historically deep urban-rural engagement, long ignored
the political implications of its genesis. Does the triumphal emergence of a distinctive urban
anthropologist not signal a disturbingly similar tendency to ignore peasant and tribal groups
precisely because they are now minority concerns and fading demographically?
Where Prato and Pardo and I converge is in insisting that ethnographic methods should
not be sacrificed to the new expansion. If the work done in cities is not ethnographic, why should
we claim it as anthropological? But what, then, is ethnography? I would argue that it
characteristically rests on the demonstrated achievement of
intimate relations with informants
,
regardless of the kind of site involved (multiple, local, linear, or even electronic); that this
requires protracted and often repeated stays ‘in the field’ to experience in person what Pardo calls
‘strong continuous interaction’; and that its success is revealed through the anthropologist’s
writerly skills at depicting minute details as expressing encompassing social and political
processes. The several works on Naples, including Pardo’s (see also Schneider and Schneider
2003, on Palermo), that describe the various ingenious ways of fixing problems are redolent of
wine, sweat, music, and fear. Because there is simply too much information in what any good
ethnographer brings home, the ability to use sensuous description to convey that encompassing
nexus of social relations and cultural values is what makes the writing sing – and inform. I would
argue, furthermore, that ‘engaged anthropology’ does not usually motivate the foray into urban
work, but emerges from the realization – as I did for me in both Rome and Bangkok – that
academic research addresses real problems, sometimes galvanizing our consciences more
urgently than we could have imagined in the safety of an academic office (see Herzfeld 2010).
If many distinguished studies were not presented as urban anthropology, as Prato and
Pardo correctly remind us, why now force them into a mould that suppresses precisely the
richness of the conceptual context from which they draw their significance? The achievement that
