Urbanities,
Vol. 3
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No 2
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November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
120
these and other authors can claim is not that of having created a new subfield, but rather that of
having done good ethnography against the often daunting odds created by urban settings.
References
Davis, J. (1977).
People of the Mediterranean: An Essay in Comparative Social Anthropology
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London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Herzfeld, M. (2009).
Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome
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University of Chicago Press.
Herzfeld, M.(2010). Engagement, Gentrification, and the Neoliberal Hijacking of
History.
Current Anthropology
51, Supplement 2: 259-267.
Hirschon, R. (1989).
Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor
Refugees in Piraeus
. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kenny, M., and Kertzer, D. I. (eds) (1983).
Urban Life in Mediterranean Europe.
Anthropological Perspectives
. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Schneider, J. C. and Schneider, P. T. (2003).
Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia, and
the Struggle for Palermo
. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Silverman, S. (1975).
Three Bells of Civilization: The Life of an Italian Hill Town
. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Jerome Krase, Ph.D.
Emeritus and Murray Koppelman Professor, Brooklyn College, The City University of New York
At a recent intensive and intellectually stimulating seminar, ‘Placing Urban Anthropology:
Synchronic and Diachronic Reflections’, held at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland,
participants rigorously examined the significance of the classic, but not ‘classical’,
anthropological paradigm in urban research as well as its value to society in general. Much of the
conversation that took place was framed by the challenging ideas presented by Prato and Pardo in
several of their works but especially in their recent essay ‘Urban Anthropology’. I should preface
my comments that follow with a rather ideological statement about the current state of affairs in
many social sciences that are challenged by post-modern, post-structural and cultural studies
critiques. The boundaries and borders between disciplines, even between newly created, and
already nearly extinct inter-disciplines, have become so porous that in some academic circles it is
difficult use terms such as ‘anthropology’ or ‘sociology’, without protestation, in conversation.
Similar has been the devaluation of science, even merely as an attitude, or, even more troubling,
the denial of its value by defining it as just another neocolonial enterprise.
On the other hand, has been the ‘conservative backlash’ of denigrating of new modes of
scholarly expression such as auto-ethnography and less than classical versions of participant-or
