Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
122
Subhadra Mitra Channa, Ph.D.
Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi
The essay on the scope, meaning, history and development of urban anthropology by Italo Pardo
and Giuliana Prato is both comprehensive and informative. They have traced the theoretical
developments of the subject, critically assessed the conceptual issues as well as given a fairly
detailed account of the works done in this field over the past few decades. There are however a
few expected omissions. For example the authors’ review is rather Eurocentric, although they
have accounted for some works done in South Asia, Africa and South America. It is never
possible for any scholar to cover every aspect with equal competence and in this comment I wish
to elaborate a little on the South Asian urban studies as well as raise a couple of conceptual issues
regarding the way in which the ‘urban’ can be understood from a slightly different platform.
In South Asia, the major impediment to a dichotomous view of urban vs. rural, as was
initially the case in the West especially when it came to observing the European rural/urban
societies, was the continuity of institutions such as caste and kinship across the various forms of
settlements. The ground realities of Indian society even today reflect very much the
predominance of kinship ties and family/caste values where people related to each other may be
spread not only across the rural/urban divide but across the globe as well. While referring to the
Mediterranean ethnography, the authors have commented that rural areas were seen as insulated
from the urban, but in India, scholars like Redfield (see Singer 1976) and Mc Kim Marriot (1955)
had talked about ‘horizontal’ relationships of caste and kinship that bound the rural with urban
societies and with each other at the same level. The interface of the concept of civilization with
that of the urban and the rural becomes interesting in this context as in old centres of civilization
like South Asia (Singer 1972), institutions cut across the rural /urban divides. In South Asia
urban studies have thus often focused on kinship and caste like those by Vatuk (1972) and
Channa (1979), Mines (2002), Seymour (1999) to name a few. Thus although distinctions have
been made among South Asian urban societies that emphasize the more ‘traditional’
(orthogenetic [Redfield and Singer 1954] or ‘sacred’ [Parry 2012]) and more ‘modern’ or
‘industrial’( Parry 2012) or ‘heterogenetic’ (Redfield and Singer 1954) with differing levels and
character of sociability, the absence of caste and kinship ties is not a feature of any social group
in India (for the non-Hindus also kinship-like clan and lineages are important and some also
follow caste-like divisions). Thus even at a more generalized level, urban society cannot be seen
so ‘impersonalised’ that existing social and political set-ups including sacred elements cease to
operate; deep-rooted social and cultural elements, and their political ramifications, are evident in
the way in which resources and space are distributed in urban areas and in which urban dwellers
live their lives.
This brings us to the theoretical perspective of comprehending the urban from a
phenomenological platform as a ‘lived space’. This issue has been left somewhat un-attended by
