Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
124
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Moshe Shokeid, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Tel Aviv University
Prato and Pardo confront the community of ‘urban anthropologists’ with a major dilemma
concerning their professional identity: What are the terms of their fieldwork sites, their subjects
of research, the theories and the methodology which distinguish their project from other
contemporary anthropologists? Although post-colonial anthropology uprooted its practitioners
from the rural sites of their professional birthplace, they seem to have carried on their tools and
interests, based mostly in the craft of community studies, into the main scene of western social
research – the urban environment, the hitherto monopoly of sociologists. True, they had some
earlier experience studying the first stages of urbanization in Africa in particular (for example,
the copper belt new towns in Zambia). However, as Prato and Pardo report, the Manchester-
school pioneering urban ethnographies from Africa were a natural extension of the tribal scene.
Thus, the first steps taken by a younger generation of anthropologists in western urban societies
resembled the old genre, namely, studying bounded neighbourhoods, ‘urban villages’, presenting
minorities of various shared social, ethnic, economic backgrounds (e.g. Hannerz’ seminal
Soulside
1969). But, as succinctly claimed by Sanjek (1990: 151), in time, the strictly ‘urban
anthropology’ endeavour proved the narrowest line of anthropological contemporary production
compared with the more theoretically rigorous and clearly defined fields of research such as the
family, medical, political, economic, religious, legal and other anthropologies.
