Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
125
I will not continue presenting Prato and Pardo’s enormous project introducing the wide
spectrum of studies and theoretical discourse that continued to dominate the field, its critiques
and defenders. The predicament of urban anthropologists was recently raised again in a
City &
Society
special issue (Barker, Harms and Lindqist 2013, no. 2). For example:
‘While urban
settings offer attractive sites to explore broader, structural relations of power, how can the “deep
hanging out” of a lone ethnographer yield compelling analysis of these broader social dynamics?’
(Ibid.: 166).
Although adopting a simplistic approach, I will introduce my own take on the venture and
identity of an urban anthropologist. I believe my personal experience represents a common story
among other practitioners of my generation.
I started my career as a Manchester School graduate, conducting eighteen months
fieldwork in a farming community of Atlas Mountains Jewish immigrants in the Israeli semi-arid
Negev (Shokeid 1971/ 1986). However, my next fieldwork project was among the Arab minority
left in a Jaffa neighbourhood (now part of Tel Aviv) after the 1948 war
's nakba
left them
separated from the majority of its Arab native population (Shokeid and Deshen 1982).
‘Naturally’, I considered myself since then an urban anthropologist. Although conducting
participant observations on a more limited daily schedule compared with my full time
engagement among the Moroccan villagers, nevertheless, I was employing my old school
methodology, ‘the extended case method’ in particular. Moreover, my interest in both the rural
and urban fields were of a similar sociological pursuit: among the Moroccan Jews, the adjustment
of ‘Third World’ immigrants to a modern farming technology and to a western communal model
of organization, and among the Arabs in Jaffa, their adjustment to a radically changed world
under the Israeli regime, the loss of their community, the imposition of Jewish-western culture,
the relationships with Jewish neighbours, and so on.
My next project took me to New York studying Israeli emigrants in the Borough of
Queens (Shokeid 1988). No doubt, the circumstances of fieldwork in metropolitan New York
have changed dramatically compared with my situation in Jaffa, but basically the goals and
methods have not been transformed. I concentrated with an ‘ethnic’ group residing within the
borders of a large ethnically mixed suburb. The leading research questions were mostly the same
as before: how these Israeli born immigrants adjusted economically, socially and culturally away
from home.
My major query at this point: implementing a similar professional agenda and
methodology, moving on from the Negev village to Jaffa and later to Queens, have I achieved or
failed the promise of a modern differentiated sub-discipline of ‘urban anthropology’?
However, conducting my next projects also in New York, it seemed I was ‘liberated’ at
last from the ‘classical community study’ model of research. I moved into a novel field of social
relationships no longer regulated mostly by the rules of ethnicity, similar social-economic
circumstances and close residence, but prescribed by one major personal source of the
participants’ identity – their shared sexual orientation.
