Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
80
‘Urban Anthropology’
1
Giuliana B. Prato and Italo Pardo
(University of Kent, U.K.)
–
Established academic disciplinary distinctions led early anthropologists to study tribal societies, or village
communities, while ignoring the city as a field of research. Thus, urban research became established in some
academic disciplines, particularly sociology, but struggled to achieve such a status in anthropology. Over the years,
historical events and geo-political changes have stimulated anthropologists to address processes of urbanization in
developing countries; yet, urban research in western industrial societies continued to be left out of the mainstream
disciplinary agenda. In this chapter we examine major debates in the development of this sub-discipline and discuss
the complex methodological and theoretical challenges posed by field-research in urban settings, clearly identifying
the significance of the anthropological paradigm in urban research and its centrality both to mainstream academic
debates and to the broader society. Today an increasing number of anthropologists carry out research in cities. With
half of humanity already living in towns and cities, growing to two-thirds in the next 50 years, there is no denying
that research in urban settings is topical and needed as western and non-western society is fast becoming urban or
mega-urban. Having outlined the background to current trends in this field of research, the discussion builds towards
an assessment of the contribution that empirically-based anthropological analysis can make to our understanding of
our increasingly urban world.
Keywords:
cities’ diversity, ethnographic methodology, human mobility, regional diversity, space and place, urban
research, urbanism, urbanization.
Introduction: Urban Anthropology in the Disciplinary Tradition
Since the 1990s an increasing number of academic events have focused on urban issues and
publications have flourished in this field, its world-wide critical importance unmistakably
testified by the establishment of the permanent UN-World Urban Forum. In part due to the rapid
growth of cities in the twentieth century, such interest in urban research has included significant
contributions from anthropologists and yet, for a long time, mainstream anthropologists,
especially in the British tradition of social anthropology, had been reluctant to recognize urban
settings, particularly in industrialized countries, as legitimate fields of enquiry.
Urban anthropology is a relatively recent new field of study within socio-cultural
anthropology. While twentieth-century sociologists paid great attention to the study of cities and
urban phenomena, social and cultural anthropologists stayed largely away from this important
field of research. One reason for such a choice was rooted in late-nineteenth century disciplinary
divisions, identifying social and cultural anthropology as principally concerned with the
comparative study on non-Western societies and cultures. To simplify, until relatively recently,
following academic classification, anthropology focused on so-called ‘primitive’ societies
(otherwise described as ‘tribal’, ‘exotic’, or ‘folk’), whereas Western industrial societies were the
1
This essay was originally published in 2012 in the
Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems
(EOLSS). Eds
UNESCO-EOLSS Joint Committee. It is reproduced here with permission from Eolss Publishers Co Ltd
(© UNESCO-EOLSS).
