Urbanities,
Vol. 3
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No 2
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November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
83
superficial and instrumental. Such a weak social integration would eventually result in anomie.
Wirth maintained that, in contrast to rural communities, in a city ‘the juxtaposition of divergent
personalities and modes of life tends to produce a relativistic perspective and a sense of toleration
of differences which may be regarded as prerequisites for rationality and which lead toward the
secularization of life’ (1938: 15), adding that ‘urbanism as a way of life’ was not confined to city-
dwellers but extended its influence beyond the city’s boundaries. His work was later criticized for
having focused on a kind of urbanism that was culturally and historically specific to the North
American city and to the capitalist economy of his time (see, for example, Fox 1977: 58-9;
Hannerz 1980: 68, 74).
Early Anthropological Studies in Urban Areas
In contrast with the received, and for a long time unquestioned, academic division between
sociology and socio-cultural anthropology, in the late 1930s, the American anthropologist Robert
Redfield (1947) began to carry out field research among peasant city-dwellers. Influenced by the
work of the sociologist Wirth (1938), he theorized a ‘folk-urban continuum’ in which ‘folk’
societies and ‘urban’ societies were the two opposite ideal types. Quite unmindful of Raymond
Firth’s conclusion that the difference between types of economic system is one of degree, not one
of kind (Firth 1939: 355), Redfield argued that folk societies consisted of small-scale, isolated
and homogeneous communities, had a rudimentary division of labor and were economically self-
sufficient. On the basis of research carried out in developing countries, such as India, he went on
to suggest that, contrary to folk societies, peasant communities were not isolated, for they were
linked, for example, to economic forces outside their own communities. They were, thus, part of
a larger social set up, specifically the city and its ‘great tradition’, as opposed to the ‘little’
tradition of the small village.
Redfield’s work stimulated anthropologists’ interest in studying society from the
perspective of the city. American anthropologists in particular began to address rural-urban
migration in peasant societies without, however, paying sufficient attention to the relevant macro-
processes beyond the community under study. Thus, from the 1930s to the 1950s, anthropologists
mainly focused on rural migrants in slums and shanty towns in Mexican and other Latin America
cities, and on the impact of ‘urbanism’ on their lives. Richard Fox (1977) aptly criticized these
studies pointing out that, following the established anthropological tradition, they focused on
small-scale units (minorities or small communities within the cities); an approach that was
reflected in these anthropologists’ interest in the ‘exotic others’. It is in such a context that,
heavily influenced by the dominant functionalist methodological paradigm and by the sociology
of the Chicago School, still in the 1960s North American-trained anthropologists engaged in
problem-centred studies, focusing on minorities, urban adaptation and poverty.
The development of urban anthropology among British social anthropologists was
significantly slower and fraught with serious difficulties, notwithstanding the seminal work of
Raymond Firth, who in 1947 stimulated members of the Department of Social Anthropology at
