Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
86
This new interest in urban research stimulated a multidisciplinary symposium on
‘Processes of Urbanism’ at the IX International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological
Sciences (ICAES) held in Chicago in 1973. The symposium was poorly attended and no further
sessions were organized at the following Congress. In the US, given a strong home-oriented
tradition, the American Anthropological Association took an interest in anthropological research
in urban areas and, in 1972, initiated the publication of the journal
Urban Anthropology
. This
initiative did not, however, lead to the establishment of ‘urban anthropology’ as a sub-
disciplinary field. A further attempt was made in 1979 with the foundation of the
Society of
Urban Anthropology
(SUA) but endless debate ensued and ostracism continued from ‘traditional’
anthropologists who believed that urban anthropology was not truly anthropology. So, after an
initial, rather enthusiastic start, the relevance of the SUA faltered. Later, as part of the steps taken
in the late-1980s in an attempt to revitalize this organization, the Society was renamed SUNTA
(
Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology
) and the journal
Urban
Anthropology
was renamed under the lengthy title,
Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural
System & World Economic Development
. A new journal called
City and Society
was also
launched.
In spite of the reluctance and, in some cases, outright opposition of the wider
anthropological community, in the late 1970s Cyril Belshaw, the then president of the IUAES
(International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences), endorsed the establishment
of a
Commission on Urban Anthropology
(from now on, CUA) within the IUAES. Ghaus Ansari
and anthropologists like Fox and Southall – who had published textbooks and readers on urban
anthropology (see, for example, Fox 1977, Southall ed. 1973) – were among the Commission’s
founding members. As the only international association of anthropology, the IUAES, through
the CUA, aimed at promoting the establishment of an international network of scholars engaged
in urban research and at stimulating debate on the variety of research identifiable as urban. Ansari
was asked to coordinate the preparatory work for the organization of this new Commission and in
1982, following prolonged consultations with specialist anthropologists, the first International
Seminar on Urban Anthropology was eventually convened in Vienna. The Seminar was attended
by 15 participants from Austria, Canada, Egypt, India, Japan, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Nigeria,
the USA and Venezuela. The proceedings were published in 1983 in a volume published by Brill
and co-edited by Ansari and Nas. Titled
Town-Talk – The Dynamics of Urban Anthropology
, the
volume aimed at providing a blueprint for the scientific program of the Commission, which
gained full affiliation to the IUAES in 1983, at the Vancouver International Congress.
The CUA has since grown in strength, its membership including scholars based in
universities across the world. It holds regularly its thematic Annual Conference and promotes
seminars and round-tables, bringing together strong fields of senior and younger anthropologists
in discussing their work and debating key issues in this subfield. In recent years, the Commission
has published its own web-site (
/). Under the chair of Giuliana B.
Prato, has established strong links with Ashgate Publishing through the Series
Urban
