Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
87
Anthropology
and, in November 2011, has launched
Urbanities
, its open-access peer-reviewed
on-line journal, which endeavours to provide the scientific community and the general public
with up-to-date research findings, debates and news in urban anthropology. A key objective of
this journal, published twice a year, is to bring out the relevance of this disciplinary sub-field in
understanding social, cultural, political and economic changes worldwide.
Defining the ‘Urban’
In the 1970s, the socio-economic and geo-political ethnographic variety of expanding urban
research generated some confusion on how precisely to define the concept of ‘urban’. The urban
was defined in terms of demographic density or in relation to occupations other than agricultural
or direct subsistence production. Southall (1983) viewed the ‘urban’ as a highly spatial density of
social interaction, rejecting a definition based on mere demographic or physical density. From a
Marxist point of view, Gutkind (1983) provided yet another definition arguing, similar to
Southall, that it is not physical density that constitutes an urban setting; it is, instead, the kind of
social relations, which, according to him, are significantly different from those in rural settings.
Gutkind maintained that class struggle constituted the essence of urban life and, like Southall,
that the city was a ‘social institution’ totally different from any other. They were influenced by
earlier sociological works, such as Louis Wirth’s aforementioned essay,
Urbanism as a Way of
Life
(1938) where he described the distinctive attributes of the city as a specific social institution,
a view that led to the conceptualization of an anthropology
of
the city, as opposed to
anthropological research
in
the city. Having argued that the aim of urban anthropology should be
the cross-cultural study of urbanism, Southall (1983) encouraged the comparative analysis of
historically established metropolises, taking further an earlier debate on classifications of city
types that, like the more recent attempts made in this line (see a later section), bring vividly to
mind the spirit of Edmund Leach’s robust warning about some anthropologists’ tendency to
engage in pointless ‘butterfly collecting’ (Leach 1961: 5). The influence that such attempts have
yielded in the history of this subfield makes them, nonetheless, worthy of some attention.
An early attempt at classifying city types was made by Redfield and Singer in their essay,
The cultural Role of Cities
(1954), which expanded on Redfield’s theorization of the folk-urban
continuum to develop the idea of a continuum with two ideal types of cities at its opposite ends,
which they called the ‘orthogenetic’ city and the ‘heterogenetic’ city. These two ideal types were
supposed to explain the role that cities play in cultural change and transmission. According to
Redfield and Singer, ‘orthogenetic’ cities are the product of endogenous development, a product
therefore of ‘primary’ urbanization. In the context of orthogenetic cities, pre-existing folk ideas
and values are transformed by a group of urban literati and transmitted back to the people (folk)
among whom they originated. Such a process of elaboration and codification of the folk culture
into a ‘great tradition’, they argued, creates an indigenous civilization. In contrast, they described
‘heterogenetic’ cities as products of a ‘secondary’ kind of urbanization; the product, that is, of the
encounter between a folk culture and a different (often colonial) culture. In this second case, the
