Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
88
outcome is not the creation of a ‘great tradition’ of indigenous civilization but a new form of
urban life which is often in conflict with the indigenous folk culture. According to Redfield and
Singer, heterogenetic cities may well be centres of technical and economic change, but the
ideological innovation that accompanies them destroys the ancient tradition and brings about
dissent, rootlessness and anomie.
Southall’s subsequent classification of African cities played a relevant role in the research
carried out in the African ex-colonies. For Southall (1961), African cities fall into either a
‘category A’ or a ‘category B’. Category A includes cities of ancient formation, which existed
long before the colonial administration; these are characterized by slow development and
maintain strong links with the subsistence economy of the surrounding rural areas. Category B
includes cities of recent formation, which are marked by fast growth and are inhabited mainly by
rural migrants employed in the mines and industries built and owned by white Europeans.
Gluckman joined the debate arguing that towns in Central Africa ‘differ only in degree from any
town, anywhere in the world’ (1961: 79), and that an ‘African townsman is a townsman’ (1961:
69). With reference to the African towns in the Copperbelt area, Gluckman maintained that these
towns’ ‘social structure is determined by the urban industrial setting’, thus ‘the starting point for
an analysis of urbanization must be an urban system of relations’ (1961: 79-80).
These Africanists’ approach was interestingly at odds with the analyses developed by
scholars who were carrying out research in urban India. In 1960 Pocock published a paper on the
Indian city, arguing that Indian cities are above all
Indian
and that many sociological
theorizations about the city had erroneously and hastily associated the urban with ‘Western
values and influences’ (Pocock 1960: 65). In a recent essay, Parry (2012) discusses these
different approaches suggesting that the divergence between these two main arguments may have
developed in part out of different academic agendas. On the one hand, the scholars of the Rhodes
Livingston Institute were attempting to distance themselves from colonial stereotypes casting
African ‘tribesmen’ as people who could never truly become ‘townsmen’. On the other hand,
anthropologists who did research in India were determined to get out from under the shadow of
Africanist anthropology, and sought to assert the unique and distinctive character of Indian cities
and civilization. However, as Parry points out, there is an objective difference between the two
kinds of urbanism addressed by Gluckman and Pocock. Pocock ignored Indian colonial cities in
his analysis and mainly referred to cities that had evolved endogenously through millennia and
were similar to the ‘orthogenetic’ cities pictured in Redfield and Singer’s model; he wanted to
demonstrate that in India there was no discontinuity between rural and urban social life. Stressing
India’s ancient urban civilization, Pocock endeavored to show that, historically, the Indian city
has been the central expression of the traditional social values reflected in the caste and kinship
system. Ultimately, his rejection of the urban-rural divide factually questioned the idea that there
could be such a distinctive field of study as urban anthropology.
Notwithstanding such an authoritative objection as Pocock’s, two main positions emerged
in the late 1960s from the described different approaches to urban research. One developed along
