Urbanities,
Vol. 3
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No 2
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November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
89
the lines sketched by Southall and Gutkind and was espoused by people like Conrad Arensberg
(1968), who, in comparing rural and urban life, regarded the city as a totality that should be
studied in itself. Arensberg’s stance reflected a strong functionalist influence, as he cast urban
studies in the methodological framework that he had applied to his research in rural Ireland,
which he published with Solan Kimball in 1940. Such functionalism should not come as a
surprise, for, as Rosemary Harris pointed out in a key essay published 1988, Arensberg and
Kimball acknowledged the influence of Lloyd Warner’s study of Yankee City. The other position
is well represented by Leeds (1968) who, in contrast with what we have just outlined, argued that
the city could not be studied as an isolated unit separated from the wider national and
international context. Leeds (1972) made it clear that too much emphasis had been put on micro-
level studies, which he regarded as having limited importance in understanding cities. His
criticism pointed to two main problems in the way in which ‘urban anthropology’ had developed.
Having argued that urban anthropology ‘has been done as if (a) the city were an isolated unit and
(b) as if the thing studied in the city has some intrinsic relation to the city,’ he concluded that
‘cities are simply one form of population nucleation, all of which are precipitates in localities of
an extraordinarily complex system of interactions which constitute a society’ (Leeds 1972: 4-5).
Leeds sought to define theoretical and methodological models that would allow anthropologists
to study the ‘totality’ of the city as part of a wider totality; that is, the state and the global context
to which it belongs. Leeds’s approach is graphically illustrated by his statement that ‘no town is
an island of itself’ (Leeds 1980; see also Leeds 1973). For him, cities are elements of a complex
macrocosm, and such a macrocosm must be taken into account for us to be able to unravel what
is going on at the local level. On a parallel line, other anthropologists increasingly realized that
cities could not be regarded as subordinate units of centralized states and that urban phenomena
should be contextualized in the global system. Richard Fox (1977), for example, emphasized the
relevance of including historical analysis in the locally significant global dimension.
Note that, apart from the US, thus far the study of Western industrial societies had
remained distinctly missing from the urban anthropological agenda. The increasing difficulty in
carrying out ‘traditional’ anthropological research in the new post-colonial situation had been a
turning point in what appeared to be a disciplinary stance against research in the West. As we
have mentioned, this was particularly true of British mainstream anthropology. As research in the
ex-colonies was increasingly hindered by lack of cooperation from local governments and by the
decreasing interest, and therefore funds, in the anthropologists’ countries of origin, some
anthropologists turned their attention to their own society, leading to a fatuous (Schneider 2002)
and damaging (Pardo and Prato 2010) search for the ‘exotic at home’.
The Tribalization of Cities: Urban Anthropology and the Functionalist Paradigm
By the early 1980s, three major tendencies had developed in anthropology: 1) the study of the
transformations that were occurring in the so-called Third World societies and in developing
countries; 2) the study of the anthropologist’s own society, the so-called ‘anthropology at home’;
