Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
90
3) the study of European communities, with particular reference to Celtic and Irish communities
and to rural settings in the Mediterranean Region. The latter trend developed especially among
Anglophone anthropologists (mainly British and North American). Since the 1960s, there had
been a proliferation of Mediterranean ethnographies, particularly on Greece, Spain, Italy,
Portugal (although, geographically this is not a Mediterranean country), Turkey (in part
considered between Europe and the Middle East) and, to a lesser extent, France, for France had
its own tradition of anthropology ‘at home’ (see, for example, Dumont 1951). As such research in
rural communities continued to be conceived mainly as the study of small-scale, self-contained
societies, a substantial body of anthropological literature was published that provided synchronic
accounts of rural villages studied as ‘isolated units’, no attempt being made to relate these
villages to the wider regional and national context to which they belonged. In short, despite the
traditional functionalist paradigm having unmistakably proved limited in other ethnographic
areas, it continued to be applied particularly to the study of Mediterranean rural villages with a
focus on social norms and on the integrating and static aspects of social structure.
About two decades later, a new generation of anthropologists with research interest in
Europe began to question this mainstream analytical approach to the study of European rural
communities. These critiques were aptly summarized by the U.S.-based British anthropologist
Herzfeld (1987), who had conducted research in rural Greece. Herzfeld forcefully argued that,
paradoxically, a discipline that claimed to reject exoticism (in the sense of sensationalizing
cultural otherness), had in fact pursued the study of cultural otherness. Most important, Herzfeld
pointed out that the focus on the village had obscured the complex web of relations between local
and national political and economic dynamics. The structural-functionalist paradigm still
dominant in the 1970s had brought about a heavily criticized tendency (see, for example,
Albera1988) to tribalise and isolate in space and time the society under study, and to seek out the
marginal. Such criticism mirrored that raised against the kind of urban anthropological approach
that focused on group dynamics and community studies. As Fox wittily noted, at its early stage,
urban anthropology appeared to be caught in an undignified scuffle to find savages in the slums
(1977).
It is important to remind the reader that ‘urban anthropology’ was developing parallel to
the study of the anthropologist’s own society. It is equally important to note that when
anthropologists began to turn their attention to ‘home’, their interest was, in a sense, of an applied
kind. They were interested in studying the ‘problems’ of their own society and contributing to
planning social intervention aimed at the solution of such problems. For these anthropologists the
Western metropolis constituted a breading field of the society’s problems. From this perspective,
the city was conceived as a mosaic, in which each piece presented different problems. Their
approach did not contemplate the study of the whole set up; instead, it focused merely on the
observation and analysis of each part separately from the others, as advocated by the Chicago
School and its followers in the USA. The School’s influence on anthropological urban research
raised animated debate and criticism – particularly directed to its focus on small-scale social units
