Urbanities,
Vol. 3
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No 2
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November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
91
– which continue to these days. Hannerz, who in the 1960s had carried out a study of ‘ghetto
culture’ and community (1969), later criticized this approach arguing that the problem-centred
studies had produced a fragmented view of the city (Hannerz 1980). Anthropologists’ failure to
bring together the various pieces of the ‘mosaic’ constituted, he suggested, a major limitation of
urban research (1980). In an earlier publication, Fox (1977) had similarly argued that by focusing
on specific groups, anthropologists were producing a fragmentary picture of urban reality (see
also Wayne and Kemper eds 1978).Years later, Leith Mullings (1987) criticized the way in which
urban anthropology had developed in the US, and yet her work (Mullings 1997) and that of other
North American scholars (see, for example, Susser 1982) continued to struggle in getting away
from an analysis in terms of urban ‘mosaic’, focusing on such issues as poverty, ethnicity and
gender. These contemporary scholars appear, however, to be motivated by a different kind of
applied interest; specifically, that of the ‘engaged’ anthropologist. The applied-oriented approach
of many US anthropologists to their own society should not be surprising for, as Marcus and
Fischer have noted, they have always had ‘domestic interests’. Their ‘exotic subjects’ have
traditionally been American Indians, urban migrants and immigrants (Marcus and Fischer 1986:
112).
As we have indicated, for a long time, and in contrast with their US and to a lesser extent
European colleagues (for instance, French and especially Scandinavian), British anthropologists
regarded the study of their own society as ‘poor man’s anthropology, … as neither testing, nor
serious scholarship’ (A.P. Cohen 1986: 15). At most, we have seen, they turned their attention to
Irish and Celtic societies (somehow depicted as ‘colonies’) or to European (mainly
Mediterranean) peasants; in particular, Mediterranean anthropology was seen as anthropologists’
second-best enterprise. These communities were regarded as ‘remote’ enough to be considered
‘fit’ for anthropological study (see Ardner 1987), which nicely met the belief that only distance,
especially semantic distance, could lend ‘enhancement, if not enchantment, to the anthropological
vision’ (Ardner 1987: 38). Eventually, a clear acknowledgment was made of the need to study a
specific social unit – being it a village, the town or a larger city – in relation to the macro-
processes that influence, and are influenced by, local dynamics.
Keeping in mind that most of this debate turned a blind eye to European cities, evolving
around research carried out in villages, it is not surprising that by the mid-1980s only a few
ethnographies had been produced on urban Europe by Anglophone anthropologists; fewer still
had been integrated in major debates. Notably, most of these monographs failed to provide a
holistic analysis, focusing on narrow topics, such as the West Indian London Carnival (Cohen
1980), political ideologies and representation of immigrants in France (Grillo, 1985), working
class political relations in Italy (Kertzer 1980), social historical study of industrial élite in Spain
(McDonogh 1986). Moreover, the aforementioned debate continued to ignore what urban
ethnographies there were, for the aim was not to stimulate urban research but to develop an
informed criticism of the structural-functionalist paradigm. Such a debate ended up proposing an
