Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
92
anthropology of ‘complex’, nation-state societies, focusing on issues such as bureaucracy,
nationalism, religious and political ideologies, gender and ethnic relations.
The Diversification of Urban Anthropology
The 1980s saw the publication of a large number of urban ethnographies. In an article published
in 1990, Sanjek reviewed urban ethnographies spanning over the five continents, looking at the
issues that caught the anthropologists’ attention, but also at the topics that were neglected. As he
pointed out, urban anthropology found itself competing with other ‘anthropologies’ – applied,
environmental, medical, educational, aesthetic, ‘of development’, ‘of gender’ – that were
developing alongside more traditional subfields, such as political, economic, religion, kinship and
a sub-section of legal anthropology (specifically, legal pluralism). As Sanjek noted, ‘urban
anthropology in 1980 was arguably the narrowest and theoretically least influential of all this
brood’ (Sanjek 1990: 151).
Significantly, however, a new trend emerged in the USA, where anthropologists started to
‘study up’, examining such topics as the dynamics of inherited wealth (G. Marcus 1980) and
Congressional patronage and ritual (Wheatherford 1985). At the same time, renewed interest in
single-subject issues led to research on the elderly, ethnic minority and new migrants, gender
(particularly feminist-oriented) and education (e.g., Susser 1982, Foner 1987, Harrison 1989,
Jones and Turner 1989). Special attention was paid to ethnic and religious identities, and to
ethnic relations. In the article cited above, Sanjek pointed out that much of this research
continued to be neighbourhood-based. Elsewhere, the empirical study of local dynamics was
linked to broader historical and international processes. For instance, ethnographies on the
Middle East addressed the Israeli-Arab conflict, looking at the influence of religious education in
political processes (Fischer 1980), the significance of ethnic demographic movement (Shokeid
and Dresden 1982) and historical processes of nation-state formation (Aronoff ed. 1986) in
relation to significant external factors.
Ethnographies of African societies continued, in part, to reflect traditional interests, such
as kinship, social organization and labour migration; some moved on to new grounds, examining,
for instance, the dramaturgy of power, the relationship between status symbolism and Masonic
lodges (Cohen 1981), the emergence of new indigenous leaders (W. MacGaffey 1983) and
entrepreneurialism (J. MacGaffey 1987). A growing field was also brought out by ethnographies
on the role of women in economic activities (Obbo 1980, Cock 1980). Work, class and gender,
along with town symbolism and urban planning, and ‘urban’ religion, were also major topics of
urban anthropological research in Asia, a trend exemplified by the work of Holmstrom (1985) on
organized and unorganized industrial sectors in India, of Smart (1989) on street hawkers in Hong
Kong, of Gates (1987) on Chinese working class in Taiwan, of Bestor (1989) on market place
and social organization in Tokyo, of Robinson (1986) on the political economy of development
in Indonesia and of the volume edited by Nas (1986) on Indonesian cities. Many studies linked
gender to work issues and migration (Ong 1987 and Sharma 1986; Trager 1988), and middle-
