Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
94
Methodology and Methods: The Development of Classic Anthropological Research in the
Western City
Throughout the 1970s, it became obvious to many that the increasing number of urban
anthropological studies had brought about the need to redefine the disciplinary paradigm
methodologically and theoretically. In particular, the post-war and post-colonial situation had
generated a critical rethinking of anthropology, of its scope and methods and of its object of
study (see, e.g., Ansari and Nas eds 1983). Research interests became more diversified. At the
same time, the study of social change and the influence of Marxism led to criticism of the
dominant functionalist paradigm.
Many anthropologists, who from a different perspective questioned the validity of the
study of alleged ‘isolated’ and ‘autonomous’ communities, began to cast their ethnographies in a
wider context. It was the beginning of a new methodological approach in the discipline as a
whole. Anthropologists became increasingly concerned with the relationship between micro-
processes (at community level) and macro-processes (at regional and national level). Such an
approach and interests were, however, only partially reflected in urban research. The limited
debate that followed the publication of European urban ethnographies continued to be marred by
the – unsubstantiated – argument that a classical anthropological study of Western urban settings
could not be done.
In the 1980s, two key issues were addressed. On the one hand, anthropologists asked
whether the classical methodological apparatus, developed specifically for the study of village
and tribal communities, could be applied to larger, more ‘complex’ settings. On the other hand,
methodological problems were raised by the perceived danger of interdisciplinarity. Undeniably,
anthropologists found it increasingly difficult to define their field of study, for global changes
forced them to take into account data that were academically ‘allocated’ to other social sciences
and to the humanities; in particular, sociology, political science, economy and history. The main
concern was how to apply the traditional anthropological methodology to more ‘complex’
(Western and non-Western) societies and, where adaptations were needed, how to avoid losing
disciplinary identity – questions, we must note, raised by Banton (1966) two decades earlier.
Having said that urban anthropology has been heavily influenced by sociology, it should
also be said that initially, and of course unsurprisingly, the taken-for-granted distinct separation
of the two disciplines’ fields of study (‘primitive’ societies and ‘exotic’ communities, on the
hand, and ‘complex’, mainly Western societies, on the other) did not bring about disciplinary
insecurity. All was well regarding data collection too for, broadly speaking, the two disciplines
adopted different research methods. Sociologists would normally study large population samples,
using mainly quantitative and statistical data, surveys, structured interviews and so on, whereas
anthropologists essentially carried out long-term qualitative research based on the in-depth
ethnographic study of a community through participant observation, collecting data through a
