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Concept
Urban anthropology
Summary
Urban anthropology is a subset of anthropology concerned with issues of urbanization, poverty, urban space, social relations, and neoliberalism. The field has become consolidated in the 1960s and 1970s.
Ulf Hannerz quotes a 1960s remark that traditional anthropologists were "a notoriously agoraphobic lot, anti-urban by definition". Various social processes in the Western World as well as in the "Third World" (the latter being the habitual focus of attention of anthropologists) brought the attention of "specialists in 'other cultures'" closer to their homes.
Urban anthropology is heavily influenced by sociology, especially the Chicago School of Urban Sociology. The traditional difference between sociology and anthropology was that the former was traditionally conceived as the study of civilized populations, whilst anthropology was approached as the study of primitive populations. There were, in addition, methodological differences between these two disciplines—sociologists would normally study a large population sample while anthropologists relied on fewer informants with deeper relations.
As interest in urban societies increased, methodology between these two fields and subject matters began to blend, leading some to question the differences between urban sociology and urban anthropology (Prato and Pardo 2013). The lines between the two fields have blurred with the interchange of ideas and methodology, to the advantage and advancement of both disciplines.
While for a long-time urban anthropology has not been officially acknowledged in the mainstream discipline, anthropologists have been conducting work in the area for a long time. Anthropologists, like sociologists, have attempted to define exactly what the city is and pinpoint the ways in which urbanism sets apart modern city lifestyles from what used to be regarded as the "primitive society" (Wirth 1933, Redfield and Singer 1954, Pocock 1960, Leeds 1972, Fox 1977).
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