Urban Anthropology

Historical Origins and Trajectories

Until the latter half of the twentieth century, the very notion of urban anthropology appeared somewhat an oxymoron. Its historical foundations are in fact manifold and rest on sociological as well as anthropological grounds. Anthropology's traditional [Page 841]emphasis on “primitive” peoples and peasants in the colonial periphery corresponded to a theoretical division between Western civilization and its others that permeated social thought at the turn of the twentieth century. Henry Sumner Maine's mid-eighteenth-century investigation of the origins of law located this distinction in a historical shift from status to contract. According to Maine, the former social order type was dictated by personal ties, particularly kin relations, the latter by the association of individuals. In a similar vein, Ferdinand Tönnies would develop the concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to differentiate the communal bonds of family, village, guild, or religion from those built on commercial and contractual ties, such as between employer and employee, creditor and debtor, or merchant and client.

The work of Émile Durkheim in the late eighteenth-century introduced a new rigor by proceeding from the premise that the degree of specialization in the division of labor profoundly shapes social life. He posited that members of simple clan and sect communities were maintained by organic solidarity, social cohesion through a shared set of norms, moral values, beliefs, and worldviews. By contrast, a different form of social integration, called organic solidarity, held together industrial societies. Here the complex differentiation and mutual interdependence of social roles give rise to the modern individual, who cultivates a personality, lifestyle, opinions, and affiliations through these relations. This is a liberating yet isolating experience for the individual.

This conceptual divide, with folk culture on one side and urban society on the other, effectively defined the boundary between sociology and cultural anthropology. Sociologists were to study Western urban industrial societies, while anthropologists would specialize in analyzing the life of villagers and peasants at the fringes of the colonial, and later capitalist, world. The early work of anthropologists on “primitive culture” provided a counterpoint to the dynamic, progressive, and often destructive forces of modernization, technological innovation, bureaucratization, and indi-vidualization occurring in Western society. Research is based on participant-observation: up-close, long-term fieldwork experiences and involvement in locals' daily life. Anthropologists often supplement field notes from these experiences with other evidence such as interview material, collected artifacts and documents, maps, and surveys. Such fieldwork methods, along with the descriptive and interpretive analytical writing that results from it, are collectively known as ethnography.

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