CASAN220 Midterm Study Guide
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25 Terms
Urban anthropology
Culture specific to city life as human life unfolds in cities
Tempo of city life, gentrification, immigration, heterogeneity, anonymity
Envisioned itself in conception that studied cultures; adopted a colonial discipline in studying cultures far away, exotic, unknown, non-literate, non-industrial
Moves to villages (rural, small-scale communities) but after it rapidly changes, they go to cities; they turn the gaze inward and think about Western cultures/societies
Participant observation
Researchers build direct, personal relationships based on mutual trust and reciprocity, and learn by participating in everyday activities while observing how people live, interact and build their worlds and create meaning
Constant dialectic (two opposing, yet converging forces) between trying to participate as much as possible without forgetting to step back and observe what people are doing
Focus on the bottom-up: Micro approach of individuals, people are at the center and works itself up to broader theorizing
Emic
An insider’s perspective
How people understand, describe, and explain their own lives, practices, beliefs, and give meaning to them
How people who belong to a community/culture/tradition, themselves explain that community/culture/tradition
Understanding from within
Etic
The analyst’s perspective
How researchers interpret cultural practices and situate them within broader patterns of social life
Interpretations that people who belong to that community may not think of or think of as important
A concept of what you’re developing through your observations
Analysis also from without
Simmel’s analysis (takeaways, division of labor)
How city life reshapes individual perception, subjectivity and social relations
City as a major actor and forefront in constituting how individuals adapt —> tension between individual autonomy and big social forces
Entering the city through sensation, rhythm, tempo, and intensity (grounded in the physiological effects of urban life on the nervous system)
Metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy, it is the concentration of economic exchange and the highest economic division of labor
Money economy has filled peoples’ minds with weighing, calculating, with numeral determinations, with a reduction of qualitative to quantitative values
Creates impersonal time schedules and punctual integration of activities
Division of labor: Specialization of occupations that result in individuals’ struggles to keep customers, compelling the individual to specialize in a function that cannot readily be replaced by another
Results in the seller always seeking new and differentiated needs of the customer, promoting differentiation, refinement, and enrichment of the public’s needs
The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life
Being part of a broader capitalist-driven society forces individuals into specialized occupations that result in them not seeing their end products through→limited face-to-face interaction and development of impersonal, cold relationships to gain profit rather than connection
Metropolitan behavior: Objective balance of service and return
Metropolitan man thus reckons with merchants and customers, and those with whom he is obliged to have social interactions (in order to receive something in return)
Acquaintances tend to stand in a relationship of utility; they are regarded as a means for the achievement of their own ends
Anonymity: Entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer’s actual field of vision; one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd
City life is cold, calculated, punctual, cosmopolitan, artificial, modern, and detached; it is forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence
Scarcity of inter-human contacts (merely transactional)
Impersonal contacts and offerings which tend to displace the genuine personal colorations
Rural behavior: Nature of the small circle in which knowledge of individuality produces a warmer tone of behavior
Rural life involves closer, tight-knit communities; frequent, kept relationships dissolves mystery and anonymity in eyes of others
Spontaneous self-expression, morale, and sense of participation that comes with living in an integrated, rural society
Deindividuation and depersonalization in metropolitan life
Difficulty of asserting one’s own personality within the dimensions of metropolitan life
Tempted to adopt the most tendentious (strongest) peculiarities, the specifically metropolitan extravagances of mannerism, caprice, and preciousness
To be different, standing out in a striking manner and thereby attracting attention
To maintain the front of belonging in the metropolis
Summoning the most exaggerated and performative elements to preserve his core and remain audible even to himself
The city constantly takes away your individuality; the more you lose your individuality, the more you have to search for it
You want to be unique and dig deep into that core and exaggerate it
More city dwellers are more performative, overexaggerating themselves to remember their individuality
Simmel’s identifying features and his assessment (blase attitude, blunting of discrimination)
Intensification of nervous stimulation
“swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli”
“rapid crowding of images”
Simmel’s assessment: Mostly negative
Taxing and overwhelming
While it sharpens perception it exhausts the individual and destabilize inner life
Silver lining: Positive trait of increased level of awareness and attentiveness
Advanced economic division of labor
“Cities are above all the seat of the most advanced economic division of labor”
Urban scale enables extreme specialization and competition, forcing individuals into a “type of specialized accomplishment”
Simmel’s assessment: Positive for the economy, negative for the individual
Enables economic productivity, specialization, fosters innovation results in narrowing the individual’s range of development
The individual becomes “a replaceable cog in the machine.” valued more for functional specialization than for authentic personality
The predominance of intellect
Simmel writes that the metropolitan individual “reacts with his head instead of his heart”
Simmel’s assessment: Ambivalent
Intellectuality functions as a protective organ that allows individuals to manage metropolitan pressures (makes you a stronger thinker) and ward off threatening currents
Metropolitan life underlies a heightened awareness
But it also distances them from emotional depth and more affective forms of social connection
Anonymity
“assures the individual of a type and degree of personal freedom to which there is no analogy in other circumstances”
“as groups grow numerically and spatially, allowing individuals greater ‘freedom of movement’ and ‘peculiarity and individuality’
Simmel’s assessment: Positive and negative
Enables form of individuality and independence that would be constrained in small-town or traditional settings
Ex) Allowed greater anonymity (going anywhere freely without people knowing what you’re up to)
The metropolis liberates the individual from constant scrutiny
Might produce loneliness and emotional strain
Reserve and detachment
Without reserve, the “unceasing external contact of numbers of persons” would lead individuals to be “completely atomized internally” and to fall into an “unthinkable mental condition”
Simmel’s assessment: Neutral
Necessary form of self-preservation when exposed to fleeting encounters with strangers (reduction of interactions)
Preservation of energy because you’re encountering many people
Pretending to not see those who are homeless or in pain
Responding to each person with the same emotional engagement would be psychologically untenable
Punctuality
“Punctuality, calculability, and exactness” are required by “the complications and extensiveness of metropolitan life”
Urban activities must be “organized and coordinated in the most punctual way into a firmly fixed framework of time which transcends all subjective elements”
Simmel’s assessment: Ambivalent
Functionally necessary
Without punctuality and calculability, urban economic and social life would fail into “inextricable chaos,” as illustrated by his example of all the watches in Berlin going wrong
City life abides by an industrial, corporate logic → necessity of having to be punctual
Goal-oriented behavior in accomplishing something
Loss of instinctive and emotionally grounded ways of living
Life is slower in rural environments (moving more with the daily rhythm of the sun and seasons); no need or pressure to foreclose or bookend a meeting
The blase attitude: A state of being completely unimpressed, bored, or indifferent because you have experienced too much of something or have grown used to luxury and excitement
More harmless impressions continue hithering the nerves until it reaches an incapacity to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy
Blunting of discrimination: Meaning and differing values of things are evenly flat and gray tone; no one object deserves preference over any other; the inability or unwillingness to discriminate/distinguish between different values
A psychic phenomenon “unconditionally reserved to the city” arising from the “rapidly shifting stimulations of the nerves” and the “intensification of metropolitan intellectuality”
He defines it as an “incapacity to react to new stimulations with the required amount of energy” (less involvement that the event should demand)
Simmel’s assessment: Neutral to negative
Adaptive response to the relentless speed and intensity of metropolitan life
Dulling responsiveness and producing indifference; while this protects individuals from being overwhelmed, it also signals a loss of vitality and emotional engagement
Not a failure to perceive differences, but indifference to those differences
The seat of the money economy
“Exchange value dominates all quality and individuality is reduced to a purely quantitative level”
Modern urban production is entirely “oriented toward unknown purchasers,” rather than known individuals
Simmel’s assessment: Ambivalent? Negative?
Structurally necessary for metropolitan life, making possible large-scale exchange
People are treated “as with numbers,” combining formal justice with an “unrelenting hardness”
Social relations become oriented toward objective equivalence
Result of choices and constraints–not moral failing–that produces indifference, reserve, and detachment in urban life
Wirth’s analysis (takeaways)
Cities have historically been the melting pot of races, peoples, and cultures, and a most favorable breeding ground of new biological and cultural hybrids
Socially constructed norms and rules overlooking cities to establish order and structure (clocks, traffic signals)
Differentiation gives rise to the spatial segregation of individuals according to color, ethnic heritage, economic and social status, and tastes and preferences (prejudice)
The close living and working together of individuals who have no sentimental and emotional ties foster a spirit of competition, aggrandizement, and mutual exploitation
Abrupt transitions from one part of the city to the other
Several factors influencing desirability for different sections of the population; requirements and modes of life are incompatible with one another and in essence, antagonistic to one another
Large, dense settlements mean that the personal mutual relationships between inhabitants which inherently appear in a neighborhood is lacking (instead, will know a smaller proportion and have less intensive knowledge—>shallow, impersonal relationships)
Place of residence, income, and employment fluctuate, thus the maintenance and promotion of intimate relationships is difficult (only rarely is he truly a neighbor)
As density increases, the social structure becomes more complex and occupationally divided
Visual recognition: We see the uniform which denotes the role of the functionaries and are oblivious to the personal eccentricities hidden behind the uniform
Urban life has conditioned our brains to automatically associate certain clothing with certain occupations and not to their subjective, personal personalities
Growing reserve of unattached individuals toward one another, friction and irritation from frequent movement of members, and nervous tensions derived from personal frustrations are accentuated by the rapid tempo and complicated technology under which life in dense areas must be lived
Increased disorder and chaos within urban life
Personal disorganization, mental breakdown, suicide, deliquency, crime, corruption, and disorder might be expected under these circumstances to be more prevalent in the urban than in the rural community
Blase attitude, reserve, and indifference are regarded as devices for immunizing/protecting themselves against personal claims and expectations of others (similar to Simmel’s analysis)
Contacts of the city may be face to face but they are nevertheless impersonal, superficial, and segmental
Rise of a mass market is only possible due to standardization of processes and products; when large numbers have to make common use of facilities and institutions, an arrangement must be made to adjust these to the needs of the average person rather than to particular individuals (adjusted to mass requirements)
For the individual to participate in urban life (social, political, economic), they must give up and subordinate some of their individuality to the demands of the larger community
Wirth’s identifying features and assessment
Negative
Acceptance of insecurity as a norm
“The corporation has no soul”
Positive
Sophistication, rationality, emancipation from the emotional
Efficiency, utility
Heightened individual mobility
Secularization of life
Leveling influence
Not only tolerates but rewards difference
Neutral
Size, density, heterogeneity
Division of labor
Close physical/distant social contact
Place or work disassociated from place of residence
Weakening of kinship- and tradition-based social bonds, competitiveness leading to mutual exploitation, secondary contacts and detachment
“The bonds of kinship, of neighborliness and the sentiments arising out of living together for generations under a common folk tradition are likely to be absent, or, at best, relatively weak”
Wirth’s assessment: Neutral, with potentially negative implications
Cohesion is achieved through impersonal, mutually exploitative mechanisms–competition, rules, and formal institutions makes large-scale urban life possible, but also produces thinner, more instrumental forms of social integration, setting limits on intimacy and solidarity in the city
Can cause…anomie (inspired by Durkheim)
Segmental roles: Secondary, rather than primary contacts
“They are dependent upon more people for the satisfaction of their life needs than are rural people and thus are associated with a greater number of organized groups, but they are less dependent upon particular persons and their dependence upon others is confined to a highly fractionalized aspect of the other’s round of activity”
Highly fractionalized: You serve many little parts to peoples’ lives but not everything to a single person
Don’t have one primary role (i.e., Joe the Baker), you are Joe the x,y,z…
Quality vs. quantitative proliferation of those multiple roles
Higher number of connections but less personal connections
Your identity gets splintered and proliferated in an urban setting as opposed to a rural setting
Site of heterogeneity and functional difference
“melting pot of races, peoples, and cultures” that “has not only tolerated but rewarded individual differences”
Life brings people together “because they’re different and thus useful to one another, rather than because they are homogenous and like-minded”
Wirth’s assessment: Predominantly positive
Difference is not merely accommodated but actively valued
Supports economic specialization, social interdependence, and innovation
Diversity a structural condition rather than a moral ideal
Too instrumentalist? – Critique of his view on heterogeneity
Too much functional (it will help the economy)
Diversity not for the sake of ethical, but economic wellbeing (how much it serves the economy)
Anomie: Lack of moral rules telling us what our responsibility is to each other
How increasingly complex and differentiated (division of labor) societies hold together (no longer living in tight knit communities)
From mechanical to organic solidarity
Mechanical solidarity: Characterized the simple, traditional, community and kinship based societies
Ex) Your shoe maker can carry all the steps of the shoemaking (picking up the leather, stitching, final production of the shoe)
Seeing the process through to the end
Seller and consumer are known to each other
Organic solidarity: Individuated, specialized roles in order for that society to function
Ex) Different specialists in order to produce a shoe at mass-scale (serving people in fractured, splintered ways)
Not a guarantee of social cohesion
If there is a breakdown of standards and values in a given society, then this will cause unrest, alienation, and uncertainty that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals
Key traits of Simmel and Wirth compared (what they illuminate and what they leave out)
Simmel: Articulation of the individual (how will the individual survive?)
Sensory overload and nervous stimulation
Blase attitude and reserve as psychological adaptation and self-protection (necessary response, not a moral failing)
Head over heart; intellectual and calculating
Seat of money economy and division of labor
Greater personal freedom, but at the cost of authentic self?
Wirth: Articulation at the level of society (how will the society move on or deal with anomie?)
Size, density, population, and heterogeneity
Reserve, indifference; weakening of kinship and neighborly ties
Competition and formal control as substitutes for solidarity
Secondary ties and role specialization: segmentalization of human relationships
Expertise, innovation but also danger of anomie
What they illuminate
Early classic and powerful diagnoses of modern urban life
City as a major social force, not a backdrop/context: how the Urban conditions conduct and subjectivity
Adaptations, not moral failures
Freedom and constraint held together (constant tension)
How the city SHAPES its dwellers
What they leave out
Both write as if it is the authoritative/universal view of what urban life is without locating their individual positioning in how it affects their view; we must recognize that they are writing from a particular position as particular intellectuals (excludes different populations that inhabit the city)
There are multiple viewpoints that would add onto how people differently experience the city
To be cognizant of how who they are influences the way they collect, think, and write data
Uneven power: Whose perspective counts? Does everyone’s perspective count equally in terms of implementation?
There’s no specific city mentioned, resulting in a lack of cultural, historical, and geographic specificity
Every city is different
Will all cities remain the same? (no acknowledgement of change over time)
Street-level knowledge (not taking the streets seriously, just theorizing from a bird’s eye point of view)
Ethnographic knowledge (armchair anthropology)
Having the etic perspective but missing the emic perspective
Collective action and mobilization; grassroots organizing, political imagination
What happens when people do more than adapt – and act back on the city?
All about how the residents are being overwhelmed by the city and adapting to it, not concerned with how city dwellers actively shape urban space together
Not just passive participants, but active agents
Jacobs’ analysis (takeaways)
Highway project through the city: Destroying thousands of historic structures and forcibly displacing tens of thousands of residents
Urban renewal: For the sake of the automobile; cutting across a beautiful, vibrant city
Residents banding together to resist and challenge urban planning (demonstrations, rallies, blocking the expressway)
From shared, communal to privatized spaces→recipe for the destruction for what makes cities wonderful
The small stores, buildings, streets, signs
Different kinds of people could work together (promotion and strength of cultural diversity); power of people
“No hint of individuality or whim or surprise, no hint that here is a city with a tradition and flavor all its own…they will deaden it…they banish the street. They banish its function. They banish its variety.” (126)
“To enjoy himself he needs to see plenty of contrast on the streets. He needs assurance that the street is neither interminable nor boring.” (127)
The street is “the nervous system; it communicates the flavor, the feel, the sights. It is the major point of transaction and communication.” (127)
The engineers envision their projects to be spacious, park-like, uncrowded, stable, clean, symmetrical, orderly
But THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME (no diversity, variety, flavor, personality, tradition) → “each project will look very much like the next one”
“The project approach thus adds nothing to the individuality of a city…reflect a positive mania for obliterating a city’s individuality.” (129)
Argues that there are 2 important characteristics that make downtown special: individuality and people
“What makes it lively is the way so many different kinds of activity tend to support each other.” (130)
We are accustomed into thinking of downtowns as “divided into functional districts – financial, shopping, theatre" (130)
“Where you find the liveliest downtown you will find one with the basic activities to support two shifts of foot traffic” (130)
“A close, magnetic juncture between the old and the new, not a barrier.” (130)
Argues that urban renewal destroys the tradition and liveliness of these cities
From the abstract, universal type to the situated, particular city
Cities are/should be made by people, not (just) expert models
Political turn: City dwellers are active participants, not passive recipients
Cities produce new solidarities (not just reserve, indifference, anomie)
The street as the fundamental unit of urban life
Methodological shift: Walking the city
How Jacobs’ analysis differs from Simmel and Wirth
Jacobs offers prognoses and solutions to the issues and complexities of urban life. She offers that architects cannot universally set their imagination and vision as the set, default plan. Rather, they must OBSERVE the streets, the people, the buildings, the life. They must interact with the people and immerse themselves into these environments. It is a collective, shared responsibility that citizens have in also shaping and creating their cities, not just the architects.
She works from a down-up approach
The citizen has a vital contribution, it “is his city” (131)
“Rarely before has the citizen had such a chance to reshape the city, and to make it the kind of city that he likes and that others will too.” (131)
“The point…is to work with the city” (130)
Jacobs has a more optimistic read on how city life allows strangers to come together in their distinctive roles that allows social life to function; they come together and produce this work of art
Whereas Simmel and Wirth are ambivalent about this (individuals becoming cogs in the machine, division of labor leading to anomie, worries of alienation and isolation)
Lewis’ analysis (culture of poverty)
Poverty: Defined by material deprivation
Low income, scarcity of resources, including housing, nutrition, health
Poverty alone does not produce a culture of poverty
Culture of poverty: A dominant set of values, both imposed AND internalized (self-perpetuating subculture)
Persistently high rate of unemployment, underemployment, low wages
A strong focus on living in the present and immediate gratification
Low economic status is justified as the result of personal failing→an adaptation of the poor to their marginal position in a class-stratified, individualistic, capitalist society to cope with the despair that comes from the realization of the improbability of achieving success, where success is measured by the dominant values and goals
The dominant values continue reinforcing the American dream ideology, which gets internalized by the poorer class; when they can’t do it, they feel like failures
This produces the culture of poverty: No real feasibility or realistic expectation that they can be upwardly mobile BUT the norm keeps telling them; as a result, they accept defeat of future prospects, only thinking about the present
The American dream ideology seen as the cultural norm (individualization)
If you work hard enough, you get rewarded
Norms telling you that upward mobility is a choice
Expectation of upward mobility
The system is not the problem, it’s the person (shifts blame onto the individual as a moral failing)
“They’re not working hard enough, not doing enough to change their circumstances”
Lewis’ identifying features and assessment, and critique
Negative
Chronic unemployment, low wages, shortage of food and cash
Unstable family, childhood not cherished
Machismo, hyper masculinity
Little sense of history, historical consciousness
Fatalism, helplessness, dependence, inferiority, hopelessness, despair
Apolitical, no class consciousness
Non-integration (deterring from mainstream society) and disengagement
Positive
Strong women, including as head of household
Present-time orientation: spontaneity, sensual enjoyment
Despite his intentions of destigmatizing and decriminalizing the people he’s very much in community with, we are left with an impoverished image of a community defined by what it lacks socially and politically
Could be read as attributing responsibility for marginalization to the poor themselves
Does the culture of poverty end up becoming the poverty of culture in Lewis’ analysis?
People may share aspirations of the middle class (education, housing, family, economic security) and want the same things but the people in poverty have much less cultural resources (money, networks)
Class-stratified societies constantly creating a gap between what you should achieve and the accessibility of resources
Action is not a direct representation, rather a set of skills available to them
Let’s not assume that people’s behavior is the direct representation of their aspirations and that these values are internalized
Bourgois’ analysis (culture of resistance)
Asks: How do we take culture seriously without turning culture into the cause of poverty?
Same population, different reading: Bourgois works among Puerto Rican residents of Spanish Harlem–the same population Lewis analyzed–to re-examine the “culture of poverty”
Culture is not the cause, but the product of structural forces: Deindustrialization, racism, segregation, and exclusion from dignified work
It’s not that they have completely different values, they can want the same thing but are doing it differently as a result of unequal access to resources (the means available to them are not the same)
They want success, power, glory, stability
From “culture of poverty” to “culture of resistance”: Rejection of humiliating low-wage labor and in search for dignity and respect
To gain powerful positions in the community through unconventional paths
Not getting the respect they deserve compared to middle-class individuals
Systematic racism, exploitation, improper compensation
End up feeling drawn to a sure, faster road to success
People are resisting and pushing back, they are not passively accepting their fate
BUT this resistance is also often self-destructive: Bourgois refuses romanticization: the same practices that enable recognition also intensify addiction, violence, and suffering; the underground drug economy is also an agent in self-harm and harm to the community
Bourgois carefully threads that needle; the culture of resistance does not mean romanticizing this pursuit
“differences in job category and prestige correlate with ethnicity and are justified–consciously or unconsciously–through a racist logic”
Once you cross a certain threshold, there’s a difference in affluence and resources
Hartman’s reframing of how to review urban spaces and how it differs or compares to Lewis and Bourgois
From adaptation to experimentation
Tenement life as “living otherwise,” not just coping under constraint; freedom
Where Lewis sees poor housing and disorder, Hartman sees community and joy
Wishful stories of the things yet to come, air thick of laughter
Hard-working folks
Proximity of people (you can hear people talking, arguing, etc.)
Community can be outside of family
Stoop culture, street corner (would appreciate Bourgois’ depiction of the neighborhood→community integration)
Reframing sensory overload
What reformers call chaos, disorder becomes intimacy, and creative possibility: “beautiful cacophony of tenement life”
Segregation as imposition, not empirical reality
Urban space is ordered and often misrepresent actual reality on the ground
Ethnographic scale: From the city to the street to the street corner
Rejection of bourgeois norm
Andaya’s analysis (takeaways, time seizure, temporal governance, racialized and classed temporal structures)
Severely underfunded safety-net hospitals serving predominantly low-income people of color—>results in inadequate technology
Patients are predominantly low-income pregnant women, juggling service work, childcare, transportation, and other institutional demands
Providers themselves working in an overcrowded, underfunded system: staff shortages, high patient loads, and constant pressure to move patients through
Clinical time is a form of governance: They organize who must accommodate whom and whose time counts
Waiting has material consequences; they cannot afford to wait 3-4 hours
Wasting labor time and responsibilities
Structural problems become individualized
Racial disparities shifts the blame onto patients for being uncompliant or not organizing their time well enough to make their appointment (structural problem is turned back on the individual as a personal failing)
Providers are also governed by CLINICAL time
Get rated for productivity→pressure to quickly go through patients→perceived lower quality patient care
Time: Waiting, scheduling, lateness, rushed care whose time is valued and who must accommodate institutional schedules
How ordinary routines can reproduce racialized and classed inequality
Patients experience loss of control, frustration, and disrespect but do push back and challenge contestation of institutional time
System in itself does not consider providers’ and patients’ times as valuable, exacerbating shared conditions of resource constraints
Poor peoples’ time is assumed to be less valuable than that of wealthier individuals as well as the implicit belief that they should wait for “free” services
Racial hierarchies where POC on Medicaid are subjected to lengthy questionnaires about their living conditions, psychological factors, and others whereas privately insured pregnant patients do not have to go through this
Reveals racial disparities in which broader institutions are more suspicious of POC pregnant people; their pregnancies are perceived to be endangered by their poor choices and behaviors and their social relationships/conditions
The system produces and reproduces racial and socioeconomic disparities by making it seem that POC on Medicaid are “expected” to accommodate their own schedules to the hospital’s temporal demands and wait long hours for receiving “free” care
However, when POC patients end up not going to these appointments, this perpetuates racist and classist stereotypes
Patients feel that their times are disrespected and unequally valued, having to wait hours for an appointment that only lasts a few minutes
Waiting for several hours, they are losing valuable time in terms of economic labor (could be making money) and/or responsibilities (looking after children, household chores)
This rapid patient flow (although seen by administrators as decreasing patients’ wait times) can be perceived by patients as rude and dismissive
Patients EXPECT high quality care and doctor-patient relationships where they feel genuinely cared for
Time seizures: Engendered feelings of frustration and powerlessness, reinforcing perceptions of an institutional lack of care and respect for patients’ time
Temporal governance: How time operates as a deliberate tool or mechanism of control in institutional, legal, and policy design
Racialized and classed temporal structures: Ways in which time is weaponized, distributed, and experienced unequally based on race and socioeconomic status
Key connecting thread between Bourgois and Andaya
In search of respect
In Bourgois’ readings…
“I couldn’t be messin’ up the money. I couldn’t be fucking up no more! Besides, I had to get respect.”
“I have to go to work. They don’t respect my time!”
In Andaya’s readings…
Patients feel DISRESPECTED
Ginsburg and Rapp’s analysis (takeaways)
Centered around disability, arts, and community
Central concept: Access (more than going through the door, but changing who is physically able to access the space can change what happens in that space)
Access is not simply an accommodation added; it enables new forms of community by moving toward creativity and world-making
Legal compliance is a minimum but it’s really thinking about community integration
Disability is generative of aesthetics and creativity (not an obstacle)
Visual disability is generative of a different way in perceiving the world (enhancing your perception of other things)
Implicit hierarchy of senses
From charity/therapy (one-way) to mutuality and community (two-way)
Crip kinship: Their way of reappropriating a derogatory term to embrace that empowerment and sense of community
Looking out for one another and offering emotional/social support
Artists with disabilities share ideas and educate social scientists
Disability justice is intersectional – and art becomes political world-building
#BlackDisabilityLivesMatter
“the intersectional challenges of Black Disabled lives”
We cannot think about disability without thinking about Blackness, they must be thought of holistically and interdependently, not distinctly
“You guys in production design, you get to create the world that you want to live in”
The stage can be prefigurative politics…it [is] the world to come”
Art: Create as much as you can, how you wish the future to look like by bringing it into the present (enact the future into the present)
Space: Entry, movement, participation, design, whom spaces are built for and how they can be remade
Disabled artists and communities confront exclusion but reshape institutions and aesthetics through redesign, artistic production, and collective world-building
Yazici’s analysis (takeaways, embodied experience)
Which vehicle you’re stuck in makes a difference
Inequality is also reproduced daily through immobility and mobility, congestion, and waiting: the embodied experience of traffic
Commuting is the site of research for the urban anthropologist (participant observation)
Embodied experience: The way social conditions are lived and felt through the body – in movement, sensation, proximity, fatigue, and physical exposure
The dolmus (packed): Istanbul specific mode of transportation
Forced proximity: Not a chosen environment to be in
Movement: Necessary transport to get where they are going (unavoidable, accepted as routine, tolerable, and inevitable)
The spectrum of inequality in Istanbul’s traffic
The corporate elite in luxury cars, with personal drivers
Upper and middle class drivers at the wheel of their cars
Middle class communities in the company shuttle, taxi, the dolmus, the subway
Working class commuters in the subway, the bus and the metrobus
On the gridlock: Mobile vendors
Becomes an opportunity for earning a livelihood (jump onto municipal buses with a package full of bottled water)
Outside of the gridlock (extreme poles who escape the ethnographic gaze): The super rich and the very poor who are virtually immobile
Mastering the metrobus: Familiarity ridden by routine commuters vs. the opposite
Commuters moving quickly in the “right” direction to get hold of a “better spot” or a seat
Fleeting encounters of strangers during rush hour
Upper income people have the advantage of sheltering their bodies from contact with strangers during their commutes
Middle and lower income people are forced to use public transportation and be in intimate physical contact on a daily routine
An experiment in mass movement, where a crowd of strangers morph into a single, moving body
A commuter who loses control over their individual movements is forcibly dragged along by this moving mass of strangers
Unavoidable personal encounters: Those riding the bus versus children who run toward the cars, tapping on the windows and begging for money
City bus is a place of both social conflict and cooperation; overcrowding affects courtesy to strangers and social norms concerning gender and age
Conflict: Passengers argue with one another over personal space or for being too loud, and harassment is a central issue for female riders
Cooperation: Strangers request knowledge from one another in order to navigate the city, strangers help with small children, heavy bags, and maintaining balance, new passengers may board at the rear
Yazici’s analysis compared to Wirth’s
Density and relation among strangers
“Impersonal, transitory relations among strangers” —> fleeting encounters with strangers during rush hour
“Forced intimacy among strangers” where people are cramped together; states Wirth does not acknowledge this
Confirms Wirth’s account of urban social relations, complicate it, or both?
Confirms it with the nuance of change
What happens to Wirth’s “impersonality” when strangers are physically pressed up against one another every day?
Social anonymity and bodily intimacy can coexist
Strangers can engage in conflict or cooperation
Yazici’s analysis compared to Hartman’s and Jacobs’
“Strangers help each other with small children, heavy bags, and maintaining balance as the bus starts and stops”
Which author we have already read could you connect this passage to?
Hartman→Informal practices through which people care for, assist, and make life possible for one another in the everyday city
She talks a lot about how cities are not as divided as people think
Jacobs→The ordinary, largely unplanned coordination of strangers that makes urban life possible: a kind of moving version of her “sidewalk ballet”
You can engage in participant observation from the ground-up and merely observe how strangers interact with others
The city may produce impersonal relations among strangers, but “stranger” does not necessarily mean socially disconnected; Yazici’s bus shows anonymity, proximity, friction, and cooperation happening simultaneously
Yazici’s analysis compared to Andaya’s
Thinking about time across Yazici on traffic and Andaya on waiting in clinics
Andaya asks us whose time the institution values; Yazici asks us whose mobility gives them control over time
Together, they suggest that inequality is partly about who gets to wait–and whose life has to bend around that waiting
Who has the ability to escape, shorten, or recognize waiting?
What would it mean to say that control over one’s time is itself an urban resource?
Friction between people delivering destinations/care, and the recipients (commuters and patients)
Patients feel disrespected (similarly to commuters who may feel that their time is unvalued)
Drivers feel pressure from commuters who have places to go similarly to providers feeling pressure from patients to take them in and pressure from hospitals to squeeze in patients
Missing threads from Yazici’s analysis
Yazici is very attentive to how traffic is experienced differently by class, gender, occupation, and age but what dimension of embodied urban experience does not receive much attention?
Disability (able-bodied society that is disabling for those who cannot access it at the same terms)
Especially striking because her ethnography is so bodily; she describes standing, balancing, squeezing past strangers, boarding and exiting crowded vehicles, during physical proximity, and acquiring the “bodily knowledge” needed to navigate public transportation
Ginsburg and Rapp would push us to ask: Which kinds of bodies are these transportation systems implicitly designed for? Who can board, stand, balance, climb, hear or see announcements, move through crowds, or transfer quickly?
How might centering disability change what counts as mobility in the first place?
Taken-for-granted assumption of mobility and efficiency, how can we rethink what we are assuming what mobility means?
Arican’s analysis (takeaways, racialized death)
Un/belonging in Istanbul
Il/legality (legal status)
Spectrum of il/legality: A multilayered condition
Dual condition of legality: Comes and has a residence permit, but the policy changes and he finds himself in illegal status
Lapses into illegality but was legal status upon his arrival
Access to healthcare and housing
Initially, lack of access to healthcare contingent on possession of papers
Mehmet Abi allowed him to access healthcare (personal connections, he knew people who knew people)
One-room apartment with three other people
After death
Improper, inhumane burial and funeral
Hierarchy of exclusions
Marked and othered as an outsider, buried in a section labelled non-Muslim, and assigned a number
Race/racism
Suspicion and surveillance in everyday life
Disproportionate suspicion of African Americans compared to other races
Conflation of disease with identity
HIV gets reduced to his identity; perception that his race caused his disease
Health workers didn’t want to touch his body
Looked at his body like a liability rather than a person
Language: Racial-boundary-making in everyday speech
Driver taken aback by the ethnographer’s involvement in the burial of this young man, warning her
Racist remarks of not belonging with
Blame immigrants from Africa for taking their jobs
The author’s un/belonging (their own thinking and positionality)
Ultimate goal is objective analysis, but who they are and how others perceive them, will have an influence on what people tell them
Bus driver racially bonds with the ethnographer, warning her of the “diseases” that migrants bring into Turkey (establishing an us vs. them)
Denial of racism in the overall public culture; racialization operates without being explicitly named
Her etic term makes visible a structure that everyday language obscures
Insider to the city, outsider to the community
Immigrant, female PhD student, middle-class position, and a local
Under suspicion as a woman
Driver is confused what a woman is doing here, concerned about the young man’s death
Institutional mobility vs. migrant precarity
Belonging through citizenship, unbelonging through migration
“If I die elsewhere, who will see my body?” – certain empathy towards what happens to those who die in a strange land
Having been a migrant herself in the US
Racialized death: Etic term built from emic moments that are audible and visible in the ethnography
Refers to the way a person’s death is narrated through racial categories; Blackness becomes entangled with assumptions about disease
Describes how the dead body is treated differently because of race; fear of contamination, heightened caution during washing, and everyday racist comments mark the body as dangerous or suspect
Scapegoating errors around punctuality is directed toward certain racial groups (tight bus deadlines)
Rituals around death: Someone of a perceived difference is not entitled to those rituals
Perceptions and biases of particular groups even after death (practice of fear and disease transmission)
Segregation of bodies in the cemetery based on religious differences
Ghannam’s analysis (takeaways, flexible urbanity, al fasil wa wasil, forms of capital)
Two contrasting urban lifestyles and residences: Dreamland and Amal
Dreamland: Gated, all-inclusive community
Media and governmental support
New luxurious residential areas (a luxury enclave)
Designed by developers and foreign educated architects: “refusal to indigenize”
Modeled after certain Western ideals (Egyptian architects utilizing their US degrees and bringing their westernized-influenced visions)
Assimilation to a Hollywood, American, westernized lifestyle; nothing seen as “backward, exotic, cultural” (straying from Egyptian or Middle-Eastern ideals)
Viewed as contributing to the beauty, modernization, and globalization of the capital
Exclusion and separation: Stray away from local ways of socialization
Amal (hope): Squattler settlement
Connotations of hope are a kind of endurance and resilience and keeping at it despite what the conditions are
No signs to announce its name or mark its boundaries
An ‘ashwai’: random or unplanned area
Built by families themselves and local contractors
Viewed as eyesores and cancer cells that have to be destroyed
Inclusion and solidarity
Flexible urbanity: The ability to enjoy the benefits of urban life while avoiding its proximity (grows out of al fasil wa wasil)
Free of noise, pollution, crowdedness
A pattern she notices in these elite spaces, capturing how they are imagining themselves in this elite, exclusive, alternative space
An etic concept derived from emic representations of elite desire (their own articulation of how they want to live)
Detachment from the city’s chaos while maintaining attachment to its resources
The privilege to enjoy the benefits of urban life while avoiding its burdens
Urban life on demand: Choosing how much of urban noise, intimacy, sociality they want and when they don’t want anymore, they retreat into their enclave
Flexible urbanity is classed: only those with capital can purchase this flexibility
Al fasil wa wasil: Double dynamic of separation and connection (emic)
Dreamland: Access to schools, healthcare, shopping, sports, and without exposure to pollution, traffic, congestion
Amal
Urban life is not flexible – it is immersive and inescapable
BUT…also marked by kinship networks and solidarity
Forms of capital (Pierre Bourdieu)
While economic capital ultimately rules, to understand social life and relations, we must think of other interrelated forms of capital
Economic capital: Money, property/assets, income, material possessions
Dreamland residents purchasing these villas
Dreamland architects financing development
Social capital: Activation of networks and relationships (knowing the right people) to help you move ahead and provide leverage
Cultural capital:
Embodied: How class is lived in the body
Ex) Growing up in an aristocratic household (knowing what the three knives are for)
Ex) Growing up in a family of actors (carry your body differently)
Manners, taste, habits, rituals, lifestyle
In Dreamland, we see this through a “huge theme park, golf courses, tennis courts, horse-racing tracks, residential areas, conference facilities, a hospital, health resorts…schools…a hotel”
Objectified: Material objects that display class distinction
Clothing, jewelry
Luxury cars, watches, designer clothing
Institutionalized: Education
The architects and those who live in Dreamland