Culture and Power in Urban Anthropology Notes

Urban Anthropology: Culture and Power

Introduction

Urban anthropology is concerned with its significance and social-scientific status compared to other academic specializations.
It is divided between defining what is specifically "urban" and what is uniquely "anthropological" about its orientation.
The discipline explores urban studies' contributions to anthropology, addressing cross-cultural problems and aiming for a comprehensive "science of humanity."
It assesses the relevance of anthropological concepts and techniques to urban studies, facing skepticism from those who doubt the applicability of anthropology to urban phenomena or the existence of an "urban culture."
Urban anthropologists have often defended their field, emphasizing the need to include cities in the anthropological vision and apply anthropological insights to urban issues.
Despite calls for empirical research and interdisciplinary cooperation, intellectual efforts have focused on internal debates, conceptual elaborations, and defining the division of labor within the discipline.
The field has produced limited substantial ethnographies and innovative theoretical work, with little focus on the interplay of culture and power in urban settings.
Research strategies vary due to the complexity and variability of urban phenomena.

Perspectives on Urban Anthropology

Conventional anthropology often involves studying displaced people moving into cities, emphasizing the accommodation of new settlers to urban life.
Anthropologists have also examined the global process of urbanization, ethnicity, and poverty as "urban problems."
Richard Fox argues that contradictory developments within anthropology lead to incompatible perspectives on the city.
Fox identifies tensions between holistic perspectives and small-scale observation techniques, and between historical and synchronic analyses.
These tensions result in three distinct urban anthropologies: anthropology of urbanism, urbanization, and poverty.
Fox argues that only the anthropology of urbanism constitutes a true anthropology of the city.
The other two are merely anthropologies practiced in the city, where the urban world is the locus rather than the object of research.
Fox criticizes the focus on the romantic and marginal within urban locales, arguing it restricts the scope of urban anthropology.
He believes that focusing on poverty, slums, and native locations leads to ahistoricism and denies the city as the goal of research.

Fox's Critique and Hannerz's Relational Perspective

Fox advocates a holistic approach that examines the patterns of adaptation by cities and their linkages to societies.
He neglects the urban world as a separate social realm with its own composition and dynamic.
Fox argues that focusing on territory is best left to other disciplines and warns against ethnocentrism.
He believes that an anthropology of urban social practices tends to translate modern experience into universals of urban existence.
For Fox, the city is merely one of many institutions, such as kinship and value systems.
He suggests that the city can be typed and ranked based on economic autonomy and state power, and its cultural role in wider networks can be specified.
Ulf Hannerz, in "Exploring the City," critiques the routine practice of anthropology within city limits and calls for a more strictly conceived urban anthropology focused on urbanism itself.
Hannerz links social history, network analysis, and symbolic interactionism, drawing on Erving Goffman and the "Manchester School."
He develops a relational perspective, understanding urbanism as a system of social relationships and a set of ideas held by urbanites.
Hannerz focuses on the "role" as the intersection of differentiated perspectives and homogenizing effects of culture.
Roles are explored as elements of social networks, explaining the generation and transmission of shared meanings and local cultures.
The ideal analysis moves from the organization of diversity within the "provisioning domain" to the presentation and interactions of selves in everyday life.

Micro vs. Macro Anthropology

Hannerz concedes that his analysis tends to be set in limited assemblages of social relationships, such as neighborhoods and ego-centered networks.
He rejects Fox's criticism that interest in lesser units turns urban anthropology into "street anthropology."
Hannerz argues that any large-scale anthropology of urbanism must be dependent on detailed local ethnography.
He finds the difference between an "anthropology from within" and an "anthropology from above."
The question of mediations, such as cultural paradigms and technologies of power, is not confronted, leading to polarized micro- and macro-anthropological approaches.
Hannerz focuses on collective systems of meanings created as individuals reveal their understandings to one another.
Power is understood negatively as a check to spontaneous social constructions of reality.
Fox focuses on the relationships of excluded populations to the adaptive patterns of the cities they inhabit.
He emphasizes the linkages between the adaptive strategies of ethnic groups and the external organization of the city, and between the ghetto and the city.
The principal mediators are middlemen and brokers, who operate as bridges between ghetto and city.

Lack of Attention to the Political

These strategies demonstrate a lack of attention to the "political."
Micro-anthropologists struggle to move beyond individual interactions.
Macro-anthropologists lose sight of all but the most general functions of power.
Problems generated by administrative surveillance and resistance are de-emphasized.
Efforts to understand the dynamics of power are overshadowed by ideological or functional explanations.

The Chicago Urban School

The forms and directions of urban anthropology can be seen as elaborations of or reactions against the ideas developed by the Chicago urban school in the early 20th century.
Robert Park's "The City" identifies the city as a laboratory for investigating human behavior, focusing on the problem of integration.
For Park, the city is not merely a physical mechanism but a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions.
The city reveals human characteristics and traits that are obscured in smaller communities.
Park describes the city as a "clinic" for studying human nature and social processes due to its "chronic condition of crisis."
Park's formulations are ideological, taking the organically related industrial city as the "natural habitat of civilized man."
His focus on social controls reveals a concern with the policing of urban populations and the perceived tension between solidarities and fragmentation.
Urban organization breaks down social solidarity based on family ties, replacing it with solidarity based on communities of interest.
City life substitutes indirect, "secondary" relations for direct, primary relations.
Control based on mores is replaced by control based on law and police power.
Power also includes the division of labor, manipulation by the stock market and political parties, and the growth of advertising.
Park identifies the "mobilization of the individual man" as a transformation that substitutes casual relationships for permanent associations.
This leads to segregation according to interests and a transformation in the "art of life."

Wirth's "Urbanism as a Way of Life"

Louis Wirth proposes that social relations are typically impersonal, superficial, transitory, and segmental.
In "Urbanism as a Way of Life," Wirth defines the city as a "relatively large, dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals."
Wirth argues that size is especially determinant, requiring a narrowing of contacts and giving rise to a reserved attitude.
The individual gains freedom from personal controls but loses spontaneous self-expression and a sense of participation.
Wirth aims to make possible a sociological apprehension of the city.
He argues that the question is not whether cities exhibit distinctive traits but how potent they are in molding social life.
Wirth outlines a complex of traits that makes up urban life, including the substitution of secondary for primary contacts and the weakening of kinship bonds.
Urban culture appears as an ecological effect, with social controls depicted as reactive rather than constitutive.

Reactions to the Urban-Rural Dichotomy

The opposition between ruralism and urbanism has deflected interest in urban culture and power toward subcultures and the functioning of cities in larger formations.
Reactions to the urban-rural dichotomy have taken various forms.
Gideon Sjoberg emphasizes the contrast between industrial and pre-industrial cities.
Oscar Lewis confronts folk-urban thinking, finding complex social involvements in Mexico City.
The first reaction specifies diverse urban types, while the second explores urban sub-cultures.
Manuel Castells critiques urban sociology as mere ideology, arguing that "urbanism" is the cultural expression of capitalist industrialization.
Castells suggests that the focus is limited to social disorganization and the persistence of autonomous subcultures.
Branches of urban sociology have a non-specific theoretical object and a non-explicit scientific object: acculturation to modern society.

Castells' Critique

Castells criticizes Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzies for presenting a social process as a universal feature.
He argues that the twin assumptions that "modern" societies have a distinctive cultural system and that this system is the product of the city are flawed.
Castells rejects the idea that ecological changes could produce a form of social organization.
He argues that urbanism cannot be the specific theoretical object of urban sociology unless it is identified with modernity.
Castells claims it is misleading to attribute the facts of life under capitalism to a spatial form and an ideological prejudice to equate urbanism with "modernity."
Transformations in the technico-social base of society lead both to new types of social relations and to a new form of spatial organization.
Castells critique of the Chicago school sets up a theory of production of social forms in which culture evaporates, and power is understood restrictively.
The denial of a specific "urban culture" gives way to a theory that excludes the local play of culture, power, and space.

Williams's Perspective

Raymond Williams shows that a more illuminating discussion of the opposition between "urban" and "rural" is possible from a Marxist perspective.
Williams traces the images of city and country and the history of their opposition in British literature.
He finds that concealed in social images are precise and recent sets of social relationships.
The opposition between urban and rural is related to specific historical conjunctures and diverse strategies aimed at overcoming contradictions.
The division of city and country is the culmination of the division and specialization of labor developed under capitalism.
Williams argues that there is a growth and alteration of consciousness, perception, and relationship.
He emphasizes the need to look at the real social processes of alienation and abstraction.

A More Productive Conception of Power and Culture

A more productive conception of power and culture is called for, where the individual and the state are related within a series of paradigms and strategies.
Power may be best understood positively, by tracing the pervasive mechanism by which it inserts itself into actions and discourses.
Culture can be understood in terms of a productive deployment.
The city can be approached indirectly through mediating technologies and institutions.
New relations between culture and power and new forms of resistance can be understood in the city.
The city is partially constituted by new relations and ways of seeing that grow from subjectification.

Donzelot's "Policing of Families"

Jacques Donzelot traces the origins and implications of a "policing of families."
He isolates a shift from "government of the family" to "government through the family."
This was accomplished by medical intervention in the bourgeois family and philanthropic intervention in the working-class family.
Hygiene, education, and architectural policies were designed to reduce working-class solidarity and penetrate partitioned domains.
The family became a relay, supporting social imperatives.
Donzelot's work provides new perspectives on urban phenomena.

Housing as a Strategic Node

Housing has often been analyzed as a strategic node.
Engels argued that the "housing question" involved the choice between landless freedom and virtual slavery.
Michelle Perrot notes the importance of breaking workers' ties with the land.
Donzelot explores social housing as a strategic weapon.
Nineteenth-century hygienists struggled against the conception of the dwelling as a refuge.
The goal was to make housing into a sanitary space.
The problem was to organize a space large enough to be hygienic and small enough for family living.

Conclusion

Urban anthropologists need not restrict themselves to urban-industrial society.
Anthropologists can study power in cities cross-culturally.
This is anthropology in the city rather than anthropology of the city.
Themes articulated by the Chicago school may persist but be transformed.
Individualization may be the result of philanthropic strategies.
Urban subcultures may be effects of and potential forms of resistance to subjectification.
Anthropologists focused on urbanism fail to explore the dynamics of power in their own society.