The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnography

Italo Pardo, Giuliana B. Prato, Italo Pardo, Giuliana B. Prato, Italo Pardo, Giuliana B. Prato

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319642895
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

These ethnographically-based studies of diverse urban experiences across the world present cutting edge research and stimulate an empirically-grounded theoretical reconceptualization. The essays identify ethnography as a powerful tool for making sense of life in our rapidly changing, complex cities. They stress the point that while there is no need to fetishize fieldwork—or to view it as an end in itself —its unique value cannot be overstated. These active, engaged researchers have produced essays that avoid abstractions and generalities while engaging with the analytical complexities of ethnographic evidence. Together, they prove the great value of knowledge produced by long-term fieldwork to mainstream academic debates and, more broadly, to society.

© The Author(s) 2018

Italo Pardo and Giuliana B. Prato (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnographyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64289-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Urban Ethnography Matters—Analytical Strength, Theoretical Value and Significance to Society

Italo Pardo¹ and Giuliana B. Prato¹

(1)

School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, UK

Italo Pardo (Corresponding author)

Giuliana B. Prato

End Abstract

Urban Ethnography Today

Urban ethnography, the product of long-term in-depth research, is attracting increasing attention among academics, professionals and decision-, law- and policy-makers. Clearly, the in-depth study of urban settings and attendant complex dynamics is timely and of great importance. Recent publications have brought out the range of novel analytical and theoretical insights that urban ethnography can offer as it adopts—and adapts—methods from classic anthropology and qualitative sociology, according to specific research perspectives, aims and geographic locations. Key paradigmatic challenges have been highlighted by works such as Anthropology in the City: Methodology and Theory (Pardo and Prato 2012) and the Special Issue of Diogène on Le positionnement de l’anthropologie urbaine (Pardo et al. 2015),¹ by the epistemological reflections developed in the Forum on ‘Urban Anthropology’ (Urbanities 2013 and 2014)² and by the substantial body of publications in the Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology series,³ and, before that, in the Ashgate Urban Anthropology series,⁴ now published by Routledge. Among others, these sources of intellectual engagement at once testify to the vibrancy of this field and invite further engagement.

The present Handbook springs from this debate. It brings together thirty ethnographically based studies of diverse urban experiences across the world to offer a contested view of state-of-the-art research in this area of study and stimulate a more empirically grounded reconceptualization of urban theories. Collectively, the specially written chapters collated here identify ethnography as a powerful tool to understand life in our rapidly changing, complex cities. They also robustly stress the point (Pardo and Prato 2012, 3) that while there is no need to fetishize fieldwork—certainly not as an end—its unique value cannot be overstated. A strong field of actively engaged researchers have produced up-to-date readable contributions that avoid abstract generalities while engaging with the analytical complexity of ethnographic evidence. Taken together, the chapters that follow prove the great value of knowledge produced by long-term fieldwork to mainstream academic debates and to society more broadly.

The discussions benefit from the contributors’ active participation in meetings and intense correspondence.⁵ Most are familiar with each other’s work and many have met and thoroughly debated the central issues in this Handbook. In terms of formal disciplinary belonging, they would be called anthropologists or sociologists. Pointless academic labelling and jostling aside, in real, hands-on scientific terms, they are committed ethnographers who recognize the methodological significance of ethnographically based analysis to theoretical development. This anthropology–sociology pattern is mirrored in a growing number of high-quality publications,⁶ workshops and conferences,⁷ suggesting that a shared commitment to ethnographic soundness promotes fruitful contaminations.

Combined with specific research objectives, the application of ethnographic methodology to the urban field leads to a great variety of approaches and to new paradigmatic challenges. As the contributions offered in this volume suggest, ethnographers can engage productively with these challenges. Field research is, after all, an ‘art of the possible’, and in cities there are many possibilities. There is indeed absolutely no need for the complexity of urban life to translate into academic complication or disciplinary insecurity. Like cultures, scientific disciplines are not static. They are dynamic entities, continuously changing and developing. They modify their identity, though they always do have an identity. Thus, new collaborations arise. Cooperation and exchange of knowledge is of critical importance in gaining an informed, adequately articulated understanding of the complexity of the world in which we live.

Of course, the significance of ethnography to the development of new theoretical approaches is not a new discovery. A huge amount of high-calibre work produced by classic anthropologists has amply demonstrated the value of the ethnographically based comparative study of human beings in society to the development of theoretical frameworks that powerfully show up sterile arguments on the allegedly atheoretical bias of ethnography, as opposed to theoretically oriented anthropology, or indeed sociology. Bluntly, it is precisely ethnographic knowledge that gives scientific grounding to socio-anthropological theorization.

We all recognize the importance of the ‘armchair’ phase of our investigation; the stage in our research project when we study the relevant literature, archival, statistical, historical and other documentary sources (these days including, of course, online sources) and engage theoretically with the relevant debates on the research topic. It is also obvious that we need to take into account data that traditionally are ‘allocated’ to a variety of social sciences and to the humanities. From experience, most of us subscribe to the application of participant observation as the basic method of empirical enquiry, in conjunction with the collection of case material on significant people, circumstances and events. This apparently obvious methodological stance cannot always, however, be taken for granted in urban research. Here we will summarize the main aspects of this complicated story, referring the interested reader to the literature that we mentioned in our introductory paragraph.

A Bumpy Story

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the almost autonomous, ‘resilient’ and self-sufficient city has resurfaced as a key administrative, economic and political entity in the dynamics of regional, national and world politics. The centrality of the city has then continued to gain importance. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, substantial funding has supported sustainable urban development and the promotion of so-called ‘smart cities’. Half of humanity is now living in urban settings and that proportion is expected to grow to two-thirds in the next fifty years or so. Society—Western and non-Western—is fast becoming urban and even mega-urban. Large cities and a growing number of smaller towns are set on a path of demographic and spatial expansion, also due to intakes of native and foreign migrants.

It should go without saying that urban and urbanism do not necessarily equate to urbanization, particularly if intended in terms of the size of the built-up environment and population density. What constitutes a city and what is meant by urban are differently understood in different parts of the world, and by different scholars. In this volume, Prato expands on her previous work (2015) to address the problematic of incommensurability, pointing out that this key issue in the philosophy of science is central both to urban anthropology and to cross-disciplinary debate among the social sciences. Stimulated by Max Weber’s insights (1958), she argues for a view of the city that encompasses the meaning of urbs , polis and civitas ; that is, respectively, built-up areas, the social association of citizens and the political community. In this line, we maintain that our analysis cannot be reduced merely to a question of numbers. It would be misleading to elevate to centrality the categories of size and demographics. Eschewing such a temptation, we should endeavour to grasp the political, economic and sociocultural complexity of urban life.

While the definition of city is varied and culturally and politically specific, urban settings are widely identified as hubs of cultural and ethnic interaction as well as challenging settings for future sustainable development. Worldwide, enlightened decision-making bodies have embraced the view that the future of humankind is urban and that the world’s most pressing challenges—from environmental to political, from the draining of sustainable resources to the management of security—will continue to arise and to be addressed in cities.

Given anthropologists’ prominent role in the ongoing debate on urban ethnography, it may be useful to summarize key aspects in the development of anthropological research in the city—‘urban anthropology’ for short—and its comparative relevance. For reasons that we have explained at length elsewhere (Pardo and Prato 2012; Prato and Pardo 2013) and will summarize here, it is only relatively recently that urban anthropology has achieved legitimate status within sociocultural anthropology. The obvious question to ask is why it has taken so long for anthropologists to come to grips with studying, describing and conceptualizing urban social formations in Western society.

Since the first half of the twentieth century, geopolitical changes stimulated some anthropologists to address processes of urbanization in developing countries, especially in Africa and Latin America. Such research did not, however, significantly contribute to the development of urban anthropology. Notwithstanding promising early work, such as that of Dumont (1951), Redfield and Singer (1954) and Firth (1956), and US cultural anthropologists’ work on community problems to which we refer briefly below, most anthropological research stayed away from the Western urban setting as a field of research in its own right; the mainstream focus was on tribal societies, village communities or processes of modernization in colonial and post-colonial contexts. One reason for such a choice drew on rigid disciplinary boundaries rooted in late nineteenth-century disciplinary divisions, whereby cities, especially in Western industrial societies, were the designated realm of sociological enquiry. Accordingly, urban research in Western industrial societies was not seen as ‘proper anthropology’ and until the mid-1980s was left out of the mainstream disciplinary agenda. As we have explained elsewhere (Prato and Pardo 2013; also Chap. 3 in this volume), this was particularly the case in British anthropology.

Only in the late 1960s did the anthropological establishment, especially in the USA, cautiously begin to acknowledge the relevance of urban research and focus on ‘problem-centred’ studies: poverty, minorities—including ethnic minorities—and urban adaptation (see, for example, Hannerz 1969). Interestingly, this key development was both stimulated and influenced by the work of the qualitative sociologists of what has become known as the Chicago School. Key to that new development was Louis Wirth’s Urbanism as a Way of Life (1938), which was later criticized for focusing on a kind of urbanism that was culturally and historically specific to the North American city and to the capitalist economy of his time (see Fox 1977, 58–9; Hannerz 1980, 68 and 74). Perhaps more importantly, the work of Carolyn Ware (1935) and William Foote Whyte’s masterpiece, Street Corner Society (1943), exemplify a key methodological approach whose influence continues today. The 1970s saw the publication of several books and articles debating the conceptual and theoretical definition of ‘urban’ and the extent to which ‘urban’ anthropology differed from ‘traditional’ anthropology. Some endeavoured to define the city as a specific ‘social institution’ with its dynamics and social, economic and political relations, thus maintaining that urban anthropology is anthropology of the city. For others, urban anthropology was ‘simply’ anthropological research carried out in urban areas.⁸ We do not make such a sharp opposition between the two approaches. We simply aim at highlighting the danger of abstract theorization that an ‘anthropology of the city’ has too often produced.

Again, we note, abstract theorization has tended to develop ‘generalizing’ models of cities and, worryingly, perhaps consequently, o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Urban Ethnography Matters—Analytical Strength, Theoretical Value and Significance to Society
• 1. Paradigmatic Reflections
• 2. Everyday Practices and Challenges
• 3. Coping with Economic and Political Agendas
• 4. Urban Planning and Local Instances
• 5. Change and Grassroots Dynamics
• 6. Transnational Urbanities
• 7. Urbanity Beyond the City
• Backmatter