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COPYRIGHT 2006 The Institute Inc.
For nearly four decades, prominent figures in urban anthropology have argued that the aspiration of this subdiscipline should be to create an anthropology of the city, rather than one merely in the city (Fox 1972, 1977; Gulick 1989; Jackson 1985; Low 1999). This of course was and is a worthy goal, given the analytical dangers that transplanting the "traditional" object of anthropological study into the city posed: studies of city neighborhoods and urban subcultures that risked replicating the theoretical and epistemological distortions inherent in "the billiard-ball theory of culture," the characteristics of which Eric Wolf (1982: 6) elucidated long ago. For if the idea of cultures as bounded, timeless, and internally cohesive wholes was erroneous in the case of "Dene, Baluba, or Malay fisherman" (Wolf 1982: 18), surely it was so in the case of the city and city-dwellers given the mobility, complexity, and diversity that scholars of the city as far back as Engels and Simmel have noted. Constructing an anthropology of the city has represented an important effort to take the specificity of city life into account.
Fortunately this has been a successful effort. In the 21st century there are in fact many anthropologies of the city to build upon, a rich tradition of cultural and urbanistic insights regarding how people live in cities. Whether dealing with the specificity of kinship networks in inner-city neighborhoods, the ideological and cultural aspects of city planning, changing patterns of ethnicity in cities, or particular urban labor market niches, urban anthropologists have made the specificity of city life integral to their analysis of topics both long-addressed and novel in anthropology. The question is where we might go from here: how can we engage and expand upon this tradition through anthropological analysis of urban culture, space and politics?
The four articles included in this special issue of URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY represent one answer to this question: to focus anthropological analysis on not just city life, but on the broader process of urbanization, and to do so in a way that draws on anthropology's great strengths: ethnographic analysis, a careful attention to detail and the specificity of context, a willingness to take the words of our informants seriously, an openness to the unexpected and the emergent, and finally, familiarity with the vagaries of identity, ideology, mythology, the irrational, and the implicit, in short, the cultural. These articles have absorbed not just the theoretical lessons of scholars of the city but also the lessons of those who have argued that what needs to be understood is the processes through which particular historical geographies (economic, political, cultural, infrastructural, imaginative, mythical) are produced and reproduced (for a foundational explication of this point of view, see the essays in Harvey 1989). Doing so requires careful attention to scale, a willingness to cast our analytical lens beyond the boundaries of the city itself, and an understanding that the city is embedded in and constituted by a broader set of processes and social relations, a point Anthony Leeds (1994) made years ago, but is nevertheless worthy of constant reiteration.
While "the urban" taken as synonymous with "the city" has been one scale at which these processes have been studied, geographers in particular have demonstrated that both this scale and the social, economic, cultural, and political functions mapped onto it cannot be accepted without question (Brenner...
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