ancient cities

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 mideighteenth-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 individualization
occurring in Western society. Research
is based on participant-observation: up-close, longterm
fieldwork experiences and involvement in
locals’ daily life. Anthropologists often supplement
field notes from these experiences with other
Urban Anthropology
841
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.
Urban anthropology also draws upon other
sources from outside its discipline. The earliest
urban ethnographies were produced not by anthropologists
but by social reformers and revolutionaries
outraged by the miserable plight of the working
class in urban industrial centers. Friedrich Engels’s
(1845) account of Victorian-era Manchester and
other rapidly industrializing English cities turns on
riveting descriptions of dismal conditions of disease,
hunger, overcrowding, and exploitation to
construct a scathing critique of class power and
spatial form under the capitalist system. Charles
Booth produced extensive maps of wealth distribution
in turn-of-the-century London (1969) in an
attempt to influence policy toward working-class
poverty alleviation and avert socialist revolution in
Britain. W. E. B. Du Bois, the first African American
to earn a PhD from Harvard University, combined
Booth’s method of statistical analysis and extensive
interviews with historical perspective in his
study of race relations in Philadelphia (1899).
Jacob Riis’s pioneering photojournalist studies of
squalid slum conditions (1890) helped the introduction
of tenement reform in New York. And as
head resident of Hull House, Jane Addams (1910)
wrote of the impact of social services for poverty
alleviation among ethnic immigrants in Chicago.
Such works prefigured the political and moral
implications, if not imperatives, of research among
vulnerable urban populations.
The Chicago School and the
Human Ecological Perspective
Many early-twentieth-century conceptualizations
of the city sought to define it as a distinct ecological
domain. Theory and empirical research conducted
in this vein thus concerned itself with how
humans adapted to the urban environment, echoing
Darwinist and Durkheimian ideas about
populations and increasing specialization. Georg
Simmel’s classic essay, “The Metropolis and
Mental Life” (1903), took the experience of sensory
bombardment, the money economy, and
coordinated time schedules as the basis for a