ancient cities

842 Urban Anthropology
sweeping psychological portrait of the urban
dweller and urban social relations. Overstimulation,
coupled with an active intellect, produced certain
traits in the individual: a necessary indifference,
even aversion, to others (which Simmel termed the
blasé attitude) that serves a self-protective purpose,
or reserve. Antipathy, distrust, rationalization, and
calculation represented social and psychological
traits mediating the spatially dense, touch-and-go
relationships of everyday urban life.
These ideas became influential at the University
of Chicago’s Department of Sociology, which
emerged as a major center for urban theory and
research in the 1920s and 1930s. Robert E. Park,
who had studied philosophy under Simmel in
Berlin, and Louis Wirth became central figures of
the so-called Chicago School. For Park, the city
was quintessentially the locus of civilization, a
melting pot in which tribal and ethnic affiliations
would fade and human potential be realized.
Echoing Durkheim, Park asserted the city as the
place par excellence where individuals could pursue
their place in the division of labor yet remain
subordinated to the collective consciousness of
society. Within the city, Park discerned, was a constant
oscillation between the breakdown of traditional
moral constraints and new modes of social
control. Wirth, in his influential essay “Urbanism
as a Way of Life” (1938), proposed that the city
could be defined by three variables: size, density,
and heterogeneity. From this formulation, and following
Simmel, he deduced that urban social relations
are characterized by their impersonal,
instrumental, and segmental nature.
Chicago-brand urbanism understood the city as
a special kind of environment that exerts influence
over society and individuals. Moreover, its foundational
principles rested on ideas of primitive and
peasant life as, by contrast, static and undifferentiated.
Anthropologist Robert Redfield, a pupil (and
son-in-law) of Park, formalized this duality between
rural and urban societies based on extensive fieldwork
in the Mexican village of Tepoztlán, in different
settlement types on the Yucatán Peninsula,
and in early Mexican immigrant communities in
Chicago. Redfield’s folk–urban continuum model
(1930) posited rural and urban society at opposite
poles of a spectrum. At the rural extreme, social
life is characterized by tradition, harmony, homogeneity,
and isolation. These traits become eroded
by increasing urbanization. In Redfield’s scheme,
rural cultures become fragmented and disorganized
as they enter into urban domains. Critics
maintained that Chicago scholars had advanced a
thoroughly anti-urban theory of urbanism.
Anthropologists in Cities
Cultural anthropology thus developed primarily in
context of small-scale, nonindustrialized societies.
But over the course of a twentieth century that
witnessed mass urbanization worldwide, more
anthropologists’ attention became drawn to cities.
In many cases this shift was a direct result of ethnographers
following their informants from rural
to urban areas. In the 1960s and 1970s in particular,
much urban anthropological research focused
on the migration experience, ethnic enclaves, and
peri-urban informal settlements. The arrival of
anthropologists in cities presented challenges to
the research tradition, however. Having developed
a methodological tool kit centered on simple societies,
anthropologists confronted questions of how
urbanization affected their traditional objects of
interest.
Despite its formalism and generalizing claims,
the Chicago urbanist tradition also encouraged
and supported a vast body of empirical research.
Moreover, the conceptual framework of the
Chicago School prefigured how and what anthropologists
would study in cities, but many scholars
tested those assumptions and generated critiques.
W. Lloyd Warner brought the traditional anthropological
methods he crafted in dissertation work
on Australian Aborigine society to the context of
the urban America. His five-volume work, Yankee
City (1963), stands as perhaps the most ambitious
and exhaustive attempt to investigate American
urban life. He and his research team conducted
interviews and surveys in the small industrial
town of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in a nearly
decade-long endeavor to document race relations,
class distinction, religion, and social mobility.
Warner’s previous field experience with tribal villages
appeared a direct analog for urban communities,
but this assumption meant inadequate
treatment of the broader context of U.S. politics
and history.
The notion of “traditional” cultures’ adaptation
to urbanization, the hallmark principle of Redfield’s