ancient cities

folk–urban continuum, came under scrutiny from
different locales. A broad interest in migrants,
slum dwellers, and other “peasants in cities” drew
upon the hypothesis that such groups faced the
disintegration of traditional familial, religious, and
ethnic ties. William Foote Whyte lived for an
extended period with a family in “Cornerville,” a
poor Italian neighborhood in Boston. His Street
Corner Society (1943) is not only an up-close portrait
of the everyday struggles of immigrants in a
U.S. city but also a chronicle of the ethical confrontations
and emotional investments of the fieldwork
experience. Years later, Herbert Gans treaded
much the same urban ground as Whyte in his ethnography
of Italian Americans in Boston’s West
End, The Urban Villagers (1962). The circumstances
of the neighborhood, in the midst of demolition
to make way for high-rise apartments,
impelled Gans to expand his scope from an ethnic
group’s cultural adaptation to urban life to critical
reflection on market-led urban renewal. This work
revealed one of the principal shortcomings of community
studies: that treating neighborhoods as
isolated worlds tends to miss how power operates
across city areas.
A direct critique of the continuum model came
from a 1943 restudy of Tepoztlán by Oscar Lewis.
Redfield’s depiction of village life as harmonious
and homogeneous collided with Lewis’s evidence of
violence, discord, cruelty, disease, suffering, and
poverty. The latter suggested that urbanization was
not a uniform process but assumes different forms
and meanings according to historical, economic,
and cultural conditions. He criticized Redfield for
explaining social behavior as a result of culture,
instead of the inverse.
Lewis’s subsequent research in Mexico and
Puerto Rico garnered both public policy attention
and vigorous rebukes from fellow anthropologists,
ironically along the same lines as his own critique
of Redfield. His notion of a “culture of poverty”
sought to describe poverty not as lack of material
resources but as sustained by a set of values largely
shaping social life. He identified behavioral traits
among slum dwellers—such as disorganization,
fatalism, helplessness, dependency, promiscuity,
gregariousness, sense of inferiority, and lack of
participation in social institutions—and attributed
these to a self-sustaining cycle of poverty. Lewis
believed that a robust welfare system or socialist
Urban Anthropology
843
revolution would eliminate the culture of poverty,
and his theory undergirded the 1960s federal War
on Poverty program. Nevertheless, critics pointed
out that the theory essentially blames the victim
while ignoring the political and economic conditions
contributing to poverty. They maintained
that the culture of poverty further treats the poor
as a distinct category of people and slums as a
world unto themselves, separated from the rest of
the urban system.
Another focal point of new research was at the
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in the Copperbelt
region of Northern Rhodesia, where a generation of
social anthropologists from Manchester University
received training in the ethnographic method.
Many became interested in the question of detribalization
of native Africans in colonial cities. They
found that migration and adaptation was not a
linear process and that tribal affiliations, far from
disappearing in cities, became articulated in new
ways, such as in dance, joking relations, and other
cultural forms. Ethnicity, they argued, was not a
preurban or anti-urban sentiment, but one constitutive
of the city. Paradoxically, modernity and
tradition coevolved in African cities. They further
developed sophisticated methodologies centered
on situational analysis and shifted focus from
localized communities to more encompassing
urban regional systems.
Multisited Ethnographic Research
The changing global political and economic
landscape from the 1970s onward corresponded
with new perspectives in urban anthropology
emphasizing political economic perspectives and
more mobile cultural forms. Anthony Leeds
issued a critique and reorientation of the subfield
by directing attention to the role of state power
in the urban process. This intervention compelled
researchers to look beyond their immediate
localities at systems of, for example, taxation,
land tenure, labor markets, food production,
commodity exchange, education, credit, information,
and military force. Many anthropologists
became receptive to Marxian analyses of
how post-Fordist forms of capital accumulation
were reshaping understandings of time and space
while exacerbating class inequalities. More
bottom-up approaches suggested the continuous