Block 1

BANE-147
URBAN
ANTHROPOLOGY
School of Social Sciences

Indira Gandhi National Open University 1
EXPERT COMMITTEE
Prof. S.M. Patnaik Dr. Mitoo Das
Department of Anthropology Discipline of Anthropology
University of Delhi School of Social Sciences
IGNOU
Dr. Sunita Reddy
Associate Professor Dr. Palla Venkatramana
Centre of Social Medicine, Community Health Discipline of Anthropology
School of Social Sciences School of Social Sciences
Jawaharlal Nehru University IGNOU
Prof. Rashmi Sinha Dr. K. Anil Kumar

Discipline of Anthropology Discipline of Anthropology
School of Social Sciences School of Social Sciences
IGNOU IGNOU
Dr. Rukshana Zaman

Discipline of Anthropology
School of Social Sciences
IGNOU
COURSE COORDINATOR
Dr. Mitoo Das,
Discipline of Anthropology,
School of Social Sciences,
IGNOU
EDITOR ENGLISH (Content, FORMATING & LANGUAGE)

Dr. Mitoo Das,
Discipline of Anthropology,
School of Social Sciences,
IGNOU
COURSE PREPARATION TEAM

BLOCK TITLES UNIT WRITER
Block 1 Fundamentals of Urban Anthropology
Unit 1 Foundation of Urban Anthropology Dr. Chakraverti Mahajan,
Assistant Professor, Department of
Anthropology, University of Delhi
Unit 2 Theoretical Perspectives Dr. Chakraverti Mahajan,
Unit 3 Folk-Urban Continuum Dr. Chakraverti Mahajan,
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Block 2 Urban Anthropology: Structure and Processes
Unit 4 Urban Processes Ms. Aayushi Malhotra,
Research Scholar, Department of
Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS
Pilani, Rajasthan
Unit 5 Diversity and Differences in Urban Dr. Gurinder Kaur,
Spaces Assistant Professor, Centre for Research
in Rural & Industrial Development
(CRRID), Chandigarh
Unit 6 Movement from Rural to Urban Mr. Krishna Kant Yadav,
Research Scholar, Deparmtent of
Anthropology, University of Delhi, Delhi
Block 3 Urban Social Structure
Unit 7 Family, Marriage and Kinship Dr. Prashant Khattri,
Anthropology, University of Allahabad,
Prayagraj
Unit 8 Caste and Class Dr. Prashant Khattri,
Prayagraj
Unit 9 Religion, Faith and Tolerance Dr. Prashant Khattri,
Prayagraj
Unit 10 Multi-ethnicity and Multiculturalism Dr. Kalindi Sharma,
Assistant Professor (Guest), Amity
University, Noida
Block 4 Global Concerns in Urban Growth
Unit 11 Contemporary Urban Concerns Dr. Indrani Mukherjee,
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of
Anthropology, University of Delhi, Delhi
Unit 12 World Cities and the Production of Space Dr. Kalindi Sharma,
Assistant Professor (Guest), Amity
University, Noida
Unit 13 Urban Ethnography Ms. Aayushi Malhotra,
Research Scholar, Department of
Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS
Pilani, Rajasthan
Practical Manual Dr. Mitoo Das, Faculty,

Discipline of Anthropology, School of
Social Sciences, IGNOU
3
Cover Design
Dr. Mitoo Das
PRODUCTION TEAM
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Assistant Registrar, Section Officer,
MPDD, IGNOU, New Delhi MPDD, IGNOU, New Delhi
February, 2022
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4
COURSE INTRODUCTION
Cities are an extension of the rural. Anthropology conventionally has always
dealt with simpler societies, however with time it extended its lenses to more
inclusive areas considering the fact that its main agenda has always been to
understand humans better. Hence the study of cities or the urban space is
equally a critical and crucial subject of study for anthropologists. Keeping this
in mind the bachelor’s programme offers this course on Urban Anthropology
which provides the learner with the nitty gritties of what the urban space entails.
The first part of the course deals classically with the historical and theoretical
perspectives with an explanation of how the rural and the urban are linked and
how it plays as a continuum. The second part of the course covers fundamentals
of how urban structures are created and managed, the diversities that enter due
to the apparent movement from the rural to the urban which leads to the creation
of the urban leading to processes like acculturation, adaptation, marginalisation
etc. The third part of the course discusses the elementary social structures of
society like family, marriage, kinship, caste, class, religion, ethnicities etc., and
how they survive, influence and shape each other and build newer structures
due to the connectedness that ensues. The fourth and last part of the course
touches upon the contemporary concerns that are evident in a global urban world
and the methodologies by which urban ethnography can be visited ethically to
investigate these concerns.
Course Outcomes
After completing the course, a learner is expected to:
 Define the basics of urban anthropology;
 Describe the subject’s structure and processes;
 Examine the various evolving social structures; and
 Evaluate the global issues that crop up in urban development.
Course Presentation
The course is divided into four blocks and a practical manual. Each block carries
a theme which is reflected in the form of units. There are a total of 13 units in
this course. Below we provide you with a brief explanation of what each unit
covers in the thematic blocks.
Block 1 Fundamentals of Urban Anthropology
The first block contains three units and discusses the historical and theoretical
development of urban anthropology. The first unit, Foundation of Urban
Anthropology (Unit 1) takes into consideration in its description the meaning,
aim, scope and expanding horizons of urban anthropology. It explains the
influence of other social sciences on urban anthropology and talks about
concepts such as the city, urban, urbanism, urbanisation, pre-industrial and
post-industrial etc., which are vital to urban anthropology. The second unit,
Theoretical Perspectives (Unit 2) discusses the contributions of the Chicago and
the Manchester schools of thought. It highlights the concept of scale in urban
anthropology along with important methods like network analysis and extended 5
case study. This unit finally looks into the anthropological approaches in urban
anthropology. The third unit, Folk-Urban Continuum (Unit 3), describes the
concept of Folk-Urban Continuum as proposed by Robert Redfield and takes it
further with a discussion on how McKim Marriot employed and further refined
it in the Indian context. In this unit concepts like semi-urban, peri-urban, towns
and two-tier cities are delved into.
Block 2 Urban Anthropology: Structure and Processes
The second block contains three units which deal with the structure and processes
of urban spaces. The first unit (Unit 4) is called Urban Processes and describes
the emergence and expansion of urban areas as well as the urban way of life. It
discusses the organisation of urban areas in terms of urban settlement patterns
and examines the different challenges and problems of urban life. The second
unit (Unit 5) is named Diversity and Differences in Urban Spaces. It begins
with a discussion on what diversity and differences one can see in a city. The
unit explains this also in the context of neighborhood and ethnicity and how
urban governance runs. Finally it narrows down to a discussion on the creation
and presentation of Indian cities. The third and the last unit of the block (Unit
6) is called Movement from Rural to Urban. This unit defines the concept of
migration and describes anthropological concepts linked to migration. The unit
explores the role of kinship and network in migration as a process and ends with
an examination of the inter-relationship between issues of citizenship, legality,
identity and migration.
Block 3 Urban Social Structure
This is the third block in the course and has four associated units. The first unit
(Unit 7) is called Family, Marriage and Kinship and deals with how these
concepts are studied within the domain of urban anthropology. The unit describes
the changing and continuing patterns of kinship, family and marriage in urban
areas. The factors affecting the changes and their continuity are also delved into
which are examined from the perspective of urban social structure in the Indian
context. The second unit (Unit 8) is named Caste and Class. This unit takes
into consideration various aspects of caste as visible in cities, from the way it
operates to being a political force. The unit also views how class is understood
in urban context and the dynamics of both class and caste in urban spaces are
covered here. The third unit (Unit 9) is Religion, Faith and Tolerance. From
explaining its history and growth in urban spaces to discussing conflict, hate and
fear resulting from religious fanaticism, each aspect is covered in detail. The
last unit (Unit 10) in the block is called Multi-Ethnicity and Multiculturalism.
Along with defining the notions of multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism in urban
spaces this unit describes the characteristics of diversity and pluralism in urban
spaces. The unit attempts to demonstrate an understanding of a cosmopolitan
identity in a multi-ethnic and multicultural space and explains the difference
between individual identity and group identity and also evaluates the integration
of these identities within a multi-ethnic and multicultural space.
Block 4 Global Concerns in Urban Growth
This is the last block of this course. This block contains three units. The first
one (Unit 11) is called Contemporary Urban Concerns. As the name suggests,
6 this unit discusses the need for anthropological focus in the urban areas. The
unit describes the various topics on which anthropological research has been
conducted and examines critiques within urban anthropology which helped the
sub-discipline to reflect and grow. It finally evaluates the continuity in urban
anthropology with old concerns of research and new topics of investigation.
The second unit (Unit 12) is World Cities and the Production of Space.
This unit defines the concept of cities, world cities and urban spaces from
an anthropological vantage point and looks into the characteristics and types
of world spaces. It also discusses the impact of globalisation on urban and
rural spaces and views the spatial understanding of capitalist production and
consumption in urban spaces. The last and final unit (Unit 13) of this course is
Urban Ethnography. This vital unit defines the basics of urban anthropological
research and discusses research methodology and set of methods used for
data collection in urban anthropology and also the ethical concerns regarding
research studies based in the urban setups.
Practical Manual: This practical manual will assist the learner to build a research
design on any urban concern and make her/him ready with the methods and
techniques discussed in the manual to apply them in actual research scenarios.
The learner will be able to check these techniques and practice them and create
small projects now and later utilise these same methods and techniques in future
research work. So the practical manual will help the learner to identify methods
and techniques to conduct research, familiarise oneself with the exact way of
doing research and learn how to analyse research results to create knowledge.
With this brief about the course, you are now ready to go through each lesson in
a comprehensive manner. As you will be doing the major part of the studying on
your own, the lessons have been created in such a way to assist you understand
the course in an inclusive manner. It is adviced that you go through the course
sequentially so as to not lose the thread of clarity. As you would find a teacher in
a classroom teaching a course in a thematic and chronological manner, similarly
you too need to study your course from Unit 1 and end it with the last unit, in
this case, Unit 13 followed by the Practical Manual. Units are further divided
into sections and sub sections for your easy reading and better understanding.
Each unit comes with learning outcomes which outline what is expected from
you after the unit is read. Units also contain Check your Progress throughout so
as to help you test yourself if you have learnt what you have read. This is a good
way to go about the lesson and will help you prepare well for your Term End
Examination later as you will learn to frame your answers in your own words
rather than just copying and pasting from the sections. Each unit also contains a
Summary towards the end which gives you a brief about what the lesson entailed.
The units end with References which are cited works mentioned through the
lesson and Answers to Check Your Progress, which assists you to know where
the answers to your questions are placed. It is reiterated that though the sections
where the answers can be sought are given, you should attempt to frame the
answers in your own words which will bring clarity in your understanding of
the units. In your internal Assignments, you will be given questions/activities
where you can test your learning of your methods and techniques.
Good luck with your reading and it is hoped that this course will provide as a
basic preliminary training in your journey towards learning and understanding
urban anthropology comprehensively.
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8
COURSE CONTENTS

Pages
BLOCK 1 FUNDAMENTALS OF URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
Unit 1 Foundation of Urban Anthropology 13
Unit 2 Theoretical Perspectives 30
Unit 3 Folk-Urban Continuum 43
BLOCK 2 URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY: STRUCTURE AND PROCESSES
Unit 4 Urban Processes 57
Unit 5 Diversity and Differences in Urban Spaces 71
Unit 6 Movement from Rural to Urban 87
BLOCK 3 URBAN SOCIAL STRUCTURE
Unit 7 Family, Marriage and Kinship 101
Unit 8 Caste and Class 117
Unit 9 Religion, Faith and Tolerance 130
Unit 10 Multi-ethnicity and Multiculturalism 145
BLOCK 4 GLOBAL CONCERNS IN URBAN GROWTH
Unit 11 Contemporary Urban Concerns 163
Unit 12 World Cities and the Production of Space 174
Unit 13 Urban Ethnography 190
PRACTICAL MANUAL 203
9
10
Block 1
FUNDAMENTALS OF URBAN
ANTHROPOLOGY
11
Unit 1
Foundation of Urban Anthropology
Unit 2
Theoretical Perspectives
Unit 3
Folk-Urban Continuum
12
UNIT 1 FOUNDATION OF URBAN
ANTHROPOLOGY
Contents
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Historical Perspective: Meaning, Aim, Scope and Expanding
Horizons of Urban Anthropology
1.1.1 Historical Antecedents I: Complex Societies and the Chicago School
1.1.2 Historical Antecedents II: Manchester School
1.1.3 Urban Anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s
1.1.4 The Spatial Turn
1.1.5 Expanding Horizons
1.2 Influence of other Social Sciences on Urban Anthropology

1.3 Basic Concepts of Urban Anthropology
1.4 Cities: From Preindustrial to Industrial
1.5 Summary
1.6 References
1.7 Answers to Check Your Progress
LEARNING OUTCOMES
After reading this unit, the student will learn to:
 Describe the meaning, aim, scope and expanding horizons of urban
anthropology;
 Explain influence of other social sciences on urban anthropology;
 Identify concepts such as city, urban, urbanism, urbanisation; and
 Classify typologies of the city such as pre-industrial and post-industrial.
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Urban anthropology is one of the most important and fast growing fields in
social and cultural anthropology. At present, cities are a critical area of study
for anthropologists globally. It is a well-known fact that more than half of the
world’s population now lives in cities. This demographic trend is expected to
grow at a much faster pace in the near future. As a consequence, complexities
of human life will intensify multifold. The purpose of urban anthropology is to
understand not only these complexities arising out of social, cultural, political
and economic shifts that occur in the cities but also how these changes in return
shape the city. This unit primarily discusses the origin, nature and development
Contributor: Dr. Chakraverti Mahajan, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of
Delhi
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Fundamentals of of urban anthropology as a major sub-discipline of anthropology. In the first
Urban Anthropology section of this unit, we discuss the historical factors that influenced the growth
of urban anthropology, its subject matter and its ever expanding horizons.
In the second section we sketch the influence of other disciplines on urban
anthropology. The third section gives an overview of the basic concepts such as
city, urban, urbanism and urbanisation. The unit ends with a discussion on the
analytical typologies of cities from pre-industrial to post-industrial.
1.1 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: MEANING,

AIM, SCOPE AND EXPANDING HORIZONS
OF URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
Urban anthropology today has grown into a vast field of inquiry. It uses
interdisciplinary approaches to study various themes of urban life. Urban
anthropology considers ‘the urban’ and the changing nature of urban social
life as the object of its study. In their remarkable book, Introducing Urban
Anthropology, Jaffe and de Koning define urban anthropology as a branch of
anthropology which ‘engages explicitly with the question of how social life
is structured in by and experienced within urban contexts’ (2016:3). Today,
urban anthropology describes the multifaceted social and cultural lives of city
dwellers as they negotiate with heterogeneous, unequal and constantly changing
urban space and place ‘in the context of global flows and connections’ (Jaffe
and de Koning: 1). These new multifaceted definitions brings to our attention
how urban life needs to be studied taking view of both local as well as global
realities.
You will be surprised to know that the label urban anthropology became
widespread only in the 1960s and 1970s, although anthropologists had started
studying the cities since 1930s. In your introductory anthropology classes you
must have learnt that until the middle of twentieth century, anthropology’s main
emphasis was to carry out research on ‘exotic’ tribes’, who were most often
colonial subjects. Predominantly this research was carried out by white men who
carried out their fieldwork in remote locations. Also while you were discussing
the relationship between sociology and social anthropology, you might have
learnt about how the former was the study of complex societies whereas the
latter studied simple societies. In fact, these two features of anthropology
delayed emergence of urban anthropology to study the cities. First, this delay
was due to socio-political reasons as the pioneers of anthropology worked as
representatives of Euro-American nation-states which were mostly colonising
forces (Eames and Goode, 1977). The second major factor which delayed such
recognition was over concern with maintaining the uniqueness of anthropology
and clear distinction between from sociology (Jaffe and de Koning, 2016).
In the beginning, when anthropologists started exploring the city in the early
part of twentieth century, their interests were limited to tribes moving to
city. Discussing the varied trajectories of anthropology and sociology, Vinay
Srivastava (2017, 211-12) notes:
…the anthropologists’ interest lay in the migration of tribespersons to towns
and cities in search of the survival strategies and the kind of adaptations they
make to the new locations. In other words, urban sociologists studied the
14 ‘urban man’, whereas their counterparts in anthropology looked at the ‘tribal
man in the city’. Urban studies were central to sociology, since it started as the Foundation of
systematic and scientific study of complex, modern, developed, and Western Urban Anthropology
societies. It was also the study of the ‘us’ – the sociologist studied his or her
own society. By comparison, anthropology, to begin with, was the study of
simple, ‘primitive’, pre-literate, and non-Western societies; it was the study
of the ’them’. Sociologists started with the study of cities because this was the
starting point of their discipline; anthropologists reached the towns and cities
travelling with the tribal people who migrated to these locations. As the tribes
were changing so was the subject that studied them.
Now that we know about the two factors that delayed anthropologists’ foray
into the study of the urban, let us learn about factors which were responsible for
the growth of urban anthropology. There were two main factors that led to the
rise of urban anthropology. First, was the growth of cities and the associated
demographic and social changes and the second one was the shifts within the
discipline of anthropology itself (Jaffe and de Koning, 2016). Let us discuss
each one by one. Richard Sennett (1969), well known urbanist argues that
although the study of cities is a recent phenomenon but ‘cities are one of the
oldest artifacts of civilised life’ (p.3). Sennett argued that the reason for this
is that up to the times of the Industrial Revolution, the city was taken by most
social thinkers to be the image of society itself, and not some special, unique
form of social life. This identification of society and city changed only during the
Industrial Revolution which happened almost three centuries back in Western
Europe. Cities changed in an unprecedented manner and became immensely
larger than anything known in human history. Unlike earlier cities, their growth
did not result through internal population change, but from without, as a result
of agricultural changes that either encouraged or, in fewer cases forced men
of the villages to move to towns. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to urban
areas of a size unheard before, shaped new ways of looking at human labour,
and threw people together in new forms of relationships (Fox, 1977).
With Industrialisation in Europe and other parts of the world, came a rapid
demand for large number of human resources in the expanding European cities
(including colonial cities). This gave rise to agglomeration of large populations
at one place ultimately resulting in urbanisation. European colonisation and
the decolonisation became other factors that influenced rural urban migration
and the process of urbanisation in many parts of the world in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. As a result, a massive demographic shift was seen in
all parts of the world due to large scale migration and urbanisation. The social,
cultural, political and economic changes that accompanied this demographic
shift drew attention of anthropologists as they started affecting the groups of
people they were studying. Whereas the growth of industrial cities in Europe and
North America in the nineteenth century was the key factor in the development
of sociology as a discipline, urban anthropology has developed along multiple
trajectories. While a number of important studies were based on fieldwork in
North American and European cities, urban anthropology also developed in the
colonised world, where researchers studied the process of urbanisation in relation
to forces of modernity, development and decolonisation. Urban anthropologists
also started taking keen interest on impacts of urbanisation in terms of social
problems in the developed world. In the late twentieth century, the processes
of urbanisation were being linked to globalisation and these massive economic, 15
social and cultural changes caught anthropologists’ attention as well.
Fundamentals of In addition to these broader demographic and societal changes, shifts within
Urban Anthropology the discipline of anthropology itself have become the second important factor
informing the rise of urban anthropology. We all know about questions about
the colonial links of anthropology conceivably stimulated by a demand for
information of the natives to govern them (Asad, 1973). However, with the
passage of time, anthropologists themselves began to critically reflect on their
disciplinary past. A wave to decolonise anthropology from colonial and imperial
power became mainstream in post war period (Gough, 1967). In the 1970s and
1980s a movement started in anthropology to decolonise the discipline from
its focus on ‘the exotic’ (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). Critical questions about
anthropology’s preoccupation with ‘exotic’ difference and its tendency to
privilege fieldwork in sites far away from the researcher’s home (Gupta and
Ferguson, 1997). They sought to expand the longstanding interest in people
living in traditional economies by giving more attention to social life in modern
urban economics. The tendency of doing fieldwork at isolated sites far from the
home was also critiqued. This resulted in the demand to ‘bring anthropology
home’.
In the above discussion, we have discussed two historical factors which
delayed the growth of urban anthropology and the other two which helped
in the acceleration of this sub-discipline. In many ways they shaped urban
anthropology as a field of inquiry. Sandwiched between the struggles of these
four factors, lie the history of urban anthropology. Let us learn very briefly
about the historical footprints of urban anthropology.
1.1.1 Historical Antecedents I: Complex Societies and the

Chicago School
The history of urban anthropology is rooted in the study of what has been
called as ‘rural urban transition’ of peasant cultures and their encounter with
urban social life. Before they took interest in urban studies, anthropologists
ventured into what is now known as study of complex societies (Eames and
Goode, 1977; Fox,1977; Hannerz, 1980). Robert Redfield, a Chicago based
anthropologist, took keen interest in the study of complex societies in the 1920s
and 1930s. Robert Redfield, in fact, developed the conceptual understanding of
the study of complex societies. Many studies of peasant society and the city,
carried out subsequently by other anthropologists, were extensions of issues
he raised. Robert Redfield’s most important contribution was to analytically
differentiate between folk (tribal) and peasant societies. Once he recognised that
peasant society was a distinctive type of social system and that peasant village
was not an autonomous unit, he began to develop concepts to deal with this
type of complex social system. Consequently, he conceptualised folk society
in contradiction to the city. Redfield’s formulation of Folk Urban continuum
explained the relation between folk, peasant and urban societies. (For more
see Unit 3) The concepts of Little Tradition and Great Tradition are one such
example which he devised to understand complex societies. Along with his
student, Milton Singer, he also wrote about the cultural role of cities, which
is an exercise to understand typologies of cities in the larger socio-economic
system.
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There are several other works which hint towards the anthropologist’s interests in Foundation of
cities before the formal recognition of urban anthropology. These works included Urban Anthropology
archaeological anthropologists working on the origin of city, anthropologists
work on pre-industrial cities, the early community studies in US and later other
parts of the world including India and area study work by anthropologists in
Latin America and Africa which were urban oriented (Eames and Goode, 1977)
However,the most influential place where seeds of the discipline were sown
was the Chicago school, the alma mater of Robert Redfield. The Sociology
Department at Chicago University was established by 1892 and Albion W.
Small was its founding Chair. From the 1910s to the 1930s, an influential group
of urban scholars researching the city developed what came to be known as the
Chicago School. (Hannerz, 1980: 19–58). An important body of urban research
emerged from the Sociology Department, earlier known as the Department of
Anthropology and Sociology (Jones and Rodgers, 2016). Robert Park laid the
foundation of the human ecology model that guided much early Chicago School
research. This model understood human behaviour in cities to be shaped by
the urban environment and its competitive character. Like these founders, the
next generation of Chicago sociologists, including Louis Wirth, Nels Anderson,
Florian Znaniecki and St. Clair Drake, emphasised the importance of empirical
data and especially fieldwork. They instructed their students to view the city as
their laboratory, urging them to leave their desks and libraries in order to study
urban people and places from up close. In addition to direct observation, they
experimented with various methods; exploring the use of cognitive mapping
and oral history as tools for urban research (for more see Unit 2).
1.1.2 Historical Antecedents II: Manchester School

The Second World War and decolonising movements in African and Asian
countries and the consequent political and economic changes presented an
upsurge in urban studies in anthropology. In the mid twentieth century, many
anthropologists conducted studies in urban areas of Europe, Africa and Latin
America that led to the foundation of urban anthropology as a sub-discipline of
anthropology in its literal sense. Emerging mining cities in African countries
became an important subject among the urban anthropologists working in Africa.
The Rhodes Livingstone Institute is known for studying life in mining towns
of Africa. The Copper Belt Studies, as these were popularly known, studied the
African Industrial Revolution and concept of modernity in these cities. Max
Gluckman along with his colleagues and students namely, Albert Epstein, Clyde
Mitchell and Hortense Powdermaker were closely associated with urban studies
in Africa. In 1940, Gluckman drafted a ‘Seven Year Research Plan’ aimed at
stimulating research in both rural and urban areas with particular reference to
the rural areas affected by the migration of the labour force to the new mining
towns (Prato and Pardo, 2013). Under Gluckman’s leadership, this research
addressed the effects of colonialism on tribal economies and their inclusion in
the market, focusing on the different economic structures and the kind of social
relations that were emerging in the new urban areas (ibid). Significantly, the
population of the Copper Belt mining towns was made up mainly of immigrants
from the surrounding rural villages, who were employed as cheap labour force.
As these urban immigrants had entered a new web of relationships that were
17
Fundamentals of believed to be typical of the ‘urban system’ (Gluckman, 1961), anthropological
Urban Anthropology research in these towns was to be regarded as the study of processes of social
transformation and of the situations in which such processes took place (Mitchell
1966). The works of Epstein on African politics (1958) and of Mitchell on urban
social relations (1957) exemplify this approach (for more see Unit 2).
1.1.3 Urban Anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s

We have already leant that though for a long time anthropological studies were
conducted in urban areas, but it was only in the 1960s when urban anthropology
began to be established as a separate sub discipline of anthropology. Eames
and Goode (1977) indicate three major themes in the 1960s and 1970s which
remained popular during this time:
1. Studies of peasant migrants in the city: As a result of a massive urban
migration throughout the world many people formerly studied by
anthropologists moved to cities and anthropologists also moved with them.
The resultant studies focused on the strategies employed by migrants to
adapt to city life.
2. Problem-centric studies: This was to understand the problems of urbanising
population in western and non-western cities. Anthropologists who followed
this viewpoint were engaged in understanding the problems of city and city
life such as urban poverty and rise of slums, inequality and violence.
3. The traditional analytical approach: The approach was more concerned
with concepts and theory than with policy. It was interested in urban
social structure and through ethnographic studies using city as a laboratory
discussed theoretical questions of the discipline.
During these decades, Oscar Lewis’s controversial ‘culture of poverty’ thesis
generated intense debates on the meaning of culture, the need for historical
contextualisation, and the structural factors that produce urban inequalities.
Anthropologists also debated the meanings of city and urban, which were
initially informed by Western biased knowledge. To avoid this ethnocentrism,
urban anthropologists used ethnographic methods, historical analysis, and cross-
cultural comparisons to explore the social mechanisms and cultural institutions
that differentiate cities from folk and peasant communities as well as Western
from non-Western cities. A more eclectic and regionally diversified urban
anthropology emerged during the 1970s, as field research was increasingly
carried out in Japan, India, South-East Asia and in various African and South and
North American countries. Southall’s edited volume, titled Urban Anthropology
(1973), offered an initial insight into the variety of research that was being done
at the time, bringing together methodological and ethnographic contributions
and a seventy-page bibliography on the topic (Prato and Pardo 2013). Unlike
earlier views, which depicted the city as the site of fragmentation, alienation, and
impersonal relationships, urban ethnography has been powerful in showing the
strong friendships, kinship relations, and ethnic solidarities that may structure
interactions in urban centres. The American Anthropological Association took
an interest in anthropological research in urban areas and in 1972 initiated the
publication of the journal Urban Anthropology.
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1.1.4 The Spatial Turn Foundation of
Urban Anthropology
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, anthropology saw large
expansion in its scope. Urban anthropology found itself competing with other
anthropologies such as applied, environmental, medical, educational, gender
that were developing alongside more traditional sub fields of anthropology
(Prato and Pardo 2013). Thus, urban anthropology in the 1980s was arguably
the narrowest and theoretically least influential of all these sub-disciplines
(Sanjek 1990). It took a spatial turn in the 1990s when it shifted its focus from
social organisational paradigm to political economic paradigm. Space and place
emerged as a new site of ethnographic studies in urban anthropology which is
widely known as spatial turn. By now, the production of urban space and social
construction of urban places became the central theme in urban anthropology.
This turn was widely influenced by the post-modernist thinkers like Michel
Foucault, Henry Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau. In urban anthropology,
Foucault’s conceptualisation of power as regimes of truth that shaped the world
around us and our understanding of it, has perhaps been the most influential
(Jaffe and De Koning, 2016). Similarly, Henry Lefebvre, a philosopher, in
his ‘Idea of Right of City’ (1991) argued that space is a social product and
that it often works to reproduce the interest of the powerful. According to
him, cities are crucial public spaces where different people mix and mingle
though much of the production of the city is done by and for elites (Jaffe and
De Koning, 2016). Through the spatial approach, many ethnographers tried to
see the relation between architecture and culture. Paul Rainbow analysed how
French colonialists in North Africa exploited architectural and urban planning
principles to reflect their cultural superiority. James Holsten examined the state
sponsored architecture and master planning of Brasilia as a new form of spatial
domination for state intervention. In brief, urban anthropology in the 1990s
flourished as a sub-discipline of anthropology. With the global changes and
free flow of people, ideas and economy, anthropologists increasingly began to
see consumption rather than production as the main characteristics of the late
modern city. Authors such as James Ferguson, Setha Low, Chua Beng Huat and
Arlene Davila began to study new urban lifestyles and leisure landscape as well
as the commodification of urban culture (Jaffe and De Koning, 2016).
1.1.5 Expanding Horizons

Since its inception, urban anthropology has come a long way. It was only during
the inter-war that anthropologists shifted their attention from tribal and rural
countries to the study of more complex social system. With increase in the rural
to urban migration in many parts of the world, it became more difficult to think
of rural communities as isolated, insulated and distinct entities. With the increase
in rural-urban interaction during 1950s and 1960s, cultural anthropologists
began to assess the impacts that cities were having on traditional rural societies.
From that point it was natural development to follow rural people into the cities
to see how distinct systems interacted.
By focusing on how factors such as size, density, and heterogeneity affect
customary ways of behaving, urban anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s
examined such important topics as descriptive accounts of ethnic neighbourhoods,
labour migration, urban kinship patterns, social network analysis, emerging
19
Fundamentals of systems of social stratification, squatter settlements, and informal economics.
Urban Anthropology Urban anthropology also focused on social problems such as homelessness,
race relations, poverty, social justice, unemployment, crime and public health.
Some recent studies have also described modern urban sub-cultures of truck
drivers, cocktail waitresses, street gangs, drug addicts, skid-row alcoholics, and
sex-workers.
With the spatial turn, the focus shifted to the question of rights and justice in
the city environments. Even though ideas such as space, mobility and planning
were shared with many other disciplines, urban anthropology has been able
to maintain its distinct significance because of its continuous evolving and
innovative methods and approaches. It has continuously added new dimensions
of urban life to its domain. Urban place making, mobilities, the politics of
public spaces, leisure and lifestyles and global networks are some examples
of the themes that have emerged as the new areas of exploration in urban
anthropology in contemporary times. With the increasing conflicts across the
world, study of violence and fear has also emerged as a new area of research in
it. Setha Low (2019) recently, argued for ‘an engaged urban anthropology that
draws upon a history of critical engagement with the city and a commitment to
social justice and transformation through the intersection of ethnography and
politically informed action’ (p.1).
Check Your Progress
1. What is urban anthropology? Discuss the factors which delayed the rise of
urban anthropology.
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2. Discuss the factors responsible for the growth of urban anthropology in
the twentieth century.
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3. Write a note on the history of urban anthropology.
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20
4. Discuss the role of Robert Redfield in the development of urban Foundation of
anthropology. Urban Anthropology
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5. What do you understand by spatial turn in urban anthropology?
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6. Discuss the expanding horizons of urban anthropology.
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1.2 INFLUENCE OF OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCES

ON URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
Urban anthropology is closely related to many other social sciences, such as
sociology, geography and history. However, it is classical sociology which has
influenced urban anthropology the most. ‘Early anthropological theorisations
on the specificity of urban life, institutions and social relations reflected the
classical sociological framework developed on the distinction between rural
and industrial society of the nineteenth century’ (Prato and Pardo, 2013, 81).
Writings of Ferdinand Tönnies and Emile Durkheim began to cover the effects
of urban factors on seemingly unrelated aspects of social life, although they
never theorised about the urban as such. While, German sociologist Ferdinand
Tönnies described the contrasting elements of urban and rural life from a cultural
perspective, Durkheim introduced the concept of anomie. In his remarkable
work on suicide, he argues that anomic suicide occurred among those who lived
in modern cities. Tönnies’s concept of Gemeinschaft (community) characterised
the small village and surrounding area where people united by close ties of
family and neighborhood shared traditional values and worked together for
the common good. In contrast to this “we-ness,” Gesellschaft (association or
society) denoted the “me-ness” of the city of a future-oriented heterogeneous
population, which led Tönnies to view the city negatively and as characterised
by disunity, widespread individualism, and self-centeredness, even hostility.
This typology of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft had a lasting influence on
other urban anthropologists.
21
Fundamentals of Émile Durkheim also had an enduring effect. His emphasis on contrasting
Urban Anthropology social bonds offered another perspective on urban and rural distinctiveness.
He suggested that urban social order rested on an organic solidarity in which
individual differences, greater freedom, and choice thrive in a complex division
of labour where the inhabitants are co-dependent. Rural life, on the other hand,
is organised around mechanical solidarity, with social bonds constructed on
likeness (common beliefs, customs, rituals, and symbols), where inhabitants
are relatively self-sufficient and not reliant on other groups to meet all of life’s
needs. These twofold typologies were central for much of the twentieth century
as most studies, based on a spatial emphasis on the central city, examined
different variables in comparison to non-urban areas.
Urban anthropologists appear to have been influenced majorly by the early
twentieth century sociologists’ view of the city. Richard Sennett (1969) called
them the classical urban sociologists and formulated a twofold division to make
sense of their work. The first school was the German one and its members
included Max Weber and George Simmel. They wrote in the first quarter of the
twentieth century. Max Weber’s, The City, appeared in 1905. For Weber the city
is a set of social structures that encourages social individuality and innovation,
and is thus the instrument of historical change. Unlike Durkheim, Weber did not
focus on how cities could lead to a sense of isolation in humans but rather under
what conditions cities could create positive influences on human lives. George
Simmel’s essay, The Metropolis and Mental Life appeared in 1903. Simmel,
like Weber, believed that cities could be described as an ‘ideal type’, but he
focused on the psychological elements in urban markets, families and law and
not structural ones. For Simmel, social interactions in the city get reduced as
compared to village and become instrumental in nature, therefore, lacking the
emotional and personal involvement of small communities. People are enslaved
to time, working under the clock. Everything in the city is quantifiable, value
of social life is reduced and this generates what Simmel terms as blasé attitude
– superficiality, grayness, indifference and alienation. For both Weber and
Simmel, ‘the city as a fragmenting, rather than unifying place; that is, a place of
greater freedom and opportunities for the individual but also a place of isolation,
conflict and bureaucratisation of all aspects of life’ (Prato and Pardo, 2013)
The second school grew up at Chicago, where most of the members remained
active until Second World War. The Chicago School of Urban Ecology as it
is widely known, had a number of urban sociologists who worked under the
leadership of Robert Park at the University of Chicago. Robert Park incidentally
had also studied with Georg Simmel in Germany. The human ecology model
understood human behaviour in cities to be shaped by the urban environment
and its competitive character. Like these founders, the next generation of
Chicago sociologists, including Louis Wirth, Nels Anderson, Florian Znaniecki
and St. Clair Drake, emphasised the importance of empirical data and especially
fieldwork. They instructed their students to view the city as their laboratory,
urging them to leave their desks and libraries in order to study urban people
and places from up close. In addition to direct observation, they experimented
with various methods, exploring the use of cognitive mapping and oral history
as tools for urban research (for more see unit 2). Apart from sociology, urban
anthropology in the 1990s and 2000s rejuvenated itself by drawing heavily from
22 spatial theories of geography and by focusing on built environment (Low, 2014).
Urban anthropology left behind its tag of studying small groups of culturally Foundation of
distinct people in city, linked macro and micro analyses of urban space of flows, Urban Anthropology
that is, ‘circuits of labour, capital, goods and services moving ever more rapidly
through space, time and the internet; and a space of places, that is, the physical
locations of social reproduction and the home’ (Low, 2014:15).
Let us now learn some of the basic concepts in urban anthropology.
Check Your Progress
7. Discuss cross-disciplinary influences on urban anthropology.
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8. Discuss the contributions of classical sociologists to urban anthropology.
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1.3 BASIC CONCEPTS OF URBAN

ANTHROPOLOGY
City
City means many things to many people. For some it may be infrastructure, tall
buildings, shopping malls, market areas, wide roads and airports. For others
it may be a hub of businesses, trade and commerce, education, employment
opportunities, administration and governance. Yet others may think of it as an
impersonal space where one is lonely amidst the crowd. The city may come
across as a place of social inequalities to many others. These diverse ideas make
city an important object of study and understanding. For urban anthropologists,
the city is the core concept of urban anthropology. To make sense of the city
conceptually, urban anthropologists and theorists have approached it from
multiple perspectives.
The functionalist perspective contrasted the cities with villages by focusing
on the political, economic, administrative, cultural and religious roles they
play. Cities, according to this perspective, showcase the convergence and
concentration of various activities. These activities impact the areas around cities
in multiple ways. The second set of definitions focused on physical form and
demographic characteristics based on dense populations and built environment
of cities. Louis Wirth (1938) included size, density and heterogeneity as the
main characteristics of a city. Constructivist paradigms, understand city to be
a social construct: a city is a city because it is not a village, if people believe
that, it is one. This attention to the social constructedness of cities also means 23
Fundamentals of studying who has the power to define a city. Recently city is also theorised as
Urban Anthropology an assemblage. From this perspective, cities are the intersection of multiple
dynamic and unstable networks and flows of people, animals, money, things,
ideas and technology, emphasising on the intermingling of the cities and cities as
urbanisation of nature from a political economy perspective. Urban sensorium
perspective concentrate on a range of embodied sensory experiences including
urban sounds, images, tastes, smells and movements.
Urban
The literal meaning of the word urban comes from a Latin word called urbs
meaning urbanus i.e., ‘city or town’, and has been in use for last four centuries.
A basic problem in the use of the word urban in anthropology is the lack of
clear cut and generally accepted definition (Eames and Goode, 1977). Vincent
Parrillo (2016) notes that varying criteria exist among the 195 countries in
defining ‘urban’. These criterion include administrative function (national or
regional capital), economic characteristics (most residents in nonagricultural
occupations), functional nature (a developed infrastructure), and population
size or density. However, commonsensically, the term ‘urban’ fundamentally
holds the same nuance for most people.
In the 1970s, expanding urban research generated some confusion on how
precisely to define the concept of ‘urban’. Urban, as per Eames and Goode
(1977) is understood as a form of settlements as well as a set of specific
functions. Thus, urban has two essential features: 1) Form and, 2) Function.
While demographic characteristics, architectural forms and settlement zones
indicate form, functional attributes include economic, political and recreational
activity. Southall (1983) viewed the ‘urban’ as a highly spatial density of social
interaction, rejecting a definition based on mere demographic or physical density.
Gutkind (1983) provided yet another definition arguing it is not physical density
that constitutes an urban setting; it is, instead, the kind of social relations, which
are considerably dissimilar from those in rural settings. Gutkind also believed
that class struggle was the core of urban life. Both Southall and Gutkind were
influenced by Louis Wirth’s essay, Urbanism as a Way of Life (1938) ‘where he
described the distinctive attributes of the city as a specific social institution, a
view that led to the conceptualisation of an anthropology of the city, as opposed
to anthropological research in the city’ (Prato and Padro 2013, 87).
In recent decades, however, changing settlement patterns and the evolution of
a global economy reduced the analytical value of this simplistic urban/rural
dichotomy. Disparities in urban definitions and the blurring of urban and
non-urban elements have led social scientists to new theoretical approaches
for analysing the changing world and attempting to forecast its direction
(Parrillo 2016). Convergence theory argues that technology will lead cities and
communities everywhere to develop similar organisational forms. In contrast,
divergence theory posits that increasingly dissimilar organisational forms will
emerge because of differences in (1) cultural values and histories; (2) timing
and pace of urbanisation; (3) form of government and planning approaches;
and (4) the hierarchy of countries in the global economy. Another perspective,
postmodern theory, rests on the premise that cities develop in ways that are no
longer rational or manageable. Instead, global capitalism serves as the underlying
24
rationale for actions by increasingly fragmented urban power structures. The Foundation of
economic welfare of cities now results from causes existing beyond their Urban Anthropology
boundaries. This interplay of global, national, regional, and local forces is an
additional complicating factor in explaining what we mean by urban.
The concept of urban remains subject to varying interpretations, with or without
a spatial premise; with a local, regional, national, or global perspective; and
with a positive or a negative emphasis. Regardless of theoretical or conceptual
approaches, the term nonetheless remains mostly suggestive of its Latin origins:
particular qualities associated with people and patterns found in cities.
Urbanism
With time, within cities numerous cultures grow, interact, and shape human
interaction and social organisation. Urbanism is defined as those characteristics,
social and cultural, that emerge as a result of staying in the city. In other words,
urbanism is the patterns of behaviour, relationships, and modes of thinking that
characterises city dwellers (for more detailed discussion see Unit 4).
Urbanisation
Urbanisation is defined as the process by which a society becomes more urban.
This can be either due to population shift from rural to urban areas or the spread
of urban forms and functions to previously non-urban areas (Eames and Goode
1977). Urbanisation occurs due to increased economic activities which triggers
migration from rural areas to urban areas generally. Urbanisation is generally
measured in two ways: first, level of urbanisation i.e. ratio of urban to rural
population; and, second, rate of population growth in urban areas. While the
level of urbanisation indicates urban population share with respect to total
population of a nation and rate of urbanisation indicates annual growth rate
of urban population. Taking these two parameters together, one can say that
cities have been growing and probably will grow further in the future (for more
detailed discussion see Unit 4).
Check Your Progress
9. What do understand by the term city? Discuss various perspectives to
understand city.
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10. Define urban. Discuss the changing notions around the term.
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25
Fundamentals of 11. Define urbanisation and explain how is it measured?
Urban Anthropology
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1.4 CITIES: PRE-INDUSTRIAL TO INDUSTRIAL

During the 1970s, urban anthropologists moved beyond from anthropology in
the city (i.e., the city as just a site for research) to anthropology of the city (i.e.,
making the urban aspect fundamental to the study). They also argued that only
the latter should be considered as urban anthropology. This was the time when
a number of anthropologists used typological approach to map diverse urban
forms. Gideon Sjoberg, the author of The Pre-Industrial City (1960) proposed a
twofold approach to understand the cities. By suggesting industrialisation is the
basis of transformation of cities, Sjoberg postulated that there were basically
two types of cities, a) Pre-industrial and b) Industrial. Sojoberg located the
pre-industrial city in what he called feudal society (Fox 1977). Feudal society
distinguished itself from folk society by greater agricultural surpluses, particularly
grain, arrived at through the use of plough of wheel, improved metallurgy, and
large-scale irrigation works. Yet in contrast to industrial society, it was almost
entirely dependent on animate (human and animal) sources of energy. The pre-
industrial city exhibited rigid class barriers, segregation of population into ethnic
quarters, guilds which monopolise trades and small literate elite which guards
its knowledge and specialisation. The industrial cities represented an industrial
system with inanimate sources of power, a rational and centralised economic
and political organisation, recruitment to positions in terms of universal criteria,
systems of mass education, mass communication and efficient transportation.
Urban culture is the way life which is understood well by the residents of that
particular city but has certain kind of shock value for the new comers. This is
mostly true in the context of industrial cities. (Srivastava 2016) recounts how
he taught his students about the distinction between pre-industrial and post-
industrial cities with the help of a fieldwork in rural and urban Bikaner in
Rajasthan:
Whilst we visited two villages, one multi-caste and the other of Muslims, I
made all the students spend several hours in the town of Bikaner, and try to
understand the articulation of the rural and the urban. The students learnt about
the unbroken continuity between the town and the villages, which prepared
them to question the concepts of ‘culture shock’ and ‘cultural inadequacy’.
When a rural dweller came to the town in connection with a work in the court,
to sell his cart of wool, to see a film, to buy fancy clothes or clarified butter, he
did not feel any deficiency of the dialect and cultural mannerism, and was able
to deal with the urban world without being exploited or lost.
26
Check Your Progress Foundation of
Urban Anthropology
12. Discuss Sjoberg’s conception of pre-industrial city.
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13. Distinguish between pre-industrial and industrial cities.
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1.5 SUMMARY
As the description above illustrates, urban anthropology can be seen as both,
anthropology in the city and the anthropology of the city. Whereas anthropology
in the city focuses on studying the everyday life in the city by advocating the
need for distinct research methods for urban research, on the other hand a focus
for studying the cities at large is done through anthropology of city. As we see
in the historical development of the sub discipline, studies in urban set up is
not a new phenomenon. But, urban anthropology started being recognised as a
field of anthropology in the late twentieth century. As the fast-growing urban
population across the world and cities has became the new centres of all cultural,
political and economic activities, urban anthropology is sometime referred as
‘the’ anthropology. The conception of the cities has changed over the period of
time. In the earlier times, cities were seen as those spaces with individualistic
identities where anonymity and loneliness were the characteristics of urban life.
But today cities are seen as sites of entertainment and leisure. The nature and
size of cities have changed with time which essentially requires new definitions
to appreciate everyday changing urban life in and of the cities.
1.6 References
Asad, T. ed. (1973). Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca
Press.
Clifford, J. and G. Marcus. (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Eames, E. and J. G. Goode. (1977). Anthropology of the City: An Introduction
to Urban Anthropology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Epstein, A. L. (1958). Politics in an Urban African Community. Manchester:
Manchester University Press for Rhodes-Livingstone Institute.
Fox, R. G. (1977). Urban Anthropology: Cities in their Cultural Settings.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. 27
Fundamentals of Gluckman, M. (1961). “Anthropological Problems Arising from the African
Urban Anthropology Industrial Revolution”. In A. Southall (ed.). Urban Anthropology. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Gough, K. (1967). “New Proposals for Anthropologists”. Economic and
Political Weekly. 2 (36): 1653-1658.
Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson, eds. (1997). Anthropological Locations: Boundaries
and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Hannerz, U. (1980). Exploring the City: Inquiries toward an Urban Anthropology.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Jaffe, R. and A. de Koning. (2016). Introducing Urban Anthropology. London,
Routledge.
Jones, G. A. and D. Rodgers. (2016). “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants?
Anthropology and the City”. Etnofoor. 28 (2): 13-32.
Low, S. (2014). “Specialities: The Rebirth of Urban Anthropology through
Studies of Urban Space”. In A Companion to Urban Anthropology, edited by
Donald M. Nonini, 15-27. Chichester, West Sussex : Wiley-Blackwell. Pp. 15-
27.
Mitchell, J.C. (1957). The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships
Among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia. Rhodes-Livingstone Paper No.
27. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Mitchell, J.C. (1966). “Theoretical Orientations in African Urban Studies”,
in M. Banton (ed.) The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies. London:
Tavistock.
Parrillo, V. (2016). “Concept of Urban”, in George Ritzer (ed.) The Blackwell
Encyclopedia of Sociology.Malden, Mass: Blackwell. Pp. 1-3.
Prato, B. G. and I. Pardo, (2013). “Urban Anthropology”. Urbanities. 3 (2):
80-110.
Sanjek, R. (1990). “Urban Anthropology in the 1980s: A World View”. Annual
Review of Anthropology, 19: 151-85.
Sanjek, R. (1990). “Urban Anthropology in the 1980s: A World View” Annual
Review of Anthropology. 19: 151-86.
Sennett, R. (1969). Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities. New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts.
Sjoberg, G. (1960). The Preindustrial City. New York: Free Press.
Southall, A. (1983). “Toward a Universal Urban Anthropology”. In G. Ansari
and P. J. M. Nas (eds.). Town Talk: The Dynamics of Urban Anthropology.
Leiden: Brill.
Southall, A. (ed.) (1973). Urban Anthropology. New York: Oxford University
Press.
28
Srivastava, V. K. (2017). “My Tryst with Urban Studies, Sociological Foundation of
and Anthropological: Experiences of Teaching and Learning”. Eastern Urban Anthropology
Anthropologist. 70 (3-4): 202-217.
Wirth, L. (1938_. “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology.
44: 1-24.

1. Refer to section 1.1
3. Refer to sections 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3 and 1.1.4
4. Refer to section 1.1.1
5. Refer to section 1.1.4
6. Refer 1.1 in general and focus on section 1.1.5
9. See 1st and 2nd paragraph of section 1.3
10. See 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th paragraph of section 1.3
11. See 7th paragraph of section 1.3
12. Refer to Section 1.4
29
Fundamentals of
Urban Anthropology UNIT 2 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
Contents
2.0 Introduction
2.1 The Chicago School
2.2 The Manchester School
2.3 Social Network Analysis
2.4 Extended Case Method
2.5 Concept of Scale in Urban Anthropological Studies
2.6 Emerging Approaches to the Study of Cities
2.7 Summary
2.8 References
LEARNING OUTCOMES
 Define contributions of the Chicago and the Manchester schools to urban
anthropology
 Describe network analysis and extended case methods
 Identify the concept of scale in urban anthropology
 Examine anthropological approaches in urban anthropology
2.0 INTRODUCTION
In the first unit, we deliberated on the growth and relevance of urban anthropology.
We ascertained the role of various anthropologists in the development of urban
anthropology as an important branch of anthropology. Apart from learning about
its relationship with other social disciplines we also discussed the basic concepts
such as city, urban, urbanism and urbanisation. We concluded the unit with a
discussion about the shifting nature of cities from pre-industrial to industrial and
post-industrial. This unit presents a brief introduction to some of the theoretical
perspectives in urban anthropology which are crucial to understand its changing
character. The unit is divided into five sections. The first section examines the
contributions of the Chicago School to urban anthropology by focusing on
Robert Park’s ecological model. The second section draws attention to the role
and contribution of scholars who lead the Manchester School and among other
issues studied the process of urbanisation in Africa. The third and the fourth
sections describe the method of social network analysis and extended case

Delhi
30
method respectively. In the concluding section we discuss the concept of scale Theoretical
in urban anthropological research and various approaches to study the urban. Perspectives
Cities are sites of economic, political, social and cultural dynamics. The fast
growing population and ensuing demographic shift from rural to urban, simple
to complex societies in the cities, has posed many theoretical and methodological
challenges. Several generations of scholars have tried to make sense of these
changes. Every discipline has a group of scholars who have explicit theoretical
or methodological bend for certain approaches. This grouping of theoretical
frameworks and approaches into categories is known as a school or school of
thought. For example, in anthropology, in general, there are many significant
schools such as the evolutionary school, the historical particularism school and
the culture and personality school to understand the foundational concepts of
society and culture. Urban anthropology is in the same way associated with some
specific schools. The Chicago and the Manchester school are the two foremost
schools that have provided theoretical perspective to urban anthropology. In the
next two sections we will discuss these two schools.
2.1 THE CHICAGO SCHOOL

The Chicago school refers to a specific group of sociologists and cultural
anthropologists at the University of Chicago during the first half of the
twentieth century. This school of thought is known by several names such as
Chicago school of sociology, Chicago school of urban ecology and sometimes
just Chicago school. Their approach to the study of city and social relations
was heavily qualitative, rigorous in data analysis, and focused on the city as a
social laboratory. The studies by the school became foundational to American
sociological/anthropological methods and exemplify the finest traditions of
balancing theory and empirical inquiry, especially through ethnography (Apter
et al. 2009). Robert Park and William Thomas are two social scientists who are
considered as the main proponents of Chicago school (Jaffe and de Koning,
2016).
Robert Park was influenced by German philosopher George Simmel and always
emphasised on empirical, first hand studies. He theorised the city as being made
up of adjacent ecological niches occupied by social groups in a succession of
concentric rings surrounding the core. For him, class, occupation, worldview
and life experiences are synchronous with an inhabitant’s location within the
human ecology. Social change was thought to happen with an inhabitant’s
position within this human ecology. Robert Park developed his ideas on the city
by borrowing concepts (for example, “community”, “struggle for existence”,
“equilibrium”, “dominance”, “succession”) from theories of animal and plant
ecology (Howe, 1990).
Robert Park (1952) opined that the manifestation of city life could be understood
as interaction of two types of process. The first of these works is what he calls
the biotic level. Here humans act much like animals. They live in a habitat
(“community”) and each group (“species”) is dependent on others (as in a
food chain). The condition of the habitat is determined by a raw, uncontrolled
economic competition (“the struggle for existence”). As this proceeds each
group finds its niche in the city. At some point a community accomplishes a state
of equilibrium and then the biotic forces of economic struggle reconcile. Since 31
Fundamentals of humans are also mobile, mindful and innovative, human society transcends
Urban Anthropology animal and plant society, and so a second level of analysis is required. This is
the societal or cultural level. Once equilibrium has been obtained and the biotic
sub-structure is steady, Park argues (Howe, 1990: 39) that:
Cooperation takes over and that such cooperation is founded on the generation
of cultural values. Empirically what one sees at any point is the product of the
fusion of these two sets of forces interacting. In any natural habitat one finds
a dominant species, and the analogue of this in cities is the group with the
greatest economic resources. Groups find their niches in the urban environment
according to their economic strength. Space allocation is thus linked to economic
processes.
For example, how in Chicago and other metropolitan cities, Robert Park noted,
there was a broadly similar pattern of spatial distribution between the business
district, slums, rooming house areas, bright lights entertainment areas, industrial
sites and suburbs. In this fashion dominance working together with economic
competition carves up the city into zones. Once the pattern stabilises cultural
cooperation takes place within and between zones. The system can be thrown
into chaos by new groups entering the city reinitiating economic competition.
This was a very noticeable feature of many north American cities as wave after
wave of new immigrants entered the country like the Irish, Germans, Swedes,
Jews, Italians, Blacks and many other ethnic groups and Park denoted this
process with the term “succession” (Howe, 1990).
While Park’s theory of human ecology remained marginal to social anthropology
it did help ethnography to become an important method to study cities. Robert
Park inspired his colleagues and students to carry out detailed studies of various
domains in the city of Chicago. Conceived to be a combination of the two
sets of forces, biotic and societal, the areas with the city were inhabited by
homogeneous groups having a common set of norms and values. Robert Park
believed that it was difficult for any one study to make sense of the city as a
whole and forces acting on it. To develop theoretical generalisations about the
city, he advocated that it was crucial to study a variety of areas and complete a
sufficient number of studies.
William Isaac Thomas, another pioneer of Chicago school, was an American
sociologist known for his contribution to the studies of migration. His book,
The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, five volumes (1918-20) written in
collaboration with Florian Znaniecki, who is known for using extensive life
histories, is a classic work on migration studies. Thomas is perhaps best known
for the Thomas theorem (if man defines situations as real, they are real in their
consequences), while Park laid the foundation of the human ecology model that
guided much of early Chicago school research. This model understood human
behaviour in cities to be shaped by the urban environment and its competitive
character (Jaffe and de Koning, 2016).
Ernest Burgess, Louis Wirth, Nels Anderson, Florian Znaniecki and St. Clair
Drake are some important sociologists who were trained at Chicago school and
emphasised upon empirical data and fieldwork in social science research. Ernest
Burgess with Robert Park wrote a popular textbook Introduction to Science of
32 Sociology (1921) which gave new direction to sociology. Much of Burgess’
collaborative research with Park focused on urban land use and the social Theoretical
aspects of the urban community. Louis Wirth, who was the next generation to Perspectives
Park, is best known for his essay Urbanism as a way of life (1937). His studies
on the Jewish Ghettos of Chicago which he described in another book The
Ghettos (1928) is a classic work.
Some features of The Chicago School:
a) It was based at the University of Chicago.
b) It was founded by Robert Park and William Thomas and was dominant in
American sociology during the interwar period.
c) Louis Wirth and Ernest Burgess were some of the prominent sociologists
whose works contributed to further development of the Chicago school.
d) It is famed for its methodological contributions to urban sociology, urban
anthropology and social science in general.
e) Spatial analysis and ethnography were the two major methods used by this
school.
f) Introduced the urban ecology concept to understand city life.
g) It emphasised on empirical data and the fieldwork.
g) Stressed on viewing the city as their laboratories.
i) Used cognitive methods, oral history and life history.
j) It produced three kinds of ethnographies which were based on community,
places and the groups.
Some classic ethnographic works produced by the Chicago school:
The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-20)
The Hobo (1923)
The Ghetto (1928)
The Taxi Dance Hall (1932)
Black Metropolis (1945)
Street Corner Society (1943)
Check Your Progress
1. Discuss the contributions of the Chicago School to the discipline of urban
anthropology.
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33
Fundamentals of 2. Discuss Robert Park’s ecological model to understand cities.
Urban Anthropology
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2.2 THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL

Apart from the contributions of the Chicago School in the first half of the
twentieth century, possibly no other localised complex of urban anthropology can
match the studies which came out of Central Africa (Hannerz 1980). This work
was the product of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute (RLI), set up in 1937. The
institute transformed into the Institute for Social Research of the new University
of Zambia after the Zambian independence in 1964. The Institute was initially
directed by the British anthropologist Godfrey Wilson. Wilson encouraged
researchers to examine the social transformations that were occurring in Central
Africa, including the process of urbanisation. One of the earliest studies carried
out by Godfrey and his wife Monica Wilson was on ‘detribalisation’ in urban
Central Africa. There was a significant difference in African urbanism, and the
RLI anthropologists did not cover the entire spectrum (Werbner, 2020). Two
mining centres became the subject of most rigorous documentation: Broken
Hill (later to be renamed Kabwe) and Luanshya. The former, based on zinc
and lead mining, was older, regarded as a more stable community, and more
diversified as it was also an important railroad junction. Luanshya was farther
north in the Copperbelt, and had come into existence only in the 1920s but it
had already experienced periods of boom and bustle as well as serious conflict
between the mine management and African workers (Hannerz, 1983).
In 1941, the South-African-born anthropologist Max Gluckman joined the
directorship of the Institute and drafted a ‘Seven Year Research Plan’ aimed
at vitalising research in both rural and urban areas. The focus of this research
was to study the rural areas affected by the migration of the labour force to
the new mining towns (Werbner 2020). Such research focused on the mining
areas of the Copperbelt and, under Gluckman’s leadership, addressed the
effects of colonialism on tribal economies and their inclusion in the market.
The focus was on shifting economic structures and the nature of social relations
that were emerging in the urban areas. The Copperbelt mining towns attracted
immigrants from the surrounding rural villages, who were employed as cheap
labor force. Gluckman (1961) was of the opinion that these urban immigrants
had entered a new web of relationships that were believed to be typical of the
‘urban system’.
Until the mid-twentieth century, the research produced by British anthropologists
under Gluckman’s direction at the RLI provided the main body of African urban
ethnography. Following Gluckman’s appointment in 1949 to the Chair in Social
Anthropology at the University of Manchester, this group of anthropologists
became known as the ‘Manchester School’. Gluckman inspired the first wave
of ethnographers who viewed processes rather than a bound set of people
34 as the proper object of their investigation. Victor Turner, Elizabeth Colson,
F. G. Bailey, Edmund Ronald Leach, Fredrik Barth are some well-known Theoretical
anthropologists who are associated with the Manchester school. Perspectives
Soon after, in the 1950s, the Manchester group launched a ‘school in urban
anthropology’. While the studies do not offer the wealth of descriptive detail
concerning a variety of groups and settings which one finds in their Chicago
counterparts, they are important also for their awareness of problems of method,
conceptualisation, and analysis (Kempny, 2005). In particular, anthropological
methods such as social network, the extended case study method, situational
analysis and the social drama became defining characteristics of this school and
are widely regarded as its major legacy (for a detailed discussion see Werbner,
2020).
Clyde Mitchell, a close associate of Gluckman, also played a major role in
the development of the extended-case method as well as network analysis
(Handleman, 2005). Mitchell’s work The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social
Relationships among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia is an important
book which analysed the performances of a dance troupe in the Copperbelt
town of Luanshya. The Kalela Dance is not so much a study of dance, but as
a study which takes the leisure condition as a stage for understanding casual
social interaction in town. The book argued that tribalism was not about the
tribe as such except in these dancing teams; tribalism does not form the basis
for the organisation of corporate groups. Mitchell focused most of his analysis
on issues of the people’s construction of their cultural and ethnic identities,
their use of social categories, and their making of a modern subjectivity for
themselves. He made it clear that in his view, ethnicity or tribalism was not one
thing or even about one thing, but was actually open to recreation, play and fun
too (Werbner, 2020).
The Manchester school was different from the Chicago school in the sense
that it focused on Africa as its field which was a non-western, colonial set up
whereas the Chicago school concentrated on western cities such as Chicago and
other American cities.
Check Your Progress
3. Discuss the contributions of the Manchester school to urban anthropology.
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2.3 SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

Anthropologists have always been interested in understanding relations between
the individual and the society. The types of associations people have in their
environs are known as their social networks in the society. Social networks
are based on both the formal and informal relations an individual makes while
negotiating the urban anonymity. Classical anthropologists have used this
method in understanding the kinship structure, exchange patterns and social 35
Fundamentals of mobilisations in traditional societies. However social network analysis became
Urban Anthropology an important method in urban anthropological research in the mid twentieth
century. Since the 1950s, anthropologists have employed the concept of social
networks in the urban settings. They were of the opinion that social networks as
a promising new area of theory and research can be used for better understanding
the total fabric of modern urban life (Gold, 1982).
A group of anthropologists at the social anthropology department of the
University of Manchester, including John Barnes, Clyde Mitchell and Elizabeth
Bott conceived of society as a tapestry woven from the social networks of
individuals. Rather than focusing on the whole society, they studied the networks
of relations surrounding individuals. This concept was tested by Bott in her
work with English families, by Barnes in his work with Norwegian fishermen,
and by Mitchell in his work with rural migrants to towns of what was then
Northern Rhodesia (Zambia today). Here, we will focus on J Clyde Mitchell
specifically. Mitchell was particularly known for his concern for certain
innovative aspects of modern life in urban Africa. He focused on the new urban
dwellers of Zambia, finding their town ways in recently created new towns in
urban Africa. He researched urban residents’ awareness of choice-making in
the face of urban complexity and uncertainties. How individuals often felt the
need to maneuver, negotiate and even manipulate others, especially friends,
acquaintances and often kin or conjugal partners in stress was a major concern
of the Manchester School anthropologists (Werbner, 2020).
Social network analysis is an exciting and stimulating possible means of
understanding human relationships in situations where the usual social structures
are not observed and contacts appear scattered and diffused. City dwellers have
multiple positions with regard to their networks in the city. It can be based on
their friend circle, common occupation, similar interest and their institutional
ties. Such networks can be found in common neighbourhoods as well as far in
the city or in the suburbs. Urban anthropologists are interested in social network
analysis to understand the social structure of urban life. It describes why an
individual chooses to link herself/himself to a particular social network. Such
social networks provide the city dwellers with the option to choose from the
available networks which accomplish their desires most. The analysis of social
networks gives a clue to what drives the whole urban community to function as
a social system.
2.4 THE EXTENDED CASE METHOD

The extended case study method is the hallmark of the Manchester school and
is considered as the most important innovation in anthropological inquiry.
Extended case study method brought new horizons in the way data is collected
and interpreted in anthropology. It is capable of digging beneath the political
binaries of the coloniser and the colonised, white and black, metropolis
and periphery, capital and labour to discover multiple processes, interests, and
identities (Hannerz, 1980).
The method was developed by anthropologists Max Gluckman and Jaap van
Velsen in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It became a significant method in
African studies during the mid-fifties. The researchers began to question the
36 validity of taking notes and various other methods of collecting data from the
field rather than just jotting down the answers of their respondent. Instead of Theoretical
collecting data from informants about what natives ought to do, researchers Perspectives
began to fill their diaries with narratives of what natives actually were doing
with accounts of real events, struggles, and dramas that took place over space
and time (Burawoy, 1998). Richard Werbner (2020: 55-56) notes that while he
was a first year student in 1959, Gluckman asked him Marx’s 18th Brumaire,
‘in order to learn from it as the best example of the extended case method.
How do sequences of events – relations between events not the events as such
– and relationships matter and make it possible for a central, would-be heroic
figure to play his part? It was a question of documenting and analysing a highly
significant social process.’ An extended case study was seen as advantageous
because it documented micro-history in fine detail. The method unfolds certain
changes people know, interpret, and to some extent direct over a significant
period in their lives.
Extended case method applies reflexive science to ethnography in order to
extract the general from the unique, to move from the ‘micro’ to the ‘macro’,
and to connect the present to the past in anticipation of the future, all by
building on pre-existing theory (Burawoy, 1998). The method places less
emphasis on identifying structural regularities and more on detailed analyses
of social processes wherein individual strategies and choices reveal the context
of everyday life. According to Max Gluckman, ‘the most fruitful use of cases
consists in taking a series of specific incidents affecting the same persons or
groups, through a long period of time, and showing … [the] change of social
relations among these persons and groups, within the framework of their social
system and culture’ (1961: 10).
Extended case study method can be summarised in the following points:
a) Extending the observer to the participant
b) Extending observation over space and time
c) Extending out from process to force
d) Extending theory
Check Your Progress
4. Write a short note on the social network analysis method.
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5. What is the extended case study method? Explain with the help of a
suitable example.
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37
Fundamentals of ......................................................................................................................
Urban Anthropology
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2.5 CONCEPT OF SCALE IN URBAN

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES
There have been long debates over what should be the subject matter of urban
anthropology. Should we study the city as an object or focus on the relations
between different actors in the city? What should be the approach to look
at the cities? Urban anthropology has been pre dominated by the theoretical
frameworks of the Chicago and the Manchester schools, political economic
approach, cultural analysis and ordinary city approach, where the Chicago
partisans tended to focus on the methods of doing urban anthropology in the
western cities, and the Manchester school studied the processes of urbanisation
and urban development peculiar of the African context. Similarly, political
economy approach, cultural analysis and ordinary city approach also have
their vantage points. Since these schools and theoretical frameworks appeared
at different times and spaces, they have substantial variance in their scale
of understanding and approach to the conceptualisation of the cities. The
question of how and to what extent should the researcher study a city has been
problematic and thus some argue for a geographic scale at which a city must be
studied. Urban theories operationalise the city at different geographical scales.
Scale is ‘the geographical organiser and expression of collective social action’
(Smith, 1995: 61). According to Howitt’s (1998) scale has three facets: the
geographical, the hierarchical and the dialectical. The geographic scale has an
aerial facet that refers to size (census tract, province, continent), a hierarchical
facet that refers to level (local, regional, national) and a dialectical facet that
refers to relations (relations to other cities, to the social and political order and
to the larger society). This classification describes size, level and relation as the
three scales to conceptualise cities.
The size perspective focuses on the classification of cities on the basis of
their size into world cities and small cities, megacities, metropolitan cities
and cities of global north and global south. Every so often the researchers in
urban anthropology have conceptualised the cities of the global north (USA and
Europe) as the big, modern and influential cities; their focus is less on the small
cities of the global south.
The level perspective advocates for studying cities at different levels such as
neighbourhood, regional, nation-state and global level. The Chicago School
studied the neighbourhood at micro level dealing with issues of migration,
poverty and crime; issues of homelessness and interpersonal relations whereas
the political economy approach studied the structural factors such as capital,
power and urban social inequalities using a macro level understanding of cities
and their complications. At present, the trend is to understand neoliberal cities
and the urban places, mobilities and social spaces.
The third which is relational perspective emphasises on studying the social
relations by observing the city as a whole and understanding its dynamics with
the population diversity, cultural activities, consumption patterns economy,
38 urban social change and the governance structure. The initial studies conducted
in anthropology focused on some particular segments of the city and its structure Theoretical
neglecting the totality of urban life. The relational approach identifies the city as Perspectives
a place where multiple social relations are formed. Thus, a city (or any locality)
needs to be conceptualised not only as a set of social relations, but also as a
group of actors who play an active role in practicing and reshaping those social
relations.
2.6 EMERGING APPROACHES TO THE STUDY

OF CITY
Urban anthropologists have looked at the city in many different ways. From the
earlier understandings of city as an anonymous place to city as an entertainment
machine, the methods and approaches to the study of cities have changed over
the period of time. These below are the approaches that have been popularly
used in recent years in urban anthropological research.
The ordinary city approach
According to the ordinary city approach, all cities are ordinary. In order to keep
the urban theories relevant to the majority of cities and the urban population
residing in all parts of the world, it is essential to emphasise on similar ways or
methods to study all cities.
Cultural analysis approach
This approach to the study of the city is the result of the process of globalisation
and economic change. Each city has its own distinct and unique culture emerging
from the local influences. Anthropologists use the cultural analysis approach to
understand the role of specific culture of a city on the wide-reaching processes
of globalisation.
City as an entertainment machine
Cities are the new normal. With the economic, technological and social changes
in the last few decades, the character of cities as a mere place for living has
changed too. Today, they are the hub of various cultural activities. Apart from
cinema, art and sports, the rising pubs, bars and cafe, amusement parks and other
public places offer a great source of leisure and unique lifestyle. ‘Urban public
officials, business, and non-profit leaders are using culture, entertainment, and
urban amnesties to (or seek to) enhance their location -for present and future
residents, tourists’ conventioneers and shoppers’ (Clark, 2004). Consumption
becoming the new form of self-expression, it is now an important topic of
anthropological research.
The scenes approach (multidimensional approach)
Scenes approach to the city is relatively a new method in urban anthropology.
Itinclinesto understand the dynamic experiences produced in the city by
analysing the emerging scenes from the visuals or the settings at a time and
place. Scenes analysis encourages us to approach cities (or places in general)
not simply in terms of the presence of, for example, churches, parks, bike paths,
juice bars or cafes; people of different races, classes or nationalities; or music
festivals, sports activities or social movements; but holistically, in terms of
39
Fundamentals of the distinctive meanings created by the specific combination of all of these
Urban Anthropology elements (Wu et al.,2019).Just like any art gallery or exhibition creates a scene
at the place, all dwellings in the city have a certain kind of ambience that shape
the urban experiences consequently. These experiences are created through the
scenes that emerge at a sight. For example, a city can have multiple scenes i.e.
transgressive, glamorous, self-expressive, traditional, and neighbourly or may
have some kind of ethnic or local authenticity. These scenes are vital to the
consumer perspective and of great importance as to how a consumer perceives
any particular scene and whether he accepts or rejects that particular scene.
Scenes theory is important in understanding the debate of scale approach to the
city.
Check Your Progress
6. Discuss the concept of scale in urban anthropology.
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7. What are the emerging approaches to study the city?
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2.7 SUMMARY
In this unit, we discussed the foremost approaches and methods of urban
anthropology. At the outset we learnt about the Chicago school and the Manchester
school which shaped the future of urban anthropology immeasurably. While the
Chicago school stressed on studying the city as a laboratory to understand how
American cities were undergoing transformation in the wake of industrialisation
and rural-urban migration in the early twentieth century, the Manchester
school, on the other hand, emerged as a consequence of anthropological
studies done by the RLI and the social anthropology department of Manchester
University which focused on African cities and the colonial impact on them.
Max Gluckman’s role at the RLI and the Manchester school is enormous. He
not only developed some noteworthy methods in urban anthropology but also
trained many excellent ethnographers of his time. The Extended case method
developed by the Manchester school of thought advocates for extending the
observer to the participant. Extended case method provided reflexivity to
ethnographic practices in anthropology and encouraged understanding the
field situations through theories suitable to the case. The concept of scale in
urban anthropology provided different perspectives to look at city and urban
life. Through scale, the city can be seen from different perspectives of size,
40 level and relations. It is in the theoretical light of this scale method, cities are
classified into various categories such as small and big cities, global and local Theoretical
cities, third world and ordinary cities, African and Asian cities, marginalised Perspectives
cities, feminist cities and cities of consumption. The social network analysis is
crucial to the understanding of the threads of social relations which form the
city life. With technological development, social network analysis has become
a more significant method in understanding the flow of ideas, people and their
movements in urban spaces. Thus, it would be no exaggeration to say that
urban anthropology has developed as a sub-discipline of anthropology through
its continuously evolving theoretical and methodological advancement through
various schools.
2.8 REFERENCES
Apter, David, et al. (2009). “The Chicago School and the Roots of Urban
Ethnography”. Ethnography. 10 (4): 375-396.
Burawoy, M. (1998). “The Extended Case Method”. Sociological Theory. 16
(1): 4-33.
Clark, T. N. (2011). The City as an Entertainment Machine. Lanham, Md:
Lexington Books.
Evens, T.M.S. and Don Handleman. (2006). “Theorizing the Extended Case
Study Method”. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology.
49(3): 13-15.
Fox, R. G. (1977). Urban Anthropology: Cities in their Cultural Settings.
Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall.
Gluckman, M. (1961). “Ethnographic Data in British Social
Anthropology”. Sociological Review 9 (1): 5–17.
Gold, H. (1982). The Sociology of Urban Life. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
Hall.
Hannerz, U. (1980). Exploring the City: Inquiries toward an Urban Anthropology.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Howe, L. (1990). “Urban Anthropology: Trends in Its Development since
1920”. Cambridge Anthropology. 14 (1): 37-66.
Howitt R. (1998). “Scale As Relation: Musical Metaphors of Geographical
Scale”. Area. 30: 49–58.
Jaffe, R. and Anouk de Koning. (2016). Introducing Urban Anthropology.
London: Routledge.
Kempny, M. (2005). “History of the Manchester ‘School’ and the Extended-
Case Method”. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and
Cultural Practice. 49 (3): 144-165.
Park, R. (1952). Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology. New
York: The Free Press.
Prato G.B., and Pardo I. (2013). “Urban Anthropology”. Urbanities. 3 (2): 80-
110. 41
Fundamentals of Smith N. (1995). “Remaking Scale: Competition Cooperation in Prenational
Urban Anthropology And Postnational Europe”. In: Eskelinen H. and Snickars F. (eds.) Competitive
European Peripheries. Berlin: Springer Verlag, pp. 59–74.
Werbner, R. P. (2020). Anthropology after Gluckman: the Manchester School,
Colonial and Postcolonial Transformations. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Wu C. et al. (2019). “Current Debates in Urban Theory from a Scale Perspective:
Introducing a Scenes Approach”. Urban Studies. 56 (8): 1487-1497.
2.10 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

2. Refer to section 2.2.
42
Folk-Urban
UNIT 3 FOLK URBAN CONTINUUM Continuum
Contents
3.0 Introduction
3.1 Continuities between Rural and Urban
3.2 Folk Urban Continuum: Robert Redfield and McKim Marriot
3.3 Semi-Urban and Peri-Urban
3.4 Towns and Two-Tier Cities
3.5 Summary
3.6 References
LEARNING OUTCOMES
 Describe the concept of Folk-Urban Continuum proposed by Robert
Redfield
 Grasp how McKim Marriot employed and further refined it in the Indian
context
 Identify concepts including semi-urban, peri-urban, towns and two-tier
cities
3.0 INTRODUCTION
In the previous unit, we learnt how the Chicago and the Manchester schools
contributed to the growth of urban anthropology. This unit is about folk-urban
continuum, a concept developed by Robert Redfield (1897-1958), a prominent
Chicago anthropologist. Robert Redfield contributed to urban anthropology by
studying relationships between urban and other types of settlements. Human
settlements around the world vary a great deal in their geography, size and
structure. They can be broadly divided into two types, rural and urban. Rural
areas are marked by agriculture as the chief activity. The urban areas are the
seats of commerce, trade and administration. However, both the rural and urban
do not exist in a vacuum or isolation. There is a movement of both people and
practices from one place to the other. This flow of ideas, traits and patterns from
rural to urban and urban to rural can be termed as a continuum.
Continuum also can be understood in terms of continuity. When we speak of
the folk-urban continuum, we refer to the continuity between rural and urban
areas. At one end of this continuous scale lies the village life. At the other end of
this continuum is urban life. Both the urban and the rural are social formations,
and they interact with each other. This ceaseless interaction between the rural

Delhi
43
Fundamentals of and urban is the study matter of the folk-urban continuum. The folk and urban
Urban Anthropology continuum explain how the imprints of the urban life reach and get absorbed
into the folk life. The vice versa is also true whereby certain cultural traits of
the village life develop and become a part of the urban life. The folk-urban
continuum also shows how, over time, villages transform into towns and then
cities.
The concept of rural-urban continuum is about social, political, cultural and
economic interactions between the villages and the towns or cities. Many
cultural traits are diffused from cities to rural areas. For example, dress patterns
diffuse from cities to rural areas. Besides these, new thoughts and ideologies are
also diffused from the cities to the rural areas due to increased communication
via radio, television, newspapers and social media.
3.1 CONTINUITIES BETWEEN RURAL TO

URBAN
Urbanisation has increased the continuity between rural and urban areas. The
whole gamut of occupational diversification, the spread of literacy, education
and mass communication have contributed to this increased continuity. Many
modern agricultural technological innovations and institutional frameworks
for rural development find their origin in the urban centres. The process of
urbanisation has facilitated the large scale commercialisation of agriculture.
Similarly, agricultural requirements for machinery have generated the growth
of manufacturing units in urban areas. As evident, some of the rural demands
are met through the urban centres and vice versa.
Folk society and urban society are conceived of as polarities at opposite ends
of a continuum. The folk society and the urban society have a very abstract
relationship to social reality. Both are synthetic compound of characteristics
that are lifted out of fundamental social situations. However, the ideal folk or
the ideal urban societies cannot be found. According to Robert Redfield, who
was the first to discuss the concept of folk-urban continuum, the ideal type
of folk and urban society is a type which is not a reduction of the particular
characteristics of many societies; the features which these societies share
in common and which together might make for a necessary and sufficient
description of the type wherever it is found (Mintz, 1953).
According to Mintz (ibid), the folk society is marked by isolation compared to
the urban society. There is a high degree of genetic and cultural homogeneity,
slow culture change, pre-literacy; small numbers; minimal division of labour;
simple technology (with every individual as a primary producer). The social
organisation is based on blood and fictive kinship; behaviour is traditional and
uncritical, and there is a tendency to view the inanimate and nonhuman world
personally. Furthermore, there is a viewing of traditional objects which acts as
sacred with the pervasive importance of magic and religion, thus resulting in
ritual behaviour in all areas of life. Redfield defined urban society primarily as
the absence or opposite of these characteristics present in folk society.
Redfield described three principal processes of change from folk to urban:
secularisation, individualisation, and disorganisation. To what degree these
44 processes are interrelated has not been made clear, although Redfield welcomed
the work of those who have sought to show in various cases that change of one Folk-Urban
kind may take place without a change of another. Sol Tax, for instance, has Continuum
described a folk-like social situation for Guatemala, where individualisation
and commercialism are well advanced. Spicer studied what he and Redfield
regard as folk like society existing on the very margins of an urban centre,
and features of both folk and urban types are present in curious juxtaposition
(Mintz, 1953).
Check Your Progress
1. Discuss the continuities between rural and urban areas.
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3.2 FOLK URBAN CONTINUUM: ROBERT

REDFIELD AND MCKIM MARRIOT
The concept of folk-urban continuum is explained and understood through Robert
Redfield’s landmark study, which he later published in the form of a book. The
book was titled The Folk Culture of Yucatan and published in 1941. It was based
upon a comparative study of the four communities: city society, town society,
peasant society, and folk society. He had selected these four communities or
societies from the Mexican province of Yucatan. The four communities located
in the Mexican province with different habitations were Marida (city society),
Diztas (town society), Chankom (a peasant village) and Tuski (village of folk
society). In the Yucatan study, Redfield and his co-workers compared these
four different communities in order to analyse and explain the cultural contrast
between the Spanish and modern urban civilisation of the northwest area of
the peninsula and the more indigenous southeast. The general conclusion of
this work was that the same relative order of the four different communities on
the map of Yucatan, from tribal village to city, also corresponds to decreasing
isolation and homogeneity and increasing secularisation, individualism, and
cultural disorganisation.
Redfield called this order a folk-urban continuum with a folk-type society and
culture at one end and urban civilisation at the other. He also suggested the
following general hypotheses:
1) that the primitive and peasant societies (as isolated, homogeneous local
communities) tend to have the general character of a ‘folk’ type of society;
2) that as these come into contact with the urbanised society, they change in
the direction of an ‘urban’ type; and
3) that the different changes are interdependent, as changes in some of the
characteristics of a society tend to bring about, or at least go with other
changes.
45
Fundamentals of This folk-urban continuum; is a one dimensional, linear continuum connecting
Urban Anthropology different points on a map. The four communities selected for study are four
separate points treated as if they all exist simultaneously without essential
interrelation; civilisation, meaning chiefly Spanish and modern western, is
associated with one of the points, the capital city of Merida.
The Mayan civilisation, having been decapitated by the Spanish conquest, does
not enter the picture. Redfield was quite aware that this model has historical
implications, chiefly along the lines of the age-area principle. He writes, for
example, that it could be used to reconstruct; a sort of generalised hypothetical
account of the history of the culture of Yucatan as a whole. Similarly, it might
be validly asserted that a comparative description of communities encountered
as one goes from Paris southward through Marseilles, Algiers, the Sahara, and
then Sudan would provide the vague outlines of the cultural history of Western
Europe. However, he believes this would be a crude way to derive even the
most tentative historical conclusions. While he used the available history of
Yucatan, the whole study follows a comparison of present conditions in one
community with present conditions in the others. The historical dimension is
left to historians and archaeologists (Redfield, 1941: 340-42.)
Redfield observed a pronounced continuum between the cultures of these
four communities. He put Marida on one end of the continuum and Taski on
the other end. Based on the study of the cultural traits of these four societies,
Redfield observed that Taski and Marida displayed a high degree of cultural
variations. However, Marida and Diztas society, on the one hand, and Chankom
and Taski on the other shared lot of similarities. However, some commonness
or similarities were also between Diztas and Chankom, especially in shops and
intermediaries. Since the city community shared a lot with the town community,
the peasant community and the folk community also showed resemblance
accordingly, Redfield described Marida and Diztas as urban communities and
Chankom and Taski as folk communities. Based on this significant empirical
study, Redfield concluded that no known society should be precisely the same
as the societies on these two poles. However, different societies may share some
cultural features of these two extreme poles (Hasnain, 2010: 182).
According to the folk-urban-continuum, the folk society comes in contact with
urban society and inherits specific characteristics. In this way, a folk society
has specific characteristics of folk and certain characteristics of urban society.
Redfield explains that the folk society is between literate and illiterate, between
developed and undeveloped societies. It was observed that folk society begins
to lose some of its characteristics because of urban contact. Isolation, kinship
system, group feeling, homogeneity slowly wane from the folk community.
Redfield wrote that ‘the increase of contacts, heterogeneity and disorganisation
of culture, are sufficient causes of secularisation and individualisation’. Thus
Redfield says that the folk like community lost its isolation through contact
with the city, it became more heterogenous, a market economy developed, and
an indication of disorganisation appeared. Increased contact with any dissimilar
society results in a change. The evidence of disorganisation and secularisation,
and impersonal behaviour was more evident in the relationship between
different ethnic community elements. Any attempt to characterise society and
46 compare it with others highlights that the folk-urban continuum deals with the
relative degree of presence or absence of polar characteristics (Miner 1952). Folk-Urban
Redfield stated that if a society loses its isolation or homogeneity, it becomes Continuum
secularised, and its members work more for their interest rather than in the
interest of others. However, the comparison of Yucatan with that of Guatemala
led Redfield to conclude that ‘there is no single necessary cause for secularisation
and individualisation’.
Sol Tax observed that Guatemala societies were ‘small… homogenous in
beliefs and practices… with relationship impersonal… and with familial
organisation weak, with life secularised and individuals were acting more from
economic or other personal advantages than from any deep thought of social
good’. Redfield regarded Tax’s observation as suggesting that the development
of the money economy may be another sufficient cause of secularisation and
individualisation. Robert Redfield’s continuum scheme defines an ideal type,
and the folk society is the polar opposite of urban society. The ideal type is a
mental construct, and no known society precisely corresponds to it. According
to Miner (1952), criticisms of the folk-urban concept might be classed under
three general headings:
1. the problem of lack of fit between the empirical evidence on particular
societies and the nature of these societies, which one might expect from the
ideal type construct,
2. the problem of definition of the characteristics of the ideal types, and
3. the limited theoretical insight provided by the continuum.
Oscar Lewis pointed out that the folk concept is an ideal and hence a matter of
definition. It is upon the heuristic value that the type and its related continuum
must be judged. In his book, Life in a Mexican Village (1951: 432-440), Lewis
made the following six criticisms of the conceptual framework about its utility
for studying culture change and cultural analysis (Miner, 1952).
• The folk-urban conceptualisation of social change focuses primarily on
the city as a transformation agent to exclude or neglect other internal or
external factors.
• Culture change may not be a matter of folk-urban progression. However,
rather an increasing or decreasing heterogeneity of Spanish rural element,
such as the plough, did not make Tepoztlan more urban but instead gave it
a more varied rural culture.
• The typology involved in the folk-urban classification of societies tends
to obscure the wide range in the ways of life, and in the value systems
among so-called primitive peoples, the criteria used are concerned with
the purely formal aspects of society. Focusing only on the formal aspects
of urban society reduces all urban societies to a common denominator and
treats them as if they all had the same culture. It should be clear that the
concept “urban” is too much of a catchall to be useful for cultural analysis.
Moreover, it is suggested here that the question posed by Redfield, namely,
what happens to an isolated, homogeneous society when it comes into
contact with an urbanised society, cannot possibly be answered because
the question is too general and the terms used do not give us the necessary
47
Fundamentals of data. We need to know what kind of urban society, under what conditions
Urban Anthropology of contact, and a host of other specific historical data.
• The folk-urban classification has severe limitations in guiding field research
because of the highly selective implications of the categories themselves and
the relatively narrow focus of the problem. The emphasis upon essentially
formal aspects of culture leads to neglect of psychological data and, as a
rule, does not give insight into the people’s character.
• Finally, underlying the folk-urban dichotomy as used by Redfield is a system
of value judgments that contains the old Rousseauan notion of ‘primitive’
people as noble ‘savages’ and the corollary that civilisation has made man
selfish. While folk societies are thought to be integrated, urban societies
are thought to be responsible for disorganisation.
Sol Tax pointed out that world view can change folk society’s independent
characteristics without changing independent characteristics.
McKim Marriot
Robert Redfield conceptualised his idea based on the distinctions put forward
earlier by European sociologists, such as Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
(Tonnies) and mechanical and organic solidarity (Durkheim). Redfield (1955)
formalised his ideas in the concept of the ‘Little Community’ with its four
characteristics: smallness, distinctiveness, homogeneity, and self-sufficiency.
Marriott, who was an American anthropologist, saw the interplay among the
communities of rural and urban centres. In his essay on ‘Little Communities in
an Indigenous Civilisation’ (1955), Marriott explicitly indicated the association
between the caste system and the larger order of state and civilisation.
Marriot conducted his study in the village of Kishan Garhi, which is located in
Uttar Pradesh. He talked about the Little Tradition and the Great Tradition and
how cultural traits travelled from one society to another through universalisation
and parochialisation. Marriot borrowed the concepts of the Great Tradition
and the Little Tradition from Redfield’s idea of the Great Community and the
Little Community, which the latter had discussed while conducting his studies
in Mexican communities. According to Redfield, the Little Community was a
smaller size, self-sufficient and relatively isolated village. Redfield held that
every civilisation is composed of traditions. On the one end are the traditions of
‘elite’ and ‘thinking class’ while there are traditions of unlettered peasants. The
former emanated from urban centres, and their temples, educational institutions
and was described as the Great Tradition. The concept may be understood
from another angle. Every society consists of the Great Tradition and the Little
Tradition. The traditions, behavioural patterns, customs and rites, rituals and
festivals of these communities may be the Great and the Little.
In Indian society, Hinduism is the Great tradition, and it represents the way of
life and shapes social structure. The source of this great tradition may be traced
back to its ancient thinkers and philosophers and the scholarly works and epics
and treatises. The Little Tradition is represented by numerous rural and tribal
segments of Indian society.
48
McKim Marriott, influenced by the studies conducted by Robert Redfield for Folk-Urban
their intensive study of India’s villages, elaborated the original model of Redfield Continuum
in the light of data generated from Indian villages. Marriott envisaged two
concepts: Parochialisation and Universalisation, with the two poles having been
defined as the Great Tradition and the Little Tradition. Marriott characterised
the mode of interaction between the Little and the Great Traditions in the Indian
village as ‘parochialisation’ and ‘universalisation. Universalisation, according
to Marriot, refers to the carrying forward of materials that are already present in
the Little Tradition. In other words, it is the upward journey of little traditions
to become a part of great traditions. Parochialisation, on the other hand, is the
downward devolution of the Great Tradition elements and their integration with
the Little Tradition elements. It is a process of localisation. Thus, there is a
continuous dialogue between elements of the Little and the Great Tradition.
Marriott’s analysis is very illuminating, but one may argue that there is
something more to be considered in studying modern India than the Great and
the Little traditions; there is also the ‘new tradition’. Morris Opler (1955:153)
has argued that:
Marriott’s conceptualisation leaves no room . . . for elements that are not
aboriginal or local on the one hand or classical Indian on the other, but
which come from without or which are invented by carriers of the culture.
How the village will absorb and respond to these new ideas which sweep in
from the West and the East or which are being generated in India today is
perhaps even more important than how it copes with Sanskritic rites.
Opler’s criticism is valid, but Marriott’s study, nevertheless, has great merit.
Through him, we are being helped to a viewpoint, a set of concepts, and a way of
working that will allow anthropologists to study a village in its generic historic
processes of interaction with the civilisation of which it is a part (Sharma, 1969).
However, studying the interplay of the Great and Little Traditions or the advent
of the “new tradition” within a village does not help understand the Indian
culture. It may be true that ‘to study Jonesville is to study America’, but it is
not true that ‘To study Kishan Garhi, or Bisipara, is to study India.’ To do this,
social scientists should not limit themselves to the village as an isolate (ibid).
Check Your Progress
2. What is folk-urban continuum? Describe its features in detail.
......................................................................................................................
......................................................................................................................
......................................................................................................................
......................................................................................................................
3. Discuss the contribution of Robert Redfield and McKim Marriot in the
study of Indian villages.
......................................................................................................................
......................................................................................................................
49
Fundamentals of ......................................................................................................................
Urban Anthropology
......................................................................................................................
3.3 SEMI-URBAN AND PERI-URBAN

There are settlements which differ from cities as well as villages in configuration
and function. It is not easy to describe such settlements. Sometimes we refer
to these settlements as semi-urban or peri-urban areas. We come across two
broader categories explicating the semi-urban condition. First, descriptive
categories primarily try to develop analytical frameworks under one of the
following captions: the urban-rural divide, the fringe, sprawl, and semi-
urban landscapes. The second group corresponds to development or strategic
categories for sustainable development, including garden cities, new urbanism,
landscape urbanism, urban agriculture, neo-rurality, and ecopolis.
Peri-urban areas often lie outside the city’s legal jurisdiction and sometimes
even outside the legal jurisdiction of any urban local body. They are thus not
provided with many of the essential services taken for granted in the city.
They must make do on their own which results in increased local inequities as
large companies and public institutions as the upper-income group can install
privatised essential services. However, there is a complete absence of these
services for the poor and more minor businesses/workshops. Electricity, for
example, is often the first service to be provided by the government in peri-
urban areas, but these areas generally lack piped water supply and residents
obtain it from local rivers, lakes and ponds or through tube wells. Regarding
sanitation, private homeowners and institutions in the peri-urban area create
their facilities to build septic tanks and surface drains that empty into local
streams or nullahs (Shaw, 2005).
Allen and Dávila (2002) defined a peri-urban interface as a mosaic of agricultural
and urban ecosystems, subject to rapid change with a large social mix and
measurable distinctive features (Allen, 2003). According to Adell (1999),
peri-urban zones are dynamic, spatially and structurally, and form distinctive
agricultural and non-agricultural activity areas.
Bourne (1996) stated that there is no clear border between suburbia and exurbia
that contains edge cities and semi-agricultural, semi-urban landscapes. These
landscapes were seen under urbanisation pressures as “nurtured landscapes”,
literally fed by the cities they enclose as peri-urban areas. In densely populated
areas with extensive networks of cities and towns, the semi-urban landscape
is enclosed by the city fabric and thus “nurtured” by multiple sources.
Wolman et al. (2005) proposed the extended urban areas based on housing
density and commuting patterns. Peri-urban areas could be situated within
the larger metropolitan region and yet not have any essential services other
than electricity, making them no different from the villages. However, unlike
these villages, they face a more significant environmental burden stemming
from their transition. The Desakota concept deserves to be mentioned here.
Traditional theories relate the rapid growth of cities in third world countries
to the fast depopulation of the countryside in the Southeast. In Asia, the rural
population, living within the hinterlands of large (rapidly industrialising) cities,
50 is spontaneously transforming their rural lifestyles into urban ones without
leaving their rural environments. In this approach, cities are not expanding, Folk-Urban
but the neighbouring countryside transforms ‘itself’ into a specific semi-urban Continuum
fabric (Meuss, 2008).
Check Your Progress
4. Write a note on peri-urban settlements.
......................................................................................................................
......................................................................................................................
......................................................................................................................
......................................................................................................................
3.4 TOWNS AND TWO-TIER CITIES

In the developing world, towns are neither traditional in their form nor do they
represent modern settlements. However, functionally they have similarities with
both the city and the village. Towns have better links with their surrounding
villages but have weaker inter-community ties and social life.
A town is a place where urbanity has not yet reached its full vigour. It may
also sound relatively more minor in size by area and by the population residing
within it. However, the concept is not fully clear simply by its demographic
status or by its areal occupancy. There are unique small urban settlements
within hills providing facilities or resorts.
Similarly, there are towns near or adjoining mining areas. These cannot fulfil
the underlying concept involving functions of urban centre termed by urban
geography as ‘small town’. Population and areal occupancy may be components
of town, but these do not carry the entire ecology of towns.
Up to Census 1951, the definition of a town included all habitations with more
than 5000; every municipality/corporation/notified area of whatever size; and
all civil lines not included within the municipal units. In 1961, this definition
was changed. Furthermore, a town was defined as a settlement with a minimum
population of 5,000 and a population density not less than 1,000 persons per
square mile. Apart from this, 75 per cent of the working population should be
engaged in non-agricultural activities. The town should have a few characteristics
and civic amenities like transport and communication, banks, schools, markets,
recreation centres, hospitals, electricity, and newspapers.
The above definition was in use till the 2001 census. All places with a
municipality, corporation, cantonment board, or notified town area committee,
a minimum population of 5,000, at least 75 percent of the male main working
population engaged in non-agricultural pursuits; and density of population of at
least 400 persons per sq. km. The first category of urban units is called Statutory
Towns. These towns are notified under the law by the concerned State/UT
Government and have local bodies like municipal corporations, municipalities,
municipal committees, irrespective of their demographic characteristics. The
second category of towns is known as Census Town. These were identified
based on Census 2001 data.
51
Fundamentals of According to the government, cities with a population range of 50,000 to
Urban Anthropology 100,000 are classified as tier 2 cities. This classification of Indian cities is a
ranking system used by the Government of India. Cities are classified based on
their population, as recommended by the Sixth Central Pay Finance. First-tier
cities, national capitals or not, are usually larger than second-tiers. Second-tier
cities are generally the capitals of states and other larger cities.
The relationship between small towns, the larger employment story and
growth is significant. Small towns have remained an essential feature of the
urban system. They might or might not account for a large share of the GDP,
but they represent a large and growing market, and they also act as essential
service centres to the rural population. In a context of limited rural to urban
migration, job destruction in the agricultural sector and minimal job creation,
places of adjustment where people cope with poverty, uncertainty through
the mobilisation of their kinship networks and family resources. Economic
activities range from: natural resource extraction; manufacturing; services and
trade; real estate; and educational institutions. Moreover, the urbanisation of the
peripheral settlements of large cities is not necessarily dependent on the city.
Check Your Progress
5. Discuss the idea of town and two-tier cities.
......................................................................................................................
......................................................................................................................
......................................................................................................................
......................................................................................................................
3.5 SUMMARY
Human settlements and way of living are affected by geography and the
resources at their disposal. Based on population density, development, amenities,
employment opportunities, education, human settlement is divided into two
categories, i.e. Urban and Rural. Urban refers to a human settlement where
the rate of urbanisation and industrialisation is high. On the other hand, a rural
settlement is one where the rate of urbanisation is relatively slow. However,
these two types of human settlements are in constant and continuous interaction
with each other. There exists both upward and downward flow of cultural
traits between the urban and rural. Robert Redfield and McKim Marriot have
proposed concepts to explain how a continuum exists between these societies
and how traits are ‘universalised’ and ‘parochialised’. Apart from the urban and
rural, newer forms of settlements have emerged. These are the semi-urban, peri-
urban and suburban settlements.
3.6 REFERENCES
Adell, G. (1999). “Theories and Models of the Peri-urban Interface: A Changing
Conceptual Landscape (Literature Review)”, London: Development Planning
Unit, University College London. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu/pui/research/
previous/epm/g_adell.htm.
52
Allen, A. (2003). “Environmental Planning and Management of the Peri-Urban Folk-Urban
Interface: Perspectives on an Emerging Field”. Environment & Urbanization. Continuum
15(1): 135–148.
Allen, A., & Dávila, J. (Eds.). (2002). Mind the gap: bridging the rural–urban
divide. Insights Development Research (41), May. http://www.id21.org/
insights/insights41/index.html.
Bourne, L.S. (1996). “Reinventing the Suburbs: Old Myths and New Realities”.
Progress in Planning. 46(3): 163–184
Denis, E. et al. (2012). “Subaltern Urbanisation in India”. Economic and
Hasnain, Nadeem. (2010). Indian Anthropology. Lucknow: New Royal Book Co.
Meeus, S. J., and H. Gulinck. (2008). “Semi-Urban Areas in Landscape
Research: A Review”. Living Reviews in Landscape Research. 2: 1-45.
Miner, H. (1952). “The Folk-Urban Continuum”. American Sociological
Review. 17(5): 529-537.
Mintz, S. W. (1953). “The Folk-Urban Continuum and the Rural Proletarian
Community”. American Journal of Sociology. 59 (2): 136-143.
Mylott, E. (2009). Urban-Rural Connections: A Review of the Literature.
Oregon: Oregon State University. https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/
technical_reports/rb68xb945
Opler, M. (1955). “Village India: Studies in the Little Community by McKim
Marriott”. Far Eastern Quarterly. 15(1): 146-153.
Redfield, R. (1947). “The Folk Society”. The American Journal of Sociology.
52 (4):293-308.
Sharma, S. P. (1969). “Indian Village as a Unit of Study”. Economic and
Shaw, A. (2005). “Peri-Urban Interface of Indian Cities: Growth, Governance
and Local Initiatives”. Economic and Political Weekly. 40 (2): 129-136.
Tacoli, C. (1998), “Rural-Urban Interactions: A Guide to the Literature”.
Environment & Urbanization. 10 (1): 147–166.
Wolman, H. et al. (2005). “The Fundamental Challenge in Measuring Sprawl:
Which Land Should Be Considered?”. Professional Geographer, 57(1): 94–105.
3.7 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

5. Refer to section 3.5. 53
Fundamentals of
Urban Anthropology
54

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BANE-147

School of Social Sciences

Prof. Rashmi Sinha Dr. K. Anil Kumar

Dr. Rukshana Zaman

EDITOR ENGLISH (Content, FORMATING & LANGUAGE)

COURSE PREPARATION TEAM

Practical Manual Dr. Mitoo Das, Faculty,

1.1.2 Historical Antecedents II: Manchester School

1.1.3 Urban Anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s

1.1.4 The Spatial Turn

1.1.5 Expanding Horizons

1.2 Influence of other Social Sciences on Urban Anthropology

1.1 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: MEANING,

1.1.1 Historical Antecedents I: Complex Societies and the

1.1.2 Historical Antecedents II: Manchester School

1.1.3 Urban Anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s

1.1.5 Expanding Horizons

1.2 INFLUENCE OF OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCES

1.3 BASIC CONCEPTS OF URBAN

1.4 CITIES: PRE-INDUSTRIAL TO INDUSTRIAL

1.8 Answers to Check Your Progress

Contributor: Dr. Chakraverti Mahajan, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of

2.1 THE CHICAGO SCHOOL

2.2 THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL

2.3 SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

2.4 THE EXTENDED CASE METHOD

2.5 CONCEPT OF SCALE IN URBAN

2.6 EMERGING APPROACHES TO THE STUDY

2.10 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

Contributor: Dr. Chakraverti Mahajan, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of

3.1 CONTINUITIES BETWEEN RURAL TO

3.2 FOLK URBAN CONTINUUM: ROBERT

3.3 SEMI-URBAN AND PERI-URBAN

3.4 TOWNS AND TWO-TIER CITIES

3.7 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

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