Encyclopedia of

Cultural
Anthropology
SPONSORED BY:

Human Relations Area Files at Yale University

David Levinson
Melvin Ember

Volume 4

A Henry Holt Reference Book

Henry Holt and Company
New York
URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
T raditionally, anthropology in the United States
covered four fields: sociocultural anthropology,
archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and biological
anthropology. The first three combine conceptually
because they focus on culture and behavior, whereas
biological anthropology emphasizes physical evolu-
tion and genetic diversity. Sociocultural anthropol-
ogy, archaeology, and, to a lesser degree, linguistics
thus provided a common foundation for urban
anthropology. Although most sociocultural anthro-
pologists distinguish their research from that of ar-
chaeologists, they recognize that archaeologists have
made significant contributions to understanding the
development of civilizations and urban spatial systems.
Similarly, many sociocultural anthropologists depend
on linguistic insights in working with the literate
populations characteristic of urban places. Only since
the 1960s, especially in areas of research concerned
with medical issues (e.g., AIDS and other sexually
transmitted diseases), have sociocultural and biologi-
cal anthropologists come together to share methods,
theories, and data about urban issues.
The distribution of urban anthropologists among
the subdisciplines strongly favors sociocultural anthro-
pology. Most archaeologists are more interested in
civilizations than in urban phenomena per se. Indeed,
the subfield of urban archaeology often involves work
done in contemporary cities where redevelopment
projects expose subsurface remains for excavation,
analysis, and interpretation. For example, the con-
struction of Mexico City's subway system brought
forth thousands of artifacts from the pre-Conquest
and colonial periods. Similarly, few linguists identify
themselves as urban specialists, even though they may
focus on speech communities within cities, and
physical anthropologists rarely emphasize the urban
dimensions of their work, even if they specialize in
research topics (e.g., AIDS) with a mainly urban
distribution. Therefore, sociocultural anthropology
can be treated as the primary area of urban anthro-
pology.
DEFINING URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
At the simplest level, urban anthropology is what
urban anthropologists do. While some anthropolo-
gists do research in particular cities, they do so with-
out much, if any, concern for the urban context; others
are concerned with the structure of city life and its
impact on human behavior locally or cross-culturally;
and still others are concerned with the development
of international urban systems through time and space
as distinctive social-cultural and political-economic
domains. The focus of field research is usually on
relatively small populations (e.g., people from one
village who have migrated to a city, the culture of one
ethnic population of one city, female members of one
gang in one city). Urban anthropologists then describe
and explain why a particular population behaves as
it does.
In more theoretical terms, urban anthropology
involves the study of the cultural systems of cities as
well as the linkages of cities to larger and smaller places
and populations as part of a worldwide urban system.
Thus, urban anthropology emphasizes ethnographic
research on the cultural systems of selected popula-
tions, compares the cultural systems of these popu-
lations, and offers contextual explanations for the
attitudes and behaviors observed among these popu-
lations.
DEVELOPMENT OF
URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
Anthropologists were conducting research on life in
cities and on processes related to urban places long
before the term "urban anthropology" began to be used
widely in the 1960s. When the discipline of anthro-
URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
pology began to emerge in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, its central subject matter was
the cultures of so-called primitive peoples living in
areas remote from the civilizations of Europe and
North America. As anthropologists began to rede-
fine their task as the study of human beings every-
where and throughout history, the conceptual
foundation for the study of the cities and societies by
sociocultural anthropologists was laid.
The Early Years: 1930s to 1950s
From the 1930s to the 1950s, cultural anthropolo-
gists increasingly turned their attention to the study
of peasants, those small-scale food producers who are
incorporated economically, politically, and culturally
into nation-states dominated by cities. Robert
Redfield's research in Mexico, especially his 1926-
1927 community study of the village ofTepoztlan and
his team project The Folk Culhre of Yucatdn (1941),
raised a number of questions about such topics as the
impact of cities on relatively isolated peasant villages
and the contrast between the moral and idyllic Life
in folk communities and the technical and impersonal
life in cities.
Oscar Lewis also did research on Tepoztlan, in the
1940s, and concluded that peasant life was far from
idyllic. He thenturned his attention to the migration
of some villagers from Tepoztlhn to Mexico City and
to their lives in the metropolis. After challenging U.S.-
derived sociological models about urban life in his
influential paper "Urbanization Without Breakdown"
(1952), Lewis shifted from community studies to
family studies in his subsequent publications. His Five
Families (1959) was controversial because of his at-
tention to what Mexican critics termed "lurid" aspects
(i.e., sexual exploits, criminal activities, and immoral
acts) of life in Mexico City. He was accused of
defaming the Mexican national character by a group
of elite intellectuals, but the Mexican courts found
him innocent of the charge. Urban anthropological
research during this period obviously held risks not
found in more traditional fieldwork among tribal
groups or in peasant villages.
By the 1950s a number of anthropologists were
conducting research on urban phenomena. For ex-
ample, V. Gordon Childe, an archaeologist, opened
the decade with an article called "The Urban Revo-
lution", and a year later Ralph Beals, a cultural an-
thropologist, published "Urbanism, Urbanization, and
Acculturation." In mid-decade, in a manner similar
to what Lewis had done for Mexico City, William
Bascom offered a test of some Western theories in
his article "Urbanization Among the Yoruba." In the
same year, Gideon Sjoberg, a sociologist, published
a model for what he termed the 'preindustrial city,"
a form of urban place that stood in contrast to the
kinds of cities that developed after the European
industrial revolution. Meanwhile, in Europe, several
anthropologists were discovering that social-network
analysis provided key insights about personal inter-
action in urban settings. Of special importance was
Elizabeth Bott's Family and Social Network: Roles,
Norms, and Extended Relationships in Ordinary Urban
Families (1957).
By the end of the 1950s, anthropologists and other
social scientists were combining ethnographic obser-
vations drawn from specific case studies with national-
level census data to develop new ideas about trends
in urbanization in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
For example, the United Nations organized a con-
ference in 1959 on the theme of urbanization in Latin
America, at which Peruvian anthropologistJosC Matos
Mar presented the now-classic paper, "Migration and
Urbanization: The Barriadas of Lima." This paper,
and others like it, set the research agenda for the
following generation of scholars interested in rural-
urban linkages, peasant migrants to cities, and squat-
ter settlements as arenas of urban adaptation.
The 1960s
The growing interest in urban phenomena among
anthropologists, especially those in the United States,
was a result of the recognition that the traditional
subject matter of anthropological fieldwork-tribal
and peasant peoples-was increasingly being inte-
grated into an urban-dominated world. After 1963,
when John Gulick laid out an agenda for urban
anthropology,the War on Poverty in the United States
and the expansion of funding for international de-
velopment projects-especially in Latin America,
Africa, and Asia-substantially increased opportuni-
ties for anthropologists and other social scientists to
carry out significant urban research.
There was a steady expansion of urban research
by anthropologists during the 1960s, with particular
attention given to rural-urban migration, urban ad-
aptation, ethnicity, and poverty. Among the most often
cited works of the period are Andrew Whiteford's
 URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY

pioneering comparative ethnography of Popayan, anthropology). T h e widespread recognition of the

Colombia, and Quer~taro,Mexico, published as Two emergence of the subfield is also reflected in John
Cities in Latin America (1964); Kenneth Little's analy- Gulick's chapter "Urban Anthropology" in the mas-
sis, West Afiican Urbanization:A Study of Yoluntary sive HatidbooR of Social and Cultural Anthropology,
Associations in Social Chan~e- (1965); Lewis's La Vida: edited by John J. Honigrnann (1973).
A Puerto Rican FamiIy in the Culture ofpoverty (1965);
The distinctive problems of doing fieldwork in
Elliot Liebow's study TalIyi Corner:A Study of Negro
urban settings is considered in Anthropologists in Cities,
Streetcorner Men (1967); John Gulick's monograph
edited by George M. Foster and Robert V. Kemper
Tripoli: A Modern Arab City (1967); Lisa Redfield
(1974), a follow-up to Mangin's earlier volume. The
Peattie's critique of urban planning in Ciudad Guayana
focus on urban adaptation is also visible in "Adaptive
(Santo Tom6 de Guayana), titled The Viewfiom the
Strategies in Urban Migration," by Nancy Graves and
Barrio (1968); Owen Lynch's study The Politics of
Theodore Graves (1974), the first article about urban
Untouchability:Social Mobility and Social Change in a
anthropology to appear in the prestigious Annual
City of India (1969); J. Clyde Mitchell's edited vol-
Review of Anthropology. In the same year, another
ume Social Networkr in Urban Situations: AnaIysis of
reader was published, City Ways:A Selective Reader in
Personal Relationships in CentralAfiican Towns (1969);
Urban Anthropology, edited by John Fried1 and Noel
and Ulf' Hannerz's outsider perspective on Washing-
J. Chr'isman.
ton, D.C., titled Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture
and Community (1969). The first integrated textbooks devoted to urban
anthropology appeared before the end of the 1970s.
The decade of the 1960s ended with the publi-
In 1976 Douglas J. Uzzell and Ronald Provencher
cation of papers delivered at the 1968 Southern
coauthored the slim volume UrbanAnthropology,soon
Anthropological Society conference as UrbanAnthro-
followed by another textbook, jointly written by Edwin
pology.- Research Perspectives and Strategies, edited by
Eames and Judith Granich Goode and titled Anthro-
Elizabeth Eddy (1968). Two similar conferences, one
pology and the City (1977), which focuses on cities in
held at an American Anthropological Association
a cross-cultural perspective, urban ethnography, "what
meeting and the other at the School ofAmerican Re-
to do and what not to do," and includes a chapter
search in Santa Fe, New Mexico, also took place in
on the culture of poverty. By contrast, in Urban
1968. Their joint results appear in The Anthropology
Anthropology: Cities in Their Cultural Settings (1977),
of UrbanEnvironments, edited byThomas Weaver and
Richard G. Fox identifies five different types of cit-
Douglas White (1972).
ies-regal-ritual
- cities, administrative cities, mercan-
The 1970s tile cities and city-states, colonial cities, and industrial
cities--and discusses the relationship between cities
By the beginning of the 1970s, urban anthropology
and the societies in which they are embedded. In 1978
finally was being defined by most of its practitioners
Richard Basharn wrote UrbanAnthropology: The Cross-
as a distinctive domain within cultural anthropology,
Cultural Study of Complex Societies in which he pro-
the major exception being Anthony Leeds (1972),who
vides a comprehensivediscussion of the study of urban
urged instead an interdisciplinary approach rather than
and complex societies; the origin and evolution of
a sub-disciplinary perspective on city systems. The
cities; rural-urban migration and the growth of cities;
result was a tremendous growth in textbooks, readers,
kinship in the city; migrants and urbanites; class, caste,
and reviews aimed at undergraduate and graduate stu-
and ethnicity; and urban ethnology and ethnology.
dents taking new courses in urban anthropology.
Peasants in Cities: Readings in the Anthropology of During this same period, anthropologists contin-
Urbanization, edited by William Mangin, was pub- ued to carry out a wide range of urban case studies
lished in 1970. By 1973,with the appearance of Aidan around the globe. Within the United States, James
Southall's edited volume Urban Anthropolou Cross Spradley opened the decade by publishing his prize-
Cultural Studies of Urbanization,the subfield of urban winning research, based on fieldwork in Seattle, titled
anthropology took its place among the burgeoning You Owe Yoursefa Drunk An Ethnography of Urban
number of specializations withln socioculturalanthro- Nomads (1970). Carol Stack published her ethno-
pology'(e.g., educational anthropology, medical an- graphic case study of a fictitious Midwest city, "Jack-
thropology, psychological anthropology, visual son Harbor," as All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival
URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
in a Black Community (1974). In 1977 Larissa Lomnitz
published Networks and Marginality: Life in a Mexi-
can Shantytown, and Robert V. Kemper, following
upon George M. Foster's long-term study of
Tzintzuntzan, MichoacPn, wrote Migration and Ad-
aptation: Tzintzuntzan Peasants in Mexico City.
Meanwhile, Helen Safa had published The Urban Poor
of Puerto Rico (1974) and Michael Whiteford, in his
1976 book The Forgotten Ones: Colombian Country-
men in an Urban Setting provides a restudy of his
father's earlier work on Popay5n.
The significance of urban anthropology within
Latin American studies was demonstrated by the
publication of two major collections of original ar-
ticles. The first was uAnthropological Perspectives on
Latin American Urbanization," volume 4 (1974) of
Latin American Urban Research, edited by the politi-
cal scientists Wayne A. Cornelius and Felicity M.
Trueblood.The second collection, Urbanization in the
Americasji-om its Beginnings to the Present, edited by
Richard P. Schaedel,Jorge E. Hardoy, and Nora Scott
Kinzer (1978), combined anthropological and histori-
cal perspectives.
London was the focus of two important case stud-
ies of immigrants. James Watson's Emigration andthe
Chinese Lineage (1975) deals with people from Hong
Kong's New Territories, and Nancy Foner's Jamaican
Farewell (1978) analyzes the experiences of Jamaican
migrants in London. George Gmelch carried out
fieldwork in Dublin, published as The Irish Tinkers
(1977). In continental Europe, Thomas Belmonte
reported on an impoverished neighborhood in Naples,
Italy, in The Broken Fountain (1979), in the same year
that Irwin Press published a comprehensive study of
urbanism and behavioral constraints in Seville, Spain,
titled The City as Context. One of the few studies of
urbanization in communist Europe was carried out
by Andrei Simi-, who reported his results in The
Peasant Urbanites:AStudy ofRural-Urban Mobility in
Serbia (1973). Further afield, Sylvia Vatuk's work in
India was published as Kinship and Urbanization
(1972), and Alan Rew discusses his study of Port
Moresby in Social Images and Process in Urban New
Guinea (1974).
The 1980s
During the 1980s there appeared a second genera-
tion of readers, textbooks, and surveys of the subfield
of urban anthropology, as well as a continuing torrent
of case studies of specific urban populations and places.
In 1980 two readers were published to compete for
the market in urban-anthropology courses-The first,
Urban Life, edited by George Gmelch and Walter F.'
Zenner, contained thirty contributions under the
rubrics of urbanism, migration and the adaptation of
migrants to city life, family and kin in urban society,
ethnicity and class in the city, the urban poor, and
urban fieldwork. The second, Urban Place and Pro-
cess, edited by Irwin Press and M . Estellie Smith,
contains thirty-four contributions arranged under the
categories of urbs ("the city") and urbanism, the study
of the urban milieu, the development and differen-
tiation of cities, urbanization, units of urban
organization, urban places, economic and cultural dif-
ferentiation in the city, and the urban future. In the
same year, another set of conference papers from a
meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society
appeared, under the title Cities in a Larger Context,
edited by Thomas W. Collins. In 1981 Ulf Hannerz
published another general text, Exploring the City:
Inyuiries Toward an Urban Anthropology.
Collectively, these four volumes set the stage for
a decade in which urban anthropologists raised their
sights (and also th-r sites) from local, isolated urban
communities to the linkages among communities
within regional, national, and international culturd
and political-economic systems. The resultant trans-
formations in the work of urban anthropologists
involved not only a change of geographical scale but
also more attention to historical issues. A cursory
review of major works published during the 1980s
makes clear the shift in fieldwork strategies and
theoretical frameworks in urban anthropology.
In the United States, Herbert Applebaum wrote
Royal Blue: The Culture of Construction Workers(l981),
and William Pilcher published The Portland Long-
shoremen (1972). Michel Laguerre describes Haitians
in American Odyssey:Haitians in New York City (1984);
and Louise Lamphere combines the themes of
ethnicity, labor, and immigration with gender issues
in From Working Daughters to Working Mothers: Im-
migrant Women in a New England Industrial Commu-
nity (1987). Ida Susser describes a neighborhood in
Brooklyn, New York, in Norman Street: Poverty and
Politics in an Urban Neighborhood (1982), Sally Merry
gives a new twist to community studies in Urban Dan-
ger:Life in a Neighborhood $Strangers (1981),and Brett
W i a m s considers Washington, D.C., in Upscaling

Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington,D. C.
(1988). Ethnicity is an important theme in works such
as The Urbanization ofAmerican Indians by Russell
Thornton et al. (1982); Barrio Gangs: Street L f e and
Identity in Southern Calfornia by James Diego Vigil
(1988); Chinatown: Economic Adaptation and Ethnic
Identity of the Chinese by Bernard Wong (1982);
Transforming the Past: Tradition and Kinship among
Japanese Americans by Sylvia Yanagisako (1985); and
Women? Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers
ofthe Santa Clara Elley by Patricia Zavella (1987).
The agenda for research in Latin America was
established by the general survey volume, Latin
American Urbanization, by Douglas Butterworth and
John Chance (1981), which covers the city in history;
why people move; who moves from whereselectiv-
ity and migration; return migration, brokerage, and
effects on the community; migrant adaptation-hn-
ship, networks, and small groups; the urban class struc-
ture; voluntary associations; housing, poverty, and
politics; and international migration. Important works
issued during the 1980s on these themes included
Diane Austin's Urban L f e in Kingston, Jamaica: The
Culture and C h s Ideology ofTvo Neighborhoods (1984);
Nancy Foner's Jamaican Migrants: A Comparative
Analysis of the New York andLondon Experience (1983);
Michael Higgins's Somos ~ o c a ~ o s : ' A n t h r o ~of
olo~~
Urbanismandpoverty (1983); Peter Lloyd's The "Young
Towns"oflima:Aspects ofurbanization in Peru (1980);
Susan Lobo's A House of My Own: Social Organiza-
tion in the Squatter Settlements of Lima, Peru (1982);
Kathleen Logan's Haciendo Pueblo: The Development
o f a Guadalajaran Suburb (1984); and Carlos Velez-
Ibaiiez's (1983) Bonds of Mutual Trust: The Cultural
Systems of Rotating Credit Associations Among Urban
Mexicans and ~hicano;(1983).
Urban anthropologists produced detailed urban
ethnographies as well as regional syntheses. Among
the most important of these diverse works the fol-
lowing deserve mention: Soraya Altorki and Donald
Cole describe the transformation of the 'Unayzab in
their Arabian Oasis City (1989); Sandra Barnes ex-
amines politics in Lagos, Nigeria, in Patrons andpower
(1986); Theodore Bestor restudies Tokyo (first de-
scribed in 1958 by sociologist Ronald P. Dore) in his
monograph Neighborhood Tokyo (1989); Patricia
Caplan examines women and their organizations in
Madras in Class and Gender in India (1985); Ruth
Finnegan extols the importance of amateur music-
URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
making in the "new" city of Milton Keynes, England,
in The Hidden Musicians (1989), a study called "per-
haps the finest urban ethnography of the 1980s" by
Roger Sanjek (1990); Marianne Gullestad provides
a case study of family life and friendship among young
working-class mothers in urban Norway in Kitchen-
Table Society (1984); Michael Kenny and David
Kertzer edited a collection of papers, Urban Life in
Mediterranean Europe (1983), that contains overviews
and case studies of urban-anthropological research in
Spain, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece; Kertzer also
wrote a monograph about religion and politics in
Bologna, Italy, titled Comrades and Christians (1980);
Margaret Lock discusses the varieties of medical ex-
perience in her widely acclaimed book East Asian
Medicine in Urban Japan (1980); Gary McDonogh
crafts a social history of power in the industrial era
in GoodFamilies ofBarcelona (1986); Leith Mullings
evaluates mental healing in urban Ghana in Therapy,
Ideology, and Social Change (1984); and Lillian Trager
analyzes migration and family interdependence in the
Philippines in her monograph The City Connection
(1988).
CONTEMPORARY CONCEPTS
AND METHODS
Whereas the efforts of urban anthropologists in the
1960s and 1970s were focused on issues (e.g., migra-
tion, family and kinship, social networks, poverty,
ethnicity, and urban adaptation) derived from or con-
trasted with traditional rural-based fieldwork, by the
1980s anthropologists had expanded their interests to
include virtually every dimension of urban life--from
individual life stories to city neighborhoods and
institutions (e.g., hospitals, schools, jails) to linkages
among places and populations of different scales
within the overall urban system. Anthropologists
began explicitly to turn their attention to class-based
models of cities and their contexts, the impact of
colonialism on cities, and their integration into a
worldwide economic system. As a result, urban an-
thropology became more integrated into the discourse
of the other social sciences, and urban anthropolo-
gists cited nonanthropological works more frequently
and with less hesitation.
The focus on extended communities in the con-
temporary period simply reflects the ethnographic
reality confronting humans throughout their daily
lives. Four splendid examples of this broadened ap-
proach to urban systems are: for Mexico, Lane Ryo
URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
Hirabayashi examines mountain Zapotec migrant
associations in Mexico City in the monograph Cul-
tural Capital (1993), and in a prize-winning volume,
Shadowed Lives (1992), Leo R. Chavez illuminates
the undocumented Mexican immigrants in Southern
California; for the Caribbean, George Gmelch de-
scribes the lives of Barbadian migrants abroad and
back home in his study Double Passage (1992), and
Eugenia Georges examines migration, development,
and cultural change in the Dominican Republic in
The Making of a Transnational Community (1990).
A critical perspective on urban history and culture
is reflected in two outstanding works: Learning
Capitalist Culture: Deep in the Heart o f T ~ a (1990)
s world in urban ethnography on a region-by-region
by Douglas E. Foley, and Sociallneyuality in Oaxaca:
A History of Resistance and Change by Arthur Murphy
and Alex Stepick (1991). O n the other hand, con-
cerns with the symbols of community as place and
space are evident in the first two volumes published
in the series, Contemporary Urban Studies, edited by
Robert V. Kemper and M. Estellie Smith; Robert
Rotenberg and Gary McDonogh have assembled a
revealing volume of original contributions in The
CulturalMeaning $Urban Space (1993); and Ruth H.
Landman discusses cooperatives and community
gardens in Washington, D.C., in her monograph
Creating Community in the City (1993).
PROFESSIONAL DIMENSIONS
OF URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
The journal Urban Anthropology (UA) was founded
in 1972 by Jack R. Rollwagen. Because U A included
only articles during its first three years, it was accom-
panied by the Urban Anthropology Newsletter (UAN),
edited by Robert V. Kemper. In 1985 U A changed
its name to Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cul-
tural Systems and World Economic Development (UAS),
which suggests that anthropological studies of cities
and their cultural subsystems may best be conceptu-
alized within a worldwide cultural system.
In 1979 Rollwagen founded and served as first
president of the Society for Urban Anthropology
(SUA), which subsequently became a unit of the
American Anthropological Association (AAA).In its
early years, SUA did not publish a journal, although
there was a newsletter, first edited by Leonard
Plotnicov. In 1986 SUA initiated its own semi-an-
nual journal, City U Society (CS). The relatively small
SUA membership (never more than 500) made
publication of CS financially burdensome, however,
and beginning in 1994 it was published only once a
year. O n the other hand, SUA sponsored two pub-.
lications that comprisk urban anthropology course
syllabi: Urban Anthropology in the 1980s and Urban
Anthropology in the 1990s, the latter edited by
Lawrence Breitborde and Irene Glasser (1990, revised
1995).
A provocative assessment of the subfield is in Roger
Sanjek's review article, "Urban Anthropology in the
1980s" (1990). After a brief historical review of the
field, Sanjek discusses "urban anthropology as anthro-
pology" and then provides a splendid coverage of the
basis, including the United States, the Caribbean and
Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and North
Africa, Africa, and East Asia, and Southeast Asia and
Oceania. H e concludes his review with the sugges-
tion that "the urban anthropology of the 1980s...
[may] offer all anthropologists conceptual pathways
to practice."
An alternative view of the development of the
subfield is offered in an essay (Kemper 1991b) which
appears as the introduction to a special twenty-year
index issue of U A and UAS. This 192-page double
issue of WAS contains abstracts as well as author,
subject, and geographical indices for 362 articles
published in UAand UAS in the first twenty volumes.
The first of two other valuable sources of infor-
mation about U.S.-based urban anthropologists and
their works is a special issue (Kemper 1991a) of UAS
containing the "Directory of Urban Anthropologists,"
which not only provides information on nearly 900
individuals (mainly in the United States) but also
includes Kernper's essay "Urban Anthropology in the
1990s: The State of its Practice."The second source,
another UAS special issue (Kernper 1993), is "Urban
Anthropology: A Guide to U.S. and Canadian Dis-
sertations,"which offers information on 1,717 anthro-
pological dissertations with urban subject matter.
CONCLUSION
Urban anthropology is now accepted as an important
subfield of the anthropological discipline, not just in
the United States and by the American Anthropo-
logical Association,but also on a worldwide basis.This
recognition is evident in the creation of the Commis-
sion on Urban Anthropology in the late 1970s within
the International Union of Anthropological and

Ethnological Sciences (IUAES).The commission not
only conducts sessions at the congresses of the IUAES,
held every five years, it also sponsors international
conferences and occasional publications on urban an-
thropology.
Given the diversity of contemporary sociocultural
anthropology, as well as the broad range of studies
carried out under the rubric of the subfield of urban
anthropology, it seems appropriate to recall the pro-
phetic words at the end of Richard Basham's (1978)
textbook: "Urban anthropology is in no sense a threat
to the integrity of anthropology. Rather, it is the
promise of anthropology's hture."Toward the end of
the twentieth century, research and teaching about
cities and urban systems had become a widespread
and standard component of contemporary cultural
anthropology. Whether one is trying to deal with
problems as far removed from city life as the destruc-
tion of tropical rain forests or as intimately involved
with urbanism as violence and ethnicity in inner-city
slums, one is constantly reminded that the world
system is tightly tied to metropolitan nodes of power
and culture. Perhaps in this sense we are all becoming
urban anthropologists, even though only a minority
of cultural anthropologists are directly concerned with
theories of urbanization and urbanism or the meth-
odologies required for studying them comparatively
and historically.
SEE ALSO: Adaptation; American An thropologicalAsso-
ciation; Archaeology; Biological An fhropology; Cities;
CriticalAnthropology;Ethnicity; Family and Household
Structure; Fieldwork; Gender Dzfferences and Roles;
Linguistic Anthropology; Migration; Network Analysis;
Peasants; Poverty
Note: In treating the development of urban anthro-
pology and its contemporary concepts and methods,
the authors mention more than seventy ethnographic
case studies. Since author, title, and year of publica-
tion is provided for these as they appear, we have only
included general references in the bibliography.
BASHAM,RICHARD.Urban Anthropology.. The Cross-
Cultural Study of Complex Societies. Palo Alto, Calif.:
Mayfield, 1978.
Born, ELIZABETH. Family and Scoial Network: Roles,
Norms, and External Relationships in Oridnary
URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
Urban Families. London: Tavistock, 1957.
BREITBORDE, LAWRENCE B., and IRENE GLASSER, eds.
UrbanAnthropology in the 1990s. Washington, D.C.:
Society for Urban Anthropology; American An-
thropological Association, 1990.
EAMES,EDWN, and JUDITH GRANICHGOODE,eds.
Anthropology and the City:An Introduction to Urban
Anthropology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1977.
COLLINS, THOMAS W. ed." Cities in a Larger Con-
text". Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings,
number 14, Robert L Blakey, Series Editor. Ath-
ens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press,
1980.
CORNELIUS, WAYNE A., and FELICITY M. TRUEBLOOD,
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