Kinship Theories: Descent, Alliance and Cultural

 

 

Youtube lecture on Kinship theories (Descent theory and Structuralism)

                             Youtube lecture on Kinship theories (Alliance theory and Cultural theory)

TYPES OF DESCENT AND KINSHIP

ROLES

THEORIES

DESCENT

ALLIANCE

CULTURAL

 

 

Spatial turn in Urban Anthropology

Contents

Urban Space studies: 1

Contested Urban Space. 1

Racialized Space. 2

Landscapes of Fear: 2

Global, Transnational and Translocal Spaces. 2

 

 

The methodological and theoretical use of spatiality within anthropology began with ethnographies that examined the relationship of architecture and culture. The concepts of space and place emerged in urban ethnographies through the collective work of anthropologists who employed material space as a strategy for interrogating the city (Bestor 2004; Cooper 1994; Holston 1989; Low 1999, 2000; Pellow 1996; Rotenberg and McDonogh 1993). Their work was directly influenced by French social theorists who theorized space in terms of the power dynamics of spatial relations and the meaning of everyday places and practices.

Drawing upon Foucault (1977), Paul Rabinow (1989) was one of the first anthropologists to link the growth of modern forms of political power with the evolution of aesthetic theories, and to analyze how French colonists in North Africa exploited architectural and urban planning principles to reflect their cultural superiority. James Holston (1989) also examined the state-sponsored architecture and master planning of Brasilia as a new form of spatial domination through which daily life became the target for state intervention.

Lefebvre’s (1991) well-known argument that space is never transparent, but must be queried through an analysis of spatial representations, spatial practices, and spaces of representation also became the basis of many anthropological  analyses. Nancy Munn (1996), and Stuart Rockefeller (2010) draw upon  Lefebvre to link conceptual space to the tangible by arguing that social space is both a field of action and a basis for action.

Other anthropological efforts started with Bourdieu (1977) and focused on how meaning and action interact in interdependent ways to inculcate and reinforce cultural knowledge and behavior. Bourdieu’s theory of practice provides the point of departure for Henrietta Moore (1986) who concurs that space only acquires meaning when actors invoke it. She argues that spaces are subject to multiple interpretations, such that Endo men and women may share the same conceptual structure but enter into it in different positions and therefore subject it to different interpretations (Moore 1986: 163). Margaret Rodman (1992) and Miles Richardson (1982), on the other hand, relied on Merleau-Ponty’s theories of phenomenology and lived space to focus attention on how different actors construct,   contest, and ground their personal experience. Alberto Corsín Jiménez (2003) goes even further and insists that “space is no longer a category of fixed and ontological attributes, but a becoming, an emergent property of social relationship. Put somewhat differently, social relationships are inherently spatial, and space an instrument and dimension of space’s sociality” (2003: 140).

Contested Urban Space

Ethnographic approaches to urban space are an important strategy for studying contestation and resistance in the city. When the appropriation of land for urban redevelopment threatens to limit access to or exclude certain groups from using public spaces, these plans may be contested by local segments of the population whose identity is variously bound to the site (Cooper 1994).

Racialized Space

The processes of racialization have been studied primarily in US and South African cites, focused on different aspects of racism and racial segregation In the United States, the displacement of Blacks through redlining and other real estate activities, analyses of gentrification in African American neighborhoods, and studies of housing abandonment by the city and federal government provide ethnographic explanations of American residential apartheid (Gregory 1998).

Landscapes of Fear:

Landscapes of fear have become a central focus in the spatialities research within urban anthropology, producing considerable debate about the nature of the fear and how it is produced. For example, Washington, DC’s and New York City’s emerging landscapes of fear are being produced by new defensive spatial designs, the erosion of public space through privatization and securitization, and memorials that constitute and reinforce affective responses to the built environment. Hoffman goes so far as to suggest that post-colonial African cities such as Freetown or Monrovia are organized according to a “logic of barracks” creating “spaces of the organization and deployment of violent labor.” For example, Bourgois (1995) describes the fear and sense of vulnerability experienced by El Barrio residents and by anthropologists faced with the everyday violence of those who sell crack in East Harlem, New York City.

Global, Transnational and Translocal Spaces

Within urban anthropology, transnational processes are defined by Ulf Hannerz (1992) based on cultural flows organized by nations, markets, and movements. He criticizes world-systems analyses as being too simplified to reflect the complexity and fluidity of the “creolization” of postcolonial culture. From this perspective, global space is conceived of as the flow of goods, people, and services – as well as capital, technology, and ideas – across national borders and geographic regions, resulting in the deterritorialization of space; that is space detached from local places. Within anthropology, the term “transnational,” was first used to describe the way that immigrants “live their lives across borders and maintain their ties to home, even when their countries of origin and settlement are geographically distant” (Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992: ix). Part of this effort was to understand the implications of a multiplicity of social relations and involvements that span borders. Eric Wolf (1982) laid the theoretical groundwork in his landmark history of how the movement of capital and labor has transformed global relations since the 1400s, dispelling the myth that globalization is a recent phenomenon. However, while Wolf’s approach to the issue of global connections is seminal, it deals primarily with issues of power and its allocation, and only indirectly with the spaces of daily life. It is much later, through the detailed ethnographies of the rhythms of daily life in transnational migrant communities, that a sense of transnational urban space emerges.

Translocal spaces are also produced by other forms of cultural deterritorialization such as travel, tourism, and religious diaspora. Marc Augé (1995) considers the airport a non-place, a space of supermodernity, where  customers, passengers, and other users are identified by names, occupation, place of birth, and address, but only upon entering and leaving. Airports along with superstores and railways stations are non-places that “do not contain any organic society” (1995: 112); social relations are suspended and this non-place becomes a site of coming and going. Studies of migration and translocality emphasize the role of diaspora communities within the new geography of globalization. The technologies of time– space compression – such as the use of international cellphones, the internet, and bargain airfares – enable diaspora communities to survive, even at the margins of the global economy. The power of the internet to mediate transnational urbanism is a key element in the continuity of culture and social relationships between less developed parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with developed regions of North America and Asia, but also between the metropole and the periphery. Secondary and mid-size cities are becoming  more important as urban processes are seen as spaces of flows of information, labor, and capital. It is in these studies that urban anthropology returns to some of its earliest concerns with the urban to rural and migration circuits, but now drawing upon a new arsenal of theory and bolstered by a critical perspective based on political economic analysis and a spatialities framework as well as ethnographic sophistication. 

 

 Zoom class lecture on Spatial turn in urban anthropology (bilingual, meant for my students)

Part I: https://youtu.be/1fnSMZtumtk

Part II: https://youtu.be/2P5K_5rkT7o

 

Urbanisation

 

Studies of urbanisation deal with city ward movement and modes of settlement; those of the 1950s-1970s urban anthropology heydays concerned Third World ‘peasants in cities’, the ‘adaptive functions’ of kinship and voluntary associations, and the persistence and creation of ethnic identities and political organization.

 

In anthropology the study of the process of Urbanisation started with a debate on weather rural and urban are two distinctively identifiable and isolated poles or not. The long history of ethnographic research especially because of the dominant paradigm of functionalism, scholars have been of the perception that villages were self sufficient units that doesn’t really have a strong connection with the urban centres. This very notion began to change with the Robert Redfield who developed a model of connection between the rural and urban poles, which is known as the folk-urban continuum. He tried to classify different types of community and historic process, which he illustrated with examples from the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico (Redfield 1941). At one end of the continuum was the "modern" city of Merida, while at the other was a small, "traditional" indigenous village. These two communities represented the most and the least developed types. In comparing them Redfield examined their respective technology, social organization, and worldview (Miner 1952). Thus Merida was a modern city populated with many individuals who participated in national and international affairs, were relatively free to make social and economic decisions, and had modern worldviews. In contrast the "Indians" of the village lived from foraging (see foragers) and swidden agriculture. They had a prescientific worldview and unlike the individual freedom and modernity of the urbanites, they were tightly incorporated into familial and community social relationships that restricted personal freedom. Intermediate between these polar extremes Redfield identified two other communities: a commercial rural "town" with close ties to the city, and the peasant community of Chan Kom, which had a mix of "traditional" and "modern" features but more closely resembled the village. Redfield saw historical change as occurring by the diffusion of modern technology, social forms, and ideas outward from the city toward the folk end of the continuum in a gradual process of modernization.

Robert Redfield later on collaborated with Milton Singer to study the process of urbanisation. With their intensive studies they argued that city is the center of change and that this susccptibility to change is reflected in two types of cities a) orthogenetic and b) heterogenetic. Recognizing the classic distinction between the preindustrial and post-industrial cities, they classified all postindustrial cities as heterogenetic. The orthogenetic city is one which is the center of native bureaucratic functions. Its population is relativelv homogeneous in culture of origin. These centers became the centers of a) Primary urbanization. The trend of primary urbanisation is to coordinate political economic, educational, intellectual and aesthetic activities to the norms provided by Great Tradition. In this process of urbanization the cultural role of the city is to maintain and continuously reintegrate the Great Tradition by injecting elements of Little Tradition through interaction of the city and peasantry. Redfield and Singer state that this form of the city is basically conservative. Although some change does take place as city and countryside interact with each other. They suggest that there is continuity between aspects of the Great Tradition at different points in time. Examples of this form of urbanization include Benares in India and Peking (Peiping) in China.

While orthogenetic cities formed by primary urbanization are preindustrial, heterogenetic cities include one elements of preindustrial city and postindustrial types. Heterogenetic cities include people of different cultural origins as well as from places outside the local social worlds.  In such cities these outside influences are from beyond the political boundaries of the state itself; in other cases, they are from beyond the immediate hinterland. The main function of such cities as a place for the exchange of goods and services require standardized value. As a place the divergent cosmologies and lifestyle are juxtaposed, the city becomes a narrator or sources of new ideas. If we refer back to the distinction previously made between great and Little tradition. A heterogenetic city of the preindustrial type is one in which a variety of Great Traditions interact with one another. Shifting our attention to the postindustrial heterogenetic city, we discover two types: the new administrative city and the financial city. The process of secondary urbanisation works in the industrial phase of the city, and is characterised by heterogenetic development. Thus, the effects of secondary urbanisation are those of disintegration. They opine that: “the general consequence of secondary urbanisation is the weakening of suppression of the local and traditional cultures by states of mind that are incongruent with those local cultures.” The first type carries forward the regional tradition, and the city becomes its epi-centre, the second type bring external elements to the city.

 

[Youtube link to the class lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2uWn-Qr0oc] 

 

 

Urban Ecology

 

Urban Ecology

Urban ecology, pioneered by Chicago sociologists in the 1920s, was central to the development of human ecology. Indeed the two terms are often used interchangeably.  Urban ecology applies principles derived from biological science to the explanation of spatial distribution in urban populations. This is said to result from ‘biotic’ competition for territorial advantage by human groups, each constituted by social basis, for example, common class position or ethnicity. It was an approach to the study of cities, social change, and urban life, these theories were introduced into sociology by the Chicago School to explain the competition between social groups for scarce resources such as land. The competition between groups was assumed to increase efficiency and promote a greater division of labor. These competitive struggles meant that distinctive social groups had adapted to their local environment, just as the competition between plants and their adaptation to the local environment in the natural world resulted in specialization. The balance between competition and co-operation functions to allocate members of a population to urban niches. The city, like the economy, was seen to produce a social equilibrium. According to the theory, groups occupy distinctive ‘natural areas’ or neighbourhoods. The concentric zone model proposed by Ernest Burgess is an ecological representation of this urban system. The ecological concepts of invasion, domination, and succession describe the stages of change occurring as groups relocate due to competitive pressures. However, unrestrained biotic competition makes social order impossible, so a second level of social organization (‘culture’) overlays and limits territorial competition. This involves communication, consensus, and co-operation, seen in both the natural areas occupied by socially homogeneous groups, and in city-wide mechanisms of integration, such as mass culture, the media, and urban politics. This competitive process was also described in terms of the concentric zone theory in which the central zone of the city is occupied by banks and the service sector, while the zone of transition emerges as the central business district expands outwards. Social classes are distributed through various zones according to rental values, house prices, and the accessibility of work. The manual workers live in the third zone and the fourth zone houses the middle class. The fringe of the city is a commuter belt. This theory helps us to understand how migrants move into run-down areas of the city where rental costs are low and, as a result of social mobility, they can move eventually to better-quality housing as they join the middle class. The urban ecology school embraced a number of prominent American sociologists,  including Robert Ezra Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie who published The City (1925). It is not clear that there is a systematic theory of the urban ecology; there appears to be rather a collection of assumptions about how cities develop over time. Another member of the Chicago School, Louis Wirth, following the approach of Georg Simmel, wrote his famous “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (1938, American Journal of Sociology) in which he described the anomie and anonymity of city life.

 

Urban ecology has been criticized because its assumptions are too simple to explain the variations between cities, but its basic notions (about the central business district, transition zones, and the urban distribution of social classes) continue to influence the work of modern sociology. Few sociologists now accept the biologically derived assumptions underlying urban ecology. However, the urban ecologists' use of Chicago as a research laboratory contributed greatly to the development of empirically grounded sociology and its research methods, influencing directly the development of urban sociology, community studies, cultural sociology, the study of deviance and illness, social and religious movements, the family and race relations, and rural sociology. The recollections by Helen MacGill Hughes of her training in Chicago shed an interesting light on the (at times naïve) methodology of urban ecology.

 

Youtube class lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlnEgCSEYkc&ab_channel=AnthropologyforBeginners