Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

THE UNHOMELY

premise of the assimilationist and the colonial relationship is one that has made inequality—political, social, epistemological—the axiomatic starting-point of all argument. Such assumed inequality becomes thereby secure against challenge and scrutiny, whether by the pen of governor or anthropologists. There are nevertheless possibilities for a very different type of overt engagement. One suggestion would be that the successful anthropologist of turn-of-millennium times must with full selfknowledge assume the status of the reflexive hybrid. In so doing he or she sheds, to the extent possible, their status as a representative (and certainly spokesperson) of a powerful nation-state and academy. Only if necessary strategically is it a status to be resumed in the process of dealing with governmental, multi-national and funding institutions. ‘Hybridity’ can take many forms. The message here is that of the novelist Walcott, that everyone has their right to hybridity—but included here is the anthropologist as well as the indigenous people.

The greatest strength of anthropologists is that we appreciate multiperspectivism. Within the universe of pluralities that we study, there are also plenty of ‘hybrids’, and ‘states of hybridity’. This multi-perspectival outlook is surely anthropology’s real potential. To translate all those blurred categories of human existence, now that is a worthwhile project. One way we can do this (acceptably) is systematically to undermine the exotica of Western obsessions, its use of, display of, things and peoples considered as exotic. To displace Western exotica is a worthy anthropological ambition.This is not to underplay the extent that people can differ, for perspicacious difference is the object of this message. Exotica and difference do not need to be conjoined.

We can diminish the exoticism rampant in anthropology (all that magic, all that ritual and scarification taken out of context) by focusing upon (accepting) the everyday of indigenous life, translating it in such a way that it becomes familiar to us. In other words we can become ‘at home with the unhomely’ (see Overing 1999). What about situated practices, their everyday ways of knowing and doing things, acting and responding? What about the sentiments and bodily styles that attract them, and those that offend? What about the homeliness of ‘the unhomely’? It is wise to remember that indigenous peoples see what they do as ‘everyday’, ‘ordinary’; for them what we do is ‘exotic’. An anthropology for ‘the unhomely’ would be where we, on our side, transmit the message that we too are local, and often bizarre in our solutions. Indigenous peoples usually do not need this particular lesson about themselves, and certainly not about us.They are usually very comfortable with the idea of shared knowledges, but for obvious reasons not so keen on the idea of assimilation. They from the start, not having our

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hegemonic ideas about knowledge and being more tolerant about difference, are usually much more open than we.

See also: Alterity, Culture, Gender, Home and Homelessness,

Human Rights, Movement, Situation and Context, Stereotypes

URBANISM

Do cities represent distinctive socio-cultural spaces? If so, is this because they are home to particular types of relationship, or attitude and mindset, or practices, norms, roles and ways of life? Or is it that cities are componential parts of wider social systems, regional and global, and as such are better seen as conduits in networks of relations that connect up the most localized interaction with the most far-flung? In either case, do cities play a central role in an evolutionary change of human being: from small-scale communities to ever-increasing large-scale associations?

It is questions such as these that an urban anthropology, an anthropology of urbanization and the city, has been interested to answer. For, even if ‘city’ is understood to be a vague concept—to demarcate simply a sizeable, dense settlement in whose more or less common physical space a relatively high level of accessibility between a relatively large number of people obtains (Hannerz 1980:243)—it is now claimed that more than half of the worlds population has become ‘urban’; and with some half-a-dozen cities boasting populations of greater than 15 million, there is no sign of this trend reversing. However fuzzy the category, in short, ‘city life’ is difficult, anthropologically, to discount.

An urban way of life

For Simmel (1971), cities are particular because they give rise to certain common psychological traits; in cities there is an intensification of nervous stimulation, so that a lasting and predictable sequence of psychic impressions (as in rural communities) is replaced by a crowding-in of rapidly changing, unexpectable and discontinuous images. City-dwellers thus become more mentally sophisticated but also more blasé. Similarly, for Durkheim (1964 [1893]), cities represent distinct environments due to the degree of role specialization likely to be found there, and the concentration of powerful social institutions.

Extending these lines of thought in the 1920s and 1930s, the Chicago School of (ethnographic) sociologists and anthropologists famously developed the notion of an ‘urban way of life’ which could be expected

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to replace a traditional rural one, in the same way that the burgeoning city of Chicago was transmogrifying both a rural hinterland and the stream of ex-rural migrants entering its portals. Central figures in the School were Robert Park and Louis Wirth. For Park, an examination of the impact of industrial-capitalist expansion on Chicago, its suddenly large population of immigrants, entrepreneurs and hoboes, partaking of their own communities, neighbourhoods and leisure pursuits, suggested that city life amounted to a meeting and mingling of ‘all sorts of people …who never fully comprehend one another’ (1968:26). At the same time, and recalling the medieval German proverb that ‘city air makes for freedom’, Park concluded that: ‘[t]he city is…the natural habitat of civilized man’ (1968:3).

In a celebrated paper, ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’ (1938),Wirth sought to detail just what made cities different: how a different domiciliary ecology gave rise to different types of people, identities and relationships. Defining a city as ‘a relatively large, dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals’, Wirth described the replacement of rural relations which were long-lived, knowledgeable and often derived from kinship, with urban relations which were impersonal, superficial, segmented, non-cumulative, unpredictable, and given to a faster turnover. Clearly also influenced by the nineteenth-century, premonitory writings of the likes of Henry Maine (1861—‘from status to contractual relations’) and Ferdinand Toennies (1957 [1887]—‘from natural communities to artificial associations’),Wirth imaged cities as distinct social systems, and an evolutionary stage set to change rural ways of life—folkways, folklore, all that was folksy—for ever.

Renowned, Chicago-sponsored, ethnographic studies were undertaken in such evolving urban milieux by the likes of Warner and Lunt (1941, 1942) and Whyte (1943), while Robert Redfield set out to examine the transformations as they occurred at the rural end of a ‘folk—urban continuum’. Communities, it was mooted, could be placed at various points along a continuum as, across time, they evolved from occupying the former pole to the latter. In studies of the Mexican village of Tepotzlan and then on the Yucatan peninsula (1930, 1941), Redfield sought to plot the urbanization of the rural in terms of the following diacritica: small-scale to large-scale; social homogeneity to social differentiation (regarding occupations, recreations, and so on); physical isolation to a predominance of networks of communication; group solidarity to individualism; personal, face-to-face relations to relations at a distance (in both physical terms and emotional); sacred experience and action to secular; illiteracy to literacy; practising Little Traditions of cultural learning to partaking of sophisticated Great Traditions.

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Cities as diverse

The particularity of the city in the Chicago model was to come under increasing attack, however. Were there not many urbanisms to consider: the industrial city as distinct from the pre-industrial city, the Western city as distinct from the non-Western, the colonial as distinct from the postcolonial, and so on? And did not this diversity mitigate against reductive generalization (such as, for instance, the notion that in the city kinship as a load-bearing social institution was superseded by non-ascriptive measures)? Instead of treating the urban and the rural as two discrete (types of) social system was it not more accurate to plot their relations in one overarching set of socio-economic structures?

In a historical analysis, then, Sjoberg (1960) described the logic of the pre-industrial city as pertaining more to a concentration of governmental, religious and literate elites than a dense population focused upon manufacture or commerce; in its running, moreover, it continued to favour social organization along familial and ethnic lines. In a series of ethnographic critiques (1951, 1961), Oscar Lewis retraced Redfield’s steps to Tepotzlan and then followed villagers from Tepotzlan to Mexico City. Not only was village life not personable and harmonic, he claimed, but urbanism did not bring about necessarily large-scale or irrevocable changes to social organization or lifestyle. Rather, people always and everywhere tend to live as members of small groups— families, neighbourhoods, associations—and not as nameless parts of amorphous masses; hence it is ‘peasants in cities’ that one can expect to find following processes of urbanization and migration.

In studies based in London (Wilmott and Young 1960; Young and Wilmott 1974), Washington (Hannerz 1969) and Boston (Gans 1965), comparable arguments were put forward for the existence of ‘urban villagers’: people partaking in face-to-face exchanges, living in relatively cohesive communities, based on kinship, familiarity and religiosity. Being encapsulated within an urban space and occupied in urban pursuits need not give rise to urbane identities.To the extent that cities-as-wholes have characters at all, they can be expected to be manifestations of the particular admixtures of the smaller and more traditional groupings that live on within them. This also calls for the study of the city within a broader context: as part of a flow of people and resources within a region and between regions.

This kind of regional emphasis was maintained in a series of studies undertaken by anthropologists working with Max Gluckman at Manchester in the 1950s and 1960s, and focused upon the urbanizing Copperbelt area of Central Africa (Mitchell 1969; Kapferer 1972). The

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specificity of situations rather than the particularity of cities was the logic employed here to apprehend ways of life; cities were spaces in which to undertake studies of (for instance) migration, poverty, ethnicity, networks and cultural change, rather than things to study in themselves.

Indeed, the 1960s and after have witnessed a flowering of studies of particular urban situations and topics: from urbanism and state-formation (Leeds 1994), to urbanism and musical subculture (Finnegan 1989), to urbanism and drug-gangs (Bourgois 1995). One area of special growth has been in studies of shanty-towns, and those post-colonial ‘squatter cities’ which have grown up in many Third World locations and today form the worlds largest conurbations (Lloyd 1982; Scheper-Hughes 1992). In what are often seen as reproductions of colonial-style relations of hierarchy, exploitation and even genocide, new urban elites peripheralize the plight of those masses who move to and fro within and between urban spaces but subsist well below the poverty line. In a critique (in turn) of Lewis’s notions of a ‘culture of poverty’ (1959), whose members are trapped in slum lives and whose fatalistic attitudes condemn them to reproduce their situation across the generations, recent study stresses the complexity of social organization and the flexibility of strategizing that goes on among shanty-town inhabitants (Wikan 1980). Not only do these latter play a vital role in the continuing wealth-creation of the elite, as cheap labour, but in an ‘informal economy’ (Hart 1982) beyond institutional control and official record, they engage in practices which lead to the maintenance of community ways of life against great odds.

Cities as soft

If an appreciation of the diversity of city life has mitigated against reductive generalization concerning urbanism, there are still occasional efforts to construct overviews. In Exploring the City (1980), Ulf Hannerz admitted that urbanism always represents the expression of a particular centripetal tendency in a particular encompassing society, but still felt it amounted to a discrete set of relations between a number of sociocultural domains. The domains of urban life included: household and kinship, provisioning, recreation, neighbouring, and traffic with strangers; and while only the range of provisioning and the patterns of trafficking with strangers may have a specifically urban quality to them, what gave the city its character was variation on the theme of relations between these domains.

At the same time as Hannerz seeks to identify this specifically urban quality, however, he grants that cities are ‘soft’ environments (1980: 249):

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