Urban anthropology is the study of cultural systems and identities in cities as well as the various political, social, economic, and cultural forces that shape urban forms and processes. Although anthropologists have studied the city since the 1930s, the label urban anthropology became common only in the early 1960s. Interest in urban issues was originally an extension of the anthropological interest in peasants and rural areas. Using research methods developed for and through studies of small tribes and other societies, anthropologists studied spatially bounded communities such as ghettos, ethnic neighbourhoods, and “urban villages.” Social problems (especially poverty) were the focus of most urban anthropological research. In the 1960s and early ’70s, Oscar Lewis’s controversial “culture of poverty” thesis generated intense debates on the meaning of culture, the need for historical contextualization, 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 “primitive” societies and peasant communities as well as Western from non-Western cities. 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.

During the 1970s, urban anthropologists also shifted attention from studies in the city (i.e., viewing the city as merely a site for research) to studies of the city (i.e., making the urban dimension central to the analysis of relationships and symbols). Some argued that only the latter should be considered “urban anthropology.” Typologies continued to be formulated to map diverse urban forms. One common typology was based on a distinction between industrial and preindustrial cities. Within these two categories, other classifications were presented. Focusing on historical articulations between economic and political structures, Richard Fox, for example, distinguished among regal-ritual, administrative, mercantile, colonial, and industrial cities. Others have added types such as postcolonial, modernist, and postmodern cities.

Research in cities posed several methodological and conceptual challenges to anthropology. In particular, urban anthropologists were pioneers in questioning emphasis on holism and synchronic analysis. Political economy became useful in analyzing historical and contemporary forces that produce inequalities within and between cities. In addition, urban anthropologists tried to find other methods (such as network analysis and extended case studies) to research the city. By the early 1980s they also drew on methods and theoretical insights from other fields to grasp the complexity of urban life and to account for the multiple actors that shape the city and its spaces. Current studies are careful not to homogenize urban types and are sensitive to diversity between and within cities. In the early 1990s urban anthropologists began studying a broad range of practical and theoretical issues such as homelessness, spatial practices, popular culture, social movements and citizenship, gender and racial inequalities, global processes, and transnational connections.

National and transnational studies

With anthropology’s historical orientation toward non-European societies, after the end of World War II many anthropologists were confronted with successful national movements, as the old colonial empires of Asia and Africa gave way to newly independent states.

The new states gave rise to new questions in anthropology: What are the cultural dimensions of political movements in general? Do national movements, does nationalism, have particular cultural dimensions? Are national movements constituted culturally? To answer these questions, anthropologists borrowed the idea of “modernization” from political science and linked it to familiar anthropological objects, such as family and kin groups. In the 1960s the University of Chicago’s Committee on the Comparative Study of New Nations, which was composed of sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists, published Old Societies, New States, a collection of essays examining case studies of old cultural forms blending with new political institutions.

Modernization theory, however, was an intellectual project that developed in the shadow of the Cold War, and it was often more prescriptive of what might be than analytically descriptive of what was. Debates in later years focused on the shortcomings of the theory, and then the study of nationalism moved to the discipline of history, where the 19th-century roots of national movements were examined.

In the early 1980s Benedict Anderson, a political scientist, made the extremely influential move of analyzing nations as “imagined communities.” His argument that nations, like religions, are based on the relation of this world to the next allowed anthropologists to relate ideas of meaning and solidarity or culture and community to political movements. The 1980s then become a very productive time for the anthropological studies of nations. Yet these studies were formulated around ideas of a national culture, and this concept, other scholars argued, needed to be questioned. Ranajith Guha and the anticolonial historiographers of the subaltern studies collective argued on the one hand that nonelite groups share neither the political space nor the cultural world of national elites, and other anthropologists argued on the other hand that the idea that culture could be tied to a place such as a country was conceptually flawed.

Arjun Appadurai, a pioneer in the latter argument, went on to develop in a series of influential essays the anthropological field of transnational studies, which is based on an idea of culture not tied to a place but rather in flow. By thinking of these flows as making up “scapes” such as “mediascapes,” these works allow anthropologists to understand the relationship between, say, satellite TV or the World Wide Web and a country’s national development. This approach also enables new anthropological inquiries into a rather old phenomenon, that of diasporas. Interconnections in the 21st century work in new ways radically different from the old, and the study of diasporic groups and the countries they call home highlights for anthropologists another fascinating 21st-century question: What are the boundaries of the nation?

The study of gender

Gender has always been a topic of anthropological investigation, but the 1970s brought about a critical rethinking of assumptions about gender, spurred in part by the women’s movement and in part by the entrance of large numbers of women into academic careers. During the next quarter century, this rethinking opened up new conceptual pathways for considering not only the relationships between sex and gender, kinship and procreation, men’s work and women’s work, and public and private spheres but also the significance of gender to language, primatology, archaeology, religion, and cosmology. At first many studies of gender focused primarily on women since they had been underrepresented in the anthropological record, but the result was that gender came to stand for women. A primary question in these early studies was how and why women were subordinated in patriarchal social systems. Soon, however, the awareness that men, too, have gender sparked a much deeper analysis of the ways in which definitions of gender were mutually constructed. Rather than assuming that gender is a natural given, therefore universal, based on an extension of animal mating behaviour, new studies demonstrated that, just as different societies produce a variety of religious, kinship, and economic systems, they also vary in terms of gender systems. While it was often assumed that sex was the natural given and gender the cultural definition built upon that natural base, some studies have raised questions about the relation between sex and sexual orientation and, thus, whether there might be more than two genders and whether sex itself may, to a large extent, be culturally constructed. Studies of primates, long thought to hold the key to human behaviour, have shown that results depend to a significant extent on the theoretical lens through which scientists view their behaviour as well as on which primates are the object of study; this discovery has destabilized the ground on which many assumptions about gender were based. When the critical gender lens has been focused on the archaeological record, old biases and assumptions—for example, about “man the hunter, woman the gatherer”—have been overturned or significantly modified, new approaches to the study of the past and material culture have emerged, and origin stories have been changed.

Another area creatively affected by the focus on gender is that of linguistic anthropology: these researchers now note not just the gendered aspects of linguistic structure—pronouns, for example—but also the different ways in which women and men use language, asking to what extent gender is culturally constituted through linguistic practice over the life cycle. Other researchers have studied the way in which language lends connotations of gender to conceptual fields, for example, “soft” versus “hard” sciences, and how these labels may affect the women and men working in those fields.

Still others have raised questions about gender in topics that seem to have little connection to gender, such as colonialism and “Orientalism,” and in much broader systems including worldviews, theology, and cosmology; these researchers ask, for example, about the consequences for men and women when the deity is symbolically male and the earth is symbolically female. And some have even asked about the notions of gender implicit in the idea of the anthropologist and the anthropological endeavour itself. In short, the proliferation of anthropological studies of gender during the last quarter of the 20th century opened up new paths to yet unexplored areas in the 21st.