In the 1970s anthropologists debated whether they should proceed with micro-studies of the city’s poor or its recent migrants—an anthropology “in the city,” as it was called—or with macro-studies of the city as a whole—an anthropology “of the city.” Ten years later the debate was resolved by a tide of studies that focused neither at the micro-level nor at the macro-level but rather at the links in between, that is, the webs of cultural, economic, and political relationship binding the shantytown, ghetto, or neighbourhood to the city and even beyond, to the world economy.
In urban cultures after the establishment of the capitalist world system these webs consist of the economic, political, and cultural strands linking mass-communications cities in the core with neocolonial cities in the Third World into a world system of unequal political and economic relationships. For precapitalist urban cultures these webs consisted of power and wealth inequalities and cultural domination within the urban culture. These different webs effect variant urban cultural roles and cultural forms.
Urban anthropologists in the 1970s also worried over the contribution their studies of urban cultures would make to the general anthropological concept of culture. Oscar Lewis initiated a debate about the nature of culture when he put forward his notion of an urban “culture of poverty.” He believed the culture of poverty socialized the poor into political apathy, immediate gratification, broken families, and passive responses to their economic plight, and he argued that the poor could not lose this debilitating culture even if they ceased to be poor. A massive scholarly critique of the culture of poverty concept also exposed the limitations in the traditional anthropological conception of culture on which it was based. This critique argued that the poor’s marginality was not a result of their internalized culture but rather of their abject material conditions given the world system (as in the case of the shantytown research cited above). In the face of this critique, the traditional notion of culture—that it was a weighty set of traditions compelling individuals to act in certain ways—gave way to a conception of the constant production of cultures (urban or nonurban) through continual human action—people working with their hands and minds—in response to the material conditions of everyday life.
Richard G. Fox