Anthropology in the City

In this session we will focus more closely on what it means to do anthropology in an urban environment, and how methods should be adapted from the older, rural traditions of ethnographic research. Particular attention will be paid to research in capital cities, from Athens and Rome to Bangkok and Shanghai. This session will also include consideration of planners and architects as ethnographic as well as historical “subjects,” and will cover issues such as gated communities, gentrification, and spatial cleansing, and we will ask at what point and in what ways anthropologists should become engaged in the struggles of the people they study.