Urbanities,
Vol. 3 • No 1 • May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
94
DISCUSSIONS AND COMMENTS
On Classical Ethnography:
A Comment Inspired by Leslie Bank’s Home, Spaces, Street Styles
François Ruegg
(University of Fribourg, Switzerland)
As the anthropologists Eriksen and Low mention on the back cover of Leslie Bank’s
Home,
Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City
(Pluto Press 2011),
this book certainly exemplifies the significance of classical ethnography in urban anthropology.
It offers a very deep and well documented ethnographic analysis, dealing with apartheid and
post-apartheid South-Africa. It is classical in the sense that it prioritises fieldwork. Deep and
wholesome, since it considers the conurbation of East London not only as the framework for
participant observation in a changing environment, but also as a built (as a matter of fact,
destroyed and reconstructed) environment in a broader sense, that is, composed of houses,
hostels, shacks or shanty towns and even significant courtyards. The book should be identified as
belonging to the general anthropological trend of
revisiting
classical fields of ethnography which
has occupied many anthropologists in the aftermath of decolonization. Here Leslie Bank brings
us back to East London, to revisit a famous series of ethnographies published in the 1950s by
Philip and Iona Mayer (
Xhosa in Town
). Through the study of the transformation of these
‘places’, the author builds a map which can be read through different keys. Spatial, socio-
economic and political interpretations add to the comprehension of the setting. However in the
late 1960s Mayers came under criticism by a ‘humanitarian’ movement in urban anthropology
which tended to focus on the social deficits rather than on the organization of space and life in
the urban areas. Hence Bank’s scope does not just add another ethnographical flash-back to a
fashionable critical anthropology, but attempts to restore and empirically update the whole
history of East London and, above all, its social life; as he points out ‘it is a historical
anthropology of urbanism in an “ordinary” South African city’(p. viii). This gives the reader a
chance to evaluate the changes that occurred there at diverse historical moments throughout the
