Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
84
DISCUSSIONS AND COMMENTS
Forum
‘Urban Anthropology’
This Forum on ‘Urban Anthropology’, started last year in
Urbanities
(Vol. 3 No. 2, 2013: 79-
132), stimulated several scholars to contribute their reflections and comments. Below, in
alphabetical order, those that have reached us in time for publication in the present issue.
Anya Ahmed
,
Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer in Social Policy, University of Salford
The detailed essay by Giuliana Prato and Italo Pardo on the history and development of urban
anthropology (2013) raises important theoretical and methodological questions regarding
disciplinary divides and influences, research contexts and foci. I suppose I am commenting
from the position of someone who occupies the blurred space between disciplines:
theoretically influenced by sociology, methodologically inspired by anthropology and
substantively located in social policy. I would like to offer my reflections and brief comments
on a particular cross-disciplinary influence highlighted by Prato and Pardo and to contribute
to debates on whether the sociological distinction between urban and rural life remains as
salient in an era of globablisation and international migration. I suggest that studying
‘community’
(Gemeinschaft)
within the context of ‘society’
(Gesellschaft)
has the capacity to
illuminate processes of social continuity as well as social change. Community can be
understood as multiple and overlapping forms of belonging (Ahmed 2011) and thus can be
used to explain different forms of belonging in the modern world (Delanty 2003). My main
argument here is that using community as a lens to understand how and to what people
construct belonging —
in urban as well as rural settings —
highlights social continuity as well
as social change. Further, how people experience belonging has significance in relation to
how they see themselves in temporal as well as spatial contexts.
Conceptually, community is characterised by ambiguity, although it is broadly
considered to be a positive feature of social and institutional life (Crow 2002a). Community
studies characterise a range of academic disciplines and community is also a feature in UK
policy circles, evidenced by New Labour’s ‘Community Cohesion’ project and the
Conservative-led Coalition ‘Big Society’ initiative. Focusing on community allows us to
contextualise individual agency and social relations and processes within wider contexts
(Crow 2002b). The discourse underpinning community is often one of loss: modernity and
social change are seen as destroying community (Delanty 2003) and this leads to an
idealisation of the past. Nostalgia too is a feature of community rhetoric and imagined
community (Anderson 1983, 2006) can provide a sense of belonging to multi-dimensional
communities and social continuity within the context of social change.
