Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
96
Explorers. So I knew how to talk with dead ‘informants’ and to approach a field that was ‘far
away’ in more than one sense. Moreover, living in Madrid, ‘ports’ as an anthropological
subject were for me as exotic as the Eighteenth Century Northwest Coast of North America. I
was born and lived most of my life far from the sea.
Nevertheless, as the work progressed, I realized that there was a huge divide in the
field; namely, between those who
make
the port
—
stevedores, sailors, ship officers, port
authorities, administrators and so on
—
and those who
study
it. Port agencies, managers and
administrators were not interested in the heritage of the city, they just wanted to run an
efficient and profitable node of commerce and distribution. Old buildings were useful as long
as they had some economic function. Sometimes, heritage buildings were torn down in order
to make room for a shopping mall or a five-star hotel. Once aware of this division, I realized
that ports and port cities were not only strategic, vantage points for dealing with the
transformations related to urbanization and globalization; they were an excellent topic to
apply, develop or challenge what we know about ‘urban anthropology’.
What did I learn dealing with port cities? It seemed to me that most of the cross-
disciplinary influences Giuliana Prato and Italo Pardo so clearly show in their essay (2013)
are related to a historical moment. By the end of the nineteenth century cities were entering a
new modern configuration and the then new social sciences defined that moment particularly
well. The bias when we carry out our fieldwork is not just ethnocentrism, there are also
methodological and theoretical problems. We should be aware of the way that both theory and
our own understanding of the field may be inadequate to address current problems. An
example, to put it simply: the Chicago School of Urban Ecology naturalized a moral
dimension in their theoretical orientations. Most of the scholars of that School dealing with
Chicago were concerned with social problems and with the future of the city. It is not my
intent to criticize their moral grounds, yet cities are not moral creatures with ‘ordinary’
neighbourhoods and not so ‘ordinary’ slums or ghettos. The clash of different class moralities
were a paramount field of contention in port cities, at least from the middle of the nineteenth
century to the first third of the twentieth. Why impose our moral reading over those we find in
the field? Today this Chicago School-style moral reading of urban life is still present, too
present I would dare say, in many of my American colleagues’ work. Good urban
ethnographies do not need that dimension to be enlightening or useful from an activist point
of view.
The city, as seen by Nestor Garcia Canclini in 1990, is approached on a very specific
level of observation. He writes, ‘The anthropologist arrives in the city by foot, the sociologist
by car and via the main highway, the communication specialist by plane. Each registers what
he or she can and constructs a distinct and, therefore partial vision. There is a fourth
perspective, that of the historian, which is acquired not by entering but rather by leaving the
city, moving from its old center toward the contemporary margins. But the current center of
the city is no longer in the past.’ (Garcia Canclini 1995: 4).
There is another concern, well outlined by Prato and Pardo and (2013), which I would
like to stress. Entering the city on foot, that is, by means of an ethnographically grounded
approach, we should be mindful of the peculiarities of the cross-disciplinary and early
