ABSTRACT

Fieldwork by anthropologists in urban locales began in the 1930s and 1940s, with its theoretical direction set mainly by the social anthropology of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski. During these decades the ethnographic method of participant observation was used by W. Lloyd Warner and his students in ‘Yankee City’, Chicago and Natchez, Mississippi; by Robert Redfield and associates in Yucatan; and by William F. Whyte in Boston (1943), Edward Spicer among the Yaqui in Tucson, Arizona, Horace Miner in Timbuctoo, William Bascom in Ife, Godfrey Wilson in Zambia, and Ellen Hellmann and Bengt Sundkler in South Africa. This work shared inspiration with contemporaneous studies of peasant and rural communities in Europe, North America, Japan and China, and of acculturation to colonialism among kin-ordered ‘tribal’ peoples. This research in towns and cities (not then

called or thought of as a separate ‘urban anthropology’) also had non-anthropological roots. The most important were in the University of Chicago sociological tradition of research into the neighbourhoods and institutions of that city initiated by Robert Park after World War I (Hannerz 1980). Drawing upon the nineteenthcentury British social survey methods of Charles Booth and others, and influenced by continental European social theorists, Park and his colleagues moved in an ethnographic direction as they studied immigrant communities, neighbourhood

zones and leisure life. They tied their work to an over-arching theory of industrial city organization and concentric outward growth. Though never acknowledged, this theory is largely anticipated in †Frederick Engels’s analysis (1969 [1892]) of the impact of capitalism on Manchester in the 1840s. The first academic application of Booth’s

approach in the USA, however, was W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro (1899). Also influenced like Park by the new settlement house movement, this study was undertaken two decades before the Chicago work was to begin. Du Bois, the first African-American Harvard PhD, was a historian and his Philadelphia study drew as much on documentary historical contextualization as on statistical analysis of his extensive interviews. Although he lived in the neighbourhood he studied, direct insights from participant observation are few; they appear mainly in passages on churches, social classes and amusements, and race prejudice. Nonetheless, in articulating the informant’s point of view, and in enriching theoretical analysis of racial division (a major non-kin principle of human organization in contemporary complex societies), Du Bois’s community study had lasting impact, as was evident in the Warner-sponsored studies of race by Allison Davis and St Clair Drake during the 1930s (see Harrison 1988).