ABSTRACT
This chapter explores social and cultural studies of urban environments by combining insights from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Since the 1970s, many of the most important contributions within the field of urban studies have been the result of such interdisciplinary efforts. The regular translation meant that sections of the urban working class continued to possess, and transmit from one generation to the next, important rural skills. Elements of the urban context were consciously reproduced in rural settings and, being such a regular event, maintained an active interaction between two sides of a dualism usually considered in terms of a linear progression. Ethnicity involves, in Mitchell's formulation, principally a practice relating to the everyday behaviour of people in urban contexts. As Kapferer sees it: Mitchell's point was that in the modern urban industrial setting ethnic categories were culturally creative innovations entirely relevant to, and formed within, modern capitalist conditions.
