And thus begins yet another blog, another entry into the burgeoning field of anthropology blogs. We hope that this site will serve as an ongoing resource for people interested in what it means to be human in an urban context. In the process, we hope to foment discussion on what that unsettled term, “urban”, even means. And heck, maybe even a little bit about what “human” means. Please bear with us as we get things set up around here. (And in the name of transparency, please don’t be alarmed if this post disappears at some point — we just want to get something up so the site actually looks inhabited.)
UrbanHuman
exploring urban anthropology and related fields
Heard! Thanks, Bascom!
Besides thinking about being “human in an urban context,” it might be interesting to think about being “urban in a human context.” Not to be totally old school, but I think something that is perhaps obvious that Wirth wrote in 1938 still deserves much attention.
“The degree to which the contemporary world may be said to be ‘urban’ is not fully or accurately measured by the proportion of the total population living in cities. The influences which cities exert upon the social life of man are greater than the ration of the urban population would indicate, for the city is not only in ever larger degrees the dwelling-place and the workshop of modern man, but it is the initiating and controlling center of economic, political, and cultural life that has drawn the most remote parts of the world into its orbit and woven diverse areas, peoples, and activities into a cosmos.”
Wirth’s point reminds me of a number of moments, images, and unsettled ways of thinking about people and places. While doing fieldwork, a friend said to me, “So you’re studying cosmopolitanism as something that lives in people instead of something that lives in cities?” Perhaps she should have been the one to write my research grant proposal. I had never thought of my interest in such terms: that the stuff cities get called “cosmopolitan” for are not restricted to such places.
While one’s geographic location still matters, less and less it seems do places produce social relations and ways of being that can only be found in such places. Flows flows flows, scapes, scapes, scapes. So many that it causes people to jump too hastily to the conclusion that place DOESN’T matter–e.g. we now know that simply living in a city doesn’t make a person anymore “cosmopolitan-minded” than someone living on the outskirts of a city or even far from one. The city seems to live everywhere these days, so how/why, then, does place still matter? Why are some city folk more in-tune with cosmopolitan sensibilities than others? Why can the same be said for non-city folk? What mechanisms continue to ground people? And why does any of this even matter?