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P08b


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Seeing like a city? Reimagining urban anthropology 
Convenors:
Catherine West
Matt Barlow
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Format:
Panel
Sessions:
Tuesday 30 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney

Short Abstract:

The city is a challenging ethnographic field site which is often conceived as a place of material, political, and economic excess. This panel aims to reimagine the city as a site that also includes the immaterial, ideological, virtual, and spiritual.

Long Abstract:

'That we construct "religion" and "science" is not the main problem; that we forget that we have constructed them in our own image - that is a problem.'

Bell (1996, p. 188).

We invite you to consider how anthropologists might have constructed 'the city' in their own image, and promptly forgotten that they have done so. As a large physical entity with complex fast-moving parts, the city is a challenging ethnographic field. It requires 'political imagination' (Hoffman 2017) and a maddening flexibility to appreciate its specificities and holism simultaneously, the kind of reflexive work that anthropologists do best. However, while the anthropology of the urban has the ambition of 'seeing like a city' (Mack & Herzfeld 2020) it struggles to find a position that balances both affinity and distance. For example, recent urban anthropology tends to overlook kinship and religion to instead focus on political economy. Is this an un-reflexive repetition of Durkheim's separation of the sacred and the profane, exacerbated by anomie? Or perhaps an attempt to remain relevant within an extant neoliberal system, where religion is out, and infrastructure is in? What gets obscured in the assumption of the city as a secular place of development and material excess? We invite papers that speak to the theoretical, methodological, and ethical challenges of an urban anthropology that is attuned to the immaterial, ideological, virtual, and spiritual.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Tuesday 30 November, 2021, -
Panel Video visible to paid-up delegates