Subtitle: The New Urban Anthropology Reader
Editor: Setha M. Low
Subject: Urban Studies/soc/Cultural Anthropology
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2719-8
Paperback ISBN 0-8135-2720-1
Pages: 432 pp., 13 photos
Description: A collection of essays offering cutting-edge perspectives on the city
"Theorizing the City is a welcome addition to the urban anthropology literature. The informative essays make clear that anthropology has much to offer to urban theory and public policy debates."-Nancy Foner, editor of New Immigrants in New York and professor of anthropology at SUNY-Purchase.
"Using rich comparative material, this volume presents an intriguing anthropological vision of how cities are shaped. A major addition to a comparative anthropology of cities, this volume demonstrates the complex structural and cultural forces that shape urban experience."-Judith Goode, professor of anthropology and urban studies, Temple University
Anthropological perspectives are not often represented in urban studies, even though many anthropologists have been contributing actively to theory and research on urban poverty, racism, globalization, and architecture. Theorizing the City corrects this omission. Following a brief history of urban anthropology, emphasizing developments in the field during the 1990s, this volume presents twelve ethnographies of major cities in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe.
Five images of the city-the divided city, the contested city, the global city, the modernist city, and the postmodern city-serve as frameworks for the essays. Each section highlights current research trends such as poststructural studies of race, class, and gender in the urban context; political economic studies of transnational culture; and studies of the symbolic meanings and social production of urban spaces.
The contributors-Ted Bestor, Teresa P. R. Caldeira, Matthew Cooper, Steven Gregory, James Holston, Setha M. Low, Gary McDonogh, Deborah Pellow, Robert Rotenberg, Charles Rutheiser, Ida Susser, Josephine Smart, and Alan Smart- are leading scholars
in urban and spatial anthropology.
Setha M. Low is professor of environmental psychology and anthropology and director of the Public Space Research Group at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. She is the co-author of Children of the Urban Poor, and of many other books on urban and social issues.
