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Urban History, Culture and Urban Ethnography
Author(s) -
Sanjek Roger
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
city and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.308
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1548-744X
pISSN - 0893-0465
DOI - 10.1525/city.2000.12.2.105
Subject(s) - ethnography , anthropology , sociology , urban anthropology , politics , power (physics) , applied anthropology , urban planning , political science , law , urban density , ecology , physics , quantum mechanics , biology
Three instances of Louise Tilly's influence on and engagements with anthropology are discussed: first, her work on families, households, and women's work; second, her critique of anthropology for descriptions lodged in "the ethnographic present" rather than in real past and present events; third, a call for documenting political process and collective action. Anthropology over the past two decades has largely overcome her temporal critique, and deployed a more nuanced, and historical, conception of culture {if not in undergraduate textbooks and case studies). Within urban ethnography, a tradition of attention to power relations, beginning with Engels and Du Bois and consolidated in anthropology during the 1920s‐l940s, has flourished. These developments have made urban ethnography more historical, for the better. Still, a distinctive anthropological "upstream1 view of the past from the present persists, one based in fieldwork "ground truth.11 [culture, Tilly, Louise, urban ethnography, urban history]