Urban Anthropology

Abstract

Urban anthropology attends to the social relations, symbols, and political economies that are most manifest in the city. The influence of political economy, architectural and planning theory, cultural studies, urban sociology, and cultural geography can be seen in the increasing attention to economic, political, and discursive models of the city. At the same time poststructural and postmodern perspectives have recast the kinds of questions and modes of inquiry used to study the city. The dominant research trends in urban anthropology are currently poststructural studies of race, class, and gender in the urban context; political economic studies of transnational culture; and studies of the symbolic and social production of urban space and planning.