Washington and Kafanchan : A View of Urban Anthropology - article ; n°4 ; vol.22, pg 25-36

Ulf Hannerz

Description

L'Homme - Année 1982 - Volume 22 - Numéro 4 - Pages 25-36
12 pages
Source : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

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• Publié par: L-HOMME0
• Publié le: 01 janvier 1982
• Nombre de lectures: 19
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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Ulf Hannerz
Washington and Kafanchan : A View of Urban Anthropology
In: L'Homme, 1982, tome 22 n°4. pp. 25-36.
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Hannerz Ulf. Washington and Kafanchan : A View of Urban Anthropology. In: L'Homme, 1982, tome 22 n°4. pp. 25-36.
doi : 10.3406/hom.1982.368322
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/hom_0439-4216_1982_num_22_4_368322WASHINGTON AND KAFANCHAN!
A VIEW OF URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY
by
ULF HANNERZ
What is the relationship of urban anthropology, as it is nowadays practiced,
to anthropology, and to urbanism? Two urban field studies of my own, in
Washington, dc, and in Kafanchan, a Nigerian town, seem to lead to rather
different answers. My aim here is to describe these two studies, and then sketch
some of the principal issues in the development of urban anthropology as I see
them, partly on the basis of these research experiences.1
A Neighborhood in Black America
I did fieldwork in Washington in 1966-1968, in a Black ghetto neighborhood.
While I was associated with a sociolinguistic research project concerned with
the dialect patterns of Black Americans, my own task was broadly defined as
supplying a broad ethnographic background understanding of the culture and
community life of low-income Black urban Americans, and I worked largely
alone as ethnographers tend to do. The study has been fully discussed els
ewhere, so I will only dwell briefly on the fieldwork itself and my most central
analytical concerns.2
The territorial focus of my study was in one small residential neighborhood,
around a short street which I have called "Winston Street", and I engaged in a
rather pure form of participant observation. It had appeared to me from the
very beginning that my best chance of getting the kind of access to neighborhood
1 . The paper is an inexact reconstruction of my presentation to the Association française
des Anthropologues in November 1981. I thank the participants in the urban anthropology
session for their interest in the presentation, and especially Jacques Gutwirth for including
my paper in this issue of L'Homme.
2. My Washington study is most completely described in Hannkrz 1969.
L'Homme, oct.-déc. 1982, XXII (4), pp. 25-36. 26 ULF HANNERZ
life which I wanted was to function, as far as possible, as an ordinary participant
in its everyday activities. The fact that I was a White European in a Black
American neighborhood would certainly mean that I could never be altogether
unobtrusive. Yet I hoped to avoid being seen as a member of that category of
White officials who were continuously present at the interface between the ghetto
and White America — social workers, policemen, etc. Thus I did a minimum of
formal interviewing, seeking information instead through informal, more or less
spontaneous conversations. Having found a small apartment a few minutes'
walk from the neighborhood, I made my first contacts there by striking up a
conversation with some men who were gathered at a street corner. A couple of
them, I later found out, had a bad reputation, and I may not have been quite
safe with them during that first encounter. Be that as it may; as I talked with
them, other neighborhood people also stopped at the corner for a chat, and I made
more acquaintances.
In this manner, beginning that first evening, I gradually developed my own
network in the neighborhood. The fact that I was a foreigner made me some
thing of an anomaly, a creature not directly implicated in the tensions between
Black and White America; also perhaps a person of some interest as a curiosity.
While I never hid the fact that I was there as a researcher, hoping to write a book
about life in Winston Street, most neighborhood inhabitants did not seem par
ticularly concerned about this aspect of my presence. I could take part in the
groups which would sit around for hours on the front stairs of houses, exchanging
small talk with one another or passers-by; I could be in and out of the houses,
listening to heated arguments between friends or within families, or just quietly
watching television. In the back alley behind the houses I might share a bottle
of wine with another group of men, or accompany them to bars and pool halls.
We might drive around in a car to visit their friends and kinsmen in another
part of Black Washington, and those who belonged to organized social clubs
invited me to their picnics in a city park. For a period I belonged to a bowling
team with some neighborhood men. I also went to services in several Black
churches, and I was a frequent visitor to Howard Theatre where many of the
stars of soul music — ascendant, established, or had-beens — appeared. My radio
at home was usually tuned to one or other of the three Black radio stations. In
this manner I had a rather wide exposure to ghetto life, and while Winston Street
remained the center of my study, my network and my experiences gradually
developed to take in more of the Black Washington scene.
This may possibly suffice as an indication of the nature of my fieldwork. What,
then, did I actually make note of, what have been the main directions of my
analysis of ghetto culture and community? Obviously my study related to the
more general currents of debate over Black American life in recent times, such as
that concerning "the culture of poverty". I would point to the external con- A VIEW OF URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY 27
straints. imposed on the Black community by the wider American society, but
my real emphasis was on what the Black community itself did within these
constraints. As the general debate often seemed somewhat lacking in subtlety,
it seemed to me that an anthropologist's contribution could well be to underline
the fact that the inhabitants of the Black ghetto were neither unaffected by the
constraining circumstances nor affected by them only on an individual basis.
Instead, they had shaped a collective adaptation to circumstances, interacting
over time to create a series of different but interconnected styles of life. Even in
a small neighborhood like that of Winston Street, one must not underestimate the
heterogeneity. Its inhabitants ranged from the more or less permanently un
employed to stable working class or even lower middle class, from "respectable
people" to those inclined toward petty criminality or occasional violence. House
hold structures varied from nuclear families to the female-centered households
recurrent in many Afro-American communities; there were of course other
constellations as well. But this internal variety generated an array of expectat
ions concerning life, modeled for everyone by people in the immediate envi
ronment, symbolically expressed for instance in soul music and streetcorner narrat
ive. Through shared understanding of how life could turn out and through
contexts serving as havens for varying personal adjustments, people in differing
predicaments could still fit into the community. And although individuals could
change between life styles over time, the fact that generations of low-income
Blacks grew up under relatively similar circumstances appeared to contribute to
a certain stability in the totality.
On the whole, I think of this as a cultural analysis; a study of the way people
develop a culture as an instrument for coping with their conditions of life. My
experience in the Winston Street neighborhood has been one of the bases for a
long-term interest in conceptualizations of culture sophisticated enough to be
useful rather than misleading in anthropological attempts to understand complex
societies. In Black America, there is naturally the further complication, apart
from what I have just said, that whatever culture its people evolve for themselves
will have to co-exist in their minds with the ideas of the wider American culture
from which they cannot shield themselves.
Was my study in Washington an example of urban anthropology? To this
question I will return. Let me just note at this point that at the time of the
study, I did not give much thought to the emergence of such a subdiscipline. As
one book after another, and one journal, appeared under that label, however, and
as I began to be invited to urban anthropological conferences because of my work
in Washington, I was forcde to consider what the expansion of anthropology into
towns and cities actually meant. Of all the different things one can observe in
the city, are some more urban than others, and in what way? Could an urban
anthropology continue to deal with segments of city life — neighborhoods, asso- 28 ULF HANNERZ
ciations, occupations, family structures — or would it have to try and deal with
entire urban communities? In other words, to what extent ought anthropology
to devote itself to the phenomenon of urbanism as such, and would it be able to do
so? These were the kind of questions I had in mind as I found an opportunity
to engage in a field study in a Nigerian town.
The Complexity of Kafanchan
The site of my research, as I found it when my work there began in 1974,
was an urban community of some 10,000-15,000 people (there had been no trus
tworthy census for a long time), close to fifty years old as a settlement, built a