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Donald M. Nonini, ed., A Companion to Urban Anthropology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 532 pp. ISBN 9781444330106.
This is a good book to use as an undergraduate teaching book. It is a large volume with many contributors and chapters that provide a succinct summary of specialized topics, major arguments, and classic ethnographies in urban studies. Needless to say, the book is no substitute for reading the original works that are discussed. The extensive range of summarized topics include urban planning, race and ethnicity, changing class relations, policing, citizenship, migration, national borders, gender, pollution, and food security. The focus is mainly on Western cities, although South America does receive good discussion. There is little on cities in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, which is disappointing. Along with rapid and massive urbanization, those regions have produced some of the classic studies dealing with the emergence of urban-rural ties and new ethnic-tribal traditions and identities in urban areas. Criticizing popular postmodern views of urbanization, the book warns against idealized accounts of cities as supposedly generating globalized cosmopolitanism, hybridity, and multiculturalism. These romantic narratives of fusion and creativity miss the systemic processes of segregation and enclavization that are being recreated in contemporary cities.
The book avoids some of the pitfalls of contemporary anthropology, which involve irrelevant apolitical debates about ontology and idealistic forms of materialism that avoid any mention of historical materialism. The introduction by the volume's editor, Donald Nonini, does flirt with the problematic approach of Latour and the pseudo-historical concept of the Anthropocene, but thankfully this is never pursued. Instead, the book is influenced by studies on the political economy of urban spaces that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s. Developed principally in geography and among Marxist scholars, those studies have reshaped urban anthropology. Their influence inspired ethnographic analyses of the interrelationships between the inequalities of class, race, and ethnicity and how those interrelationships relate to unemployment, drug use, imprisonment, poor health, low education, sanitation, and pollution. In all societies, the systemic articulation of power relations is created and maintained through controlled access to different spaces and their resources.
Going beyond a focus on renewal and gentrification versus urban decline, the book explores rising forms of wealth alongside new ways of criminalizing the poor, racial-ethnic segregation, changing...