Urban Anthropology

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course explores the city as a product of, and a rich site for, humans’ negotiations over social and economic rights, identity, meaning, and community. Drawing on a variety of analytical, historical, geographic, and ethnographic studies, we will ask whether urban life is qualitatively distinct from rural life, and whether there are different types of urban life in different places and times. Debates over urban planning encompass moral, cultural, and personal concerns, not simply the planning schemes of economists, policymakers, and architects. Throughout the course, methodological questions regarding the city as an object of historical and ethnographic study are highlighted.