The Processes of Urbanism: A Multidisciplinary Approach 9783110801798, 9789027976208

Table of contents :
General Editor’s Preface
Preface
Introduction
PART ONE: URBAN RESOURCES AND POWER STRUCTURES
Introduction
The Necessity for a Macrocosmic Model in Urban Anthropological Studies
Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues
The Role of Applied Research in the Development of Health Services in a Chicano Community in Chicago
The Role of Interorganizational Networks in Urban Community Development
Institutional and Community-Controlled Approaches to Urban Mental-Health Care
Solid-Waste Accumulation in Residential Neighborhoods as Sociopolitical Process
Progress and Failure in Swedish Health Planning
Program, Organization, Planning, and Decision Making in a Community-Education System
PART TWO: URBAN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
Introduction
Acculturation and urbanization of immigrants in Barcelona: A Question of Ethnicity or a Question of Class?
On Voluntary Associations as an Adaptive Mechanism in West African Urbanization: Another Perspective
Neighbors, Friends, and Kin of Black Families in the Urban Adaptation
Careers of Black Youth in the Metro-East Area
Problems in the Analysis of Urban Cultural Organization
PART THREE: URBAN DEVELOPMENT, DECAY, AND RECONSTRUCTION
Introduction
Urban Ecology and Urban Renewal: The Case of Ibadan and Sapele
The Creation of New Housing in a Central-City Urban Renewal Project
A Systems Approach to Metropolitan Economic Development Goals
PART FOUR: THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE SECTORS IN URBAN ORGANIZATION
Introduction
The Role of Industry in the Urban Process
The Urban Utility Rate-Making Process
Technological Transfer: A Principle of Culture Change in an Urban System
Biographical Notes
Index of Names
Index of Subjects

Citation preview

The Processes of Urbanism

World Anthropology

General Editor SOL T A X Patrons CLAUDE

LEVI-STRAUSS

MARGARET

MEAD

L A I L A S H U K R Y EL H A M A M S Y Μ. N. S R I N I V A S

MOUTON

PUBLISHERS

DISTRIBUTED

IN

THE

USA

AND

· THE CANADA

HAGUE BY

ALDINE,

·

PARIS CHICAGO

The Processes of Urbanism A Multidisciplinary

Approach

Editors

JOYCE

ASCHENBRENNER

L L O Y D R. C O L L I N S

MOUTON

PUBLISHERS

DISTRIBUTED

IN

THE

USA

AND

· THE CANADA

HAGUE BY

ALDINE,

·

PARIS CHICAGO

Copyright © 1978 by Mouton Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Mouton Publishers, The Hague Distributed in the United States of America and Canada by Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago, Illinois ISBN 90-279-7620-1 (Mouton) 0-202-90061-4 (Aldine) Jacket photo by Cas Oorthuys Indexes by Society of Indexers, Great Britain Cover and jacket design by Jurriaan Schrofer Printed in Great Britain

General Editor's

Preface

To discover how problems of cities might be solved, or how to better manage cities, anthropologists look at them both internationally and historically to see how they operate. One is tempted to add the word "naturally" to emphasize that of course cities are artifactural (or "cultural") but that kin groupings, tribes, villages and other human social structures that we treat comparatively are cultural as well. Nevertheless, it is only in this generation that anthropologists have seriously considered the political and administrative problems of large, modern cities — as opposed to problems of neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves — and this is probably the first book dealing deliberately with them in the anthropological context. It therefore serves to help end the myth that we are confined to old bones and stones, or to "primitive" or back-wash societies. Even the financing of the conference from which this book resulted — held in St. Louis, Missouri, USA — appropriately came largely from urban business corporations, who wished to benefit from the broad perspectives which a great congress of scholars from all the world's continents made possible. Like most contemporary sciences, anthropology is a product of the European tradition. Some argue that it is a product of colonialism, with one small and self-interested part of the species dominating the study of the whole. If we are to understand the species, our science needs substantial input from scholars who represent a variety of the world's cultures. It was a deliberate purpose of the IXth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences to provide impetus in this direction. The World Anthropology volumes, therefore, offer a first glimpse of a human science in which members from all societies have played an active role. Each of the

VI

General Editor's

Preface

books is designed to be self-contained; each is an attempt to update its particular sector of scientific knowledge and is written by specialists from all parts of the world. Each volume should be read and reviewed individually as a separate volume on its own given subject. The set as a whole will indicate what changes are in store for anthropology as scholars from the developing countries join in studying the species of which we are all a part. The IXth Congress was planned from the beginning not only to include as many of the scholars from every part of the world as possible, but also with a view toward the eventual publication of the papers in high-quality volumes. At previous Congresses scholars were invited to bring papers which were then read out loud. They were necessarily limited in length; many were only summarized; there was little time for discussion; and the sparse discussion could only be in one language. The IXth Congress as an experiment aimed at changing this. Papers were written with the intention of exchanging them before the Congress, particularly in extensive preCongress sessions; they were not intended to be read aloud at the Congress, that time being devoted to discussions — discussions which were simultaneously and professionally translated into five languages. The method for eliciting the papers was structured to make as representative a sample as was allowable when scholarly creativity — hence self-selection — was critically important. Scholars were asked both to propose papers of their own and to suggest topics for sessions of the Congress which they might edit into volumes. All were then informed of the suggestions and encouraged to rethink their own papers and the topics. The process, therefore, was a continuous one of feedback and exchange and it has continued to be so even after the Congress. The some two thousand papers comprising World Anthropology certainly then offer a substantial sample of world anthropology. It has been said that anthropology is at a turning point; if this is so, these volumes will be the historical direction-markers. As might have been foreseen in the first postcolonial generation, the large majority of the Congress papers (82 percent) are the work of scholars identified with the industrialized world which fathered our traditional discipline and the institution of the Congress itself: Eastern Europe (15 percent); Western Europe (16 percent); North America (47 percent); Japan, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand (4 percent). Only 18 percent of the papers are from developing areas: Africa (4 percent); Asia-Oceania (9 percent); Latin America (5 percent). Aside from the substantial representation from the U.S.S.R. and the nations of Eastern Europe, a significant difference between this corpus of written material and that of other Congresses is the addition of the large proportion of contributions from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. "Only 18 percent" is two to four times as

General Editor's

Preface

vii

great a proportion as that of other Congresses; moreover, 18 percent of 2,000 papers is 360 papers, 10 times the number of "Third World" papers presented at previous Congresses. In fact, these 360 papers are more than the total of all papers published after the last International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sicences which was held in the United States (Philadelphia, 1956). The significance of the increase is not simply quantitative. The input of scholars from areas which have until recently been no more than subject matter for anthropology represents both feedback and also long-awaited theoretical contributions from the perspectives of very different cultural, social, and historical traditions. Many who attended the IXth Congress were convinced that anthropology would not be the same in the future. The fact that the next Congress (India, 1978) will be our first in the "Third World" may be symbolic of the change. Meanwhile, sober consideration of the present set of books will show how much, and just where and how, our discipline is being revolutionized. Most closely related to the present volume are several books in the series dealing specifically with cities in Latin America and elsewhere, with related processes of population changes, migration, ethnicity, and the like, and with the ways in which anthropologists deal with phenomena ranging from multinational corporations, economic development and war to health-care delivery, drug and alcohol use, and problems of mental health. Chicago, Illinois January 18, 1978

SOL T A X

Preface

This volume is the product of the IXth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences pre-Congress Conference on "The Processes of Urbanism," held in St. Louis, Missouri, and Edwardsville, Illinois, August 28-30, 1973. The contributors to this conference and to the volume consist of representatives from Africa, Japan, Spain, Sweden, and the United States who come from academic, industrial, public, and municipal services. The reader will note that not all of the participants and contributors are anthropologists. We felt that anthropologists would acquire new and different insights into the area of urban anthropological research by communicating with urban practitioners and with persons from other disciplines. We also felt that this approach would be more timely and innovative because of the present explosion of urban development on a worldwide basis and the consequent need for increasing informative and purposeful exchanges of ideas about the urban process. The conference began with a keynote address by Harry Morley, president of the St. Louis Regional Commerce and Growth Association, who set the tone of the symposia by encouraging the participants to consider the urban process as one of regional concern rather than to adopt a "bits and pieces" approach to urban problems. He stressed that we must know and identify the parts of the urban region with the understanding that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. This macrocosmic approach is consistently employed throughout. The conference included workshops as a part of each session. The following led discussions for the symposia, including the workshops. These discussions contributed much to the theoretical position

X

Preface

stated in this volume. Jane Altes, Thomas J. Maloney, Charles Townsend, Harvey Taylor, Fred Hamilton, Charles Leven. We believe that the approach and the papers of this volume contribute to urban theory insights and perspectives that can be of benefit in urban centers throughout the world community, through the sharing of ideas about urban experience by members of the international academic and professional community. We would like to express our appreciation to Professor Charlotte J. Frisbie, Anthropology Department, Southern Illinois UniversityEdwardsville; Dr. Janet Duthie Collins, Department of English, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville; and Dr. Thomas Hay, and Martha DodyDavis, student assistant, of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Missouri—St. Louis, for reading and commenting on the views expressed in this volume. We would like to give special recognition to the following organizations, which gave support for the pre-congress conference: Ralston-Purina Company University of Missouri—St. Louis Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville Monsanto Company Pet, Inc. Sverdrup, Parcel and Associates, Inc. Modern Urban Systems Technology, Inc. Webster College St. Louis University Edwardsville, Illinois Cleveland, Ohio March 1,1977

JOYCE ASCHENBRENNER LLOYD R . COLLINS

Table of Contents

General Editor's Preface

ν

Preface

ΐχ

Introduction by Joyce Aschenbrenner and Lloyd R. Collins

1

PART ONE: URBAN RESOURCES AND POWER STRUCTURES

Introduction The Necessity for a Macrocosmic Model in Urban Anthropological Studies by Steven H. Jones Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical Issues by Amelia Mariotti and Bernard Magubane The Role of Applied Research in the Development of Health Services in a Chicano Community in Chicago by Stephen L. Schensul and Mary Bakszysz Bymel The Role of Interorganizational Networks in Urban Community Development by Santiago Boiton Institutional and Community-Controlled Approaches to Urban Mental-Health Care by Ε mile M. Schepers

15 19 45

69

91

103

XII

Table of Contents

Solid-Waste Accumulation in Residential Neighborhoods as Sociopolitical Process by Sherif El-Hakim and John Markoff Progress and Failure in Swedish Health Planning by Edgar Borgenhammar Program, Organization, Planning, and Decision Making in a Community-Education System by Everette E. Nance

121 135

143

PART TWO: URBAN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

Introduction Acculturation and urbanization of immigrants in Barcelona: A Question of Ethnicity or a Question of Class? by Claudio Esteva-Fabregat On Voluntary Associations as an Adaptive Mechanism in West African Urbanization: Another Perspective by Oladejo O. Okediji Neighbors, Friends, and Kin of Black Families in the Urban Adaptation by Kiyotaka Aoyagi Careers of Black Youth in the Metro-East Area by Joyce Aschenbrenner Problems in the Analysis of Urban Cultural Organization by Ulf Hannerz

153 159

195

223 267 297

PART THREE: URBAN DEVELOPMENT, DECAY, AND RECONSTRUCTION

Introduction Urban Ecology and Urban Renewal: The Case of Ibadan and Sapele by Oshomha Imoagene The Creation of New Housing in a Central-City Urban Renewal Project by Fred Perabo A Systems Approach to Metropolitan Economic Development Goals by D. Reid Ross

317 319

333 337

XIII

Table of Contents

PART FOUR: THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE SECTORS IN

URBAN

ORGANIZATION

Introduction The Role of Industry in the Urban Process by John F. Hanieski The Urban Utility Rate-Making Process by William R. Bosse Technological Transfer: A Principle of Culture Change in an Urban System by Lloyd R. Collins

353 355 365

371

Biographical Notes

407

Index of Names

413

Index of Subjects

417

Introduction

JOYCE ASCHENBRENNER and LLOYD R. COLLINS

A MACROCOSMIC PERSPECTIVE Urban areas, whether we are speaking of city, region, or metropolis, represent, on the one hand, an intensification of the processes that occur in society generally — population growth, technological development, increasing social and political complexity, specialization, expansion of the production and distribution of goods — and, on the other, a concentration of the values, mores, identities, and goals of the members of a particular society. Social processes become urban processes as they accelerate and react upon one another to produce a new order of phenomena: an urban system, the components of which are highly specialized and interdependent. While urban systems are bounded, they are also open to environmental, political, and economic influences from without, so that their vitality, growth, and decline are conditioned by forces in the larger society and in the environment. However, an urban area is more than a level in an organizational hierarchy. It is, as has been demonstrated by Leeds (1973) and Fox (1972), a semiautonomous entity with a unique environment (locale), a history, and a power base in the form of control over resources, people, and capital. In addition, an urban area possesses an ethos that reflects not only a universal ideology, as delineated by Esteva-Fabregat in this volume, but also those ideologies characteristic of the society and the particular groups—ethnic, occupational, status—which make up its population. In the light of these complexities of urbanism, some authors have questioned the concept of "urban society" and the comparability of different urban phenomena (Arensberg 1968; Rollwagen 1972), particularly as these have been described and analyzed by past investigators. An examination of

2

JOYCE ASCHENBRENNER, LLOYD R. COLLINS

urban types, using such criteria as size, rate of growth, regional location, origin of immigrants (Rollwagen 1972), historical relationships, and ideologies (Fox 1972), is urged by these writers; and relationships between rural and urban areas (Arensberg 1968; Rollwagen 1972; Gonzales 1974), as well as forces on an international level (Blok 1973), are characterized as important differentiating influences on urban development. In the current volume, Mariotti and Magubane stress the latter concern, voicing the need to view African cities in the context of colonialism and showing that the processes of population growth, technological development, the production and distribution of goods, and political organization in African cities were based primarily on the prerequisites and dynamics of European societies rather than on those of indigenous societies. The economic and political forces in this system have been highly disruptive to African societies. In a discussion of urban growth and blight in two West African cities, Imoagene, taking a contrary view to that of Mariotti and Magubane, distinguishes between "native" and modern industrial African cities, holding that the former are comparable to Western cities in their growth pattern. Nevertheless, according to Imoagene, these types share characteristics distinguishing them from European cities. Fox's advocacy (1972) of an approach which makes the city the object, and not merely the locale, of research is taken up by Jones in this volume. The failure of urban anthropologists to specify the ecological, economic, and political contexts of social behavior stems from a perspective relating to a halcyon era, largely imaginary, in which isolated "primitives" were fitting subjects for anthropological study. In this setting, ethnographic description sufficed to delineate the context of social behavior; "outside" influences were relatively constant and were often described in a separate section under the rubric culture change, or acculturation. These assumptions are reminiscent of theory in the field of astronomy before Copernicus, in which deviations from an assumed status quo (earth-centric) were explained by ad hoc hypotheses; in both instances, a new theoretical perspective reveals the "exceptions" as the crux of theoretical analysis. Thus, "marginal" peoples, such as peasants, hunting and herding societies, and, more recently, minorities, are seen as peoples who have been systematically exploited and disenfranchised by contemporary "higher-energy" societies (see Harris 1971), rather than as isolated, romantic enclaves surviving from an earlier era and relatively untouched by "progress." Paradoxically, then, almost despite himself, the anthropologist's traditional concern for the marginal and the "backwashes" of civilization have put him at the forefront of social movements, as the disenfranchised have developed political consciousness and have begun to organize and

Introduction

3

mobilize their resources. Since the discipline is dependent on the cooperation of these people, its survival depends upon whether or not it will rise to the challenge; further, the usefulness of its theories and insights — that is, the question of whether or not it deserves to survive — will be determined by the extent to which its traditional concerns and assumptions are modified and expanded by contemporary events. It is on this note that, in the opening article of this work, Jones appeals for a "macrocosmic perspective" in urban studies, in which the forces external to communities that limit and control them are clearly delineated and analyzed. Anthropologists have contributed much to the range and scope of knowledge about human society; however, they need to address themselves to the problems, dispositions, and uses of power in a modern industrial setting in order to understand social processes in the communities they observe. As Jones notes, such an attempt may necessarily involve interdisciplinary coordination and effort; it is for this reason that the present volume is multidisciplinary in scope. Even such matters as waste disposal, as documented by El-Hakim and Markoff, must be studied in terms of complex power relationships. This is particularly true in societies, such as exist in the United States, in which many basic human necessities are controlled by special-interest groups; this is in contrast to societies, such as exist in Sweden, in which such human requirements as health services, described in this volume by Borgenhammar, are "rationalized" and made a part of the public domain.

APPROACHES TO URBAN PROBLEMS North Americans are notably distrustful and resistant to the nationalization of social, economic, and political processes. Sociologists (Stein 1971) have characterized the loss of community control and individual autonomy that occurs with industrialization; the American worker he: fought back with local unions (though ultimately succumbing to outside control here as well) and with determined opposition to bureaucratization in all areas. However, the workers have apparently lost the battle, if not the war, and the unequal distribution of power and wealth, as well as the market and technological processes described herein by Collins, Hanieski, Jones, andMariotti andMagubane, are controlled primarily by government and large corporate enterprise; further, they are often stress-producing and destructive to human well-being. Attempts on an individual, group, and community level to gain some control over these processes or, at least, to meliorate some of the dysfunctional consequences are described by Nance, Boiton, Schepers, Collins, Schensul and Bymel, Perabo, and

4

JOYCE ASCHENBRENNER, LLOYD R. COLLINS

Aschenbrenner in this volume. On the whole, these studies advocate local and individual efforts at organization and control rather than the nationalization of services and functions as described by Borgenhammar. The latter acknowledges some of the weaknesses in the Swedish health system resulting from a massive approach, namely, the emphasis on institutional care at the expense of outpatient care. Of course, this weakness is not inherent in such a system; however, it would seem that in order to satisfy community needs — particularly in a heterogenous society — as well as monitor outside influences in the community, a combination of local organization and direction with support and coordination on a supralocal level is necessary to solve some of the problems facing urban communities. The three common focuses of anthropological studies of cities, reflecting traditional concerns — the poor and powerless, urban migrants, and the "autonomous" community — have been increasingly criticized by those concerned with contemporary problems (see Leeds 1968; Valentine 1972; Southall 1973). However, if placed within a different theoretical context, these focuses represent a powerful potential for the efficacy of the anthropological approach to current problems. The potential for change lies with the disenfranchised; historical events have demonstrated this, as do the articles in this volume by Schepers, Schensul and Bymel, and Boiton. While the poor and the immigrants need information about the "establishment," their fundamental strength and capacity to use such information lies in the recognition of their essential potency as social forces; thus, perhaps we can look for social change to those immigrants in Barcelona (Esteva-Fabregat) who resist "Catalanization," rather than imitate the "directing class" in all ways, provided that they are able to attain the means and knowledge necessary to achieve such change. In order to fulfill a role of advocacy in the enfranchisement of the peoples who are their subjects of study, anthropologists need to recognize that their communities are not isolates and to develop expertise in articulating community strengths with supralocal institutions in the pursuit of human well-being (see Jones in this volume for an explication of "supralocal institutions"). Where such institutions are not responsive to human needs, communities should use their knowledge to challenge and help change them. In addition to the above-cited studies of El Barrio in Chicago, those of Nance, Bosse, and Aschenbrenner in the present volume emphasize this point.

"ADAPTIVE PROCESS": A CRITIQUE The ecological approach, in which urban systems are described in terms of

5

Introduction

adaptation to " a particular set of demographic and environmental exigencies" (Fox 1972:208), has been developed in recent studies. The concept of urban adaptation

needs rethinking

to turn it away

from

Spencer's

evolutionary model, which influenced such social ecologists as Sahlins (1960: 23-24) and Steward (1972); the latter assume a typological approach, which they interpret in terms of "adaptive systems." Jones, like Buechler (1968), moves away from the position of these social ecologists and calls for urban anthropologists to consider the total urban scene in terms of the component-linking systems operating as "coordinated and competing social forms which are in constant flux" (Buechler 1968:55). The papers in this volume, by and large, follow this macrocosmic theme. They are concerned not with typologies but with the adjustive processes occurring within the urban system. On this view, urban phenomena are not treated in a manner parallel to the evolutionary model developed by Spencer. Over a long period of time, biological systems (species) acquire adaptive mechanisms necessary for getting food, for reproducing viable offspring, and for living in a given physical environment. When the biological system attains a balance among the three variables (food-getting, reproduction, acclimatization), systems equilibrium has been attained and extinction may be avoided. Oversimplification results if this biological evolutionary concept is combined with that of urbanization (which follows a different evolutionary pattern) merely as an additional abstraction. Thus, a "balance of nature" concept is fused with cultural typology by social ecologists to form ecological types. When this hybrid concept is applied to urban systems, "sociocultural system" (an open system) becomes equated with "species" (a closed system) and "extinction" with "social decay." Yet all cities exhibit various types and degrees of decay, but only rarely, if ever, do we observe total urban decay. Therefore, in urban phenomena perhaps we do not observe adaptation, in the biological sense of equilibrium, or even extinction, as a negative index of adaptation. W e may refer to a number of opencomponent systems, that is, institutions, in terms of their internal, adjustive processes but never in the final sense of the attainment of closed system equilibrium. The contributors to this volume tend to avoid the typological approach common to the analysis of traditional societies. In considering the complex urban scene cross-culturally, they are concerned not with "types" of adaptive traits or systems but with linked series of processual adjustments that represent a constant, but never quite successful, struggle to acquire equilibrium. It is clear that in their treatment of internal processual adjustments these students of urban phenomena are ready to grapple with the dynamic institutional processes associated with complex urban societies

6

JOYCE ASCHENBRENNER, LLOYD R. COLLINS

and with the variable range of urban settlement patterns and institutions. Bee (1974:3) remarks that process is a slippery term and one that "has been used repeatedly in literature dealing with culture change." The term process has been used as often as adaptation, and the two are often joined together to evolve the concept of "adaptive processes." With regard to process and its meaning in the symposium on which this volume is based, Collins and Aschenbrenner have commented elsewhere (1974:9): Process is a recurrent dynamic system which takes place in time and space as do all things, but time or space are not the inherent properties of process; recurrence is. This system can be made to repeat itself as long as the conditions and requirements for its existence exist. A process has a starting point, a course of action and termination point, and if you can conceive of its termination point as the starting point, then it can be thought of as a teleological circular action system. . . .

There is a state of confusion in the urban literature as to what "adaptive processes" and/or "adjustment processes" are. These processes operate on different levels of abstraction; for example, adaptation is used in the urban literature to explain short-term external changes that are reversible, whereas adaptation in biological evolution is used to explain long-term genetic and demographic changes that cannot readapt. An organism cannot return to a previous adaptation (econiche), but an urban system can readjust and maintain its identity. The processes of adjustment are subject to reversal, but the processes of adaptation are not. This confusion of the levels of abstractions, due to terminological and semantic usages, calls for new analysis along the lines of Alland's model (1970:49). Internal and external adaptation and adjustment need to be clarified relative to genetic and nongenetic levels of abstraction. Modification of Alland's model may help urban anthropologists to determine what is adaptive and what is adjustive in the urban system.

PROCESSES OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT Urban adjustment is the process involved in the development of Ibadan and Sapele, as described by Imoagene. The processes of renewal in the two Nigerian towns involve essentially a self-adjustment, common to Nigerian urban systems, in which, Imoagene states, the variables of commercialization, immigration, housing configuration, and sanitation appear identical to those associated with the development of mid-nineteenth-century American frontier towns. Magubane and Mariotti would maintain that the elements of colonialism also have to be taken into account in this analysis. Imoagene's comparison touches upon some developmental processes that may be con-

Introduction

1

sidered urban universale — that is, family life and housing may be affected by the above social vectors; Esteva-Fabregat's description shows that this holds true for Barcelona as well. The contributors are concerned with urbanism as a recurring phenomenon in which such processes as "power, marketing of utilities, development, technological transfer, economic density, suburbanization" (Collins and Aschenbrenner 1974:9) are brought together to produce urban transformation. One result of the coming together of these processes may be urban decay. Perabo's discussion of the results and observations of an attempt to reduce urban decay by housing and neighborhood redevelopment is an example of an industry's effort to become involved in urban transformation. This illustrates a mechanism whereby urban processes react upon one another, bringing change in the total system. Perabo and his colleagues have taken the social scientists' point of view in designing their redevelopment program for the LaSalle Park area in St. Louis. In this program they attempt to overcome the inertia of local and federal power structures in order to attack problems of crime, population instability, and the concentration of low-income families in a failing public high-rise housing project. The construction of the LaSalle neighborhood project, which would have taken care of the residents from the dismantled high rise, was "stalemated" by a governmental freeze on housing development.1 The research of Perabo and his colleagues revealed that an urban social context, defined by resident ownership, residence support and maintenance, nearby employment, and the availability of economic goods, is basic to urban development and necessary for the reduction of urban decay. Social decay is also the concern of Imoagene, who examines the effort to preempt "urban blight" through redevelopment, in an attempt to reach some form of equilibrium. Imoagene, like Perabo, may be described as advocating and furthering certain types of adjustive processes. Ross proposes to reach the goal of relative equilibrium through the manipulation and adjustment of the specific goals of transportation, economic development, and community development. He calls for redevelopment on a regional scale (macrocosmic), where specific variables determining these goals must be analyzed and manipulated for implementation. He struggles with the problem of identifying those useful and meaningful transformation processes that would lead to complete articulation of urban goals on a regional basis. Ross's practical approach is very similar in its assumptions to the theoretical model proposed by Jones. 1

This policy has recently been reversed, and Ralston-Purina has been granted the funds to proceed with its housing program (editors).

8

JOYCE ASCHENBRENNER, LLOYD R. COLLINS

URBAN IDENTITY AND SOCIAL PROCESS Collins isolates technological transfer as a process involved in the development of urban social identity through technological change. In his paper he deals with the urban macrocosm and its linked open-component systems (institutions) in terms of specific processes related to the social-identity change of the urbanite. Adjustment and nonadjustment are features of the urbanization process that cannot be explained away by "adaptation"; they can be explained by the systems of working relationships and transformations that strain toward equilibrium. The urban system is never in a condition of equilibrium; it is always in one of "flux," although one of the goals is equilibrium. To suggest that the urban system is in a state of equilibrium is to say that culture and society are static. Objections similar to those relating to the theoretical framework of adaptive processes applied to urban systems as a whole also hold for analyses of social phenomena on the microlevel. Localized institutions, such as the family, have been described as adaptive mechanisms, and individual behavior as adaptive strategy (see Despres 1970; Stack 1972; Valentine 1968). In the microcosmic analysis of social organization, the adaptive model tends toward an assumption of economic determinism, narrowing the scope of investigation and oversimplifying the complexity of human activity and motivation. It also tends toward an acceptance of the status quo by emphasizing adjustment in the social organism, glossing over possibly destructive elements in the environment that may cause a social form to change in a manner inimical to human well-being, or, alternatively, to overcome or transform the environment. While economic forces in the larger society are undoubtedly crucial in human behavior, not all social phenomena are explainable in such terms; as in the case offunctional, adaptive explains too little when it is too widely applied. Such a model may result in overlooking important human needs and values that may not be functional or adaptive in a given environment. In the adaptive approach, as in the case of the concept "culture of poverty," stress is laid on uniformity of values and perceptions of reality at the expense of different meaning systems that may persist in identical or differing environments. Although poverty does affect humans in similar ways, there are differences in response that reflect value differences and conceptual alternatives. Thus, among Black Americans, family organization reflects Black values transcending economic status; and, as shown by Aoyagi, hometown and kinship ties among Los Angeles Black migrants reflect continuities between small-town and urban social organization. The social networks in the urban setting analyzed by Okediji are also

Introduction

9

based on traditional kinship and patron-client relationships; however, he concentrates on the individualist, manipulative aspect of these relationships, characterizing them as "adaptive strategies." Esteva-Fabregat, too, adopts an individualist approach to the adjustment of urban migrants in Barcelona. Other writers in this volume stress the primary importance of ethnic identity in the pursuit of economic and other social goals. They would agree with Cohen's statement (1974:xiii) concerning the attempt to characterize ethnicity as essentially a strategy of individuals to advance personal interests:

The difficulty with this kind of explanation is that . . . it cannot account for the potency of the normative symbols which the individual manipulates in his struggle for power. . . . Norms, beliefs and values are effective and have their own constraining power only because they are the collective representations of a group and are backed by the pressures of that group. An individual can manipulate customs if he becomes part of such a group, adopting its current major symbols. He cannot manipulate others without being ready to be manipulated by them. . . .

As shown by the above considerations, the adaptive model is seriously limited, whether applied to total urban systems, to social organization, or to individual adjustment. Anthropologists need to develop models, such as those proposed by Hannerz, that more accurately describe and illuminate social behavior in a complex setting. While the adaptive model may have been useful as a corrective to the view of autonomy of cultural development, to the neglect of material variables, it has, nevertheless, been overused. As social scientists, we assume the reasonableness of human behavior; however, we cannot assume that it adheres to any one model. Perhaps the models we employ should allow for a bit of "magic" (see Eichenbaum 1974), covering those aspects of the phenomena we are examining that are not accounted for by our models. At any rate, it is presumptuous to suppose that any model explains or accounts for all social phenomena or even that it completely explains any aspect of society. While they are different in orientation, the papers in this volume share an active approach toward social knowledge, aimed at the solution of urban problems. Given the knowledge of how a system works, it is possible to identify and implement positive goals that lead to solutions to problems on a individual, institutional, or community level. Analyses are presented in terms of political, economic, ecological, cultural, and social principles. The unity stems from a faith in the power and effectiveness of social knowledge and from agreement on the need to use such knowledge to better the lot of urban dwellers rather than from agreement on ideology, theory, or practice.

10

JOYCE ASCHENBRENNER, LLOYD R. COLLINS

REFERENCES ALLAND, ALEXANDER, JR.

1970

Adaptation in cultural evolution: an approach to medical New York: Columbia University Press.

anthropology.

ARENSBERG, CONRAD

1968

"The urban in cross-cultural perspective," in Urban anthropology: research perspectives and strategies. Edited by Elizabeth M. Eddy, 3-15. Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings Series: No. 2. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

BANTON, MICHAEL

1974

"Urbanization and role analysis," in Urban anthropology: cross-cultural studies of urbanization. Edited by Aidan Southall, 43-70. London: Oxford University Press.

BEE, ROBERT L.

1974

Patterns and processes: an introduction to anthropological strategies for the study of sociocultural change. New York: Free Press.

Β LOK, ANTON

1973

"Commentary" in A note on ethics and power. Human 32:95-98.

Organization

BUECHLER, HANS C.

1968

"The reorganization of counties in the Bolivian highlands: an analysis of rural-urban networks and hierarchies," in Urban anthropology: research perspectives and strategies. Edited by Elizabeth M. Eddy, 48-57. Southern Anthropological Proceedings Series: No. 2. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

COHEN, ABNER

1974

"Introduction: the lesson of ethnicity," in Urban ethnicity. Edited by Abner Cohen, ix—xxiv. London: Tavistock.

COLLINS, LLOYD, J. ASCHENBRENNER

1974

Review of "Processes of urbanism: a multidisciplinary approach," IXth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. Urban Anthropology Newsletter 3:8-15.

DESPRES, LEO A.

1970

"Differential adaptations and microcultural evolution in Guyana," in Afro-American anthropology: contemporary perspectives on theory and research. Edited by Norman E. Whitten Jr. and John F. Szwed, 263-286. New York: Free Press.

EICHENBAUM, JACK

1974

Metaphor in urban theory: the city as magic theatre. Antipode 6:1-6.

FOX, RICHARD G.

1972

Rational and romance in urban anthropology. Urban 1:205-235.

anthropology

GONZALES, NANCIE M.

1974

"The city of gentlemen: Santiago de los caballeros," in Anthropologists in cities. Edited by George M. Foster and Robert V. Kemper, 19-40. Boston: Little, Brown.

HARRIS, MARVIN

1971

Culture, people, and nature: an introduction to general (second edition). New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.

anthropology

11

Introduction

LEEDS, ANTHONY

1968

1973

"The anthropology of cities: some methodological issues," in Urban anthropology: research strategies and perspectives. Edited by Elizabeth M. Eddy, 12—44. Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings Series: No. 2. Athens: University of Georgia Press. "Locality power in relation to supralocal power institutions," in Urban anthropology: cross-cultural studies of urbanization. Edited by Aidan Southall, 15—41. New York: Oxford University Press.

ROLLWAGEN, JACK

1972

A comparative framework for the investigation of city-as-context: a discussion of the Mexican case. Urban anthropology 1:68-86.

SAHLINS, M. D.

1960

"Evolution: specific and general," in Evolution and culture. Edited by Marshall D. Sahlins and Elman R. Service, 12-44. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

SERVICE, E. R.

1960

"The law of evolutionary potential," in Evolution and culture. Edited by Marshall D. Sahlins and Elman R. Service, 93-122. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

SOUTHALL, AIDAN

1973

"The density of role-relationships as a universal index of urbanization," in Urban anthropology: cross-cultural studies of urbanization. Edited by Aidan Southall. New York: Oxford University Press.

STACK, CAROL B.

1972

Black kindreds: parenthood and personal kindreds among urban blacks. Journal of Comparative Family Studies 3:194—206.

STEIN, MAURICE

1971

R.

Eclipse of community: an interpretation of American studies. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

STEWARD, JULIAN H.

1972

Theory of culture change: the methodology of multilinear Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

evolution.

VALENTINE, CHARLES A.

1968 1972

Culture and poverty: critique and counter-proposals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Black studies and anthropology: scholarly and political interests in AfroAmerican culture. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

PART ONE

Urban Resources and Power Structures

Introduction

The two opening presentations in the symposium on urban ecology, by Steven H. Jones and Amelia Mariotti and Bernard Magubane, respectively, stress a common theme. This theme is, basically, a criticism of anthropologists for looking at "surface appearances" only, as Mariotti and Magubane describe traditional ethnology, ignoring the political and economic context of the cultural phenomena under analysis. Both statements involve the premise that this neglect of the uses and effects of power stems from a fundamental bias, resulting from the membership of anthropologists among the former or present oppressors of the people they study. Thus, in Jones's words, anthropologists tend to engage in "victim analysis," attributing the problems of the people they study to their cultural or social patterns. Whether or not anthropologists have been aware of this tendency in the past, there is no excuse for the continuance of this practice since the "objects" of study, for example, Magubane, a South African, and Jones, an Afro-American, are beginning more and more to criticize this policy from within the discipline. As Magubane states elsewhere, "If anthropology is not to die with the death of colonialism and imperialism, then it should find itself a new responsibility: our struggles should be the struggles of anthropologists" (1974:26). In their description of a mental health program in El Barrio, Chicago, Stephen L. Schensul and Mary Bakszysz Bymel present a case study of the adoption of such an active role in support of the community rather than the traditional research role they were hired to perform. In a companion article, Emile M. Schepers points out that the responsibility of the anthropologist involves more than attempts to overcome institutional stereotypes; it means

16

Introduction

working to change programs. At the same time, he expresses the dilemma faced by all activists: that of unwittingly assuming a leadership role that subverts the development of leadership and decision-making power in the community one is trying to help. Santiago Boiton's description of the process through which a community becomes united and organizes to oppose and control institutional actions that are ineffective or oppressive is a valuable case study in community organization; it also offers an illustration of the type of basic information that anthropologists can use either to manipulate the community to the benefit of outside interests or, as in this case, to aid the community in its attempts to control its environment and services. Schensul and Bymel face this issue and at the same time pose a solution to Schepers's dilemma by stressing the role of the anthropologist as the provider of information needed by the community, at the behest of the community. Thus the anthropologist works for the community rather than for powerful institutional interests. The last three articles in this section — by Sherif El-Hakim and John Markoff, both sociologists, Edgar Borgenhammar, and Everette E. Nance — deal primarily with the technical and organizational aspects of the control of resources in urban communities. El-Hakim and Markoff clearly show the connection between urban blight and power relationships, in terms of which communities in a city do or do not receive adequate or optimum services. Other nonpolitical factors mentioned, such as attitudes and practices of community residents, contribute to blight; however, these, in turn, are ultimately effects of underlying political processes, as is implicit in the differential treatment received by various urban communities. By definition, the poor lack economic and, therefore, political power; thus, they have little control over community resources and services. In his study of the Swedish health system, Borgenhammar describes an alternative organizational system in which the "juggling" process of allocating resources on the basis of political pressures, described by ElHakim and Markoff, is replaced by a rationalized system, that is, bureaucracy. Borgenhammar presents a balanced view of the strengths and weaknesses of this system. While deploring the tendency of administration to proliferate, as well as to overrely on hospitalization as the solution to health problems, he points out that quality of treatment does not depend on economic status, and that physicians are released from a concern with the financial aspects of health treatment, and thus freed to concentrate on the task of treatment and the prevention of illness. He states that, while Swedish citizens pay high taxes, they appear to be satisfied with the services they receive. Outlining a plan of community education that has been implemented in

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Independence, Missouri, Everette E. Nance proposes a solution to community problems through an alternative type of community organization, neither in terms of pressure groups, as in El Barrio nor as described by ElHakim and Markoff, nor on the basis of bureaucratic principles, as in Sweden. This alternative involves a series of nonprofessional (in political terms) citizens' groups, whose main task is to keep informed and to inform others about issues affecting the community. Nance believes that such official, yet nonpolitical, groups will eliminate the need for pressure groups, demonstrations, and rioting, because of the continuous flow of information into the community and the resulting potential political power of wellinformed citizens. The citizens of El Barrio may disagree with the assumption that the basic problem is lack of information, given their experiences with the external institutions serving their community. Perhaps such a system will work in some communities, whereas in others (as often seems the case) it might be too easily undermined by special interests. Nevertheless, Nance's solution as well as other views and proposals in this section, offers interesting alternatives and perspectives on the issues of power and resources.

REFERENCE MAGUBANE, B.

1974

Comment in, "The new native resistance: indigenous peoples' struggles and the responsibilities of scholars." Edited by Joseph G. Jorgensen and Richard B. Lee. New York: MSS Modular Publications.

The Necessity for a Macrocosmic Model in Urban Anthropological Studies

STEVEN H. JONES

This paper originates from several sets of activities and from genuine concerns arising from those activities — in particular, certain narrow theoretical perspectives and a tenacious attachment to the study of powerless populations by urban anthropologists. The writer is alarmed about the paucity of urban anthropological studies that employ the holistic approach as a research strategy. And as a Black social scientist, the writer is concerned about the social scientific approach of "victim analysis" (blaming the victim for the total situation), which is tantamount to denying the existence of institutional racism and the systematic exploitation of the poor. The latter points will be developed more extensively in the last section of the paper. This presentation will establish a rationale for a macrocosmic perspective in examining urban populations. A selective review of ethnographic material will afford evaluative criteria for determining the status of the macrocosmic approach in urban anthropology. The writer will introduce a preparadigmatic model (see Kuhn 1970 [1962]), implicitly applying General Systems Theory and demonstrating the paradigm with research data pertaining to the East St. Louis and Metro-East area of southern Illinois. Ideological implications of the preparadigmatic model will be treated, with some discussion relating to the "value freedom" debate in anthropology. I am indebted to Dr. Joyce Aschenbrenner, Dr. Ed Robbins, and Dr. Ed Montgomery for their comments on a draft of this paper. This study was made possible by a grant from the Center of Urban and Environmental Research and Services, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville.

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THE RATIONALE FOR A MACROCOSMIC APPROACH The holistic perspective is in danger of being eliminated in urban anthropological studies; most attempts thus far key almost exclusively on the neighborhood or a few blocks of a single street. One result has been to remove the research area from the context of the city as a total system, suggesting serious questions concerning the representativeness of the sample and the influence of external control. In most cases, urban anthropologists seem to assume that urbanites, usually the poor or minorities, live as isolated populations, with their behavior controlled by a "subcultural" value system. The assumption that primitives were isolated is debatable (Leeds 1973; Mangin 1970); the same assumption about urban populations is untenable. For the aforementioned traditional perspective, the writer has coined the label Internal Normative Approach. Although the Internal Normative Approach has contributed valuable insights to the study of human cultures, the writer takes the position that it is time to adopt a macrocosmic perspective along with the traditional approach. As a result of exclusive employment of the Internal Normative Approach, several distinct trends in urban ethnographies have evolved. These trends are more applicable to research conducted by U.S. anthropologists than to that conducted by British anthropologists. The trends are: (1) a focus on minority groups or poverty populations; (2) an uncritical acceptance of U.S. culture as a homogenous system, or, conversely, an acceptance of U.S. culture as a set of "subcultures"; and (3) a reliance on the use of qualitative description to the exclusion of quantification. The exclusive focus on minority and poverty populations has had several serious repercussions, one of the most notable being the reluctance to study middle- and upper-class sections. In addition, without an operational definition, middle-class standards are used as a base-line measurement. Thus, one may question whether "middle class" refers to a set of values or a particular economic or educational status, or some dialectical relationship among all three factors. As a result of the Internal Normative Approach, minority and poverty populations have been regarded as closed systems. The relationships of these populations with dominant groups, such as welfare workers, policemen, merchants, politicians, and the like, have often been ignored or minimized. The following quotation is illustrative of the ethnic/povertygroup bias in urban ethnographies: "Racial groups, ethnic groups, outcast groups and poverty groups, the downtrodden of the earth seem to be followed around by anthropologists. We have much more description of Poverty Culture than Middle Class or Upper Class Culture" (Price 1972:16).

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The issue of a homogeneous American culture versus multiple subcultures is a crucial one (Valentine 1970). The basic dilemma stems from the melting-pot tradition in the social sciences. Many anthropologists adhering to this tradition have uncritically accepted the concept of a homogeneous culture (Liebow 1967; Keiser 1969), whereas others have uncritically assumed the existence of subcultures (Miller 1958). To this writer the issue is epistemological and should be resolved through the formulation and empirical testing of deductive hypotheses. 1 The Internal Normative Approach has a logical proclivity toward consideration of local cultural varieties (subcultures), while macrocosmic variables are not easily brought within the scope of the model; for the homogeneous concept, the macrocosmic microcosmic issue does not exist, since the two models correspond. Obviously, a more adequate model is needed. The construction and application of such a model will be the aim of this treatment. The tendency toward nonqualified description involves two immediate pitfalls. First, without the use of quantitative data the single urban ethnographer cannot hope to formulate generalizations derived from consideration of the total city as the context for the interpretation of data (Hutchinson 1968). It would be impossible for one ethnographer, using primarily descriptive techniques, in the customary time frame of one and a half to two years, to conduct an in-depth study of a city of even 100,000 people. Second, it is difficult to establish a basis of comparison (intraculturally and cross-culturally) without the use of quantification (Arensberg 1968). For instance, urban anthropologists, relying on what Levi-Strauss has referred to as "mechanical models," have defined "cities" as nodal centers with populations ranging from a few thousand (Harris 1969 [1956]) to over one million (Drake and Cayton 1970 [1945]). Macrocosmic models have been discussed in a descriptive context in some urban anthropological literature (Arensberg 1968; Price 1972; Gulick 1968; Olien 1968), but only a few macrocosmic models have been subjected to empirical investigation (Miner 1965; Gulick 1967). In the 1930's and 1940's national character studies made an attempt to employ a macrocosmic approach (Benedict 1946; Mead and Metraux 1953), as did civilizational studies (Kroeber 1952). The principal difficulty in these research efforts was that the sectors of the society researched were highly visible, but were not representative of the total society. The following quotation suggests the theoretical consequences for anthropologists when the part 1 The writer takes the position that anthropologists should attempt to formulate testable, deductive hypotheses. This reasoning is based on the proposition that the discipline of anthropology should attempt to develop general laws facilitating the description, explanation, and prediction of cultural differences and similarities.

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is not representative of the whole (Weaver and White 1972:111): The fallacy of equating macrocosm with microcosm was a fatal theoretical weakness in the transfer of the anthropological community study method to cities and towns in complex society. Anthropological holism flounders when it attempts to capture a differentiated and heterogeneous civilization within the simplified formula and ethnographic style used for small scale societies.

A macrocosmic model that represents an exception to the aforementioned criticisms is the pluralist concept originated by J. S. Furnivall (1944:25). According to Furnivall, the model is related to societies that "comprise two or more elements or social orders which live side by side, yet without mingling in one political unit." Furnivall and other plural society theorists have used economic determinism to provide causal explanations for social orders. Van den Berghe (1967) and Colby and Van den Berghe (1969) have elaborated Furnivall's original model, extending it to weigh "economic interdependence," "social cohesion" and "coercion," "conflict" and "exploitation," contingent on the social situation. The additions of Colby and Van den Berghe have the advantage of not biasing the model in the direction of conflict or stasis. Even though the plural society model has some theoretical difficulties, it seems to move anthropological theory in the right direction in analyzing complex societies. Some anthropologists have become cognizant of the fact that urban societies are organizationally complex because of their internal mechanics and because of their hierarchical relationships to other societal and nonsocietal parts. The following quotation is an example of the points mentioned above and the central importance of utilizing the holistic perspective in urban studies (Olien 1968:83): The city is not an isolated community. Instead, the urban community lies in a nexus of interrelationships. Not only are there relations between the subculture of the community, but there are also relations between the city and the rural areas, between the city and the nation and even international relations. In part, it is this very network of relationships which makes an understanding of the city possible. Describing the context in which an urban area exists may allow the same level of totality in their [the anthropologists'] studies of cities as has been reached in the studies of isolated primitive groups.

A SELECTIVE REVIEW OF THE URBAN ETHNOGRAPHIC LITERATURE A review of the urban ethnographic literature reveals some interesting facts concerning the status of the macrocosmic perspective. For instance, the new journal Urban Anthropology (Spring 1972:4—5) listed two "Newsletter"

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comments (John Gulick and Anthony Leeds) concerning the need to use a "systems or holistic approach" and to avoid conceptualizing the city as an "isolated," "autonomous" unit. In the first issue of the journal (Spring 1972), three of the seven articles utilized a macrocosmic approach; the other four relied primarily on the Internal Normative Approach. Price (1972) stresses the fact that few anthropologists have the "audacity" to study a whole city, and he suggests the team ethnographic approach as the most feasible methodological procedure. Jones (1972) emphasizes the fact that local communities (especially ghettos) are controlled in many ways by "external institutions" which prevent community organizations from developing. Rollwagen (1972) proposes that the concept of the "city as context" must be developed to accomplish adequate cross-cultural comparisons of the urbanization process. In the second issue of Urban Anthropology (Fall 1972), the writers of two out of the seven articles express the opinion that the macrocosmic perspective should be used as an alternative to the traditional reliance on the Internal Normative model. Fox (1972:218) suggests that a serious limitation of urban studies in Latin America and the United States is regarding the city as a given rather than as an object of study. He feels that the "emphasis on the city as a research locale rather than as the object of investigation has given much urban anthropology a limited perspective. This defect characterized the two major currents of urban work in anthropology: urbanization research in Africa and slum studies in the United States and Latin America." Cornelius (1972:235) takes the opposing position, maintaining that some cities can be subdivided into "zones" representing independent "subcommunities." The author supports this contention by stating: " . . . we may study a low income residential zone not merely as a fragment of the larger urban society and polity, but as an ecologically and sociologically distinct urban sub-community, which constitutes a meaningful and highly salient reference group to most of its inhabitants." Cornelius's position is difficult to justify, given the fact that an "ecological approach," by definition, implies an interrelationship between organisms and their total immediate environments. The number of urban ethnographies is becoming quite extensive; some of these make reference to the implementation of the macrocosmic approach. Liebow (1967:209), in his study of street-corner men, asserts that Blacks "don't have a self-contained, self-generating, self-sustaining system or even a subsystem with clear boundaries marking it off from the larger world around it." This statement seems, to some degree, to be a rationalization for the author's use of the Internal Normative Approach. Spradley (1970), studying urban derelicts, employs the concept of subculture without

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supplying the reader with an operational definition, not indicating clearly how this subsystem is functionally or structurally related to the larger society. Plotnicov (1967:9) acknowledges that urban populations researched by anthropologists are "arbitrarily isolated and small enough to be manageable . . . [whereas] town wards are closely interdependent with the wider community . . . [and] the city subsection by itself is not a viable community." The author later asserts in justification of his "situational analysis method" (Internal Normative Approach) that the total urban scene can appear as "an incomprehensible jumble of contrast and contradictions" (1967:10). Miner (1965) implicitly utilizes the macrocosmic perspective in his study of Timbuktu. He examines the influence of the French on the city's commercial and governmental spheres, the relationship between the city and its agricultural hinterland, and the reliance of the city on the importation of essential goods such as salt. Newton (1972), researching "drag queens," speaks of the conflict between the cultural norm of heterosexuality (national level) and the subcultural (subsystem) norm of homosexuality. The book Soulside: inquiries into ghetto culture and community makes some definitive statements concerning the macrocosmic model. In the following remarks, the author, Ulf Hannerz (1969:13), relates the issue directly to his ethnographic study: I hope that despite its focus within the ghetto community, this book will not in any way serve as an example of neglect of such macrostructural determinants. On the contrary, I hope to have made quite clear the continuous impact of the constraints imposed on the ghetto dwellers by the wider society. A study of a depressed group is obviously doomed to failure if it is not formed by such an ecological perspective. Hannerz also comments (1969:13) on what this writer has described as the Internal Normative Approach: " F o r better or worse, it is in the anthropological tradition of trying to get close to small-scale social structures. An anthropologist may feel out of place doing anything else; as ghetto dwellers sometimes put it you 'do what you know'." This would seem to indicate that exclusive use of the Internal Normative Approach occurs because it is an anachronism dictated by blind obedience to anthropological tradition and not because it is the best theoretical device.2

INTRODUCTION OF A PREPARADIGMATIC MODEL The following are important assumptions concerning the criteria for an adequate macrocosmic perspective: (1) any urban society represents an 2

Hannerz's study is an exceptional ethnography which attempts to address such major theoretical issues as culture versus subculture, macrocosm versus microcosm, and the culture of poverty.

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open system involving information and energy exchanges with external environments; (2) mechanical models should be excluded in favor of complex adaptive models; (3) adaptive systems maintain exchanges of information and services with the external environment, which provide the basis for selfregulation (feedback); (4) the urban area is a unit in a hierarchical system of functionally interconnected structures. It seems almost banal to remind readers that an urban society is an open system. Perhaps a more central issue is whether anthropologists should study the upper ranges of the system or its macrostructural features, to use Hannerz's terminology. Urban minority groups and poverty populations most assuredly are dependent populations in many ways. Can anthropologists deny the reliance of these urban groups on supralocal institutions,3 such as public welfare, law-enforcement agencies, local industry, schools, and the like? Whether the external institutions represent exploitative, beneficial, or symbiotic relationships with community residents, or some combination of these relationships, is an empirical question. Adaptive models appear most applicable because of the physical and cultural vicissitudes of the urban environment; all urban populations are involved in a continuous cycle of adjustment to their environs. The physical environment changes in relationship to such factors as time-distance variables, pollutant levels, rodent and insect population levels (Hare 1970), river water levels, and so on. The cultural milieu changes in response to a multitude of factors. Urban anthropologists have had the difficult task of explaining such phenomena as shifts to cultural nationalism (Hannerz 1969) and community control of schools (Valentine 1970). Adaptive models have the advantage of not presupposing what the population is reacting to; Bennett (1973) states the case this way: "The concept of adaptive behavior would appear the most useful: it is neutral with respect to preferred or assumed directions of change, and it thrusts the responsibility for determining the direction of change, in part at least, upon the members of the society under study." Furthermore, change is generated as the local urban area articulates with external institutions, with power descending through various levels (state and regional governmental and nongovernmental agencies), shaping the lives of the populace. Anthony Leeds (1973:30) traces the complex shifts in power relationships in urban societies, commenting:

3

Supralocal institutions are patterns of social relationships that ideally function, at least partially, for the benefit of the community; they are not controlled by community residents and treat residents in a standardized way, irrespective of local conditions (Leeds 1973:15—41).

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The evolution of society involved a continuous adjustment and readjustment between locality and supralocal power institutions. A n y shift in resources of the institutions of control brings about shifts in the power relations, shifts which may be responded to by still further adjustments to compensate for the shifts. Power systems, as conceived here, may thus be seen as moving equilibria, occasionally passing into disequilibria or, through quantum leaps, from one equilibrium state to another.

The assertion that the urban center maintains an exchange of information and services with the external environment is based on several premises. First, the city is not economically self-sufficient: food and other items must be imported regularly from outside the urban center. Thus, prices and the quality of social services — important determinants of social behavior — must be regarded in part as externally influenced (Leeds 1973). Second, the flow of information into the city via the mass media has pervasive influences on behavior (Hannerz 1969). And finally, many cities serve as central locations for a hinterland, commercial centers, and transportation nexuses (Arensberg 1968). The view of the city as a subsystem is founded on its ecological setting, governmental relationships, and ideological ties to the larger society. The city is a geographic unit, ecologically related to a larger region (Rose 1971) via the topography of the land, natural resources, transportation routes, climate, and so on. Governmentally, the city is a subsystem through its relationships with county, state, and federal agencies. This last point is central when considering the penetration of nationally funded agencies into the community (Jones 1972). Political and moral issues will be ideologically interpreted with some combination of national value orientation and local alternative views. The following preparadigmatic model speaks to the issue of ranking ecological variables, especially populations, physical structures, and geographic features located in a specific spatial arrangement. The model will consist of levels of articulation — hierarchically arranged ecological structures, external and internal to the urban area. These levels of articulation are the urban-area level, the regional level, and the national level. The urbanarea level refers to a large number of social interactions of different kinds taking place among large numbers of persons within a certain limited range of space and time.4 The regional level refers to two or more urban areas and to the relative position therein of geographic and geologic features. The national level refers to the total number of urban units in the national territorial state. The cultural dimension of these spatial arrangements encompasses adaptive behavioral responses to historical, natural environmen4

This definition of urban-area level is based on Leeds's definition of locality. Leeds has an excellent discussion of the confusion developing from the use of such terms as community, town, and village (Leeds 1973:15—41).

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tal, and existing social circumstances. The natural environment of the levels consists of biotic factors, the landscape, and natural resources as well as the spatial relationships of these items. Subsystems are hierarchically and horizontally arranged structures that constitute the internal environment of the urban-area levels (refer to Rule 2 below). The following rules should be applied when determining the relative importance of the levels of articulation. Rule 1. When decisions in the unit of analysis are directly influenced by levels of articulation, the levels must be considered as major variables. This rule is based on points made by John Bennett (1973) in his discussion of "macrostructures" and "microstructures." Rule 2. The urban area (city) is the smallest unit of analysis; therefore, populations, physical structures, and geographic features are always subsystems within a level of articulation. Rule 3. There are many (but a finite number) of subsystems, their constitution and external connections are determined by specific structural elements and the researcher's perspective. Rule 4. (preparadigmatic orientation). It can be assumed that there is a continual interpenetration of influences descending through the levels of articulation as well as an opposing reverse process. One example of the reverse process involved a group of citizens in East St. Louis (urban-level subsystem) who forced the city government to pressure the railroads (regional level of articulation) into building levees on the riverfront to prevent flooding in nearby residential neighborhoods. This action was followed by similar actions on the part of farmers in the area (regional level); the railroads built more levees, thus reducing flooding in the region. In the future, testable propositions concerning the rules of influence that control the relationships among "levels of articulation" and "subsystems" should be forthcoming. The levels of articulation represent spheres of power 5 which exert influence through the spatial patterning of urban populations. Power can be channeled through supralocal institutions (education, government, economics) and internal institutions6 (family, voluntary associations, churches). The interdependence of these institutions is axiomatic. The task of unraveling the chain of causality is especially difficult where multiple institutional influences intersect with concomitant ecological forces. For in5

Power is defined as the ability of an individual or group to control the life chances of another individual or group, even against resistance by the individual or group being controlled. (This is based on a definition by Max Weber.) 6 Internal institutions are patterns of social relationships that usually function for the benefit of the community and that are accessible to control by a large section of community residents.

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stance, external institutional (city government) effectiveness seems to be directly related to how far populations are located from service centers, such as fire departments, police stations, and supermarkets. In this example, space is the major ecological variable, along with the quality of public transportation. The first step in the analytic process is determining the levels of articulation from which power is being exerted on the object of study (hereafter referred to as the unit of analysis). This procedure gives the researcher the opportunity to isolate the causal factors in a specific context and to organize the factors in a rank order of influence. National environmental factors, such as the relief of the land, mineral resources, water supply, and climate should be juxtaposed with cultural factors, such as values, attitudes, and customs; supracultural factors, such as the economic market and restrictive legal statutes, must also be considered. These sets of causal agents must be ranked according to their direct influence on the unit of analysis. The urban anthropologist must analytically separate these three sets of factors in any ecological analysis, even though all the factors are interdependent in their empirical manifestations. The preparadigmatic model or macrocosmic perspective that has been presented in this section is not intended to be exclusively explanatory; rather, its purpose is to provide a classificatory scheme for specific ecological variables. Furthermore, before proceeding further we must first establish the relevant ecological variables in urban analysis, then their location in space, and finally a diachronic as well as a synchronic explanation of their influences on populations. The model discussed above is meant to enumerate some of the ecological components, while proposing a classification of their most probable spatial locations and rules for ranking one location over another as a sphere of influence. This procedure provides both a limited degree of explanation and, more important, the foundation for explaining multiple causal factors in a complex socioenvironmental field.

THE MODEL APPLIED TO AN ECOLOGICAL CASE An ecological focus on urban areas dictates an eclectic approach, drawing on the contributions made in social ecology, cultural geography, demography, and the archaeology of urban settlements. The ecological approach seems to offer an excellent opportunity for urban anthropologists to explore the macrocosmic perspective. The Chicago school of sociology launched the social sciences on a systematic examination of the ecology of urban environments. Park,

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Burgess, and McKenzie are perhaps the most well known scholars of the Chicago group. These social scientists were interested in the city as a "spatial" phenomenon; in this connection they applied concepts borrowed from animal and plant ecology (niche, succession, etc.) to the study of urban communities (Park and Burgess 1967 [1925]). Perhaps most significant, in spite of the influence of biological ecology the Chicago school established the importance of "position" in both time and space for human behavior and human institutions (Hawley 1969). Cultural geography has made noteworthy contributions to the literature on urban environments (Rose 1971; Wheatley 1974). This discipline has the advantage of implementing a regional perspective in urban research, conceptualizing the urban area in a wider territorial context. Sophisticated geographic models, such as Central Place Theory (Christaller, 1933), offer exciting possibilities for urban ecological analysis. For instance, Central Place Theory offers an opportunity to measure institutional effectiveness quantitatively; linear distance could be used to analyze the relationship between community residents and service locations. Archaeologists have made valuable additions to the definitions of urbanism (Childe 1950). Parameters of urbanism have been developed, consisting of such items as population size and density, the centrality of trading centers, and the availability of natural resources. The discussion of urbanism in an evolutionary framework has been essential in creating dynamic models for u r b a n environmental research ( G r o v e 1974). Some archaeologists have attempted to utilize Central Place Theory in evaluating the impact of economic changes in urban settlements (Johnson 1974). Most of the materials discussed in this section were collected by other social scientists and by government agencies. These materials were used by the writer because it is his opinion that urban anthropologists should make an attempt to read the voluminous literature on a given urban population before undertaking a research study of that population. For instance, 125 studies on the East St. Louis community were completed by 1968 (Mendelson et al. 1969). Urban anthropologists should also familiarize themselves with relevant studies in such physical sciences as biology and geology; this material is invaluable in urban ecological studies. In this way urban anthropologists will acquire a truly holistic perspective by establishing a broad context within which to interpret cultural data. The following example is drawn from the Metro-East area of Illinois, including East St. Louis; geologically, this locale is known as the American Bottoms. This area is examined by using the national, regional, and urban area levels of articulation and their concomitant ecological variables. There are two important points of which the reader should remain cognizant. First,

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the city (East St. Louis) is the lowest level of articulation; specific explanations concerning parts of the city (subsystems) will be examined from the perspective of the total city as the context. Second, the main criterion for designating the influence of a level of articulation is empirically manifested evidence that decisions made in the city are directly influenced by power being exerted from a higher level of articulation. The analysis will attempt to confirm or disconfirm the following hypothesis: There is an ecological component in the explanation of the migration of populations to and their settlement in East St. Louis.

Topography: Drainage, Groundwater, Mineral

Resources

Isolation of the ecological factors influential on the regional and urban levels of articulation can be accomplished by a physiographic description of the American Bottoms (see Map 1). The area encompasses one hundred and

Map 1.

American Bottoms

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seventy-five square miles; it is thirty miles long and eleven miles wide at the widest point. The area includes the cities of East St. Louis, Granite City, and Wood River. The topography is flat, with shallow depressions forming lakes and swamps. The floodplain is a low-level area that can be inundated with river water or runoff water from higher ground levels. Furthermore, there is a gradual sloping of the land moving south and east, towards the Mississippi River. Drainage is poor in the American Bottoms because of the flatness of the land. Meandering channels take excess water to the Mississippi River. In addition, water runs off lands of higher elevation in the north, flowing southward. Thus much of the area is exposed to floods either from the adjoining upland runoff or from the flooding of the Mississippi River. The elevation of the alluvial plain is not much higher than that of the Mississippi. Mildly successful attempts have been made to control flooding by building levees and artificial channels to facilitate water runoff. DRAINAGE.

The precarious position of the floodplain is shown by the fact that the 1844 flood, the second highest flood of the Mississippi River ever recorded, reached an elevation of 41.3 above 0 on the St. Louis gauge (the river is at flood stage at 30 feet on the river gauge). Only 10 percent of the American Bottoms is above flood stage at 35 feet. Three drainage basins are located on the southern edge of the floodplain, but these are largely unsuccessful in preventing floods and higher water (Branon 1938). A large network of railroads converging in East St. Louis and Alton was built, before much serious thought was given to drainage problems. The railroad companies attempted to counteract the problems by using landfills to get over swamps, shallow lakes, and sags. These landfills were constructed without consideration of natural drainage lines on farms. Farmers claimed that their crops were ruined by floods that would have been harmless if railroad fills had not interfered with natural drainage. The area has had a generous supply of groundwater in the past. The first wells were built by the Big Four Railroad in East Alton in 1894. Since 1894 the pumpage in gallons per day has steadily increased — from 2.1 million gallons per day in 1900 to 110 million gallons per day in 1962. Over 95 percent of the water pumped from wells is used by industry; domestic usage accounts for the rest. As a result of heavy pumpage, the groundwater level has been decreasing since 1900. The decline has averaged approximately twenty-three feet in the region. Shortages in some areas have been so severe as to require industries to abandon their wells and draw water from the Mississippi River. As industrial use decreases, the

GROUNDWATER.

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groundwater level rises again, adding to the problem of flooding. Flooding becomes problematic because the absorption of runoff water is poorer if the groundwater level is moving closer to the surface (Schicht 1965). Therefore, as industry leaves the region, the possibility of flooding is increased. Abundant water supplies in the form of groundwater are a strategic resource in the region. Coal is a major mineral resource of the region, and strip mining has been a dominant economic activity since 1882. Other important industrial minerals are sand, crude oil, and clay. Aquifers, or rocks and sand that absorb and hold groundwater and runoff water, are very important, because they are essential to adequate water supplies for industrial and domestic use (Prickett and Lonnquist 1971).

MINERAL RESOURCES.

Geographic Location with Respect to the Nation East St. Louis and the Metro-East area are located almost at the center of the United States. Many interstate highways and railroads intersect in the region. Thus the area is important for the dispersion of commercial goods and has been given the name "Gateway to the West." In addition, the region is directly across the river from St. Louis, Missouri, resulting in many economic and cultural advantages. The regional level is very much influenced by the region's centrality in the national level of articulation; the region's spatial location creates a wide assortment of economic advantages.

Urban-Area Level Description The urban-area level of analysis concentrates on East St. Louis, Illinois. By almost every social and economic index, this urban center is povertystricken. Furthermore, it is an urban center dominated by supralocal institutions, especially by railroad companies and other large industries outside the control of the local community. Some of the outstanding economic and social characteristics of the area are as follows: the city has the lowest median income of any city in Illinois with a population of 10,000 or more persons (its population at the time of the 1970 census was 69,000). The unemployment rate is between twentyfive and thirty percent. East St. Louis has the highest rate of welfare recipients in the state of Illinois (four out of ten). Forty percent of the city's housing is substandard, and the total number of houses is decreasing due to

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the removal of abandoned houses and the very slow rate of building new dwellings. Sixty-three percent of the city's housing was built before 1929. By the end of 1972, one out of every ten homes in the city had been burglarized. The city government is one million dollars in debt, with tax revenues decreasing and dependence of the city on the state and federal government increasing. City tax revenues have decreased because of a large outmigration of whites in the past ten years; the city is now approximately eighty percent Black. Industry has played a central role in attracting and holding ethnic and poverty populations in the East St. Louis area. The railroads, meat-packing plants, and several smaller industries were established within a short time after the city was founded, in the middle 1800's. There are many reasons why people migrate to an area; employment opportunities are usually an important factor in determining why they stay. The historical documents on the city seem to suggest an exploitative relationship between industry and the populace. For instance, several major firms were accused of instigating the race riot of 1917 by hiring Black strikebreakers (Rudwick 1964). The Terminal Railroad Association is another example of supralocal institutional exploitation. This railroad association owns the 400 acres of river front property in East St. Louis and has prevented the city for 60 years from gaining economic access to this valuable land. The city was able to build a levee on the riverfront to prevent flooding only by acquiring the land through eminent domain (Judd and Mendelson 1973). The railroad also stifles development of the city by maintaining a sprawling system of tracks across the area. These tracks traverse the urban center in all directions; trains hold up traffic from twenty minutes to an hour at major and minor street crossings. One railroad track runs the entire length of the city, north to south. On occasion, trains on this track cover the whole distance from city limit to city limit, cutting the city in half.7 Analysis The ecological influence on the regional level of articulation includes the following factors: (1) the geographic location of the region at the center of the United States and adjacent to the Mississippi River; (2) an abundance of groundwater; (3) the location of the region on a flat alluvial floodplain and concomitant conditions of flooding and poor drainage; (4) an abundance of mineral resources, such as coal, crude oil, and aquifers. 1

The information on East St. Louis was gathered from sources too numerous to mention. For those interested, much of this type of information is available in Jane Altes's works (1970, 1973).

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Furthermore, it is important to consider the specific interrelationships of ecological features. The alluvial plain is only a few feet higher than the level of the Mississippi River, facilitating river flooding. The higher lands, located to the north and east of the main population centers cause flood conditions for the region's urban communities located to the south. An abundant water supply (groundwater and river water) in close proximity to large population centers has attracted industry. At the urban level of articulation, we can analyze the specific research question of why ethnic and poverty populations move to and remain in the area. Ecological and regional factors exert power through external economic institutions. Normative factors were not included in this analysis because this type of data has not yet been collected by the writer. Thus, what is being proposed by way of explanation is not ecological determinism, but rather that the ecological factors and their relative positions constitute the context for social action, broad limits being set by the past and present levels of technology. The causal agents are as follows: 1. The location of the region in close proximity to the Mississippi River and the center of the United States. 2. The availability in the region of vital natural resources, such as coal, crude oil, and especially water. 3. The location of industry and commerce in the urban center, drawn by natural resources, and the power of industry to employ the poor minority populations. 4. The intersection of human transportation routes in the region (bus lines, railroads, and interstate highways), bringing many Blacks and poor Whites from the South who were heading to points north, east, and west. Many southern Blacks and poor Whites passed through the area, but many stayed. The above-mentioned ecological factors do not furnish all the reasons why poverty and minority groups came to the region, yet these ecological factors were important in determining whether such groups remained in the area more or less permanently. It seems certain that employment opportunities, largely determined by local industry, played an important role in offering inducements for the members of such groups to remain in the area. Yet other factors, some negative, explain why the target population has continued to inhabit the same region over the past sixty or seventy years. For example, institutional racism vis-ä-vis housing ordinances and related customs was used pervasively to keep Blacks and immigrants outside surrounding cities and inside certain areas within the city of East St. Louis (Rudwick 1964). Thus, ecological factors seem to have provided the context

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(land, resources, etc.) for economic forces and cultural attitudes which provided the texture of social existence for poverty and minority populations of the region.

IDEOLOGY A N D URBAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH The question of how much influence political and social ideologies have on anthropological theory is a complicated and neglected issue. Several anthropologists have dealt with the question pursuant to studies of American culture (Wolf 1972; Stocking 1968), and a few have discussed the issue in relationship to urban anthropological studies of Blacks (Szwed 1972; Valentine 1970). Therefore, this section of the paper demonstrates that urban anthropological studies on American Blacks — and thus the majority of the research on American Blacks — have been greatly influenced by the social and political ideologies of the researchers. Specifically, the material in this section shows that (1) anthropological studies on American Blacks have not been value free and (2) underlying assumptions about the social position of Blacks have influenced the theoretical models utilized to analyze Black behavior. An attempt is made to establish a dialogue with more conservative colleagues on the important issue of "value freedom" in urban anthropological research on Blacks. 8 1 wish to make my readers completely aware of my ideological position, which places me left of center on most issues — in particular, on two important assumptions concerning value freedom in the social sciences. First, value freedom is impossible because of the conscious and, especially, the unconscious enculturation process, resulting in internalization of one's own societal values. Second, value freedom is impossible because of the inability, in most cases, of researchers to control the external use of their data once these are published. In addition, the writer believes that, traditionally, theoretical models have been influenced by an ideological component; perhaps the theory of functionalism with its predisposition toward stasis was developed by those who wanted to defend the status quo, namely, the colonial relationship between Western and non-Western peoples. (Goodard 1967). In accordance with the aforementioned tradition in anthropological research, the Internal Normative Approach has been used in studying Blacks in general and urban Blacks in particular. The Internal Normative model has been relied on in 8 Value freedom as originally defined by Max Weber meant to "cleanse social facts of their evaluative admixture." In this paper, the term refers to the predispositions a researcher has as a result of his or her disciplinary training, class and racial background, and sex.

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part because it avoids the contradictions of the American dream, especially the contradictions concerning equal opportunity for all groups, regardless of race or creed. It could very well be that in many cases models in the social sciences reflect as much about the researcher's political and social ideology as about the data to be explained. Value freedom is a vital issue because anthropologists have historically advocated the position that the ethnographic researcher should be an objective outsider. This position has been challenged by anthropologists in a number of recent publications (Gjessing 1968; Bonfil Batalla 1966; Maquet 1964; Lewis 1973). Most of this commentary on value freedom has concerned research on primitives and peasants. One important component in the value freedom debate has been the assumption that anthropological methodology and jargon are neutral. Yet viewing primitives and peasants living in a colonial situation as if they were governmentally and culturally autonomous implies a methodological bias through omission. In addition, such anthropological terms as primitive, nonliterate, preliterate, savage, backward, and uncivilized are far from value free (Diamond 1964 [I960]; Magubane 1973). The identification of the term primitive as synonymous with non-White goes beyond the values implied in pejorative labels and strongly suggests racism (Willis 1972; Hsu 1973; Stocking 1968). Urban anthropological research is following intellectual trends of this kind by uncritically accepting such labels as "deviant subcultures," "matriarchal families," and "cultural deprivation." In addition, anthropologists misuse these labels almost exclusively in reference to non-Whites, especially Blacks. American anthropological research concerning Blacks demonstrates that anthropologists have been advocates of particular social and political positions. Most American anthropologists writing in this century about Blacks have taken a prointegrationist position, which has been reflected in their academic research and public pronouncements. The most noted American anthropologist, Franz Boas, aided W. Ε. B. Du Bois in founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People just before World War I. Boas publicly advocated the position that Black Americans are "just American and nothing else" (Boas 1965 [1938]). Furthermore, in the introduction to Mules and men by Zora N. Hurston, he encouraged meaningful anthropological research on Afro-Americans. Boas also attended the Pan African Congress of 1927 at the invitation of W. Ε. B. Du Bois. Boas's students, among them Ruth Benedict and Melville J. Herskovits, followed the tradition of advocating the integration of Afro-Americans into the American mainstream. Most important is Herskovits's stated rationale for researching the cultural heritage of American Blacks. He said that the

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purpose of such research was to "give the Negro an appreciation of his past and to endow him with confidence in his own position in this country and in the world — which he must have [and to] influence opinion in general concerning Negro Abilities and Potentialities and thus contribute to a lessening of interracial tensions" (Herskovits 1958 [1941]:32). Szwed (1972), commenting on the social-political positions of Boas and his students, points out that the pronouncements in question derived from a deeply felt need for social change in the area of White-Black relations in the United States. In the 1940's in the book Black metropolis, the anthropologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cay ton advocated integration as a solution to the racial problem in America. The authors stated their position as follows: "Integration, in the final analysis, also means that the Negro community must increasingly become more middle-class in values and behavior if it is to win respect and approval" (Drake and Cayton 1970 [1945]). Drake and Cayton are clearly advocating a value position, and most important, they seem to be suggesting that integration is tantamount to Blacks becoming "white men with black skins." In a more recent study of Blacks by an anthropologist, Elliot Liebow makes an astonishing admission, in the final chapter of Tally's comer (1967). In the tradition of E. Franklin Frazier, Gunnar Myrdal, and Daniel P. Moynihan, Liebow states that Blacks are "just Americans" with "no culture" to "guard and protect." Proceeding from this assumption, Liebow goes on to say that the lower-class Black men he studied viewed themselves as abject failures because they utilized the larger society's values as criteria for judging self-worth. Yet some of Liebow's data suggest that the streetcorner men used an alternative system of values (relating especially to sexual prowess), at least partially, as a basis for self-esteem. Thus one wonders about the effect of Liebow's predisposition toward racial integration on his interpretation of his research data. Ulf Hannerz's ethnographic study of a Black neighborhood (1969) assumes that Blacks do have a somewhat separate way of life. Hannerz's "ghetto-specific culture" represents a value position opposite to that espoused by Liebow; this position assumes that Black Americans are not just Americans but rather are a people apart due to deliberate exclusion and systematic exploitation by the larger society. It almost goes without saying that this value position influenced Hannerz's interpretation of the data. Perhaps this is the opportune moment in the development of urban anthropology to raise the following questions: Have anthropologists inherited and accepted the pejorative tradition from sociology and other social sciences? Has victim analysis become our forte? The pertinacious refusal to consider institutional racism and institutional

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exploitation of the poor for research hypotheses has ominous possibilities for the discipline of anthropology. Anthropologists have almost completely accepted the assimilationist motif in the social sciences, despite its obvious teleological bias, suggesting that non-White populations in America are heading for the "melting pot." What would the outcome be if the assimilationist motif were subjected to empirical testing? Adherence to the assimilationist theme also makes it difficult to consider the possibility of institutional racism and its systematic inequality, because assimilationist theory a priori assumes equality of opportunity for all groups in the system. This phenomenon might explain the inaccurate use of such terms as prejudice and discrimination in many anthropological discussions. These low-level concepts explain one-to-one interaction between majority and minority group members but do not speak to the systematic exploitation of non-Whites in the economic, political, and social spheres. Perhaps in refusing to acknowledge ideological bias, anthropologists have become "hidden colonizers," creating the medium and the message, transmitted as "objective" descriptions of cultures and part-cultures (Stack 1974; Ladner 1973). How will the "science of man" prosper when the colonized become sophisticated enough or angry enough to refuse the sometimes ethnocentric, racist, class-bound definitions of their social reality? Perhaps equally important, disciplinary and ideological biases in American anthropology seem to have dictated the avoidance of supralocal structures, especially urban-based structures when these are exploitative of Black populations. For example, such institutions, as the law-enforcement agency, the welfare system, and the economic market have not been examined for the effects they have on Black behavior. Even more devastating, institutions of this kind have been omitted in urban anthropological studies of Blacks where the structures clearly affected the behavior of the local population. Urban anthropology at present seems to be capitulating to such trends.

SUMMARY The establishment of generalizations applicable across time and space dictates a theoretical mechanism that explains the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. This relationship has always been recognized but rarely understood. By postulating that primitives were isolated, the anthropologist putatively concluded that he was studying the macrocosm. In the study of urbanites, the community investigations by Lloyd Warner and his associates assumed that the microcosm was representative of the

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macrocosm. Many urban anthropologists negate the macrocosmic factors by the use of normative reductionism, yet they are aware that supralocal factors exist. As the world becomes more urbanized, the social universe will become behaviorally more complex, yielding a plethora of possible causal agents. Can urban anthropologists hope to explain and predict these complex phenomena in their research activities? If this question is answered in the negative, the following trends may characterize urban anthropology in the future: (1) research studies will be theoretically narrow to the extent of excluding causal factors in the macrocosm that determine much of the cultural behavior in the microcosm; (2) precedence over explanatory models will be taken by descriptive models which provide little opportunity to establish general propositions applicable to urban phenomena intraculturally and cross-culturally; and (3) the exclusive concentration on non-White minority groups viewed as closed systems will be empirically incomplete and covertly supportive of racist interpretations prevalent in the larger cultural system.

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2:14-28.

PRICKETT, Τ. Α., C. G. LONNQUIST

1971

Selected digital computer techniques for ground water resource evaluation. Illinois State Water Survey Bulletin 55, Urbana, 111.: State of Illinois Department of Registration and Education.

ROLLWAGEN, JACK

1972

A comparative framework for the investigation of the city-as-context: a discussion of the Mexican case. Urban Anthropology 1:68-86.

The Necessity for a Macrocosmic

Model in Urban Anthropological

Studies

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ROSE, HAROLD M.

1971

The black ghetto: a spatial behavioral perspective. New York: McGrawHill.

RUDWICK, ELLIOTT

1964

Race riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

SCHICHT, R. J.

1965

Groundwater development in East St. Louis area, Illinois. Urbana, 111.: State Water Survey Division.

SIMON, HERBERT A.

1969

The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge Mass.: M.I.T. Press.

SPRADLEY, JAMES P.

1970

You owe yourself a drunk: an ethnography of urban nomads. Boston: Little, Brown.

STACK, CAROL B.

1974

All our kin: strategies for survival in a black community. New York: Harper and Row.

STOCKING, GEORGE W. JR.

1968

Race, culture, and evolution: essays in the history of anthropology. New York: Free Press.

SZWED, JOHN

1972

"The politics of Afro-American culture," in Reinventing Anthropology. Edited by Dell Hymes, 153-181. New York: Random House.

VALENTINE, CHARLES Α., BETTY LOU VALENTINE

1970

"Making the scene, digging the action, and telling it like it is: anthropologists of work in the dark ghetto," in Afro-American anthropology: contemporary perspectives on theory and research. Edited by Norman Whitten and J. F. Szwed, 403-415. New York: Free Press.

VAN DEN BERGHE, P. L.

1967

Race and racism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

WEAVER, T., D. WHITE

1972

"Sociological contributions to an urban anthropology," in The anthropology of urban environments. Edited by T. Weaver and D. White, 97-107. Boulder Cdo.: Society for Applied Anthropology Monograph Series: No. 11.

WHEATLEY, PAUL

1974

"The concept of urbanism," in Urban settlements: the process of urbanization in archaeological settlements. Edited by Ruth Tringham, R12, 1-37. New York: MSS Information Corporation.

WILLIS, WILLIAM

1972

"Skeletons in the anthropological closet," in Reinventing anthropology. Edited by Dell Hymes, 121-152. New York: Random House.

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1972

"American anthropologists and American society," in Reinventing anthropology. Edited by Dell Hymes, 251-263. New York: Random House.

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Theoretical Issues

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AMELIA MARIOTTI and BERNARD M A G U B A N E

Colonization and Civilization? In dealing with this subject, the commonest curse is to be the dupe in good faith of a collective hypocrisy that cleverly misrepresents problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided for them. In other words, the essential thing here is to see clearly, to think clearly — that is, dangerously — and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law. To admit once and for all, without flinching at the consequences, that the decisive actors here are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies. AIME CESAIRE, Discourse

on

colonialism

This is a critical time for the social sciences, not a time for courtesies. ROBERT

LYND

Tawney remarks in one of his books (1948) that in ordinary times intellectual tameness with practical energy is sufficiently serviceable to explain, if not justify, the equanimity of those who have made their bargain with fate and are content to take what it offers without reopening the deal. It leaves Appreciation is expressed to the University of Connecticut Research Foundation for providing facilities for typing the first draft and the revised edition.

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the mind free to concentrate undisturbed upon profitable activities, because it is not distracted by a taste for unprofitable speculation. Tawney goes on to say that most generations walk in a path which they neither make, nor discover, but accept; the main thing is that they should march. The blinkers, again to summarize Tawney, worn by social scientists enable them to trot steadily along the beaten road without being disturbed by curiosity about their destination. There are times which are not ordinary, and in such times it is not enough to follow the beaten road. It is necessary to know where it leads, and if it leads nowhere, to follow another. The search for another involves reflection, which is uncongenial to bustling people who describe themselves as practical, because they take things as they are and leave them as they are. One must recognize with Barrington Moore, Jr. (1965:5) that in certain respects the tasks of the applied and the theoretical sciences are mutually contradictory. The applied scientist seeks to create an accurate map of a small portion of reality. If he is an engineer building a bridge, he wants to know all about the qualities of certain types of steel, the behavior of currents near the banks of the river, the possibility of high winds, and so forth. The social scientist who wishes to explain and ultimately predict the behavior of a particular social group will also want to learn a great deal about the specific economic, political, and other forces that impinge upon the behavior of this group as well as the organizational features of the group, its capacity to resist certain types of strains, and similar matters. He is not necessarily concerned with mining facts for or against some hypothesis. On the other hand, while the theorist endeavors to eliminate as many "perturbations" and "irrelevant" factors and forces as possible in order to reach the highest level of abstraction, he must not ignore the concrete historical reality. The social scientist who wishes to construct a logically integrated theory of urban life must deliberately and explicitly exclude from consideration many aspects of human activity in the city that are not relevant to explaining urban phenomena.

URBANIZATION AND THE MODERN ERA The concrete is concrete because it is a combination of many determinations, i.e., a unity of diverse elements. K A R L M A R X , Die

Brundrisse

Max Weber (1958:66) and Arnold Toynbee (1970:8) define the city as a settlement, the inhabitants of which engage primarily in nonagricultural

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productive activities. Such a definition is of some value in that it identifies certain general features that may be found wherever cities exist. Placed in a historical context, however, these features assume a complexity that cannot be explained by means of a rational abstraction. For a city is not an entity that can be analyzed apart from its historical and social context, but rather a historical configuration which reflects the particular class relations that prevail in a particular historical epoch. The welter of competing definitions and special theories which fill the literature on cities reflects the attempt to treat the city as a static, suprahistorical entity — to elevate various concrete, historical features to abstract universal principles. In contrast to this is Marx's view (1969:52) that a city is a set of social relations in which the social processes of a class society become focused under particular historical conditions: The existence of the town implies . . . the necessity of administration, police, taxes, etc., in short, of the municipality, and thus of politics in general. Here first became manifest the division of the population into two great classes, which is directly based on the division of labour and on the instruments of production. The town already is in actual fact the concentration of the population, of the instruments of production, of capital, of pleasures, of needs, while the country demonstrates just the opposite fact, isolation and separation. The antagonism between town and country can only exist within the framework of private property. It is the most crass expression of the subjection of the individual under the division of labour, under a definite activity forced upon him — a subjection which makes one man into a restricted town-animal, the other into a restricted country-animal, and daily creates anew the conflict between their interests. Labour is here again the chief thing, power over individuals, and as long as the latter exists, private property must exist.

Superficially, the urbanization that has occurred during different historical epochs may look identical. It is this superficial identity to which abstract definitions point. However, this identity obtains only on the level of description. Any attempt at explanation must specify the process which generates the observed facts contained in definitions and descriptions. Cities first arise with the emergence of class society (Adams 1966:197) and subsequently develop and wane with the evolution of productive forces and concomitant reorganizations of class relations and shifts in social power. The establishment of capitalism as the dominant mode of production brings a transfer of productive forces and social power to the towns. With the advent of capitalism, urbanization becomes a worldwide phenomenon reflecting the social change that is induced by economic restructuring. As the focus of productive life under industrial capitalism, the city involves the settlement of large numbers of people in industrial centers. Laborers are drawn or pressed into these centers by job opportunities created by expanding manufacturing and commercial activities. In this way the process of ur-

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banization is set in motion by those classes that control the forces of industrialization. The class structure of society and the interests of the ruling class are crucial determinants of the manifestations of urbanization. The control of the means of production gives capitalists superior power that they wield over the urban workers who have been divorced from any independent means of production of their own. Professor Thompson discusses the development of this relationship in Europe (1959 [ 1928]:792—793): Everywhere the wealthy classes controlled the local town government and local trade and industry, and passed statutes in support of their interests, like privileges and monopolies, or expressive of their contempt for the masses. Thus, in Bruges in 1241 the law associated counterfeiters, thieves and artisans together. Strikes and riots in the densely populated industrial regions of Europe, as Lombardy, Tuscany, and Flanders, are common from the middle of the thirteenth century onward This state of things led to a new form of association — namely leagues of the great guildsmen in all the cities of a province or region — and to attempts on the part of the working classes to form unions in their own midst and even to knit together such combinations in adjacent towns. But all such efforts were abortive in the Middle Ages, except in Florence, and then only successful for a short season. In societies in which an indigenous capitalist class develops, the surplus derived from earlier exploitation is invested to produce further growth. Industrialization proceeds continuously, and urbanization can be contained, more or less, by the widening economic framework. But in societies in which the capitalist mode of production is introduced and controlled by an alien bourgeoisie and develops without connection with the requirements of these societies, this process is distorted. Oskar Lange (1963:11-12) suggests: Investment in underdeveloped countries of capital from the highly developed countries acquired a specific character. It went chiefly into the exploitation of natural resources to be utilized as raw materials by the industries of the developed countries and into developing food production to feed the population of the developed capitalist countries. . . . In consequence, the economies of the underdeveloped countries became onesided, raw material and food-exporting economies. The profits which were made by foreign capital in these countries were [not used] for reinvestment in these countries where the capital came from This is the essential reason why the underdeveloped countries were not capable of following the classical capitalist path of economic development. In short, then, the process of urbanization under capitalism has a historically specific dynamic. Needless to say, this implies that industrial capitalism must be understood not as a static condition but as a developing, expanding process. That is, urbanization that occurs under imperialist expansion possesses a dynamic which by no means replicates that of the

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autochthonous process of Western Europe (contra Lerner [1967:22] and Little [1971:3]), but reflects a negative dialectic of imperialism. The widespread occurrence (both in time and place) of the urban phenomenon should not be allowed to obscure its particular manifestations. An examination of urbanization must be within definite historical limits. Also, the concrete peculiarities of the circumstances in which urbanization occurs must be taken into account. Failing to do this, social scientists undertake the fruitless task of establishing universal, abstract laws of the urban process. The search for laws which may explain all cities betrays the misconception that urbanization is an independent process in history. Isolated from other social processes, the development and decline of cities appears to be a fortuitous occurrence or a function of such factors as geographic location, population growth and dispersal, or terrain. Attempts to account for the emergence of a city in these terms become exercises in the description and correlation of traits. Trivialities assume a significance equal to necessities; cause, consequence, and coincidence become confused; and underlying social processes remain hidden by the elaboration of appearances. An adequate explanation of urbanization must be based on an investigation of this process in its historical context. Historical specificity does not, however, necessitate an eclectic method of investigation. It is possible to approach all urban situations by means of a common methodology and yet arrive at formulations which are historically specific and precise (Driscoll:1972). Marx regarded abstraction as a correct method of inquiry. This method, according to Sweezy (1942:11-12), involves successive approximations. That is, while retaining the fundamental characteristic of a context (e.g., urbanization), it allows the superficial characteristics to drop out. When moving from a high level of generalization to the concrete, Marx in his studies of the evolution of capitalism removed simplifying assumptions and undertook an analysis of the historical situation in its full complexity. Instead of employing general categories to embrace a changing content, the Marxist method requires that generalizations "always have a specific historical element" (Korsch 1963:43). Insofar as the essence and appearance of phenomena are not identical, it is the task of the social scientist to discover the essence beneath its outward appearance. Because bourgeois anthropologists who study urbanization in the so-called developing countries do not understand the method of scientific abstraction, they confuse appearances with essence in their comparative study of urban phenomena in the developing and developed countries. The study of the industrial city and its emergence everywhere must understand the dynamics of the political economy of imperialism. In its classical sense, political economy is the study of economics as shaped by political class struggle.

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THE CITY IN MODERN AFRICA The revival of trade, after the crisis of 1847, was the dawn of a new industrial epoch. The repeal of the Corn Laws and the financial reforms subsequent thereon gave to English industry and commerce all the elbow-room they had asked for. The discovery of the Californian and Australian gold-fields followed in rapid succession. The colonial markets developed at an increasing rate their capacity for absorbing English manufactured goods. In India millions of handweavers were finally crushed out by the Lancashire power loom. China was more and more being opened u p . . . . This world-market, at first was composed of a number of chiefly or entirely agricultural countries grouped around one manufacturing centre — England — which consumed the greater part of this surplus raw produce, and supplied them in return with the greater part of their requirements in manufactured articles. No wonder England's industrial progress was colossal and unparalleled.... And in proportion as this increase took place, in the same proportion did manufacturing industry become apparently moralised. FREDERICK ENGELS,

The condition of the working class in England

Urbanization in Africa is a subject of interest to many urban theorists (see Hauser 1965; Reissman 1964; Fava 1968). Some look to urbanization in the developing countries for a recapitulation of the European experience. For instance, Reissman (1964:153) says that urbanization in Africa provides a "rare opportunity to study . . . cases of historical reiteration." Hauser (1965:34) expresses the hope that studies of Africa and Asia may "shed light on the antecedents and consequences of urbanization in the West." When differences in the urbanization of nineteenth-century Europe and that of colonial Africa are observed, there is little attempt to explain them. Rather, the African experience is characterized as a deviation from the Western model (see Lerner 1967). Other theorists concern themselves with problems of definition and categorization. The literature abounds with typologies of cities based on origin, location, function, and so on (see Weber 1958; Simms 1965:5-8). Various indices have been developed to study the optimum location, size, density, and composition of population; the attributes of the city as a physical "container"; the quality of social life and the characteristic mentality of urban dwellers (Driscoll 1972). For the most part, such criteria are only descriptive of the empirical reality, yielding little in the way of explanation. An elaboration of indices is a common approach in urban studies; it is a method that takes the city as a given entity and tries to isolate those properties which seem to be common or unique to urban situations or to various urban populations. If well conceived, the search for what is distinctively

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urban may yield useful insights about the ways in which the city differs from rural life or in which the class structure of the city affects different populations differently. It cannot, however, explain why urban life is the way it is. This approach can provide at best a familiarity with the superficial aspects of urban phenomena. At worst, its resulting configurations are tautological and distorted, as when it is argued that with urbanization has come "increased freedom of women, changes in reproductive behavior, and late marriages," and these indices are then taken as "a few of the factors which have brought about direct changes within the indigenous family structure" (Simms 1965:25). Attempts at generalizations reflect the confusion that exists regarding the nature of urbanization in Africa. One source of error is ideologically prejudiced formulations. Terms such as detribalization, stabilization, and Westernization have been used to refer to the process of urbanization in Africa. Living in towns is described as "civilized," in contrast to living in rural areas, which is "uncivilized" (Pons 1969; Epstein 1967; Mitchell 1956a). Another source of error is the attempt to explain urbanization only in terms of the behavior of Africans in cities. This leads to considerable discussion concerning objective criteria for describing an "urbanized African." These include number of years of permanent residence in a city, permanent residence of wife in an urban area, and absence of land rights in the countryside (Hellman 1953; Mitchell 1956b). Students of urbanization in Africa give particular attention to Africans who live and work in cities but retain land rights in rural areas. Descriptions of African town dwellers who supplement their wages with agricultural production are a basis for superficial analyses of "dual" or "plural" society in urban and development literature. Attempts to explain the retention of rural landholdings or extended kin ties, the instability of urban residence or other features of urbanization in Africa, pass over the objective structure of colonial society to focus on the "backward" attitudes of Africans or the tenacity of the traditional way of life. Low wages, the confiscation of unworked land, and the tenuousness of urban work and residence under labor contracts, work compounds, and the color bar are less significaht in these analyses than are conjectured reasons for the rural-urban shuttling or people's perception and evaluation of that aspect of the colonial system which they directly experience. There is a general failure to recognize that the behavior and attitudes of Africans are not the cause of the kind of urbanization that Africa has experienced but rather the observable effect of social forces which initiated and shaped the process of urbanization itself. These social forces were not generated by traditional African social structures but by the development

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and expansion of the capitalist mode of production. In reality, the city in Africa is a clear expression of the nature of underdevelopment: namely, the deprivation of African countries of resources and the cumulative effects which would have resulted if the raw material of these countries had been processed and manufactured locally. The nature of urbanization in Africa requires that the relationship between Africa and certain European countries be sought out and examined. In doing so, it becomes apparent that much of what has been taken to be uniquely African is a consequence of this relationship. The attempt to study urbanization at a continental level is a risky undertaking indeed. These general observations will not be entirely adequate for any particular region or country. However, they do apply at a general level where the process and conditions in their continental manifestations can be examined without denying regional variations. Within this perspective the differential impact of colonialism on particular societies can be accounted for with further specification.1 Historically, it was the industrial revolution which occurred within the developing capitalist relations of production that allowed the more or less peaceful growth of towns as centers of the capitalist productive system in Europe. Once the basis of industrialization and urbanization had been created there, the capitalist productive forces began a steady expansion overseas. This extension was not merely to discover but to create "new worlds" through the exploitation of raw materials needed for the developing capitalist industries. The "modernizing" force of European contact did not re-create the newly established European social order in Africa. Rather, it set Africa on a course of underdevelopment as an aspect of the further capitalist development of Western Europe and later the United States. The violent penetration and rupture of precapitalist societies and the subjugation of the economic life of the greater part of the world to the profit impulse of the Western bourgeoisie constitute the fundamental reality of the colonial city in Africa. In contrast to European cities, which were an organic part of the economic growth of their respective countries, the town in Africa is a symbol of the social fractures and estrangement founded upon a multidimensional polarization (economic, political, cultural) of colonizer and colonized (see Murray and Wengraf 1963:29). Administrative, market, and 1

Many of the illustrations in this discussion are drawn from South Africa. Although the colonial experience in South Africa is marked by certain peculiarities, it is by no means unique. The general condition of imperialist expansion and domination under which urbanization took place in South Africa prevailed for the entire continent. An adequate explanation of urbanization in any particular area comes not from seeking out peculiarities of the African societies or the "national character" of the colonizers, but from examining the relation between colonizer and colonized and the process from which this relation emerged.

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industrial requirements of European countries, and not indigenous development, gave rise to most urban areas in Africa. Three interrelated trends can be identified in an indigenous process of urbanization. These are changes in the composition of the population, changes in the distribution of skills, and changes in the relation between town and country. At particular times and in various societies these trends stand in differential relation to one another. The tragic but determining fact for African societies is that the industrial development that forms the economic basis of the towns and cities was — and to a large extent still is — foreign. 2 This development is reflected in the class structure of the colonial city, in which a transplanted, alien managerial class prevails, whose interest in the development of African resources — both human and natural — is limited to the requirements of the extraction of immediate superprofits. The colonial situation also fosters the development of a tiny, indigenous petty bourgeoisie comprising comprador and low-echelon bureaucratic elements. This class remains dependent upon foreign exploitation for its existence even after the dismantling of the formal empire. It has no independent role in the development (or rather underdevelopment) of its country. Removed from the process of capital accumulation by the export of capital to the metropolis, this class turns to the conspicuous consumption of foreign commodities (see Nwosu 1973:48). The consequences of imperialist penetration are most evident in the underdeveloped proletariat, whose existence was demanded and whose character continues to be determined by the requirements of foreign capital. Thus, the development of technology and skills is not related to the material needs of African social life. African economies operate within a system which was organized to extract raw materials for foreign industries. City growth, including the aberrant relationship with the countryside, expressed the illogic and imbalance of the colonial system as a whole (see Murray and Wengraf 1963:19). The failure of colonialism to complete the task of social transformation it had begun, indeed the pauperizing dynamic of the colonial system, produced the most profoundly distorted and skewed societies. Comparing the European and African experience, Basil Davidson (1974:277) points out that: The first [industrialization] destroyed, but also, after its fashion, mightily rebuilt afresh; the second, having gone far to ruin what it found, could only leave for Africans the task of making a new society. N o such new society came into being during the colonial period. Little was left behind but an utter impoverishment of the 2

Once generated, the dynamic of underdevelopment continues even after the departure of the last colonial administrator as long as the relations between capital and labor remain unchanged. With the worldwide dismantling of the colonial order, "only in countries where capitalism was abolished was imperialist domination destroyed root and branch" (Mandel 1969:480).

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old society, a chaos of ideas and social relationships.... When the principal colonializing powers eventually withdrew, everything of basic social meaning remained to be begun or rebuilt afresh.

Thus, urbanization in Africa was accompanied by a complex process of dislocations and contradictions that was not a recapitulation of the earlier experience in the development of European capitalism, but the articulation of its final contradictions. The social and historical significance of urban dynamics in Africa can be adequately comprehended and appraised only if African cities are studied as aspects of the political and economic systems of the colonizing countries. The structure of the city in Africa reflects a situation in which the economies of African societies were conditioned by the development and needs of the European economies to which they were subjected as producers and processors of raw materials. As Dos Santos (1971:226) explains: The relation of interdependence between two or more economies and between these and world trade, assumes the form of dependence when some countries (the dominant ones) can expand and can be self-starting while other countries (the dependent ones) can do this only as a reflection of that expansion which can have either a positive or negative effect on their immediate development.

The concept of dependence facilitates an examination of the internal situation of African cities as the result not of factors characteristic of traditional African societies but of the exigencies of colonialism. In order to explain the social structures that developed in the African city, the requirements and consequences of capitalism in its imperialist development must be understood.

COMPARATIVE URBANIZATION AND INDUSTRIALIZATION Sixty, eighty years ago England was a country like any other, with small towns, few and simple industries, and a thin but proportionally large agricultural population. Today it is a country like no other, with a capital of two and a half million inhabitants; with vast manufacturing cities, with an industry that supplies the world and produces almost everything by means of the most complex machinery; with an industrious, intelligent, dense population, of which two thirds are employed in trade and commerce, and composed of classes wholly different: forming, in fact, with other customs and other needs, a different nation from the England of those days. The industrial revolution is of the same importance for England as the political revolution for France and the philosophical revolution for Germany. FREDERICK ENGELS, The condition of the working class in England

The comparative study of urbanization raises questions regarding the relationship between urbanization and industrialization (Breese 1966;

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Lerner 1967). The concurrence of these two processes in the development of Western Europe, in particular England, and of the United States contrasts sharply with the urbanization without industrialization that has occurred in Africa (Barber 1967) and elsewhere (Hauser 1965; Myrdal 1968; Ward 1969). The problems of African urban life are conceived to be what Daniel Lemer (1967:25) calls the "decoupling" of the twin processes. The solution frequently posed is the promotion of industrialization and the delaying of urbanization in order to return the two processes to harmonious relations (Ward 1969). The implementation of such a mechanical proposal usually takes the form of population-control programs and "foreign aid" which, according to Mandel (1969:472-481), do not aid the industrial development of the recipient, but facilitate the transfer of social surplus to the donor. Those who try to draw parallels between European and African urbanization and industrialization fail to recognize that these processes are aspects of the development of the capitalist mode of production at one point in history for Europe and at another point in history for Africa. Failing to recognize this, social scientists are frequently at a loss to account for the combination of burgeoning urban centers and limping industrial development in Africa. One need only examine the relation between Europe and the United States, on the one hand, and between Europe and Africa, on the other, to discover why advanced industrial development has taken place in the United States while the basis of industrialization has never been firmly established in Africa. A s Singer (1950:338-339) explains: The productive facilities for export from underdeveloped countries, which were so largely a result of foreign investment, never became a part of the internal economic structure of those underdeveloped countries themselves except in the purely geographical and physical sense. Economically speaking, they were really an outpost of the economies o f more developed investing countries. T h e main secondary multiplier effects, which the textbooks tell us to expect from investments, took place not where the investment was physically or geographically located but (to the extent that the results of these investments returned directly home) where the investment came from. I would suggest that if the proper economic test o f investment is the multiplier effect in the form of cumulative additions to income, employment, capital, technical knowledge, and growth of external economies, then a good deal o f the investment in underdeveloped countries which we used to consider as " f o r e i g n " should in fact be considered as domestic investment on the part of the industrialized countries.

Africa does not suffer from a mysterious decoupling o f urbanization and industrialization but rather from imperialist penetration which creates forced shanty urbanization in the colonies and industrial development in the metropolitan countries. The exaggerated influx of masses of people from rural areas into urban centers was precipitated by indiscriminate policies designed to create a surplus labor force as quickly as possible without

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regard for future consequences. Towns sprang up in mining regions from which raw materials were extracted and shipped to the metropolitan country without material benefit accruing to those towns. The raw materials contributed to industrial development and economic growth in Europe, not Africa. As Murray and Wengraf (1963:19) note: The leading towns [in Africa] were not the creation of industrialization and inherent technical progress, but were rather the product of an export-directed colonial agriculture [änd mining], whose rents and profits found an urban outlet in consumption and speculations.

Furthermore, colonial economies were not allowed to develop those sectors which would generate growth and support cumulative industrialization. In fact, there were few ties between one sector of the economy and another so that in any single colony there could be no beneficial interaction between the various sectors and organic development. In his recent book How Europe underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney (1972:162) explains that: Colonialism was not merely a system of exploitations but one whose essential purpose was to repatriate the profits to the so-called "mother country." From an African viewpoint, that amounted to consistent expropriation of surplus produced by African labour out of African resources. It meant the development of Europe as part of the same dialectical process in which Africa was underdeveloped.

The apparent decoupling of the "twin" processes of industrialization and urbanization can only be understood by examining another set of interrelated processes: development and underdevelopment. The appropriate context for an examination of these processes is not the geographic area of Africa but the operation of the capitalist mode of production in its imperialist extension.

COLONIAL URBANIZATION AND MIGRANT LABOR No one can long be in this country without sensing strong currents of emotion. "If only there were some way," runs the white man's dream, "of having them here and yet of not having them here"; but they, like the waves of the sea, rise and run and fall upon the white man's world witho.ut remission. BASIL DAVIDSON, A report on South Africa

The concept "urbanization" points to population movement to cities, resulting in a proportional concentration of the total population in these areas. In Africa this occurred as a particular form of labor migration. Almost every colonial regime in Africa preferred migrant African labor to labor permanently settled in town. It was not until very late in the history of

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the use of migrant labor that cautious and tentative moves were made in the former Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia to experiment with "stabilization" of the African labor force by encouraging workers to bring their families with them to work locations. Why were Africans incorporated into the colonial system as migrant laborers? Elsewhere (Magubane and O'Brien 1972), the political, social, and economic reasons that lay behind the use of migrant labor have been considered. The following is an examination of the nature of the migrant labor system in relation to the colonial city and the requirements of the metropolitan countries. The use of migrant labor and the perfunctory stabilization programs were a response to the labor and market requirements of the colonizing powers based on a rational calculus of costs. Karl Marx, in his study of capitalist organization, explains that workers are included in its system not for their own social interest but because they satisfy the aims and interest of the capitalist system itself. The development of the city in Africa during the colonial era illustrates this point. Laws and policies were promulgated and administered in such a way that only those Africans whose labor power was needed in the towns were admitted. Others were uprooted to create a floating work force that could be used to threaten and depress the wages of those employed in colonial industries. The Stallard commission of South Africa spells out unreservedly the status of Africans in the city (1922:paragraph 42): The Native should only be allowed to enter urban areas, which are essentially the White man's creation, when he is willing to enter and minister to the needs of the White man and should depart from there when he ceases so to minister.

This policy was applied in varying degrees throughout the continent. What this meant was simply that the basic interests of Africans as workers and those of White settlers as representatives of the metropolitan capitalist powers were opposed. In fact, they were antagonistic and irreconcilable. This relation was the source of the various laws and regulations specifying the conditions of African entry into the cities as well as of work and residence. The city, as the specific form of bourgeois organization coordinating imperialist interest in Africa, introduced a clear notion of labor as commodity. For as Marx (1969:6) says: In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation itself can only take place under certain circumstances that centre in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, the sum of values they possess, by buying other people's labour-power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labour-power, and therefore the sellers

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of labour. Free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, etc., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. With this polarisation of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given. The capitalist system pre supposes the complete separation of the labourers from all property in the means by which they can realise their labour. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale. Laws regulating urban migration and settlement, together with land, tax, and wage policies, were an attempt to create free wage laborers. First, Africans had to be able to dispose of their labor power as their own. Second, they could not have any other commodity for sale. Concretely, this meant that Africans had to be "extricated" from traditional kinship and subsistence arrangements and compelled to seek wage labor. In their discussion of Kenya, D o n a l d Barnett and Karari N j a m a ( 1 9 6 6 : 3 1 - 3 2 ) explain how Africans

were

disengaged

from

indigenous

subsistence

arrangements

through land appropriation: . . . in Kenya, as in other territories of east, central and south Africa, African land was appropriated for the exclusive use by immigrant white colonists. That a good deal more land was alienated than could be put to effective use by the settlers is explained in large measure by the latter's need for African labor. Lord Delamere, a leading settler spokesman, made this clear in his appeal to the Labour Commission of 1912. In order to force Africans into the centers of European enterprise, this renowned settler leader urged that the land reserved for "natives" be cut so as to prevent them from having enough for a self-supporting level of production. How, he pleaded, could Africans be obliged to labor for Europeans if they had enough land to successfully breed livestock and cultivate crops for sale. In the same discussion Barnett and N j a m a ( 1 9 6 6 : 3 2 ) quote an editorial in a settler newspaper calling for a tax and wage policy that would force Africans to migrate to urban centers in search of wage work: We consider that taxation is the only possible method for compelling the native to leave his reserve for the purpose of seeking work. Only in this way can the cost of living be increased for the native . . . [and] . . . it is on this that the supply of labour and the price of labour depend. To raise the rate of wages would not increase but would diminish the supply of labour. A rise in the rate of wages should enable the hut and pool tax of a family, sub-tribe or tribe to be earned by fewer external workers. One could go on multiplying these examples from colonial records; but they would tell the same story. Suffice it to say that these policies together with those which imposed restrictions on permanent African residence in towns created a maze in which the African became an individual of "two worlds" as the expression goes.

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In dealing with the subject of migrant labor, one finds oneself a "dupe in good faith of a collective intellectual hypocrisy that clearly misrepresents problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided for them" (Cesaire 1972:10). For example, Hanna and Hanna in their report Urban dynamics in black Africa (1969:27) tell us: In contemporary Black Africa, most decisions to migrate to a town or to remain there are spontaneous rather than dictated by a government. The basic spontaneous cause of urban in-migration has been the "revolution of values" brought about by European presence . . . which introduced a new set of values and established an infrastructure (e.g., modern schools and industries) providing Africans with opportunities to obtain what was newly valued (e.g. education and wage-earning employment). This revolution has not involved a substitution of one value system for another, but only the addition or exchange or modification of a relatively large number of specific values.... During the first stage of the value revolution, individuals were the predominant agents of c h a n g e . . . . At least until the emergence of nationalist movements, many Africans believed that Europeans were all-powerful and all-knowing demigods with virtually a divine right to rule. This was partly because Europeans were powerful, skilled, and so forth; it was also due in part to some Africans' transference of defense from their traditional leaders to Europeans.

Given these assumptions, labor migration is commonly misconceived by students of African urbanization simply as "mobility" (see Miner 1967:13; Lerner 1967:27, 30-31; Hanna and Hanna 1969:27). That misconception hides the specific dynamic of the process of colonialism in creating marginally free wage laborers who were only partially integrated into the productive relations of alien capitalism. It also leads to invalid comparisons of the manifestations of colonial labor migration with migration under qualitatively different conditions. For example, Hanna and Hanna (1969:27) comment: Migration in Africa is not a new phenomenon. Over the centuries, entire peoples migrated to more productive areas, and individual sojourns of various duration have been made to visit relatives, attend funerals, and so forth. The basic contrasts between precolonial and contemporary migration are that in the former fewer individuals (as opposed to entire peoples) were probably involved and rural to rural migration was proportionately greater.

Because the colonial situation was taken for granted, the transformation of precapitalist social relations to meet the imperialist need for labor leads to a scramble for explanations for the process of urban migration. This yields such "causal" factors as susceptibility to innovation among young adults (Hanna and Hanna 1969:47); the "glamor of urban life" (Barber 1967:122); the belief that migration is a rite of passage to manhood; and the desire to escape the dull routine at a cattle post (Schapera 1947; Van Velsen 1961). A one-sided focus on the "liberation" of individuals from the traditional way of life to the exclusion of examining the new forms of bondage into which they

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enter is also characteristic of bourgeois studies dealing with the transformation of precapitalist into industrial urban society, as this passage from Genesis of capital (Marx 1969:7) indicates: The immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondsman to another. To become a free seller of labour-power, who carries his commodity wherever he finds a market, he must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of their labour regulations. Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. (Emphasis added.) Another area of confusion concerns the nature of differences in the creation of wage laborers in nineteenth-century England, on the one hand, and in colonial Africa, on the other. This is well illustrated by Epstein's treatment (1967:279) of this problem: The drift to towns is a universal concomitant of early industrialization, but the way in which it occurs is not everywhere the same. In 19th century England, for example, the expansion of the industrial towns was achieved by the flow of labour into them from the smaller rural towns in their immediate hinterland. In Africa a few instances of progressive migration have been reported,... but in the main urbanization has proceeded, not by a series of stages, but by a sharp leap from small village to distant urban centre, from kisendji, the ancient way of life of the tribe, to kisungu, the "civilized" way of life of the towns. . . . But in Africa the transition to town has been somewhat sharper, paradoxically, the break with the village has been less radical. The new African urban labourer remained bound by social, political and even religious ties to his kinsmen in the rural areas so that, as Mitchell observes,... it is the circulation of the labourer rather than its migration which has become its characteristic feature. (Emphasis added.) Though recognizing the difference in migration patterns in a superficial manner, Epstein does not seem to understand the nature and dynamics of the process involved and so must resort to an empirical description of its appearance. Instead of examining the relations between European colonizers and colonized Africans, between capital and labor, Epstein (as do other social scientists) looks to the characteristics of Africans to explain urban migration. This approach results in acculturation studies in which the "adjustment problems" of Africans are the central concern (cf. Hanna and Hanna 1969:58-61); and in typologies in which the process of creating free wage laborers is transformed into static categories, such as townrooted/country-rooted (Mayer 1971), or kisendji/kisungu.

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The search for causes of the form of labor migration that occurred in Africa in the attitudes of Africans or in their traditional social structures is particularly dismaying when one considers the explicitness with which policies regarding migrant labor have been articulated in commission and parliamentary reports and newspapers (see Welsh 1971). Yet even when colonial policies are considered, it is merely to describe them and their superficial effects, and not infrequently to offer justification (see Barber 1967:100-101; Little 1971). Obfuscation becomes complete when the system of labor migration created by the colonialist powers is cited as the cause of agricultural deterioration and economic instability (Wilson 1941). Labor migration together with the "native reserve" is the form in which the social transformation required by expanding capitalism was accomplished in Africa. In this way the labor requirements of capitalist agriculture and capitalist extractive and manufacturing industries, as well as the service sector generated by European settlement, were met. However, the migrant labor system was not simply a way of bringing worker and employer together. It was a way of realizing the immediate superprofits necessitated by the development of monopoly capital. 3 Through land appropriation the precapitalist modes of production were disrupted to the extent that individuals could be separated from the land. The remnants of these productive systems were then incorporated into the colonial order by means of "native reserves." This incorporation subsidized profit-making by compelling Africans to retain a stake in agricultural production. This would maintain the worker's family, as well as the worker, intermittently, thus allowing the expropriation of additional surplus value. In an attempt to justify the migrant labor system by indicating how it benefited both European and African, Barber (1967:100) inadvertently describes the extraction of superprofits through the depression of wages: European employers were permitted [by the migratory patterns] to obtain laborers at low wage rates — and certainly at rates below those they would have been obliged to pay had circumstances demanded that the money wage be high enough to cover the minimum requirements of both the African worker and his family. As it was, African labor would usually be obtained in the required volume with wages sufficient to provide a "single" worker with his subsistence plus an incentive bonus [sic]. 3

In the following passage Mandel (1969:453-454) explains the necessity and meaning of superprofits: "The export of capital and the colonialism associated with it are monopoly capital's reaction to the fall in the average rate of profit in highly industrialised metropolitan countries, and the reduction in profitable fields for investment of capital in these countries. In this sense they are only the expression at a particular moment in history of a general characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, of the way it grows and spreads: capital moves towards spheres in which the rate of profit expected is higher than the average. Colonial super-profits are thus to be defined as profits higher than the average profits obtained by capital in the metropolitan country."

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The migrant labor system brought "ready-made" workers (Gorz 1970:29) into urban areas where their labor power could be efficiently exploited, and it returned them to the native reserves when they were not needed or were no longer useful. Africans were, like implements, units of labor that could be discarded when they ceased to be useful. Moreover, insofar as Africans were "temporary sojourners" in the cities and not permanent residents, they did "need" the infrastructural facilities that would require an outlay of social capital. In urban areas the minimal requirements of African workers were met to enhance their productivity (Van der Horst 1971) while the burdens of reproducing labor and supporting nonproductive individuals4 were shifted into the so-called traditional African economy. The savings thus realized were a source of additional profits. Both the impoverishment of the countryside and the poverty of African urban life were created by the requirements of monopoly capital. Migrant labor and the native reserve were complementary aspects of the strategy by which a high rate of surplus value was realized in Africa. 5 Labor migration is also perhaps the clearest expression of capitalist productive relations in which labor power is abstracted from the full potential of humans. In a discussion of labor as commodity, Rühle (1943:327) explains this feature of capitalist relations: Inasmuch as labour power attaches to man as a quality inseparable from the individual, since it cannot be isolated from him, or utilized apart from him, the man as a whole, having sold his labour power, passes into the possession of the purchaser. Not, of course, with his stomach, his hunger and thirst, his need for rest, his individual wishes and claims, but only in respect of his labour power. For the purchaser, he is not a human being with a soul, feelings, individuality, happiness and unhappiness; he is not God's image or the crown of creation; he is not even of like kind with the purchaser. For the purchaser, the man who has sold him labour power is nothing but labour power; nothing but arms, hands, fingers, capable of work; nothing but muscles, eyes, voice; nothing but capacity for labour, faculty for production.

Labor and urban policies together with the colonial ideology of African workers as temporary sojourners served this end. The Europeans did not hesitate to set forth explicitly the condition under which Africans could be incorporated into the colonial order: 4

Nonproductive individuals included not only the very young, the very old, and the infirm, but also others who could not be sufficiently productive in European enterprises. 3 For example, according to Mandel (1969:456): "The economy of Northern Rhodesia offers a striking instance of the high rate of surplus value. According to U N O statistics, the total amount paid out in wages (to black and white workers) in 1952 was around 33 million dollars, whereas the gross profits of the companies came to nearly 160 million dollars. Such a rate of surplus value, over 4 0 0 per cent, existed in Europe only in the age of usurer's, merchant'sor commercial capital."

Urban Ethnology

in Africa: Some Theoretical

Issues

63

It should be a recognised principle of government that natives — men, women and children —- should only be permitted within municipal areas in so far as their presence is demanded by the wants of the white population (quoted by Welsh 1971:187).

Moreover, the import of the colonial strategy of forcing Africans to exist as pure labor was not lost on Africans themselves. For, as David Welsh (1971:189) explains, "it was apparent to Africans that the whites paradoxically wanted their labour but objected to their presence." A 1944 report by Africans challenges the rationality of capitalist imperialism: Why should we now, after helping you Europeans to build your cities and your industries, not be allowed to derive the benefit of our labour (quoted by Welsh 1971:188-189)?

The question remains as to why social scientists have failed to understand and explain the workings of the migrant labor system and the manner in which it shaped the process of urbanization as a major feature of colonial strategy in Africa. The study of migrant labor in Africa typifies the managerial and technical thinking of social science: According to the functional requisites of his role the manager is expected to deal with and solve the problems of adapting the behavior of a human being to the structural demands of his institutional setting. It does not matter just what these demands and this setting are (Bauman 1967:403).

All social science is concerned with is proving that the individual has attained a nice stabilization of forces and is adjusted. It is not concerned with whether, perhaps, adjustment and stabilization, while good because they reduce pain, are also bad because they cause development toward a higher ideal to cease. In sum, the study of urban anthropology in its present form has irreducible ideological components; the burden of its interests and findings tends to legitimate the current social order by inducing approval or resignation in those who take them seriously. The ideological elements are closely related to practical concerns. By their concepts, methods, and style of work, urban anthropologists become consciously or unconsciously ancillary agents of power. Their conclusions can be used for purposes of domination, exploitation, and manipulation. Urban anthropologists pay too little attention or no attention at all to the imperialist context of African problems of urbanization. Precisely by dwelling exclusively on the facts derived from small-scale studies, urban anthropologists blind themselves to the historical processes which underlie the empirical data. The crucial questions left unasked are not simply troublesome elements; rather, they are part of the consistent set of themes and omissions evident in most studies of African

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AMELIA ΜΑ ΚΙΟΤΉ, BERNARD MAGUBANE

underdevelopment. A careful analysis of the themes selected for study and those left out reveals disturbing tendencies. In a world in which knowledge is utilized for manipulative and administrative ends, we should not fail to assess research findings by asking for whom this knowledge is relevant and why some questions have been asked and not others.

CONCLUSIONS The study of the city and of the social processes unleashed in the form of urbanization raises fundamental questions about the colonial legacy in Africa. What was the nature of the colonial state? For whose benefit did commerce and industry invade Africa, and what were the implications of this invasion for African industrialization? The trajectory of colonial development in Africa was extractive capitalism which created urban complexes exemplified in the Katanga region of the Congo, the copper belt of Zambia, and the Witwatersrand of the Transvaal in South Africa. Portugal, Malawi, Lesotho and Botswana for years made their policies subservient to the South African demand for labor in the mines. The copper belt and the Katanga region looked for their laborers in other areas in central and eastern Africa. The various government policies in central and southern Africa were coordinated to create conditions for labor to move from one area to another without let or hindrance. The labor policies applied in the colonial era disrupted the home life of Africans together with their political organizations. In some areas up to 60 percent of the men left home periodically in mass migration to the mining areas and other centers of work in order to raise the poll taxes laid upon them. African urbanization presented an eloquent, if tragic, example of the process which created broken communities. The towns and cities were abstracted from their environment and were more organically and closely related to the metropolitan countries than to their own hinterland. With no steady growth in the secondary and manufacturing sectors of the economy, no expansion of the internal market was possible. The position of the urban work force itself was unsteady, with its fortunes dependent on the oscillation in the demand for raw materials in the world markets. The uncertainties attendant on all raw material—producing countries were reflected in the urban structural instabilities and the unresolved contradictions between town and country. The sociopolitical consequences for the African city were remarkable. The fall of the price of cocoa in the international market created conditions which led to the fall of Kawame Nkrumah in Ghana, for instance. Who knows what the repercussions of the fall in the price of copper

Urban Ethnology in Africa: Some Theoretical

Issues

65

will mean for Zaire and Zambia? The growth of extractive industries did not lead to the development of an internal market or to an articulated commercial sector. The use of the migrant labor system for mining and cash crops led to the most advanced deracination and proletarianization, but without corresponding industrialization to meet the future need for jobs when mineral production became exhausted or unprofitable. These issues have not been confronted or raised by urban anthropologists, with their focus on problems of acculturation. The simple and almost trivial assumptions of acculturation studies are reflected in such ideological concepts as "Westernization," "destabilization," and "Europeanization," which consciously or unconsciously helped to mask or divert attention from issues of political economy. The normative concepts 6 used to describe the urban process in Africa show that the link between science and ideology is not accidental, but is an integral part of social investigations. By its methods and techniques of investigation (participant observation and depth interviews), urban anthropology can give insight into the thinking and the mentality of the subject which can be used by those whose interest it is to manipulate and dominate others if the larger process-shaping individual experiences are not disclosed. The tie between urban anthropology and social engineering is not in doubt. When particular problems are encountered, urban anthropologists and sociologists often act as experts supplying elements of a decision. Anthropology, then, can function practically at two levels, either through the "rationalization" of human behavior or by supplying tactics for the "manipulation" of behavior. This can be achieved by identifying the myths or irrational convictions closely related to the practical experiences of the masses.

REFERENCES ADAMS, ROBERT 1966 The evolution of urban society: early Mesopotamia and prehispanic Mexico. C h i c a g o : Aldine. BARBER, WILLIAM J. 1967 "Urbanization and e c o n o m i c growth: the c a s e s o f t w o white settler territories," in The city in modern Africa. Edited b y H o r a c e Miner, 9 1 - 1 2 6 . N e w York: Frederick A . Praeger. 6 According to Levi-Strauss (1963:281), " . . . conscious models, which are usually known as 'nonus,' are by definition very poor ones, since they are not intended to explain the phenomena but to perpetuate them . . . that is: the more obvious structural organization is, the more difficult it becomes to react to it because of the inaccurate conscious models lying across the path which leads to it."

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BARNETT, DONALD, KARARI NJAMA

1966

Mau Mau from within: an analysis of Kenya's peasant revolt. New York: Monthly Review Press.

BAUMAN, ZYGMUNT

1967

Modern times, modern Marxism. Social Research 34:399-415.

BREESE, GERALD

1966

Urbanization in newly developing countries. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice-Hall.

CESAIRE AIME

1972

Discourse on colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press.

DAVIDSON, BASIL

1974

Africa in history. New York: Macmillan.

DOS SANTOS, THEONTONIO

1971

"The structure of dependence," in Readings in U.S. imperialism. Edited by Κ. T. Fann and Donald C. Hodges. Boston: Porter Sargent.

DRISCOLL, JAQUELINE

1972

"Critique: Max Weber and the city." Unpublished manuscript, University of Connecticut.

EPSTEIN, A. L.

1967

Urbanization and social change in Africa. Current 8(4):275-296.

Anthropology

FARIS, JAMES

1972

Concepts and methodology in social process. Paper prepared for the symposium "Marx I: critique of theory," American Anthropological Association Annual meetings, Toronto. FAVA, SYLVIA FLEIS, editor 1968 Urbanism in world perspective: a reader. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. GORZ, ANDRE

1970

Immigrant labour. New Left Review 61:28-31. HANNA, WILLIAM J., JUDITH L. HANNA, editors 1969 Urban dynamics in black Africa: an interdisciplinary Washington, D.C.: Center for Research in Social Systems.

approach.

HAUSER, PHILIP

1965

"Urbanization: an overview," in The study of urbanization. Edited by Philip M. Hauser and L. F. Schnore, 1—47. New York: J. Wiley.

HELLMAN, ELLEN

1953

Sellgoods. Johannesburg.

KORSCH, KARL

1963

Karl Marx. New York: Russell and Russell. (Originally published 1938.)

LANGE, OSKAR

1963

Economic development, planning, and international cooperation. New York.

LERNER, DANIEL

1967

"Comparative analysis of processes of modernization," in The city in modern Africa. Edited by Horace Miner, 21-38. New York: Frederick A. Praeger.

LEVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE

1963

Structural anthropology, volume one. New York: Basic Books.

LITTLE, KENNETH

1971

"Some aspects of African urbanization south of the Sahara." Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

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MAGUBANE, B., J. O'BRIEN

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The political economy of migrant labor: a critique of conventional wisdom. Critical Anthropology 2.

MANDEL, ERNEST

1969

Marxist economic theory, volume two. Translated by Brian Pearce. New York: Monthly Review Press.

MARX, KARL

1969

Genesis of capital. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

MARX, KARL, FREDERICK ENGELS

1968

Selected works. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

MAYER, PHILIP

1971

Townsmen or tribesmen: conservatism and the process of urbanization in a South African city. New York: Oxford University Press.

MINER, HORACE

1967

"The city and modernization: an introduction," in The city in modern Africa. Edited by Horace Miner, 1-20. New York: Frederick A. Praeger.

MITCHELL, J. CLYDE

1956a "Africans in industrial towns in Northern Rhodesia," in His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh's Study Conference on Human Problems of Industrial Communities within the Commonwealth and Empire, volume two: Background papers. London: Oxford University Press. 1956b The Kahela dance: aspects of social relationships among urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia. Rhodes-Livingstone Papers 27. Manchester: Manchester University Press. MOORE, BARRINGTON, JR.

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Soviet politics: the dilemma of power. New York: Harper and Row.

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The Urban process. New York: Free Press.

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How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House.

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Karl Marx: his life and work. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. New York.

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Migrant labor and tribal life: a study of conditions in Protectorate. London: Oxford University Press.

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The acquisitive society. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

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Cities on the move. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Native labour in South Africa. London: Frank Cass.

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The poor world's cities. Economist (December 6).

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The city. Translated and edited by Don Martindale. New York: Free Press.

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in Northern

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The Role of Applied Research in the Development of Health Services in a Chicano Community in Chicago

STEPHEN L. SCHENSUL and MARY BAKSZYSZ BYMEL

In 1963 Congress enacted legislation to establish "community" mental health programs in urban and rural sites throughout the country. One such program was established in September 1967 in Chicago's West Side medical complex. Its objective was to provide mental health services to the adjacent Black community and to a large area immediately to the south in which Mexicans were rapidly replacing long-term residents of Middle-European origin. To accomplish the task, four outpatient "storefront" clinics were set up in each of the main communities of the catchment area and were linked to inpatient and specialized services available at the medical center. These outpost clinics were to extend psychiatric services to people who until then had had little access to such care. From a community base, these centers were to mobilize community forces to help in the care and rehabilitation of patients and to effect positive changes in community structure so that mental illness could be prevented as well as treated. The first of these outpost clinics was established in El Barrio (a pseudonym), a predominantly Mexican community located on Chicago's Near West Side. The El Barrio Mental Health Clinic began its operations at a time when few service institutions in Chicago had come to terms with the fact that there was a large population of recently immigrated Mexicans who required new programs, resources, and services. While the major responsibility for writing this paper was ours, the development of the ideas was a collaborative process of community activists and members of our research staff. These include: Philip Ayala, Albert Vazquez, Juan Velazquez, Humberto Martinez, Emile M. Schepers, Pertti J. Pelto, Elias Sevilla-Casas, Santiago Boiton, Susan Stechnij, and Kay Guzder.

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For the residents of El Barrio, this situation was reflected particularly in health care. A few local physicians and an overloaded county hospital were the main health resources for El Barrio residents. Differences in language, attitudes, and health practices among Mexicans were not understood by the medical establishment, creating additional barriers to effective use of even these limited resources. The Community Mental Health Program had a difficult task in trying to establish a mental health service in a community with limited services and no experience with Anglo-American mental health concepts. In the beginning of 1969, the director of the program hired the authors to establish an anthropologically oriented Community Research Unit for the purpose of providing information concerning the Mexican, MiddleEuropean, and Black populations in the area. This research was seen as providing a base for planning new clinical programs designed specifically for Mexican residents and for constructing preventive programs to integrate mental health services into community development. Our research unit was to collect information on the "natives" of the area so that the program staff could develop plans, policies, and therapeutic methods that would meet the special cultural and community needs of the area. This position closely parallels the traditional role of the applied anthropologist — that of a provider of information to dominant policy-making and power sectors on behalf of economically and politically marginal groups in a society. Over the past five years a series of events, both in the community and in the program, changed this role drastically and created a situation in which our research unit collaborated directly with community groups in El Barrio in formulating independent health projects. In describing this collaborative process, we will examine the events and actions that led to the establishment of community health programs and the strategies used by our community research team to facilitate these developments.

COMMUNITY LIFE AND HEALTH ISSUES IN EL BARRIO The El Barrio community is Chicago's "port of entry" for Mexican immigrants and its major residential enclave for Mexican-Americans. A great majority of the Mexican population has arrived in Chicago within the last ten years directly from Mexico. Approximately 20 percent are from Texas, and only 5 percent of the individuals in a recent survey were Chicago-born (Schensul 1970). These different origins in various segments of the population — "Tejanos," Mexican nationals, and Chicago-born Chicanos — produce differences in attitudes, life experience, and behavior.

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71

The influx of Mexicans into this area continues a long history of a succession of immigrant groups. Prior to the 1880's Irish and German immigrants and native-born Americans came to work in the small industries that were located in the area. Poles, Czechs, Slavs, and other Middle-European groups began to enter the area in the mid-1880's and by 1900 these were the predominant ethnic groups. For the succeeding fifty years, the community maintained a strong Middle-European ethnic character — one which has left a visible mark on the community. With the construction of a university campus north of El Barrio, many displaced Mexicans began to move south into the houses vacated by the outgoing Middle-Europeans. This movement, combined with a growing influx of people from Mexico and the American Southwest, resulted in a rapid increase in the Mexican component of the population. By the end of the 1960's, the Mexican-American sector had increased from 30 percent to almost 70 percent of El Barrio's population. Most of the migrants of this period came directly from Mexico from such cities as Monterrey, San Luis Potosi, Guadalajara, and Michoacän and from other urban areas in western and northern Mexico. The El Barrio community has a total population of 44,660 people, including 35,750 Mexicans, 2,211 Puerto Ricans, 5,631 Middle-Europeans, and 1,068 Blacks. Low rents (averaging $88 a month), a close proximity to places of potential employment, rapidly decreasing numbers of MiddleEuropean residents, and the availability of Mexican goods and services make El Barrio a highly appropriate area for settlement by in-migrating Mexicans. The overwhelmingly Mexican character of El Barrio permits the recent migrant to interact in Spanish in most contexts. Ethnographic data indicate that in Chicago a number of job situations exist which do not require English-language abilities. Contacts through relatives and friends can lead to relatively satisfactory incomes through employment in Spanish-speaking work crews. Spanish is the major language in most of the commercial establishments in the area. The availability of Spanish-language newspapers, magazines, music, household items, and food, such as large quantities of carnitas, chicharon, and pan dulce, convey a strong feeling of old Mexico. El Barrio is viewed by many in Chicago as a typical inner-city "ghetto." In a recent article on economic and social status in Chicago, one of the city's newspapers rated El Barrio as eighty-fourth in a ranking of eighty-five Chicago communities (Chicago Sun-Times 1972). This rank was based on such indicators as rent, average education, job level, home value, and family income. Figures like these are frequently used as justification for urban

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STEPHEN L. SCHENSUL, MARY BAKSZYSZ BYMEL

renewal and slum clearance. However, a different image from that conveyed by census data is created by walking through the area. It is true that in El Barrio the housing is old and that excessive subdividing has created crowded conditions in some sectors. However, most buildings are structurally sound and well maintained, which makes the area a more desirable place to live than one would expect from its low rank in the city. The median all-in family income is $8,000 per year, and an extremely low 2.3 percent of the population are unemployed. During the time the 1970 census was given, only 1.3 percent of the residents of El Barrio were on welfare. These unemployment and welfare figures are considerably lower than the national average and present a striking contrast to welfare and unemployment rates for other ghetto populations. The situation in the El Barrio community is one common to many innercity areas that have undergone rapid sociocultural change. In order to accommodate El Barrio's new Mexican population, city and community institutions have been under some pressure to change the nature of their services. Such change is usually resisted, and even when changes do occur they are agonizingly slow and frequently unsuccessful. The response of Mexican residents has been to avoid contact with these institutions and to seek alternative resources among friends and relatives to meet their needs. The political and economic powerlessness of this group has allowed the city and community institutions to continue to resist significant changes in policy and operation. This situation is particularly evident in the area of health services, in which unique health needs are not being met by standard American health institutions. The conclusions of our own and other research efforts point to clear differences between Mexican-American and the general American population in disease rates, health attitudes and practices, disease configurations, and psychopathology. These differences can be summarized as follows: 1. Chicano death rates are higher than the national averages as a consequence of the diseases of poverty, including influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis, neonatal death, and rheumatic fever. Alcoholism and drug addiction, traumatic injury, and infectious conditions exacerbated by malnutrition are also recognized as major problems. 2. Unlike Anglo-American medical beliefs, the traditional Mexican view of disease causation and symptomatology does not reflect a distinction between the mental and physical aspects of healthy functioning; this interrelationship between physical and mental factors is a key to the lack of understanding of Mexicans toward the separation of medical and psychiatric services. 3. Mexican-American beliefs about disease causation and symp-

Development of Health Services in a Chicano Community in Chicago

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tomatology include a large number of illnesses that are unique to MexicanAmericans as a group. These disease configurations, or "folk illnesses," include el ojo malo (the evil eye), empacho (stomach upset), bilis (the product of extreme anger), and susto (result of fright or shock). 4. The existence of curanderas, or traditional Mexican medical practitioners, is a very important health resource in the El Barrio community. From our research we can say with some confidence that more individuals utilize folk curers in El Barrio than use "standard" medical and psychiatric facilities. The curanderas provide low-cost care with an emphasis on a personalized and "sacred" approach. They use a large herbal inventory in addition to other techniques, such as dietary restrictions, chiropractics, and religiomagical curing. 5. Mexican psychiatric patients show pathology and personality structures that are clearly different from those reported for other ethnic groups. For example, visions and voices are a widely accepted part of normal functioning and health maintenance in the Chicano population. A member of our research team has demonstrated the potential for misinterpreting visions and voices as psychopathology by non-Latin psychiatric staff (Schepers 1972). 6. Our research in the El Barrio community indicates considerable ethnic and intraethnic diversity in other health-related problems. In drug addiction, for example, we find that patterns of drug use and life situations among Chicano addicts are quite different from what has been described by addicts of other ethnic groups. We have also observed differences in drug use and life situation that distinguish first-generation Mexican addicts from those who have come to Chicago from Texas and those that were born in Chicago (Schensul 1972). Other research currently being conducted in the El Barrio community on psychiatric difficulties, alcoholism, and old age is beginning to indicate a wide range of additional factors specific to this ethnic group. The reluctance of Mexican-Americans to utilize medical and psychiatric facilities has been well documented. This underutilization involves a number of factors, including the existence of curanderismo and the tendency of American doctors to scoff at folk beliefs, as well as outright rudeness and racism on the part of health professionals. Madsen (1970), Clark (1959), and others have made recommendations for professionals concerning possible changes in their behaviour and procedures to bring them into closer fit with the standards of Chicano culture. These and other studies (e.g., Rubel 1966) document instances in which Chicano patients, or would-be patients, have been discouraged by what seems to them to be a rejecting or patronizing attitude on the part of medical personnel. From the standpoint of first-generation immigrants, Chicago's El Barrio

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STEPHEN L. SCHENSUL, MARY BAKSZYSZ BYMEL

community may be among those most culturally and linguistically Mexican in the United States. A continuing flow of new migrants promises to maintain this strong Mexican orientation. As a consequence, we can expect that many of the health attitudes and practices described above will continue to be salient to this community rather than diminish in importance, as has been noted in other Mexican communities.

THE COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH PROGRAM The Community Mental Health Program, through the El Barrio Mental Health Clinic, represented the first publicly funded service to direct its attention to an aspect of health in the Mexican community. However, given El Barrio's broad health needs and the lack of information about the functions of the mental health outpost, the Mexican-American people did not consider the program to be relevant to their health needs. In addition, the program's narrow definition of mental health care precluded a broad attack on the community's health problems. In its first several months, the clinic found itself devoting most of its time to serving older Middle-European patients who had long histories of mental illness and hospitalizations. Few Mexican residents sought help at the clinic, and on the whole its existence and services were largely ignored. The difficulties in establishing an effective mental health service in the El Barrio community were exacerbated by the fact that the clinic was staffed almost exclusively by non-Latins who lacked an understanding of Mexican culture and the necessary bilingual ability for communicating effectively with Spanish-speaking patients. In addition, the clinic was burdened by a series of bureaucratic and political contingencies in the medical center that made it difficult for the various components of the Community Mental Health Program to coordinate their services effectively. Another problem faced by the program in this area was that of citizen participation. An important part of the community mental health movement was the involvement of citizens and consumers in the direction and formulation of program policies and objectives. Several attempts to form advisory boards for the clinic failed, and the idea of advisory boards was eventually abandoned. Thus, residents neither used the services nor were very interested in becoming involved in the clinic's operations. The clinic, and in turn the program, stood outside the mainstream of community life and related only tangentially to the community's health needs. There were great expectations on the part of the clinical staff that our Community Research Unit could quickly discover the key cultural and

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community factors that could solve their problems in communication, underutilization, and citizen participation. Because these problems were very real and immediate, the clinical staff felt that the anthropologists had to provide this information almost immediately even though we had not been brought on the staff until one and one-half years after the clinic had been established. It soon became apparent to the clinicians that we had not entered the situation with a prepackaged set of principles that would immediately help them out of the difficulties they faced in the community. They also communicated to us that they were not willing to give us the time we needed to learn about the community and its people. Their reaction was to "write us off" as an important component of the program; as a result, there were the inevitable clinician-researcher tensions in our relationship to the rest of the program. After this initial interaction with the clinical staff it became clear to us that information about the community and its various cultural and ethnic groups was producing little interest and only minimal changes in the program. While in retrospect we can see that each side failed to appreciate the point of view and professional concern of the other, the effect at the time caused us to withdraw from intensive involvement in the clinical and policy aspects of the program. We turned to a search for new situations in which our research data could make useful contributions to positive social action. We found these action situations as a part of the process of community development that had already begun in El Barrio.

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT A N D H E A L T H SERVICES

The Rise of a Chicano Organization in El Barrio In the initial stages of our involvement in El Barrio in 1969, one community organization dominated the scene. This organization, the Neighbors' Group, was established in 1954 and had its roots among the Middle-Europeans in the community. The Neighbors' Group had developed a buying cooperative, housing and community-development committees, and a credit union. However, an increasing number of Mexican residents felt that the Neighbors' Group was not working effectively for Latin people though the group had made an effort to recruit Mexican members. The firing of several of the Mexican staff led to the development of a new group emphasizing its Mexican background and challenging the policies and programs of the older organization. The struggle between these organizations ended with the collapse of the Neighbors' Group, and the Chicano group began a broad-

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STEPHEN L. SCHENSUL, MARY BAKSZYSZ BYMEL

based attack on the problems of education, urban renewal, and a number of other major issues. The strategy of our Community Research Unit in this period was to develop positive relationships with leaders and activists in all sectors of the community. Our newness to the situation allowed us to maintain these relationships without choosing sides and to view community events as neutral observers. However, this "objectivity" as well as the lack of identity in the area of the Community Mental Health Program served to keep us on the periphery of community life.

Organizing Residents'

Groups

In June 1969, a significant breakthrough occurred in our relationships with community residents. The local settlement house developed a program in community organization in which clubs would be organized on scattered blocks throughout the neighborhood. Our decision to become intimately involved with this effort provided entree and rapport for our fieldworkers, and gave us the opportunity to demonstrate to an important sector of the population that the information we were able to collect and disseminate could make a significant contribution to the goals of its programs. Throughout the following year our tactics were to seek out opportunities in which our research personnel could be useful to community groups that were involved in a broad range of problems and issues. In this period, general ethnographic data, the results of survey operations on the blocks and in the schools, and information collected through the program provided a body of material that proved to be useful to these groups. For example, information we collected through surveys of public and parochial school students and their parents proved useful to a community group working on education.

A Period of Organizational

Decline

Toward the end of 1970, the Chicano group began to experience great difficulty in maintaining its objective of dealing with a wide variety of community problems. It had difficulty in achieving success on individual issues and was overcommitted in a number of areas of community action. As a consequence, attendance at meetings began to decline and the organization lost a number of members. Over a period of several months, organizational activity declined significantly, and soon after the organization existed in

Development of Health Services in a Chicano Community in Chicago

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name only. Other community organizations with broad mandates also experienced difficulties in maintaining their efforts at this time. The decline in organizational activity was made more severe by the fact that block residents' organizations, supported by settlement-house staff during the summer, never seemed to maintain themselves during the nonsummer months. In this period of scattered and inconsistent effort, during which community action groups shifted from one issue to another, all we could do was hope that we had appropriate bodies of data to address immediate concerns, or that we could construct a "rough-and-ready" operation for quick feedback. In this fluid situation prior to 1971, community action objectives were often unclear and community efforts transitory, and as a result we were frequently caught with insufficient information to contribute. Our strategy up to this point was to: 1. Construct research operations in areas that we thought would have maximum benefit for community action research. 2. Seize opportunities in which community action groups, concerned residents, or agency staff could provide us with entree to data-gathering opportunities in the community. 3. Emphasize rapid feedback of research information to Chicano organizations and individuals in the El Barrio community. 4. Participate actively in community action organizations to the extent that such activity was approved by their members.

The Rise of Specialized Action Groups At the beginning of 1971, a new climate began to develop in both the wider society and the local community. The apparent success of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers, the efforts of Tijerina in New Mexico and Corky Gonzales in Colorado, the increasing demand for recognition of Chicanos in the Midwest, and the developing sense of Chicano identity made people in the El Barrio community aware of the role they could play in a solution to community problems. At the same time, a group of Chicanos who had gained organizing knowledge in past community efforts developed a number of voluntary groups, each of which focused on specific issues. These efforts centered on the creation of new youth facilities and greater availability of educational opportunities, and were linked to demands for significant bilingual and bicultural programs in area schools and for equal opportunities in jobs. A significant portion of these specialized activist groups began to direct

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