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Title
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Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space
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Author
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McDonogh, Gary W.
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Research Area
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Social Processes
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Topic
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Planned Environment
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Abstract
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Analysis of human interaction with and interpretations of the surrounding physical world has been of fundamental interest for anthropology since its emergence as a discipline in the nineteenth century. The comparative description of homes, monumental spaces, and worked landscapes has provided foundations for social and cultural analysis and facilitated early exchanges with archaeology, architecture history, and linguistics. Over time, changes in the lives of those with whom anthropologists work and the concomitant expansion of urban anthropologies have promoted new questions as well as expanding interactions with geography, social theory, urban studies and gender, class, ethnic, and cultural studies while engaging anthropologists in wider public participation. Future anthropologies of space and place should continue to build on these methodological, data and theoretical heritages, including fieldwork and global comparisons, while expanding interdisciplinarity and engaging civic perspectives. Building on these foundations, anthropologists will need to address environmental concerns in their broadest scope. They will also grapple with the methodological and theoretical challenges of changing mobilities and similarly analyze rapidly evolving (electronic) mediations and virtual spaces and communities while sharing this knowledge in wider academic and public discussions.
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Identifier
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etrds0029
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extracted text
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Built Environments and the
Anthropology of Space
GARY W. McDONOGH
Abstract
Analysis of human interaction with and interpretations of the surrounding physical
world has been of fundamental interest for anthropology since its emergence as a
discipline in the nineteenth century. The comparative description of homes, monumental spaces, and worked landscapes has provided foundations for social and cultural analysis and facilitated early exchanges with archaeology, architecture history,
and linguistics. Over time, changes in the lives of those with whom anthropologists
work and the concomitant expansion of urban anthropologies have promoted new
questions as well as expanding interactions with geography, social theory, urban
studies and gender, class, ethnic, and cultural studies while engaging anthropologists in wider public participation. Future anthropologies of space and place should
continue to build on these methodological, data and theoretical heritages, including
fieldwork and global comparisons, while expanding interdisciplinarity and engaging civic perspectives. Building on these foundations, anthropologists will need to
address environmental concerns in their broadest scope. They will also grapple with
the methodological and theoretical challenges of changing mobilities and similarly
analyze rapidly evolving (electronic) mediations and virtual spaces and communities
while sharing this knowledge in wider academic and public discussions.
INTRODUCTION
Description and analysis of human adaptations and impacts across
diverse environments has permeated socio-cultural anthropology since
its nineteenth-century origins. Depictions of indigenous dwellings and
settlements and their multilayered meanings, the comparative reconstruction of early monuments and their connections and the theoretical
questions of place, gender, race class, and power that became dominant
with “the spatial turn” in cultural anthropology in the 1990s have made
knowledge of the built environment fundamental. Today, continuing
issues of interdisciplinary dialogue, socio-cultural methods, comparison
and engagement with/reflection on power frame potential futures, where
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
expanding examinations of humans and their environments, relations of
movement and connections and the role of mediated imaginations will
shape changing meanings of place. These trends should continue to build
on existing documentation, analyses, and comparisons while moving into
wider exchanges.
FOUNDATIONAL ISSUES
Classic anthropological monographs analyzed questions about places and
meanings for readers far from fieldwork settings. Concerns with structures,
physical and social, pervade the British structural anthropology of Bronislaw Malinowski and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, the theoretical models of Emile
Durkheim and Marcel Mauss and the careful documentation of Native Americans by Franz Boas and his students in the United States. Despite differences
in culture and power between anthropologists and their “subjects,” critical
voices, including indigenous anthropologists as varied as Jomo Kenyatta and
Zora Neale Hurston, challenged early on many simplistic spaces of domination. Global changes after World War II brought anthropology into the cities
and cultures from which most scholars themselves had emerged. Anthropologists, too, engaged the energies of once-dominated peoples seeking change.
These developments expanded issues for anthropology of space and place,
especially in terms of global urbanization, from shanty-towns to immigrant
enclaves. Critical self-reflection in the 1960s and 1970s, when anthropology
boomed as a source of knowledge about cultural alternatives, raised questions of ethics and responsibilities abroad. Since the 1980s, anthropologists
have faced multiple challenges of speaking for and with global peoples, as
immersive fieldwork has become restricted by funds, limitations of access,
and employment markets in both academic/research domains and positions
through which anthropologists apply their knowledge to policies, education,
health care, and other social realms. General political economic concerns of
voice, power and, action and specific questions of how and when one may
work as an anthropologist shape issues for the future as well as differentiating discourses worldwide.1
In 1990, Denise Lawrence and Setha Low reviewed histories and current
work in anthropologies of space and the built environment for the Annual
Review of Anthropology (1990). They showed how classic documentation and
interpretations of place across global societies had been renewed by connections with psychology, social theory, and political economics, creating a wide,
1. North American anthropologists have begun to deal with environment degradation, cultural differences, mass media, and urban and suburban forms while Spanish colleagues often favor work on
public spaces/movements that resonates with democratic transformations since the 1970s. Chinese studies, meanwhile, look at urbanization, housing, and technologies that embody the development of a new
China.
Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space
3
fluid field with varied descriptive tools seeking to deal with ever stronger
social issues, especially the nexus of space and power. A decade later, the
authors updated their survey, underscoring continuities in studies of embodied and gendered spaces while stressing the impact of political economics,
geography and social theorists including Pierre Bourdieu, Manuel Castells,
and David Harvey as the study of the built environment moved beyond
construction and meaning toward understanding struggles over control and
identity (2003).
The interdisciplinarity characterizing anthropologies of the built environment began with awareness of archaeological explorations and reconstruction of past place as well as linguistics (in the languages of space). Early
anthropologists also reached out to history, architecture, and art as corollary disciplines of vision and form. Over time, interdisciplinarity has entailed
wider dialogues with geography, psychology, landscape and planning, and
cultural, ethnic, class, and gender studies.
In such dialogues, anthropologists share data, methods and theory. Ethnographic investigations, often based on long-term fieldwork, incorporate a
wide range of voices and interpretations, manifesting cultural diversity.
Concerns with structure and process and the integration of social life,
politics, economics, and material culture foster holistic understandings
of human places. Both field experience and theoretical models underpin
central commitments to listen and explore layers of lived meanings that
enrich anthropological intersections with environmental sciences or urban
policies.
Anthropologists generally situate differences of construction, use, and
experience of place within comparative frameworks. Nineteenth-century
studies often framed homes, temples, and fields in so-called “primitive”
societies through evolutionary models. Over time, systematic analyses
of place and process took over, replacing pseudo-temporal sequences
with questions of contact, shared heritage and parallel social processes
that embedded meanings in village walls, women’s domestic spaces, and
monumental constructions. Modern studies often look at dynamic cities,
moving populations, and multiple settings, yet comparing global cases still
provides insights in practice and theory.
A final issue arises from the multiple roles of anthropologists as
scholar/citizens who question familiar places (home, office, church,
school) as cultural products and critique implications of unequal relations
described through “neocolonialism,” “modernization,” “development,” or
“neoliberalism.” Anthropologists further address differences within “home”
settings that reveal underlying issues of social injustice and cultural debate.
While commitments vary, anthropologists remain profoundly shaped by the
societies within which they have become immersed in research and those
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
for whom they write, teach, and consult (and the intersections among these
global public spheres).
Such foundations shape trajectories for future developments. Yet, we must
recognize the continuities of anthropological research as scholars themselves
and new generations of students return to the “same” places and peoples
with new eyes. Those who inhabit these spaces with their ideas, issues and
bodies also alter their presents, futures, and pasts—and call on anthropologists to explain, defend or help preserve place and meaning. The reexamination of houses, properties, or techniques documented in the past participates
in struggles to save history and link traditions and futures in the face of globalization and conflicts. These forces, too, will shape the future anthropology
of the built environment.
CUTTING EDGE/FUTURE ISSUES
ENVIRONMENT
Amid global warming, shrinking resources, and struggles over water,
space, food and, clean air, anthropologists face environmental issues
daily in their lives, teaching, and research. The human construction of
nature—perception, ownership, techniques of exploitation, enhancement,
and damage—underpins human ecological models that have examined relations of the built environment and forms of production, from
hunter-gatherers through domestications to complex irrigated, imperial,
industrial, and post-industrial societies. Nonetheless, the twenty-first century has seen more intense awareness of environmental issues and new
connections with life and physical sciences as well as changing ecological
concerns from architecture to planning to politics. The sheer interdisciplinarity of environmental studies challenges methods, expertise, and theories:
what do anthropologists bring to contemporary discussions, policies, and
activism?
Water studies illustrate future possibilities for many other topics. Anthropologists of space and place have looked at how societies use and distribute
water, including nourishment, cleansing, agricultural use, landscaping
and ornamentation, and transportation. Today, human-created shortages,
struggles for control amid global economic interests, and social justice have
become urgent hydrological issues while anthropologists become witnesses
for existing rights of place in conflictive situations, where indigenous
societies meet multinational claims. The very question of metropolitan
flows embodies layers of social meanings, control, and exclusion as Eric
Swyngedouw has shown in his powerful analysis of the water system of
Guayaquil, Ecuador (2004). Privatization of water sparks debates in Europe
Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space
5
and North America, while just provision of safe water remains a major concern across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Thus, in a 2010 virtual edition
of Cultural Anthropology, Stuart McLean concluded, “I would see a more
sustained engagement with water and offering far-reaching possibilities for
transforming both the terms in which we describe reality and our sense of
what counts as reality” (http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/226).
While energy seems more distant from space and place, old and new
resources have important consequences for the built environment and
beyond, as argued monthly in the 2011 Anthropology Newsletter. On a global
scale, anthropologists have begun to study issues ranging from the implications of the growth and decline of societies based on cheap fossil fuels to the
consequences of alternative fuels, whether nuclear energy or water, sun, and
wind power. All these elements shape the way people live at fundamental
levels of heat, light, and power. Settlement patterns, whether suburban
sprawl, urban densification, or far-flung enclaves, must be reread through
energy costs. The fading hegemony of oil entails reexamination of the global
built environment: filling stations, road systems, and even plastics as an
intrinsic, almost unavoidable component of “modernity.” As citizens and
scholars realize that energy can never be taken for granted, anthropologists
face calls for input on planning, policy and equity as well as wider visions of
the future of energy, form, and society. This demands comparative analyses
of social forms of capture, distribution, exploitation, and ownership of
different forms of energy, themes Middle-Eastern historian Timothy Mitchell
raises in his Carbon Democracy, comparing democracies in coal and oil states
(2011).
Other energies raise similar questions. Andrew Brooks’ 2012 review of public anthropologists and nuclear power highlights issues including disaster
planning and linguists’ efforts to devise a universal code through which to
identify storage areas for nuclear waste. In many studies, the construction of
the environment seems subordinated to energy itself. Brooks, however, cites
Sumihara (2003) on the presentation of nuclear energy in welcome centers
and the shift, in Japan, from technological display to reassurance directed at
young mothers.
While examining humans in the environment, the holistic, comparative
vantages of anthropology and the field’s connections to different discourses
within and across societies provide useful counterpoints to public policies
and social movements framed in ideological terms. “Sustainable housing,”
“green cities,” “public” parks, cemeteries and stadia are all sites of materials,
energy and social formation that may take on mythic dimensions of “greenwashing.” That is, public claims about environmental values eclipse other
processes, for example, the construction of “green” luxury apartments in
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
contrast to the needs of the homeless. Here, an engaged future anthropology
should have impacts beyond journals and classrooms.
MOBILITY AND FLOWS
Classic paradigms of fieldwork put anthropologists themselves into motion
to report on distant, stable populations, even if “stability” entailed large-scale
pastoral migrations or the perilous sea voyages Malinowski charted in the
Kula ring of the Trobriands (1922). Later, recognition of the flows of people,
goods and ideas around the world fostered transnational readings and
multi-site ethnographies that challenged decades of anthropology on foot.
As Sheller and Urry (2006) show, mobilities that transform space and time
demand analysis. How do we understand people and bodies in motion,
whether bicyclists, subway riders, drivers on highways or jet passengers?
And what are the spatial ramifications of movements? Changing perceptions of landscape, burgeoning supplies of goods and emporia to display
them, magnificent terminals as symbolic gateways and questions of access,
and experience push paradigms of speed and scale beyond foot, canoes
or horseback. Moreover, choices and movements intersect with concrete
systems, from streets to the seeming placelessness of air travel.
Anthropology has evolved in an automotive age, experiencing developments in metropolitan areas and transformation of traditional field areas,
leading to a growing bibliography on automobility across cultures (Featherstone, 2004). Still, anthropologists must also speak with architects and
architectural historians, planners and others to trace complex transformation
of houses and connectors among settlements (suburbs, rural areas, squatter
towns), linking mobility to energy and to power relations favoring private or
public connections, which shaped possibilities of mass construction, density
and social spaces.
Mobility studies must balance the station and the trip. The methodological
and analytic challenges here have been highlighted by Chandra Bhimull
(2007), who reviews how anthropologists have dealt with the built environment of the air, from scrutiny of airports to understanding stewardesses, as
prelude to her analysis of airlines and empire through the role of Imperial
Airways in the Caribbean from the 1920s onwards. Recent popular texts,
meanwhile, have envisioned airports as “aerotropoles” for urbanists and
politicians (Kasarda & Lindsay, 2011), making it important to grapple with
both multiple functions and the nature of place and communities established
there as well as global linkages.
In short, studies of people in motion do not destroy ideas of place and
built environment but demand creative positioning and perspectives encompassing movement and connection, speed and rest. Through these studies,
Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space
7
anthropologists should illuminate variable interpretations reflecting multiple parameters of inclusion and exclusion: class, gender, race, age, ability,
and other social divisions are confronted (and hidden) in travel, whether
buying a ticket or debating the privacy of airport scanners. Critical comparative analyses reveal further variations in structures and outcomes and
allow anthropologists to comment on relations of power and mobility for
other future citizens.
MEDIA AND VIRTUAL WORLDS
The speed and motion that liquefy built environments evoke the media by
which we understand it. Direct experience of concrete place constitutes only
part of a web of meaning mediated through stories, memories, images, and
visions. The stuff of telling, as of movement, has been revolutionized by the
electronic transmission of data worldwide and these media demand innovative understandings of place, connections, and virtual environments.
Despite the formation of the discipline as way of telling stories, older
anthropologists moved slowly to grasp mass medias (despite sometimes
productive engagements with film and photography as tools). Linkages
between mass media studies and the built environment have tended to
stress content. Nonetheless, crucial questions of production, distribution,
and reception already underpin Brian Larkin’s studies of cinematic worlds
in Nigeria and other essays in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain
(Ginzburg, Abu-Lughod, & Larkin, 2002).
The digital revolution poses further questions. One need only consider the
cell phone, which has made obsolescent a whole series of spaces devoted to
phones (booths, central switchboards) and has altered the “place” of speech
in public. Rapid changes have had an impact where cell-phone technologies
leapfrogged over earlier infrastructural deficits. Rapid data flows, shared
photographs, and texting further revise questions of distance, privacy,
and boundaries of communication, including those of the nation-state.
Meanwhile, urban immigrant businesses “handling” communication and
transmission of money to dispersed homes remind us that mediated
communication sustains inequality, too.
Other compelling issues face anthropology vis-à-vis communicative universes formed online. These include fundamental challenges to methods—
what is the presence of the anthropologist? What are the ethical dimensions
of listening and sharing online? Different patterns and records of communication raise questions about community and place. Has an internet world
replaced, in part, physical spaces like libraries, cinemas, or classrooms? What
constitutes structure and meaning among the avatars of chat rooms, blogs,
or listservs? When mythic game worlds adopt “regular” places, currencies,
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
battles, and powers, how do we analyze them? Or relate them to other physical social worlds with which they coexist, ranging from isolated bedrooms
to gaming centers providing havens for immigrant youths to escapes from
office life?
Can virtual spaces replace fundamental places of social life? Not,
perhaps homes, beds, or parks (despite how media help reimagine
such places). But what about spaces of religion, as spiritual forms
and practices emerge based entirely on the worldwide web? To what
extent are places of worship, sites of pilgrimage, spaces of advising,
or gatherings of shared transcendent experience part of online worlds?
What demands and possibilities do these creations open for anthropology of space and place? While the examination of ritual places
represents a significant heritage, this shift in the nature of place has
provoked provocative new debates (http://digitalreligion.tamu.edu/blog/
mon-05142012-1132/scholar%E2%80%99s-top-5-christopher-helland-onlinereligion-and-religion-online). Changing media—old and new—demand
discussions about the very meaning of place, public spheres, and privacy,
relying on past knowledge but imbued by experimentation shared, perhaps
more equally than in the past, by anthropologists and informants.
CONCLUSIONS
These areas of emergent work in the study of the form, meanings and conflict scarcely exhaust futures for the field. Growing concerns with sensorial
and corporeal anthropologies and the role of sound, smell, and touch, for
example, challenge the adequacy of past interpretations (Hirshkind, 2006).
Questions from other fields of anthropology—medical studies, archaeology,
economics, agriculture—will continue to pose questions of space and society.
And new questions, will emerge from the shared experiences of humans in
changing environments—for example, where is security in a world of global
terror (Guano, 2013)? The value of future studies of space and place, nonetheless, demands understanding both of the past and of the civic matrices of an
engaged discipline.
REFERENCES
Bhimull, C. (2007). Empire in the air: Speed, perception, and airline travel in the atlantic
world (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation), University of Michigan.
Brooks, A. (2012). Radiating knowledge: The public anthropology of nuclear energy.
American Anthropologist, 114(1), 137–140.
Featherstone, M. (2004). “Automobilities: An introduction”. Theory Culture Society,
21, 1.
Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space
9
Ginzburg, F., Abu-Lughod, L., & Larkin, B. (2002). Media worlds: Anthropology on new
terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Guano, E. (2013). Inside the magic circle: Conjuring the terrorist enemy at the 2001
group of eight summit. In S. Arijit & L. D. Silverman (Eds.), Making place: Space and
embodiment in the city. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hirshkind, C. (2006). The ethical soundscape: Cassette sermons and islamic counterpublics.
New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Kasarda, J., & Lindsay, G. (2011). Aerotropolis: The way we’ll live next. Boston, MA:
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Lawrence, D., & Low, S. (1990). The built environment and spatial form. Annual
Review of Anthropology, 1990, 453–505.
Low, S. M., & Lawrence-Zuñiga, D. (2003). “Locating culture”. In S. Low & D.
Lawrence-Zuñiga (Eds.), The anthropology of space and place (pp. 1–48). Malden, MA:
Basil Blackwell.
McLean, S. (2010) Stories and cosmogenies: Imagining creativity beyond ‘Nature’
and ‘Culture’ with author interview and comments, Cultural Anthropology On-Line.
http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/226
Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the western pacific. London, England: Routledge.
Mitchell, T. (2011). Carbon democracy. London, England: Verso.
Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning
A, 38(2), 207–226.
Sumihara, N. (2003). Flamboyant representation of nuclear power station visitor centres in Japan: Revealing or concealing, or concealing by revealing? Journal of the
International Centre for Regional Studies, 1, 11–29.
Swyngedouw, E. (2004). Social power and the urbanization of water: Flows of power.
Oxford: New York, NY.
GARY W. McDONOGH SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Gary W. McDonogh is Helen Herrmann Chair and Professor in the
Department of Growth and Structure of Cities at Bryn Mawr College. An
anthropologist concerned with issues of culture, conflict, and representation
in world cities, he has worked for four decades in Barcelona, Spain, publishing Good Families of Barcelona: A Social History of Power (1986, Spanish Edition
1992) among other books and articles on that city. (e.g., Iberian Worlds, 2008).
Returning to American studies, he published Black and Catholic in Savannah,
Georgia (1992) and brought to light the long-archived WPA manuscript of
The Florida Negro (1992); he also coedited the Encyclopedia of Contemporary
American Culture (2001). His theoretical work on space and place includes
the coedited Cultural Meanings of Urban Place (1992) and the recent coedited
Global Downtowns (2012). In the twenty-first century, he has focused on
collaborative work on place and mediation in global Chinatowns, working
in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe. This work includes his 2005 study
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Global Hong Kong (coauthored with his wife, Professor of media culture
Cindy Wong) and his coauthored “Beside Downtown: Global Chinatowns”
(with Cindy Wong) in Global Downtowns. He is now coediting a collection on
Global Sustainability that will be published by Cambridge in 2014.
RELATED ESSAYS
The Public Nature of Private Property (Sociology), Debbie Becher
Neighborhoods and Cognitive Development (Psychology), Jondou Chen and
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
Cities and Sustainable Development (Sociology), Christopher Cusack
Theorizing the Death of Cities (Political Science), Peter Eisinger
Ethnic Enclaves (Sociology), Steven J. Gold
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin
N. Laland and Michael O’Brien
Remote Sensing with Satellite Technology (Archaeology), Sarah Parcak
Human Residence Patterns (Anthropology), Robert S. Walker
Incarceration and Health (Sociology), Christopher Wildeman
-
Built Environments and the
Anthropology of Space
GARY W. McDONOGH
Abstract
Analysis of human interaction with and interpretations of the surrounding physical
world has been of fundamental interest for anthropology since its emergence as a
discipline in the nineteenth century. The comparative description of homes, monumental spaces, and worked landscapes has provided foundations for social and cultural analysis and facilitated early exchanges with archaeology, architecture history,
and linguistics. Over time, changes in the lives of those with whom anthropologists
work and the concomitant expansion of urban anthropologies have promoted new
questions as well as expanding interactions with geography, social theory, urban
studies and gender, class, ethnic, and cultural studies while engaging anthropologists in wider public participation. Future anthropologies of space and place should
continue to build on these methodological, data and theoretical heritages, including
fieldwork and global comparisons, while expanding interdisciplinarity and engaging civic perspectives. Building on these foundations, anthropologists will need to
address environmental concerns in their broadest scope. They will also grapple with
the methodological and theoretical challenges of changing mobilities and similarly
analyze rapidly evolving (electronic) mediations and virtual spaces and communities
while sharing this knowledge in wider academic and public discussions.
INTRODUCTION
Description and analysis of human adaptations and impacts across
diverse environments has permeated socio-cultural anthropology since
its nineteenth-century origins. Depictions of indigenous dwellings and
settlements and their multilayered meanings, the comparative reconstruction of early monuments and their connections and the theoretical
questions of place, gender, race class, and power that became dominant
with “the spatial turn” in cultural anthropology in the 1990s have made
knowledge of the built environment fundamental. Today, continuing
issues of interdisciplinary dialogue, socio-cultural methods, comparison
and engagement with/reflection on power frame potential futures, where
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
expanding examinations of humans and their environments, relations of
movement and connections and the role of mediated imaginations will
shape changing meanings of place. These trends should continue to build
on existing documentation, analyses, and comparisons while moving into
wider exchanges.
FOUNDATIONAL ISSUES
Classic anthropological monographs analyzed questions about places and
meanings for readers far from fieldwork settings. Concerns with structures,
physical and social, pervade the British structural anthropology of Bronislaw Malinowski and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, the theoretical models of Emile
Durkheim and Marcel Mauss and the careful documentation of Native Americans by Franz Boas and his students in the United States. Despite differences
in culture and power between anthropologists and their “subjects,” critical
voices, including indigenous anthropologists as varied as Jomo Kenyatta and
Zora Neale Hurston, challenged early on many simplistic spaces of domination. Global changes after World War II brought anthropology into the cities
and cultures from which most scholars themselves had emerged. Anthropologists, too, engaged the energies of once-dominated peoples seeking change.
These developments expanded issues for anthropology of space and place,
especially in terms of global urbanization, from shanty-towns to immigrant
enclaves. Critical self-reflection in the 1960s and 1970s, when anthropology
boomed as a source of knowledge about cultural alternatives, raised questions of ethics and responsibilities abroad. Since the 1980s, anthropologists
have faced multiple challenges of speaking for and with global peoples, as
immersive fieldwork has become restricted by funds, limitations of access,
and employment markets in both academic/research domains and positions
through which anthropologists apply their knowledge to policies, education,
health care, and other social realms. General political economic concerns of
voice, power and, action and specific questions of how and when one may
work as an anthropologist shape issues for the future as well as differentiating discourses worldwide.1
In 1990, Denise Lawrence and Setha Low reviewed histories and current
work in anthropologies of space and the built environment for the Annual
Review of Anthropology (1990). They showed how classic documentation and
interpretations of place across global societies had been renewed by connections with psychology, social theory, and political economics, creating a wide,
1. North American anthropologists have begun to deal with environment degradation, cultural differences, mass media, and urban and suburban forms while Spanish colleagues often favor work on
public spaces/movements that resonates with democratic transformations since the 1970s. Chinese studies, meanwhile, look at urbanization, housing, and technologies that embody the development of a new
China.
Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space
3
fluid field with varied descriptive tools seeking to deal with ever stronger
social issues, especially the nexus of space and power. A decade later, the
authors updated their survey, underscoring continuities in studies of embodied and gendered spaces while stressing the impact of political economics,
geography and social theorists including Pierre Bourdieu, Manuel Castells,
and David Harvey as the study of the built environment moved beyond
construction and meaning toward understanding struggles over control and
identity (2003).
The interdisciplinarity characterizing anthropologies of the built environment began with awareness of archaeological explorations and reconstruction of past place as well as linguistics (in the languages of space). Early
anthropologists also reached out to history, architecture, and art as corollary disciplines of vision and form. Over time, interdisciplinarity has entailed
wider dialogues with geography, psychology, landscape and planning, and
cultural, ethnic, class, and gender studies.
In such dialogues, anthropologists share data, methods and theory. Ethnographic investigations, often based on long-term fieldwork, incorporate a
wide range of voices and interpretations, manifesting cultural diversity.
Concerns with structure and process and the integration of social life,
politics, economics, and material culture foster holistic understandings
of human places. Both field experience and theoretical models underpin
central commitments to listen and explore layers of lived meanings that
enrich anthropological intersections with environmental sciences or urban
policies.
Anthropologists generally situate differences of construction, use, and
experience of place within comparative frameworks. Nineteenth-century
studies often framed homes, temples, and fields in so-called “primitive”
societies through evolutionary models. Over time, systematic analyses
of place and process took over, replacing pseudo-temporal sequences
with questions of contact, shared heritage and parallel social processes
that embedded meanings in village walls, women’s domestic spaces, and
monumental constructions. Modern studies often look at dynamic cities,
moving populations, and multiple settings, yet comparing global cases still
provides insights in practice and theory.
A final issue arises from the multiple roles of anthropologists as
scholar/citizens who question familiar places (home, office, church,
school) as cultural products and critique implications of unequal relations
described through “neocolonialism,” “modernization,” “development,” or
“neoliberalism.” Anthropologists further address differences within “home”
settings that reveal underlying issues of social injustice and cultural debate.
While commitments vary, anthropologists remain profoundly shaped by the
societies within which they have become immersed in research and those
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
for whom they write, teach, and consult (and the intersections among these
global public spheres).
Such foundations shape trajectories for future developments. Yet, we must
recognize the continuities of anthropological research as scholars themselves
and new generations of students return to the “same” places and peoples
with new eyes. Those who inhabit these spaces with their ideas, issues and
bodies also alter their presents, futures, and pasts—and call on anthropologists to explain, defend or help preserve place and meaning. The reexamination of houses, properties, or techniques documented in the past participates
in struggles to save history and link traditions and futures in the face of globalization and conflicts. These forces, too, will shape the future anthropology
of the built environment.
CUTTING EDGE/FUTURE ISSUES
ENVIRONMENT
Amid global warming, shrinking resources, and struggles over water,
space, food and, clean air, anthropologists face environmental issues
daily in their lives, teaching, and research. The human construction of
nature—perception, ownership, techniques of exploitation, enhancement,
and damage—underpins human ecological models that have examined relations of the built environment and forms of production, from
hunter-gatherers through domestications to complex irrigated, imperial,
industrial, and post-industrial societies. Nonetheless, the twenty-first century has seen more intense awareness of environmental issues and new
connections with life and physical sciences as well as changing ecological
concerns from architecture to planning to politics. The sheer interdisciplinarity of environmental studies challenges methods, expertise, and theories:
what do anthropologists bring to contemporary discussions, policies, and
activism?
Water studies illustrate future possibilities for many other topics. Anthropologists of space and place have looked at how societies use and distribute
water, including nourishment, cleansing, agricultural use, landscaping
and ornamentation, and transportation. Today, human-created shortages,
struggles for control amid global economic interests, and social justice have
become urgent hydrological issues while anthropologists become witnesses
for existing rights of place in conflictive situations, where indigenous
societies meet multinational claims. The very question of metropolitan
flows embodies layers of social meanings, control, and exclusion as Eric
Swyngedouw has shown in his powerful analysis of the water system of
Guayaquil, Ecuador (2004). Privatization of water sparks debates in Europe
Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space
5
and North America, while just provision of safe water remains a major concern across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Thus, in a 2010 virtual edition
of Cultural Anthropology, Stuart McLean concluded, “I would see a more
sustained engagement with water and offering far-reaching possibilities for
transforming both the terms in which we describe reality and our sense of
what counts as reality” (http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/226).
While energy seems more distant from space and place, old and new
resources have important consequences for the built environment and
beyond, as argued monthly in the 2011 Anthropology Newsletter. On a global
scale, anthropologists have begun to study issues ranging from the implications of the growth and decline of societies based on cheap fossil fuels to the
consequences of alternative fuels, whether nuclear energy or water, sun, and
wind power. All these elements shape the way people live at fundamental
levels of heat, light, and power. Settlement patterns, whether suburban
sprawl, urban densification, or far-flung enclaves, must be reread through
energy costs. The fading hegemony of oil entails reexamination of the global
built environment: filling stations, road systems, and even plastics as an
intrinsic, almost unavoidable component of “modernity.” As citizens and
scholars realize that energy can never be taken for granted, anthropologists
face calls for input on planning, policy and equity as well as wider visions of
the future of energy, form, and society. This demands comparative analyses
of social forms of capture, distribution, exploitation, and ownership of
different forms of energy, themes Middle-Eastern historian Timothy Mitchell
raises in his Carbon Democracy, comparing democracies in coal and oil states
(2011).
Other energies raise similar questions. Andrew Brooks’ 2012 review of public anthropologists and nuclear power highlights issues including disaster
planning and linguists’ efforts to devise a universal code through which to
identify storage areas for nuclear waste. In many studies, the construction of
the environment seems subordinated to energy itself. Brooks, however, cites
Sumihara (2003) on the presentation of nuclear energy in welcome centers
and the shift, in Japan, from technological display to reassurance directed at
young mothers.
While examining humans in the environment, the holistic, comparative
vantages of anthropology and the field’s connections to different discourses
within and across societies provide useful counterpoints to public policies
and social movements framed in ideological terms. “Sustainable housing,”
“green cities,” “public” parks, cemeteries and stadia are all sites of materials,
energy and social formation that may take on mythic dimensions of “greenwashing.” That is, public claims about environmental values eclipse other
processes, for example, the construction of “green” luxury apartments in
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
contrast to the needs of the homeless. Here, an engaged future anthropology
should have impacts beyond journals and classrooms.
MOBILITY AND FLOWS
Classic paradigms of fieldwork put anthropologists themselves into motion
to report on distant, stable populations, even if “stability” entailed large-scale
pastoral migrations or the perilous sea voyages Malinowski charted in the
Kula ring of the Trobriands (1922). Later, recognition of the flows of people,
goods and ideas around the world fostered transnational readings and
multi-site ethnographies that challenged decades of anthropology on foot.
As Sheller and Urry (2006) show, mobilities that transform space and time
demand analysis. How do we understand people and bodies in motion,
whether bicyclists, subway riders, drivers on highways or jet passengers?
And what are the spatial ramifications of movements? Changing perceptions of landscape, burgeoning supplies of goods and emporia to display
them, magnificent terminals as symbolic gateways and questions of access,
and experience push paradigms of speed and scale beyond foot, canoes
or horseback. Moreover, choices and movements intersect with concrete
systems, from streets to the seeming placelessness of air travel.
Anthropology has evolved in an automotive age, experiencing developments in metropolitan areas and transformation of traditional field areas,
leading to a growing bibliography on automobility across cultures (Featherstone, 2004). Still, anthropologists must also speak with architects and
architectural historians, planners and others to trace complex transformation
of houses and connectors among settlements (suburbs, rural areas, squatter
towns), linking mobility to energy and to power relations favoring private or
public connections, which shaped possibilities of mass construction, density
and social spaces.
Mobility studies must balance the station and the trip. The methodological
and analytic challenges here have been highlighted by Chandra Bhimull
(2007), who reviews how anthropologists have dealt with the built environment of the air, from scrutiny of airports to understanding stewardesses, as
prelude to her analysis of airlines and empire through the role of Imperial
Airways in the Caribbean from the 1920s onwards. Recent popular texts,
meanwhile, have envisioned airports as “aerotropoles” for urbanists and
politicians (Kasarda & Lindsay, 2011), making it important to grapple with
both multiple functions and the nature of place and communities established
there as well as global linkages.
In short, studies of people in motion do not destroy ideas of place and
built environment but demand creative positioning and perspectives encompassing movement and connection, speed and rest. Through these studies,
Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space
7
anthropologists should illuminate variable interpretations reflecting multiple parameters of inclusion and exclusion: class, gender, race, age, ability,
and other social divisions are confronted (and hidden) in travel, whether
buying a ticket or debating the privacy of airport scanners. Critical comparative analyses reveal further variations in structures and outcomes and
allow anthropologists to comment on relations of power and mobility for
other future citizens.
MEDIA AND VIRTUAL WORLDS
The speed and motion that liquefy built environments evoke the media by
which we understand it. Direct experience of concrete place constitutes only
part of a web of meaning mediated through stories, memories, images, and
visions. The stuff of telling, as of movement, has been revolutionized by the
electronic transmission of data worldwide and these media demand innovative understandings of place, connections, and virtual environments.
Despite the formation of the discipline as way of telling stories, older
anthropologists moved slowly to grasp mass medias (despite sometimes
productive engagements with film and photography as tools). Linkages
between mass media studies and the built environment have tended to
stress content. Nonetheless, crucial questions of production, distribution,
and reception already underpin Brian Larkin’s studies of cinematic worlds
in Nigeria and other essays in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain
(Ginzburg, Abu-Lughod, & Larkin, 2002).
The digital revolution poses further questions. One need only consider the
cell phone, which has made obsolescent a whole series of spaces devoted to
phones (booths, central switchboards) and has altered the “place” of speech
in public. Rapid changes have had an impact where cell-phone technologies
leapfrogged over earlier infrastructural deficits. Rapid data flows, shared
photographs, and texting further revise questions of distance, privacy,
and boundaries of communication, including those of the nation-state.
Meanwhile, urban immigrant businesses “handling” communication and
transmission of money to dispersed homes remind us that mediated
communication sustains inequality, too.
Other compelling issues face anthropology vis-à-vis communicative universes formed online. These include fundamental challenges to methods—
what is the presence of the anthropologist? What are the ethical dimensions
of listening and sharing online? Different patterns and records of communication raise questions about community and place. Has an internet world
replaced, in part, physical spaces like libraries, cinemas, or classrooms? What
constitutes structure and meaning among the avatars of chat rooms, blogs,
or listservs? When mythic game worlds adopt “regular” places, currencies,
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
battles, and powers, how do we analyze them? Or relate them to other physical social worlds with which they coexist, ranging from isolated bedrooms
to gaming centers providing havens for immigrant youths to escapes from
office life?
Can virtual spaces replace fundamental places of social life? Not,
perhaps homes, beds, or parks (despite how media help reimagine
such places). But what about spaces of religion, as spiritual forms
and practices emerge based entirely on the worldwide web? To what
extent are places of worship, sites of pilgrimage, spaces of advising,
or gatherings of shared transcendent experience part of online worlds?
What demands and possibilities do these creations open for anthropology of space and place? While the examination of ritual places
represents a significant heritage, this shift in the nature of place has
provoked provocative new debates (http://digitalreligion.tamu.edu/blog/
mon-05142012-1132/scholar%E2%80%99s-top-5-christopher-helland-onlinereligion-and-religion-online). Changing media—old and new—demand
discussions about the very meaning of place, public spheres, and privacy,
relying on past knowledge but imbued by experimentation shared, perhaps
more equally than in the past, by anthropologists and informants.
CONCLUSIONS
These areas of emergent work in the study of the form, meanings and conflict scarcely exhaust futures for the field. Growing concerns with sensorial
and corporeal anthropologies and the role of sound, smell, and touch, for
example, challenge the adequacy of past interpretations (Hirshkind, 2006).
Questions from other fields of anthropology—medical studies, archaeology,
economics, agriculture—will continue to pose questions of space and society.
And new questions, will emerge from the shared experiences of humans in
changing environments—for example, where is security in a world of global
terror (Guano, 2013)? The value of future studies of space and place, nonetheless, demands understanding both of the past and of the civic matrices of an
engaged discipline.
REFERENCES
Bhimull, C. (2007). Empire in the air: Speed, perception, and airline travel in the atlantic
world (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation), University of Michigan.
Brooks, A. (2012). Radiating knowledge: The public anthropology of nuclear energy.
American Anthropologist, 114(1), 137–140.
Featherstone, M. (2004). “Automobilities: An introduction”. Theory Culture Society,
21, 1.
Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space
9
Ginzburg, F., Abu-Lughod, L., & Larkin, B. (2002). Media worlds: Anthropology on new
terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Guano, E. (2013). Inside the magic circle: Conjuring the terrorist enemy at the 2001
group of eight summit. In S. Arijit & L. D. Silverman (Eds.), Making place: Space and
embodiment in the city. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hirshkind, C. (2006). The ethical soundscape: Cassette sermons and islamic counterpublics.
New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Kasarda, J., & Lindsay, G. (2011). Aerotropolis: The way we’ll live next. Boston, MA:
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Lawrence, D., & Low, S. (1990). The built environment and spatial form. Annual
Review of Anthropology, 1990, 453–505.
Low, S. M., & Lawrence-Zuñiga, D. (2003). “Locating culture”. In S. Low & D.
Lawrence-Zuñiga (Eds.), The anthropology of space and place (pp. 1–48). Malden, MA:
Basil Blackwell.
McLean, S. (2010) Stories and cosmogenies: Imagining creativity beyond ‘Nature’
and ‘Culture’ with author interview and comments, Cultural Anthropology On-Line.
http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/226
Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the western pacific. London, England: Routledge.
Mitchell, T. (2011). Carbon democracy. London, England: Verso.
Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning
A, 38(2), 207–226.
Sumihara, N. (2003). Flamboyant representation of nuclear power station visitor centres in Japan: Revealing or concealing, or concealing by revealing? Journal of the
International Centre for Regional Studies, 1, 11–29.
Swyngedouw, E. (2004). Social power and the urbanization of water: Flows of power.
Oxford: New York, NY.
GARY W. McDONOGH SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Gary W. McDonogh is Helen Herrmann Chair and Professor in the
Department of Growth and Structure of Cities at Bryn Mawr College. An
anthropologist concerned with issues of culture, conflict, and representation
in world cities, he has worked for four decades in Barcelona, Spain, publishing Good Families of Barcelona: A Social History of Power (1986, Spanish Edition
1992) among other books and articles on that city. (e.g., Iberian Worlds, 2008).
Returning to American studies, he published Black and Catholic in Savannah,
Georgia (1992) and brought to light the long-archived WPA manuscript of
The Florida Negro (1992); he also coedited the Encyclopedia of Contemporary
American Culture (2001). His theoretical work on space and place includes
the coedited Cultural Meanings of Urban Place (1992) and the recent coedited
Global Downtowns (2012). In the twenty-first century, he has focused on
collaborative work on place and mediation in global Chinatowns, working
in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe. This work includes his 2005 study
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Global Hong Kong (coauthored with his wife, Professor of media culture
Cindy Wong) and his coauthored “Beside Downtown: Global Chinatowns”
(with Cindy Wong) in Global Downtowns. He is now coediting a collection on
Global Sustainability that will be published by Cambridge in 2014.
RELATED ESSAYS
The Public Nature of Private Property (Sociology), Debbie Becher
Neighborhoods and Cognitive Development (Psychology), Jondou Chen and
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
Cities and Sustainable Development (Sociology), Christopher Cusack
Theorizing the Death of Cities (Political Science), Peter Eisinger
Ethnic Enclaves (Sociology), Steven J. Gold
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin
N. Laland and Michael O’Brien
Remote Sensing with Satellite Technology (Archaeology), Sarah Parcak
Human Residence Patterns (Anthropology), Robert S. Walker
Incarceration and Health (Sociology), Christopher Wildeman
Built Environments and the
Anthropology of Space
GARY W. McDONOGH
Abstract
Analysis of human interaction with and interpretations of the surrounding physical
world has been of fundamental interest for anthropology since its emergence as a
discipline in the nineteenth century. The comparative description of homes, monumental spaces, and worked landscapes has provided foundations for social and cultural analysis and facilitated early exchanges with archaeology, architecture history,
and linguistics. Over time, changes in the lives of those with whom anthropologists
work and the concomitant expansion of urban anthropologies have promoted new
questions as well as expanding interactions with geography, social theory, urban
studies and gender, class, ethnic, and cultural studies while engaging anthropologists in wider public participation. Future anthropologies of space and place should
continue to build on these methodological, data and theoretical heritages, including
fieldwork and global comparisons, while expanding interdisciplinarity and engaging civic perspectives. Building on these foundations, anthropologists will need to
address environmental concerns in their broadest scope. They will also grapple with
the methodological and theoretical challenges of changing mobilities and similarly
analyze rapidly evolving (electronic) mediations and virtual spaces and communities
while sharing this knowledge in wider academic and public discussions.
INTRODUCTION
Description and analysis of human adaptations and impacts across
diverse environments has permeated socio-cultural anthropology since
its nineteenth-century origins. Depictions of indigenous dwellings and
settlements and their multilayered meanings, the comparative reconstruction of early monuments and their connections and the theoretical
questions of place, gender, race class, and power that became dominant
with “the spatial turn” in cultural anthropology in the 1990s have made
knowledge of the built environment fundamental. Today, continuing
issues of interdisciplinary dialogue, socio-cultural methods, comparison
and engagement with/reflection on power frame potential futures, where
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
expanding examinations of humans and their environments, relations of
movement and connections and the role of mediated imaginations will
shape changing meanings of place. These trends should continue to build
on existing documentation, analyses, and comparisons while moving into
wider exchanges.
FOUNDATIONAL ISSUES
Classic anthropological monographs analyzed questions about places and
meanings for readers far from fieldwork settings. Concerns with structures,
physical and social, pervade the British structural anthropology of Bronislaw Malinowski and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, the theoretical models of Emile
Durkheim and Marcel Mauss and the careful documentation of Native Americans by Franz Boas and his students in the United States. Despite differences
in culture and power between anthropologists and their “subjects,” critical
voices, including indigenous anthropologists as varied as Jomo Kenyatta and
Zora Neale Hurston, challenged early on many simplistic spaces of domination. Global changes after World War II brought anthropology into the cities
and cultures from which most scholars themselves had emerged. Anthropologists, too, engaged the energies of once-dominated peoples seeking change.
These developments expanded issues for anthropology of space and place,
especially in terms of global urbanization, from shanty-towns to immigrant
enclaves. Critical self-reflection in the 1960s and 1970s, when anthropology
boomed as a source of knowledge about cultural alternatives, raised questions of ethics and responsibilities abroad. Since the 1980s, anthropologists
have faced multiple challenges of speaking for and with global peoples, as
immersive fieldwork has become restricted by funds, limitations of access,
and employment markets in both academic/research domains and positions
through which anthropologists apply their knowledge to policies, education,
health care, and other social realms. General political economic concerns of
voice, power and, action and specific questions of how and when one may
work as an anthropologist shape issues for the future as well as differentiating discourses worldwide.1
In 1990, Denise Lawrence and Setha Low reviewed histories and current
work in anthropologies of space and the built environment for the Annual
Review of Anthropology (1990). They showed how classic documentation and
interpretations of place across global societies had been renewed by connections with psychology, social theory, and political economics, creating a wide,
1. North American anthropologists have begun to deal with environment degradation, cultural differences, mass media, and urban and suburban forms while Spanish colleagues often favor work on
public spaces/movements that resonates with democratic transformations since the 1970s. Chinese studies, meanwhile, look at urbanization, housing, and technologies that embody the development of a new
China.
Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space
3
fluid field with varied descriptive tools seeking to deal with ever stronger
social issues, especially the nexus of space and power. A decade later, the
authors updated their survey, underscoring continuities in studies of embodied and gendered spaces while stressing the impact of political economics,
geography and social theorists including Pierre Bourdieu, Manuel Castells,
and David Harvey as the study of the built environment moved beyond
construction and meaning toward understanding struggles over control and
identity (2003).
The interdisciplinarity characterizing anthropologies of the built environment began with awareness of archaeological explorations and reconstruction of past place as well as linguistics (in the languages of space). Early
anthropologists also reached out to history, architecture, and art as corollary disciplines of vision and form. Over time, interdisciplinarity has entailed
wider dialogues with geography, psychology, landscape and planning, and
cultural, ethnic, class, and gender studies.
In such dialogues, anthropologists share data, methods and theory. Ethnographic investigations, often based on long-term fieldwork, incorporate a
wide range of voices and interpretations, manifesting cultural diversity.
Concerns with structure and process and the integration of social life,
politics, economics, and material culture foster holistic understandings
of human places. Both field experience and theoretical models underpin
central commitments to listen and explore layers of lived meanings that
enrich anthropological intersections with environmental sciences or urban
policies.
Anthropologists generally situate differences of construction, use, and
experience of place within comparative frameworks. Nineteenth-century
studies often framed homes, temples, and fields in so-called “primitive”
societies through evolutionary models. Over time, systematic analyses
of place and process took over, replacing pseudo-temporal sequences
with questions of contact, shared heritage and parallel social processes
that embedded meanings in village walls, women’s domestic spaces, and
monumental constructions. Modern studies often look at dynamic cities,
moving populations, and multiple settings, yet comparing global cases still
provides insights in practice and theory.
A final issue arises from the multiple roles of anthropologists as
scholar/citizens who question familiar places (home, office, church,
school) as cultural products and critique implications of unequal relations
described through “neocolonialism,” “modernization,” “development,” or
“neoliberalism.” Anthropologists further address differences within “home”
settings that reveal underlying issues of social injustice and cultural debate.
While commitments vary, anthropologists remain profoundly shaped by the
societies within which they have become immersed in research and those
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
for whom they write, teach, and consult (and the intersections among these
global public spheres).
Such foundations shape trajectories for future developments. Yet, we must
recognize the continuities of anthropological research as scholars themselves
and new generations of students return to the “same” places and peoples
with new eyes. Those who inhabit these spaces with their ideas, issues and
bodies also alter their presents, futures, and pasts—and call on anthropologists to explain, defend or help preserve place and meaning. The reexamination of houses, properties, or techniques documented in the past participates
in struggles to save history and link traditions and futures in the face of globalization and conflicts. These forces, too, will shape the future anthropology
of the built environment.
CUTTING EDGE/FUTURE ISSUES
ENVIRONMENT
Amid global warming, shrinking resources, and struggles over water,
space, food and, clean air, anthropologists face environmental issues
daily in their lives, teaching, and research. The human construction of
nature—perception, ownership, techniques of exploitation, enhancement,
and damage—underpins human ecological models that have examined relations of the built environment and forms of production, from
hunter-gatherers through domestications to complex irrigated, imperial,
industrial, and post-industrial societies. Nonetheless, the twenty-first century has seen more intense awareness of environmental issues and new
connections with life and physical sciences as well as changing ecological
concerns from architecture to planning to politics. The sheer interdisciplinarity of environmental studies challenges methods, expertise, and theories:
what do anthropologists bring to contemporary discussions, policies, and
activism?
Water studies illustrate future possibilities for many other topics. Anthropologists of space and place have looked at how societies use and distribute
water, including nourishment, cleansing, agricultural use, landscaping
and ornamentation, and transportation. Today, human-created shortages,
struggles for control amid global economic interests, and social justice have
become urgent hydrological issues while anthropologists become witnesses
for existing rights of place in conflictive situations, where indigenous
societies meet multinational claims. The very question of metropolitan
flows embodies layers of social meanings, control, and exclusion as Eric
Swyngedouw has shown in his powerful analysis of the water system of
Guayaquil, Ecuador (2004). Privatization of water sparks debates in Europe
Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space
5
and North America, while just provision of safe water remains a major concern across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Thus, in a 2010 virtual edition
of Cultural Anthropology, Stuart McLean concluded, “I would see a more
sustained engagement with water and offering far-reaching possibilities for
transforming both the terms in which we describe reality and our sense of
what counts as reality” (http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/226).
While energy seems more distant from space and place, old and new
resources have important consequences for the built environment and
beyond, as argued monthly in the 2011 Anthropology Newsletter. On a global
scale, anthropologists have begun to study issues ranging from the implications of the growth and decline of societies based on cheap fossil fuels to the
consequences of alternative fuels, whether nuclear energy or water, sun, and
wind power. All these elements shape the way people live at fundamental
levels of heat, light, and power. Settlement patterns, whether suburban
sprawl, urban densification, or far-flung enclaves, must be reread through
energy costs. The fading hegemony of oil entails reexamination of the global
built environment: filling stations, road systems, and even plastics as an
intrinsic, almost unavoidable component of “modernity.” As citizens and
scholars realize that energy can never be taken for granted, anthropologists
face calls for input on planning, policy and equity as well as wider visions of
the future of energy, form, and society. This demands comparative analyses
of social forms of capture, distribution, exploitation, and ownership of
different forms of energy, themes Middle-Eastern historian Timothy Mitchell
raises in his Carbon Democracy, comparing democracies in coal and oil states
(2011).
Other energies raise similar questions. Andrew Brooks’ 2012 review of public anthropologists and nuclear power highlights issues including disaster
planning and linguists’ efforts to devise a universal code through which to
identify storage areas for nuclear waste. In many studies, the construction of
the environment seems subordinated to energy itself. Brooks, however, cites
Sumihara (2003) on the presentation of nuclear energy in welcome centers
and the shift, in Japan, from technological display to reassurance directed at
young mothers.
While examining humans in the environment, the holistic, comparative
vantages of anthropology and the field’s connections to different discourses
within and across societies provide useful counterpoints to public policies
and social movements framed in ideological terms. “Sustainable housing,”
“green cities,” “public” parks, cemeteries and stadia are all sites of materials,
energy and social formation that may take on mythic dimensions of “greenwashing.” That is, public claims about environmental values eclipse other
processes, for example, the construction of “green” luxury apartments in
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
contrast to the needs of the homeless. Here, an engaged future anthropology
should have impacts beyond journals and classrooms.
MOBILITY AND FLOWS
Classic paradigms of fieldwork put anthropologists themselves into motion
to report on distant, stable populations, even if “stability” entailed large-scale
pastoral migrations or the perilous sea voyages Malinowski charted in the
Kula ring of the Trobriands (1922). Later, recognition of the flows of people,
goods and ideas around the world fostered transnational readings and
multi-site ethnographies that challenged decades of anthropology on foot.
As Sheller and Urry (2006) show, mobilities that transform space and time
demand analysis. How do we understand people and bodies in motion,
whether bicyclists, subway riders, drivers on highways or jet passengers?
And what are the spatial ramifications of movements? Changing perceptions of landscape, burgeoning supplies of goods and emporia to display
them, magnificent terminals as symbolic gateways and questions of access,
and experience push paradigms of speed and scale beyond foot, canoes
or horseback. Moreover, choices and movements intersect with concrete
systems, from streets to the seeming placelessness of air travel.
Anthropology has evolved in an automotive age, experiencing developments in metropolitan areas and transformation of traditional field areas,
leading to a growing bibliography on automobility across cultures (Featherstone, 2004). Still, anthropologists must also speak with architects and
architectural historians, planners and others to trace complex transformation
of houses and connectors among settlements (suburbs, rural areas, squatter
towns), linking mobility to energy and to power relations favoring private or
public connections, which shaped possibilities of mass construction, density
and social spaces.
Mobility studies must balance the station and the trip. The methodological
and analytic challenges here have been highlighted by Chandra Bhimull
(2007), who reviews how anthropologists have dealt with the built environment of the air, from scrutiny of airports to understanding stewardesses, as
prelude to her analysis of airlines and empire through the role of Imperial
Airways in the Caribbean from the 1920s onwards. Recent popular texts,
meanwhile, have envisioned airports as “aerotropoles” for urbanists and
politicians (Kasarda & Lindsay, 2011), making it important to grapple with
both multiple functions and the nature of place and communities established
there as well as global linkages.
In short, studies of people in motion do not destroy ideas of place and
built environment but demand creative positioning and perspectives encompassing movement and connection, speed and rest. Through these studies,
Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space
7
anthropologists should illuminate variable interpretations reflecting multiple parameters of inclusion and exclusion: class, gender, race, age, ability,
and other social divisions are confronted (and hidden) in travel, whether
buying a ticket or debating the privacy of airport scanners. Critical comparative analyses reveal further variations in structures and outcomes and
allow anthropologists to comment on relations of power and mobility for
other future citizens.
MEDIA AND VIRTUAL WORLDS
The speed and motion that liquefy built environments evoke the media by
which we understand it. Direct experience of concrete place constitutes only
part of a web of meaning mediated through stories, memories, images, and
visions. The stuff of telling, as of movement, has been revolutionized by the
electronic transmission of data worldwide and these media demand innovative understandings of place, connections, and virtual environments.
Despite the formation of the discipline as way of telling stories, older
anthropologists moved slowly to grasp mass medias (despite sometimes
productive engagements with film and photography as tools). Linkages
between mass media studies and the built environment have tended to
stress content. Nonetheless, crucial questions of production, distribution,
and reception already underpin Brian Larkin’s studies of cinematic worlds
in Nigeria and other essays in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain
(Ginzburg, Abu-Lughod, & Larkin, 2002).
The digital revolution poses further questions. One need only consider the
cell phone, which has made obsolescent a whole series of spaces devoted to
phones (booths, central switchboards) and has altered the “place” of speech
in public. Rapid changes have had an impact where cell-phone technologies
leapfrogged over earlier infrastructural deficits. Rapid data flows, shared
photographs, and texting further revise questions of distance, privacy,
and boundaries of communication, including those of the nation-state.
Meanwhile, urban immigrant businesses “handling” communication and
transmission of money to dispersed homes remind us that mediated
communication sustains inequality, too.
Other compelling issues face anthropology vis-à-vis communicative universes formed online. These include fundamental challenges to methods—
what is the presence of the anthropologist? What are the ethical dimensions
of listening and sharing online? Different patterns and records of communication raise questions about community and place. Has an internet world
replaced, in part, physical spaces like libraries, cinemas, or classrooms? What
constitutes structure and meaning among the avatars of chat rooms, blogs,
or listservs? When mythic game worlds adopt “regular” places, currencies,
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
battles, and powers, how do we analyze them? Or relate them to other physical social worlds with which they coexist, ranging from isolated bedrooms
to gaming centers providing havens for immigrant youths to escapes from
office life?
Can virtual spaces replace fundamental places of social life? Not,
perhaps homes, beds, or parks (despite how media help reimagine
such places). But what about spaces of religion, as spiritual forms
and practices emerge based entirely on the worldwide web? To what
extent are places of worship, sites of pilgrimage, spaces of advising,
or gatherings of shared transcendent experience part of online worlds?
What demands and possibilities do these creations open for anthropology of space and place? While the examination of ritual places
represents a significant heritage, this shift in the nature of place has
provoked provocative new debates (http://digitalreligion.tamu.edu/blog/
mon-05142012-1132/scholar%E2%80%99s-top-5-christopher-helland-onlinereligion-and-religion-online). Changing media—old and new—demand
discussions about the very meaning of place, public spheres, and privacy,
relying on past knowledge but imbued by experimentation shared, perhaps
more equally than in the past, by anthropologists and informants.
CONCLUSIONS
These areas of emergent work in the study of the form, meanings and conflict scarcely exhaust futures for the field. Growing concerns with sensorial
and corporeal anthropologies and the role of sound, smell, and touch, for
example, challenge the adequacy of past interpretations (Hirshkind, 2006).
Questions from other fields of anthropology—medical studies, archaeology,
economics, agriculture—will continue to pose questions of space and society.
And new questions, will emerge from the shared experiences of humans in
changing environments—for example, where is security in a world of global
terror (Guano, 2013)? The value of future studies of space and place, nonetheless, demands understanding both of the past and of the civic matrices of an
engaged discipline.
REFERENCES
Bhimull, C. (2007). Empire in the air: Speed, perception, and airline travel in the atlantic
world (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation), University of Michigan.
Brooks, A. (2012). Radiating knowledge: The public anthropology of nuclear energy.
American Anthropologist, 114(1), 137–140.
Featherstone, M. (2004). “Automobilities: An introduction”. Theory Culture Society,
21, 1.
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Ginzburg, F., Abu-Lughod, L., & Larkin, B. (2002). Media worlds: Anthropology on new
terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Guano, E. (2013). Inside the magic circle: Conjuring the terrorist enemy at the 2001
group of eight summit. In S. Arijit & L. D. Silverman (Eds.), Making place: Space and
embodiment in the city. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hirshkind, C. (2006). The ethical soundscape: Cassette sermons and islamic counterpublics.
New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Kasarda, J., & Lindsay, G. (2011). Aerotropolis: The way we’ll live next. Boston, MA:
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Lawrence, D., & Low, S. (1990). The built environment and spatial form. Annual
Review of Anthropology, 1990, 453–505.
Low, S. M., & Lawrence-Zuñiga, D. (2003). “Locating culture”. In S. Low & D.
Lawrence-Zuñiga (Eds.), The anthropology of space and place (pp. 1–48). Malden, MA:
Basil Blackwell.
McLean, S. (2010) Stories and cosmogenies: Imagining creativity beyond ‘Nature’
and ‘Culture’ with author interview and comments, Cultural Anthropology On-Line.
http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/226
Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the western pacific. London, England: Routledge.
Mitchell, T. (2011). Carbon democracy. London, England: Verso.
Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning
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Sumihara, N. (2003). Flamboyant representation of nuclear power station visitor centres in Japan: Revealing or concealing, or concealing by revealing? Journal of the
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Swyngedouw, E. (2004). Social power and the urbanization of water: Flows of power.
Oxford: New York, NY.
GARY W. McDONOGH SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Gary W. McDonogh is Helen Herrmann Chair and Professor in the
Department of Growth and Structure of Cities at Bryn Mawr College. An
anthropologist concerned with issues of culture, conflict, and representation
in world cities, he has worked for four decades in Barcelona, Spain, publishing Good Families of Barcelona: A Social History of Power (1986, Spanish Edition
1992) among other books and articles on that city. (e.g., Iberian Worlds, 2008).
Returning to American studies, he published Black and Catholic in Savannah,
Georgia (1992) and brought to light the long-archived WPA manuscript of
The Florida Negro (1992); he also coedited the Encyclopedia of Contemporary
American Culture (2001). His theoretical work on space and place includes
the coedited Cultural Meanings of Urban Place (1992) and the recent coedited
Global Downtowns (2012). In the twenty-first century, he has focused on
collaborative work on place and mediation in global Chinatowns, working
in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe. This work includes his 2005 study
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Global Hong Kong (coauthored with his wife, Professor of media culture
Cindy Wong) and his coauthored “Beside Downtown: Global Chinatowns”
(with Cindy Wong) in Global Downtowns. He is now coediting a collection on
Global Sustainability that will be published by Cambridge in 2014.
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