ABSTRACT
This chapter describes anthropology and urbanism, and then sketches some of the principal issues in the development of urban anthropology, partly on the basis of these research experiences. Between traditional anthropological units of study and those units in urban anthropology which are of a comparable scale, there is usually at least a difference of degree in their openness to wider structures, and this difference we ought to respect in our ethnography. In a strict sense of the term, an urban anthropology is then anthropology of urbanism, concerned with towns and cities as social forms, and with the particular social and cultural features of these large, dense and heterogeneous settlements. From the point of view of a general, comparative anthropology, we may need more of such an urban anthropology in the strict sense than we have had hitherto.
