Blog
Notes on urban anthropology
Short, informal writing on ethnographic method and city life, published alongside the journal. New posts roughly every two weeks.
Ten Classic Texts in Urban Anthropology, Revisited
A short, opinionated starting point for readers new to the field — and a refresher for those returning to it.
Graffiti, Street Art, and Urban Visual Culture
Walls are never neutral surfaces. Reading what gets written and painted on them is its own ethnographic practice.
Food Markets as Ethnographic Sites
A public market compresses a city's economy, migration history, and social hierarchy into a single, walkable space.
Urban Peripheries and the Politics of Waiting
Waiting — for a bus, a benefit, a document, a call back — is not empty time. It is a structured, unequally distributed experience.
Digital Fieldwork: Doing Urban Ethnography Online
Neighborhood WhatsApp groups and local Facebook pages have become fieldsites in their own right.
Religion in the Metropolis: Syncretism and Urban Ritual
Cities don't just host religion — they reshape it, mixing traditions in ways rural settings rarely allow.
Sound, Noise, and the Sensory City
Before you see a neighborhood, you often hear it. Sensory ethnography takes that seriously as a source of data.
Gentrification Through an Ethnographic Lens
Statistics can show rising rents. Fieldwork shows what displacement feels like from the inside, block by block.
The Anthropology of Public Transport: Buses, Metros, and Everyday Encounters
Commuting is rarely studied as a social scene in its own right — but a crowded bus is one of the densest sites of urban interaction there is.
Favela, Bairro, Periferia: Rethinking Categories of Urban Space in Brazil
The words used to name a part of a Brazilian city are never neutral — they carry history, stigma, and claims to belonging.
Mapping the Invisible City: Cognitive Maps in Urban Fieldwork
Ask ten residents to draw their neighborhood and you will get ten different cities.
Street Vendors and the Informal Economy: Fieldwork Perspectives
Sidewalk commerce is often treated as a problem to manage. Ethnography asks what it actually organizes.
Walking as Method: Notes on the Ethnographic Flâneur
Why so much urban fieldwork begins, quite literally, with putting one foot in front of the other.
What Is Urban Anthropology? An Introduction to the Field
A short orientation to a discipline that treats the city not as a backdrop for social life, but as its central object of study.