Urban Anthropology: Understanding Cities Through an Anthropological Lens

India’s population has been shifting from villages to cities for well over a century, and anthropologists have spent nearly as long trying to work out what that shift actually does to people. According to government urbanisation data, the share of Indians living in towns and cities rose from just over 11% in 1901 to more than 31% by the 2011 census, and the number keeps climbing every decade. Cities are not simply larger versions of villages. They throw together strangers, mix castes and communities that once lived apart, and rewrite the rules for work, marriage, and everyday survival. Urban anthropology is the branch of the discipline built specifically to study this: how people construct culture, community, and meaning inside the dense, layered spaces we call cities.

From villages to cities: a discipline finds a new subject 🔗

For most of its history, anthropology studied small, self-contained communities such as tribes, villages, and kinship groups living apart from the wider world. Sociologists, by contrast, had already been studying cities for decades before anthropologists turned their attention there. It was only by the 1970s that urban anthropology properly established itself as a distinct sub-field, even though a handful of anthropologists had shown interest in city life much earlier. What changed was a growing realisation that cities were not chaotic exceptions to “real” culture, but a category of society worth studying with the same tools anthropologists already trusted: living among people, observing daily routines, and mapping social ties in close detail rather than at a statistical distance.

Origins and theoretical foundations 🔗

Robert Redfield and the folk-urban continuum 🔗

The scholar most often credited with pointing anthropology toward the city is Robert Redfield, an American anthropologist who spent years studying communities in Mexico. Rather than treating villages and cities as opposites, Redfield placed tribal areas, peasant villages, small towns, and full-fledged cities along a single developmental line that he called the folk-urban continuum. His fieldwork in Yucatán compared four settlements, an isolated tribal community, a peasant village, a provincial town, and the regional capital, and he used the differences between them to describe how social life changes as a community grows larger and more connected to the outside world.

Folk societies, in Redfield’s framework, were small, isolated, and held together by shared belief and custom. Urban societies were their opposite: large, impersonal, and organised around individual choice rather than collective tradition. Redfield argued that as folk communities came into contact with urban centres, they gradually picked up urban traits while losing older, tightly-knit characteristics such as isolation and strong kinship bonds. His model shaped anthropological thinking about cities for decades, though later scholars criticised it for painting an idealised, overly neat picture that real communities rarely matched.

The Chicago school and European influences 🔗

Redfield did not build his theory in isolation. He was closely tied to the University of Chicago, where sociologist Robert Park was developing an approach called human ecology, which treated the city as a kind of social laboratory shaped by competition, adaptation, and specialised zones, much like a natural ecosystem. Park’s ideas about how different groups settle into distinct areas of a city, and how those areas develop their own social character, gave Redfield a language for describing urban complexity. German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies added another layer with his distinction between Gemeinschaft, community life marked by close personal bonds, and Gesellschaft, modern society marked by impersonal, contractual relationships. Redfield’s folk-urban continuum essentially translated these European and American sociological ideas into a framework anthropologists could carry into fieldwork.

A distinctive anthropological approach 🔗

Once anthropologists began studying cities seriously, they did not simply borrow sociology’s questions. Where sociologists often measured urban life through surveys and large-scale statistics, anthropologists preferred long-term, close-up fieldwork, the same method they had always used with tribal and rural communities. This meant treating cities as complex societies, in contrast to the small-scale communities anthropology had traditionally studied, and examining them diachronically, tracing how social and cultural patterns changed over time rather than freezing a city in a single snapshot. A city, in this view, is not a finished object but an ongoing process shaped by migration, trade, and shifting political power.

This approach also carried a methodological commitment to cultural relativism. Anthropologists studying Asian and African cities were wary of judging non-Western urban life by Western yardsticks, or assuming that “modern” always meant “Western.” They pushed back against technological determinism, the idea that industrial development alone explains how societies change, and instead insisted on understanding each city within its own civilisational context, including its religious traditions, kinship systems, and historical layers. A city like Varanasi or Kashi, for instance, could not be understood only through the lens of factories and infrastructure; its temples, pilgrimage routes, and ritual economy were just as central to its urban character.

Key contributions from Britain and the Americas 🔗

Michael Young, Peter Willmott and family life in Bethnal Green 🔗

The first major British anthropological study of urban society came from Michael Young and Peter Willmott, whose 1957 study of the Bethnal Green district of East London examined family and kinship among its working-class residents. The research found that despite cramped and often poor housing, families in Bethnal Green were held together by dense, overlapping networks of relatives, with the bond between mothers and daughters acting as a kind of social glue for the whole neighbourhood. Later reassessments of the research suggest Young and Willmott may have sharpened the contrast between tight-knit East End streets and the quieter new housing estates families later moved to. Even so, the study’s core insight, that kinship networks survive and adapt inside dense urban neighbourhoods rather than dissolving under city life, remains a reference point for urban anthropology today.

Oscar Lewis and the culture of poverty 🔗

American anthropologist Oscar Lewis took urban anthropology in a different direction, studying poor families in Mexico City, Puerto Rico, and New York. Lewis proposed the idea of a culture of poverty, arguing that people who live for generations in conditions of economic deprivation develop shared attitudes and coping strategies that get passed down within families, sometimes making it harder for children to escape poverty even when opportunities eventually appear. The concept became widely influential in policy circles, but it also drew sharp criticism from other anthropologists, who argued it risked blaming poor communities for structural problems that were really about unequal access to jobs, housing, and education. That debate, over whether persistent urban poverty is best explained by culture or by economic structure, still shapes how researchers think about slums and informal settlements in Indian cities today.

Urban anthropology takes root in India 🔗

N.K. Bose and the social geography of Calcutta 🔗

In India, one of the earliest and most detailed urban anthropological studies came from Nirmal Kumar Bose, who mapped how different communities in Calcutta occupied distinct pockets of the city. Bose combined municipal land records with fieldwork to show how Calcutta’s Marwari, Muslim, and other communities settled into particular neighbourhoods, patterns shaped by trade, occupation, and history rather than random chance. His 1968 study of the city became a model for how anthropologists could apply the discipline’s traditional strengths, close observation, attention to caste and community, and interest in everyday economic life, to a modern metropolis rather than a village.

L.P. Vidyarthi and the sacred city of Gaya 🔗

Around the same period, L.P. Vidyarthi took a different angle on Indian urban life. His 1961 study of the pilgrimage city of Gaya in Bihar examined how the town’s sacred geography, its temples and rivers, its ritual specialists, and the ceremonies performed there worked together as an integrated system. Vidyarthi’s approach showed that Indian towns and cities could not always be understood through Western models of urbanisation alone; a place like Gaya was shaped as much by centuries of religious tradition as by economics or administration. His framework was later applied to other pilgrimage centres, including Varanasi, and stands as a distinctly Indian contribution to urban anthropology.

Mayer, Pocock and Epstein on rural change and urbanisation 🔗

Other scholars working on India, including Adrian Mayer, David Pocock, and Scarlet Epstein, focused less on cities themselves and more on how rural India was transforming under urban influence: shifting caste relations, changing patterns of land ownership, and new forms of labour migration. Together with Bose and Vidyarthi, their work built a foundation for understanding how traditional Indian social structures, caste, kinship, and religious practice, adapt when they meet the pressures and opportunities of urban life, rather than simply dissolving under them.

Why this lens still matters 🔗

India’s cities keep growing, and the questions urban anthropologists first asked in the 1960s have not gone away. How do migrants from villages rebuild community once they reach a city like Mumbai or Bengaluru? Which traditions survive the move, and which get left behind or reshaped? Studies of urban villages, informal settlements, and rural-to-urban migration in Indian metros still draw on the basic toolkit Redfield, Bose, and Vidyarthi helped build: long-term fieldwork, close attention to how communities carve out physical and social space for themselves, and a refusal to treat “traditional” and “modern” as opposites rather than as forces that constantly mix, borrow from, and reshape each other. A vegetable vendor who prays at a roadside shrine before opening a stall run on a smartphone-based payment app is not living in contradiction; that overlap is precisely what urban anthropology exists to explain.

What do you think? When people move from a village to a city, do you think they lose their old community ties, or simply rebuild them in a new form? And can a single Western model of urban development ever fully explain a city like Gaya, Varanasi, or Kolkata?

References

1. https://tcp.uk.gov.in/urbanization-in-india/
2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Redfield
3. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/robert-park-and-urban-ecology
4. https://fabians.org.uk/family-and-kinship-in-east-london-revisited/
5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/culture-of-poverty
6. https://mcrg.ac.in/Rural_Migrants/Abstracts/Iman2.pdf