Theorizing the City: Recent Research in Urban Anthropology

Half of the world's population now lives in cities. This number is expected to grow to two-thirds in the next fifty years. And yet, it is only recently that anthropologists have begun to take urban contexts seriously as fieldwork sites. In this article, I analyze three recent volumes on urban anthropology which each propose a distinctive theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the city. I suggest that there is a fine line to be drawn between urban determinism—the suggestion that the city is the pivotal force in shaping individual lives, a perspective that ignores both human agencies and the complexities of causality—and anthropology which relegates the city to mere context, ethnographies that, almost by chance take place in urban contexts but say little about the realities of city life. The texts examined share two features in common: firstly, they are most effective when they, through close ethnographic or archival engagement, show the complexity and variation in urban contexts; and secondly, each text displays an absolute commitment to ethnographic fieldwork as a powerful tool to understand the lived experience of the urban. As a commitment to long-term participant observation is the sine qua non of our discipline, my central question is whether “urban anthropology,” is not just anthropology after all?     

AHS Classics: Rural History and Environmental History

Studying rural history and environmental history in Australian Historical Studies reveals a shared effort to challenge the colonial narrative of the settlement of rural Australia that continues to hold sway in popular representations of the national past. Rather than finding distinct spheres of urban and rural Australia, it reveals instead the processes by which these areas have been mutually constitutive, whether through cultural representations, economic exchanges, or the application of science and technology. Rather than confirming the dichotomy of nature and culture of the city and the bush, it highlights instead the wider cultural and ecological implications of settler Australians’ diverse engagements with an ancient and Aboriginal land. By transcending disciplinary and spatial boundaries, rural and environmental historians reveal the complexities of colonisation and the networks of exchange that have shaped Australians and their environments since 1788. In their hands, history becomes an important form of knowledge for making sense of rural and environmental change in the twenty-first century.     

Applying Geostatistical Analysis to Crime Data: Car-Related Thefts in the Baltic States

Geostatistical methods have rarely been applied to area-level offense data. This article demonstrates their potential for improving the interpretation and understanding of crime patterns using previously analyzed data about car-related thefts for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 2000. The variogram is used to inform about the scales of variation in offense, social, and economic data. Area-to-area and area-to-point Poisson kriging are used to filter the noise caused by the small number problem. The latter is also used to produce continuous maps of the estimated crime risk (expected number of crimes per 10,000 habitants), thereby reducing the visual bias of large spatial units. In seeking to detect the most likely crime clusters, the uncertainty attached to crime risk estimates is handled through a local cluster analysis using stochastic simulation. Factorial kriging analysis is used to estimate the local- and regional-scale spatial components of the crime risk and explanatory variables. Then regression modeling is used to determine which factors are associated with the risk of car-related theft at different scales.