THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE URBAN September 3, 2006

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE URBAN

  

The anthropology of the urban is close to being alien to the Romanian cultural space . The cultural anthropology itself could not boast a crystal clear history when it comes to discussing the Romanian meridian . The name of this science is an ever growing topic for academic research , thus creating a paradoxical situation – anthropology without anthropologists . The Romanian anthropologist is a peaceful griffin , with the head of an ethnologyst , the heart of the folklore specialist , the legs of an ethnographic researcher and the hands of a lace maker.

The anthropology is a manifestation of power, held by the one who describes in comparison with the one that is described , and also with the one that reads . The anthropology is thus a manipulation . Nobody can convince us that the world described by the anthropological text is not deformed by the author’s fictional power, confronting itself with an excessive reality . Behind the cultural and social institutions , one always finds real people . They are those who nowadays have to face an excessive succession of events, seen from the viewpoint of space and identity . This circumstances makes almost impossible the attempt at correctly describing the global reality , using empirical means .

One could describe the relationship between individuals, segments of the social seen in its dynamics . The individual lives simultaneously in two types of society . On the one hand , there is a superficial society, one that is classified as surface society, which can be put under scrutiny . On the other hand, there is a profound society . The surface society appears to us as a careless and infinite flow of relationships , of inter-human connections that are ordered by a certain system  of values , norms, cultural reflexes and stereotypes , which we have named an official social code.

This one synthesizes the archetypal primary background , the significances held by the structures of the profound society in a modern reading . This kind of reading is updated through the means of such historical institutions as the school , the army, the church, the hospital , mass-media, the entertainment industry – they all have the permanent tendency to balance the enthropic discrepancies of the social by bringing the margins into central position .

The official social code becomes in this way a cohesive force of reticular domains bestowing consistency and meaning to the relationships established between the individual members of the community . These are always powerful relationships , tending to manipulate, through which each individual tries to protect and expand the freedom boundaries he has, always endangered by the limitations of the social .

There is a tendency to change into layman configuration the structures of the profound society . What is more, there is a tendency to change the archetypal code into one that does not have the cosmic feature . On the other  hand , there is a double tendency to compensate the above said, which makes it legitimate and adapts it . This can be identified as the level of the official social code .

The concrete forms of manifestation prove not only that the present can be explained through  the past, but also that the past can be a reading of the present .