Urban Ethnography

Catalog description

Through a focus on contemporary Paris, this course aims to explore the insights offered by anthropological approaches to cities and urban life. We will consider the relationships between urban spatial organization and an array of social, economic and political phenomena; the relevance of consumption and display to the shaping of urban identities; and the shifting dynamics of social groups and boundaries within the urban context. This will be accomplished through course readings and also through training in urban ethnographic research methods, supporting each student’s own systematic observation over the semester of one locus of everyday Parisian life. The final project for the course will be a piece of ethnographic analysis based on this field research.