City Ways and Means

The three books considered here were all published in 1994, though the work on which they are based extends further back in time. Each is a collection of disparate papers and articles with varying degrees of assemblage and editing still visible. Cities, Classes, and the Social Order is a posthumous collection of articles, poetry, and photography by Anthony Leeds compiled and edited by Roger Sanjek, with an introductory section containing essays on Leeds's life and work by R. Timothy Sieber and Sanjek. From Urban Village to East Village, attributed to Janet L. AbuLughod and others, is a collective product of selected participants in an ad hoc monthly seminar directed by Abu-Lughod at the New School for Social Research. The 17 contributors include among their ranks graduate students and faculty from sociology, history, political science, geography, and architecture as well as a museum planner and a former photographer. The Informal City is a collection of pieces on urban informal practices by Michel S. Laguerre, an anthropologist heretofore noted for his work on francophone Caribbean peoples, including Haitian immigrants in New York City. At a time when crisis seems to be in the air-in anthropology, in the academy, and elsewhere--it almost seems moot to point out that the urban anthropologist may also be a likely candidate for the endangered species list even as the proportion of anthropological work being carried out in urban settings in the United Sates and abroad seems to be increasing. Following Katherine Newman's recent lament that the anthropological voice no longer seems to be heard in the urban underclass debate currently underway (City and Society 6(1):3-25, 1992), this might be a propitious opportunity to take stock of urban anthropology at the mid-decade mark. Anthony Leeds's work properly belongs in an earlier epoch, given that most of his work in urban anthropology dates from the late 1960s through the mid1980s. His very public doubts and critical misgivings about anthropological parochialism and urban studies notwithstanding, Leeds was the very model of an urban (and urbane) anthropologist. This tightly composed volume is both a moving tribute to the man and an opportunity to assay his contribution to the field. The many facets of Leeds's professional and personal life are strongly presented by Sanjek and Sieber in the opening essays. An extremely productive scholar by most standards, Leeds had the fortune (or misfortune) to be a member of one of the most prolific and publicly recognized cohorts to pass through Columbia University's graduate anthropology program. Leeds never received the acclaim or opprobrium of such colleagues as Marshall Sahlins or Marvin Harris, but Sanjek makes a strong case for the high quality of his theoretical work or, at the very least, the trajectory of Leeds's work until his death in 1989 at the age of 64. Interestingly, Sanjek situates Leeds's work in relation to the debate in anthropology (exemplified by Harris and Sahlins) between the positivist claims for anthropology as science and the interpretivist claims for anthropology as something else. Noting that while some may find Leeds's vision of anthropology an anomaly, Sanjek suggests that it may offer a way out of this theoretical impasse in the discipline (p. 27). Personally, I remain unconvinced by his case (based in large measure on Sanjek's own careful marshaling of the evidence in the present volume); nevertheless, I found the essay invaluable in gaining a broad understanding of Leeds's theoretical and methodological development. Timothy Sieber's companion essay on Leeds's life is a welcome complement to Sanjek's assessment of his formal anthropological writing. Doubtless this was not an easy task, for Anthony Leeds was not an easy man; he could move people to anger and rejection as easily as gratitude and acceptance. Sieber has not produced a shallow elegy to a cardboard saint; rather, in this short take he has crafted a compassionate and constructive yet critical reading of a complex person and his life's work. This essay is essential to understanding Leeds the anthropologist, since much of his legacy was built up in what Laguerre might term the "informal" realm of academic practice. This is especially true given Leeds's lifelong practice of organizing informal seminars on topics of pressing concern. The present volume is indispensable for urban anthropologists because of the combination of the introductory essays and bibliography, the substantive works on Brazil and Portugal, and the interlocked City Ways and Means