SUNTA's Senior Scholar/Lifetime Award: Reflections on My Career and Urban Anthropology

• Published in: City & society 2017-12, Vol.29 (3), p.362-369
• Main Author: FONER, NANCY
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academic careers; Anthropologists; Anthropology; Careers; Dissertations & theses; Job characteristics; Migrants; Migration; Rural communities; Scholarship; Small business; Urban areas
• ISSN: 0893-0465; 1548-744X
• DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12131

I was deeply honored to receive SUNTA’s inaugural senior scholar award and also to be given the opportunity to reflect back on my career and contemplate some future directions in urban anthropology. In reviewing my career, what stands out is my engagement with issues related to international migration as well as my commitment to comparative, cross-national and cross-city, analysis. These features are evident in my earliest research and writing and continue to be characteristic of my work today, although I have branched out in new directions over the years. I began my academic career as a Caribbeanist studying a rural community. Like so many, indeed most, anthropologists of my generation, I was expected as a graduate student to do fieldwork outside the United States for my PhD dissertation. When I was studying at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s it was virtually unheard of to get the blessings of the department, not to mention a grant, to do fieldwork on a non-Native American group in the United States. My route to migration research is typical of the path taken by many anthropologists. I conducted my dissertation research in a Jamaican rural community; only several years later did I do research on Jamaican migrants in London, in the early 1970s, and later in New York, in the early 1980s (Foner 1973, 1978, 2005a, 2005b). Although my research in Jamaica was not designed to study migration, it did not take me long to appreciate how significant it was in the villagers’ lives. Nearly everyone in the community had a close relative in either England or the United States and received letters and parcels from them. Funds from abroad helped villagers to build houses, open up small businesses, and send their children to secondary school. When I lived in the community in the late 1960s, it seemed that every week another per-son had left for the United States, which, after a many-decades hiatus,had opened its doors to large-scale West Indian immigration following the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. In fact, many in the community saw me as a messiah who had come to provide a way for them to get to the United States, and I was besieged by requests to get people sponsors and jobs in the United States.