This review is organized to reflect early syntheses according to themes on social and symbolic dimensions, psychologies, and the social production of larger urban space, but it defers to those review works to provide details. Notions of hegemony, surveillance, and the actions of the state interpenetrate local ethnographic sites that now must consider context in more complex ways than simply adapting to the physical environment. Coping with mobility and displacement, studies now consider migration, place-making, and identity construction. Inquiries into how cultural phenomena as representations of multiple and often quite contradictory meanings have been complemented by studies of agency and embodiment. Structuralist analyses focused on unconscious symbolic structures have given way to practice theories. Authors such as Lefebvre, Foucault, de Certeau, Deleuze, and Baudrillard have inspired new lines of inquiry. Recently anthropologists, armed with theoretical concepts inspired by scholars in other disciplines, have consciously sought to demonstrate the relevance of new concepts in ethnography. Although spatial and environmental factors have always been present in ethnographies, they have appeared most often as background without being problematized. Anthropologists’ own interests in space and place have intensified during late-20th-century global economic restructuring, migratory flows, and deterritorialization that have undermined assumptions about the fixity of people they study in space/place. Space is often defined by an abstract scientific, mathematical, or measurable conception while place refers to the elaborated cultural meanings people invest in or attach to a specific site or locale. The study of space and place as distinct dimensions of culture apart from ethnographic accounts has since the 1990s spawned a number of areas of anthropological research.
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