Why an Urban Anthropology Journal?

On a national scale there are very few or no theoretical contributions, syntheses with a theoretic horizon. The need for a synthesis is to be noted, be it at the forefront or the background. These syntheses are like “bricks or steps”, working towards the knowledge of Man, yet while there is no project recognized by all, every research effort produced, sometimes remarkably so, can only reach the stage of selective “paving”, using these “bricks”, of one or more isolated alleys, not linked to each other and not known by all. We must therefore take head of and correspondingly react to the lack of coherence and conjugation in the motivational movement behind the impressive expansion process of anthropology, which is a real necessity of our times. On the other hand, the urgent need for syntheses dealing with the coordinates of Romanian urban spaces, from not only a descriptive point-of-view but also a prescriptive one, in order to identify cultural parallels with Europe, urban sources of development and deficiencies which ought to be known and studied in order to be overcome. Our editorial project wishes to offer up solutions for the economic and social (urban) regeneration, as well as paths of moral remodelling (both individual and collective). Additionally, such solutions may become active factors involved in the modification of mentalities still forming, growing, manifested in all age segments (children, teenagers, adults and elderly persons), determined by the brutal impact of changes that took place over the past 20 years. An authentic anthropologic research has several specific characteristics, among which perhaps the most important is the rapport to human condition, individual or collective, initial, original. To trace the path from that initial state to modern times, or until another fixed point in time, to understand what took place along the way, to underline the directions and areas of evolution and, eventually, to become able to predict, using this knowledge, what the future holds – this is anthropology.

How do we obtain anthropologic knowledge and anthropological signification? Only thus can a person claim to be an anthropologist involved in anthropology. The more or less fine and complicated structure of causes and effects leading to human diversity, to changes that are sometimes evolution, is formed by factors either biological or cultural, or both, that require the mastery of several borderless concepts in order to be recognised. Urban anthropology occupies a sequence of general anthropology and focuses on human groups, or individuals, that live in urban environments. The process of urbanisation is an anthropological process through which a great change in the perpetual becoming of our species in produced. Urban anthropology also encompasses all that suffers modification when going from rural to urban, and follows the noble human adventure onward into the urban, into industrialisation, post-industrialisation, until the digital age, which is just taking its first steps. First steps which will also, in time, suffer mutations, small changes in the condition of Man. Time and space have always constituted the great challenges of Man. Humans have invested considerable and unceasing efforts in attempts at dominating both time and space. What we do with time saved by this domination, what has been gained by spending only one hour from point A to point B instead of two hours is hard to determine. It would be erroneous to say that nothing has been gained, that the saved time has been wasted. The Urban Anthropology Journal must be prepared to signal and anticipate the issues which will arise in urban spaces, as well as provide solutions for these problems. In other words, it must be a project oriented towards the future, yet valuing the steps of the past through the symptoms of the present.

Dr. Adrian Majuru