The Tycoon and the Tough: towards a comparative anthropology of urban marginality

Anthropologists often use key figures, such as the street tough, the child witch, and the flbneur, as a means to elucidate, personify, and critique underlying dynamics of social and cultural transformation. It is a method that is widely used, but seldom scrutinised. In this lecture Joshua Barker uses examples from his research in the slums of Bandung, Indonesia, to argue that this method can make a powerful contribution to a comparative anthropology of urban marginality.