De angst voor Babylon. Etnografisch onderzoek in Londen, 1850-1914

Samenvatting

Fear for Babylon. Ethnographic research in London, 1850 - 1914. This article deals with the so-called 'social explorers', who were active in the second part of the nineteenth century, especially in London. These urban anthropologists avant la lettre were trying to answer the question of 'how the other half lives'. As members of the British bourgeoisie they often concealed their identity in order to be able to participate in the lives of the London poor. They succeeded in describing and analyzing the ways and customs of urban proletarians, thereby imputing human characteristics to them. Nevertheless, in the language they used they payed lip-service to the typical bourgeois feelings of anxiety about the unknown 'lower orders' who crowded London, by then the undisputed capital of a world-wide civilization. In this rhetoric of fear a close connection was expressed between poverty, illness and crime. It could be argued that this rhetoric mirrored a real threat, posed by dangerous, revolutionary classes. This explanation is contradicted by the fact that all social explorers stressed the enormous gap which was thought to keep civilized society and the urban underclasses in strictly separated social worlds. In the article, it is tried to explain the social explorers' attitude as a special case of nineteenth century urban class relationships.