The article deals with subjects regarding the urban sphere in anthropology by exploring dialogues between this discipline and sociology in three specific moments. The first one refers to the initial decades of the so-called Chicago School, which defined an agenda of ethnographic researches about the city and urban culture, so that there appeared the first investigations about social and spatial segregation concerned mainly with the concept of ghetto. The second one is related to the interfaces between urban anthropology and sociology in São Paulo of the decades of 1970 and 1980 regarding the issue of periphery. These researches were characterized by a polarization between the concepts of culture and ideology. At last the article focuses on present challenges to urban anthropology. One tries, on one hand, to recover topics related to a dialogue between anthropology and sociology which nowadays occurs only implicitly. On the other hand, one revisits the issue of periphery by having in mind recent phenomena that imply analyzing it simultaneously as a spatial order, a process and a polyphonic set of native representations.
urban anthropology; urban sociology; discipline dialogues; social and spatial segregation