State of the art of urban anthropology as a subject in the field of social sciences and its contribution to the study and understanding of the urban phenomenon, mainly in the case of great contemporary metropolises. Urban anthropology has at its disposal the ethnographic method but the challenge is to apply this approach without falling into the ' village temptation', i.e., that of looking at the heterogeneous reality of the big cities for the village conditions - small groups, limited contexts - which are supposedly identified by the ethnographic approach. Various examples of recent researches on the city of São Paulo, undertaken in the Urban Anthropology Nucleus (NAU) and in the Department of Anthropology of USP, are presented to show the potentiality of the application of concepts, techniques and methods developed in anthropology, and in particular, in urban anthropology, for the study of forms of sociability and cultural practices on a metropolitan scale.
Urban anthropology; Ethnography; Metropolis; Field research