S ESSION 4: G LOBALIZATION T HEORY IN A NTHROPOLOGY 1 A N W O A W - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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SESSION 4: GLOBALIZATION THEORY IN ANTHROPOLOGY

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 Decolonization, detribalization, urbanization  anthropology losing its raison d’être?  internal criticisms in anthropology: “the global is the true state of affairs and the only adequate framework for the analysis of any part of the world, at least since the rise of the first commercial civilizations” (Friedman, 1994, p. 3).  Eric Wolf (1982): web-like interconnections “the appearance of a global perspective is contained within the self- consciousness of the ethnographic act itself” (Friedman, 1994, p. 3) “what is ethnography if not the activity whereby members of the center travel to already pacified peripheries to examine the life of ‘the other’ ”? (Friedman, 1994, p. 3)

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 Situating the local within the global, understanding anthropology as representative of an early globalization process, questioning culture as local and bounded

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 Arjun Appadurai  Obama, 2010: “no nation should be better positioned to lead in an era

• f globalization than America—the Nation that helped bring

globalization about”  “Brave New World”: Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell, FM 3-07, “Strategic Operations”, with Lt. Col. Steven M. Leonard”:

“The forces of globalization and the emergence of regional economic and political powers are fundamentally reshaping the world we thought we understood. Future cultural and ethnocentric conflicts are likely to be exacerbated by increased global competition for shrinking natural resources, teeming urban populations with rising expectations, unrestrained technological diffusion, and rapidly accelerating climate change. The future is not one of major battles and engagements fought by armies on battlefields devoid of population; instead, the course of conflict will be decided by forces operating among the people of the world. Here, the margin of victory will be measured in far different terms than the wars of our past. The allegiance, trust, and confidence of populations will be the final arbiters of success”. (Caldwell & Leonard, 2008, p. 6)

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 “alternative fears to globalization” (p. 295)  “indigenization”  Marshall Sahlins: local cultural mediation (Sahlins, 1994, p. 414) & local reproduction (Sahlins, 1987, p. viii) “the exploitation of the world system may well be an enrichment of the local system” (Sahlins, 1994, p. 414)  Criticisms of “indigenization”: mask for Americanization?

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 Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson: “we worry at least as much about the opposite danger of celebrating the inventiveness of those ‘consumers’ of the culture industry (especially on the periphery)….The danger here is the temptation to use scattered examples of the cultural flows dribbling from the ‘periphery’ to the chief centers of the culture industry as a way of dismissing the ‘grand narrative’ of capitalism …and thus of evading the powerful political issues associated with Western global hegemony” (1992, p. 19)  Ulf Hannerz: “With regard to cultural flow, the periphery, out there in a distant territory, is more the taker than the giver of meaning and meaningful form. Much as we feel called upon to make note of any examples of counterflow, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that at least as things stand now the relationship is lopsided (Hannerz, 1991, p. 107, emphases added)

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 production of new diversity  the cosmopolitan and the creole

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1) the autonomy and boundedness of cultures is understood as a matter

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2) the asymmetrical center-periphery structure affects the distribution of culture within the world; 3) the center-periphery structure shapes the material and power contexts to which cultures adapt and they direct the influx of “initially alien” meanings; 4) these “alien meanings” do not enter a cultural tabula rasa, and hence interaction has to be stressed; 5) “not all cultures are local, in the sense of being territorially bounded;” and, 6) the global homogenization of culture is not a self-evident end result (Hannerz, 1992, pp. 261-262)

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5 dimensions of “global cultural flow”: 1) ethnoscapes; 2) mediascapes; 3) technoscapes; 4) finanscapes; and, 5) ideoscapes = “deeply perspectival constructs” (Appadurai, 1990, p. 296)

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 “movement” (Kearney, 1995, p. 547)  “transnationalism” (Basch et al., 1994, p. 22) C CR

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 a fiction that treats cultures as discrete, object-like phenomena (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992, p. 7)  If culture was really bound to place, then what is “the culture” of farm workers who spend half a year in Mexico and half a year in the United States? (1992, p. 7)  Colonialism brought cultures into relation with one another, in specific places; what then is the resulting culture of the colonizer, of the colonized?  problem of understanding multiple cultures within the same space  Migration blurs distinctions between “here” and “there” (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992, p. 10)

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 spaces have for centuries been hierarchically interconnected  difference has to be understood in relational terms, through connection  first comes space, then comes place

“The move we are calling for, most generally, is away from seeing cultural difference as the correlate of a world of ‘peoples’ whose separate histories wait to be bridged by the anthropologist and toward seeing it as a product of a shared historical process that differentiates the world as it connects it (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992, p. 16)

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 Joel Kahn (1989)  Friedman (1994)  Lila Abu-Lughod: “‘culture’ operates in anthropological discourse to enforce separations that inevitably carry a sense of hierarchy” (1991,

• pp. 137-138)

“if the preservation of a discipline is made contingent on the preservation of unsatisfactory concepts, then perhaps we have our priorities wrong” (Khan, 1989, p. 6)

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Basch, Linda; Schiller, Nina Glick & Blanc, Cristina Szanton (1994). Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. Langhorne, PA: Gordon & Breach. Caldwell, W.B., & Leonard, S.M. (2008). Field Manual 3–07, Stability Operations: Upshifting the Engine of Change. Military Review, July-August, 6–13. Friedman, Jonathan (1994). Cultural Identity and Global Process. London: Sage. Gupta, Akhil & Ferguson, James (1992). “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology, 7(1), 6-23. Hannerz, Ulf (1990). “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” in M. Featherstone, ed., Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. London: Sage, 237-251. Hannerz, Ulf (1991). “Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures,” in A.D. King, ed., Culture, Globalization and the World System. Binghamton, NY: Department of Art and Art History, State Univ. of New York at Binghamton, 107-128. Hannerz, Ulf (1992). Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. Harvey, David (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Kahn, Joel S. (1989). “Culture: Demise or Resurrection?” Critique of Anthropology, 9(2), 5-25. Matos Mar, Jose (1988). “Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century,” International Social Science Journal, No. 116, May, 203-10. Mintz, Sidney (1977). “The So-Called World System: Local Initiative and Local Response,” Dialectical Anthropology, 2(4), 253-270. Nash, June (1981). “Ethnographic Aspects of the World Capitalist System,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 10, 393-423. Sahlins, Marshall (1987). Islands of History. London: Tavistock. Sahlins, Marshall (1994). “Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of ‘The World System’,” in N.B. Dirks, G. Eley & S.B. Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History. Princeton: Princeton

• Univ. Press, 412-455.

White House. (2010). National Security Strategy. Washington, DC: The White House. Wolf, Eric (1982). Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.