Tag Archives: globalization

Globalization discourse is deeply flawed in its very conception, expressing a gratuitous assumption of the emergence of a new era that is discontinuous with the past and whose conflicts are primarily the product of those who resist this development: nationalists, racists, localists. This discourse is itself an ideological product of a cosmopolitan elite identity that has emerged (again) in recent years and which can be accounted for, in turn, by another approach. A global systemic perspective situates cosmopolitan discourses in periods of hegemonic decline, which are also periods of economic, social, and cultural fragmentation in the hegemonic zones as well as of vertical polarization that creates a new “rootedness” at the bottom and a cosmopolitanization at the top. While these processes are underway today in the West, something quite the opposite is occurring in the emergent new hegemonic centers to the East. A global systemic approach also offers a model of today’s crisis that is absent in globalization discourse.

Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman’s The Anthropology of Global Systems (AGS) is a robust, ambitious, and timely undertaking in macrotheoretical and macrohistorical anthropology. I show that, more than 30 years ago, its political-economic underpinnings anticipated the key mechanisms of financialization, so important for debates on the current financial crisis. By revisiting the “transition from feudalism to capitalism” debate with new insights from diplomatic history, I work out a Marxian critique of the Friedmans’ Weberian concept of capital, which is insufficiently relational and therefore not sufficiently alert to the politics of class. Attention to these relational politics adds an important measure of what I call “structured contingency,” and indeed agency, to temporal process, which in the AGS tends to become overly teleological. Building on my critique, I also draw attention to the absence of the possibility of “collective rationality” in the Friedmans’ grid of modern subject positions.

This article explores the links between social media and public space within the #Occupy Everywhere movements. Whereas listservs and websites helped give rise to a widespread logic of networking within the movements for global justice of the 1990s–2000s, I argue that social media have contributed to an emerging logic of aggregation in the more recent #Occupy movements—one that involves the assembling of masses of individuals from diverse backgrounds within physical spaces. However, the recent shift toward more decentralized forms of organizing and networking may help to ensure the sustainability of the #Occupy movements in a posteviction phase.

Globally circulating discourses associated with heritage language industries often promote temporally dichotomous views of spoken and written languages that deny coeval status to many linguistic minorities. In the multilingual city of Montreal, Quebec, where Sri Lankan refugees work to preserve a classicalist style of Written Tamil and Indian immigrants work to revitalize a modernist style of Spoken Tamil, this division of labor is undermined by elders and youth who, in mixing colloquial and literary styles of Tamil, French, and English, reframe curricular and nationalist discourses of language loss and degeneration into more empowering narratives of developmental progress and ethnolinguistic identification.

In this article, I analyze the processes by which transnational peace activists opposed to the U.S. military’s largest “forward operating location” (FOL) in Manta, Ecuador, came to be read by some of that city’s residents as more imperialist than the U.S. Air Force itself. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2008, I argue that this “inversion” was the product of disparate “scale-making practices” on the part of both activists and military officers. Whereas the former encouraged city residents to think of the facility as part of a global military network, the latter successfully pushed for more localized topographies and “geographies of blame.” Attention to these scale-making practices complicates social movement theory about “vertical scale shifts.”

I analyze emigration from Honduras to the United States through the lens of the anthropology of knowledge. Whereas Honduran nonmigrants describe migration as a personal choice, migrants claim to be motivated by generalized social forces. Relatively abstract and systematic explanations of migration exemplify what Douglas Holmes and George Marcus call “paraethnographies,” forms of ethnography found within the discourse of the subjects of ethnographic research. Paraethnography has been employed in other settings to show how people use context-dependent information to challenge abstract models of behavior, but, here, it contextualizes the particular within the general, performing an opposite function than that described by Holmes and Marcus.

Traditional Maori meeting houses adapted to urban areas help to create communities that are able to represent themselves as analogous to rural ones centered on descent. Such representations have impact beyond the claims they embody in a “politics of culture”: By providing frames for the interpretation of experience, they contribute to the ways in which the embrace of identity becomes a process of self-making, leading to “revived” cultures that shape actors’ ways of being and thinking in the world and, thus, their political struggles and goals. This outcome has implications for the future of cultural diversity.