Globalisation , livre ebook

Anthropology, Culture and Society

Series Editors:
Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo
Dr Katy Gardner, University of Sussex
Dr Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex

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P ETER W ADE
GLOBALISATION

First published 2003
by PLUTO PRESS
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Copyright © Thomas Hylland Eriksen 2003

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as
the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 2060 0 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 2059 7 paperback
ISBN 978 1 7837 1053 9 ePub

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Globalisation: studies in anthropology / edited by Thomas Hylland Eriksen.
p. cm. – (Anthropology, culture, and society)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-7453-2060-0 (hbk) – ISBN 0-7453-2059-7 (pbk) – ISBN 9 7817 8371 0 539 (ePub)
1. Anthropology. 2. Globalization. 3. Law and anthropology. I. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. II. Series.
GN27. G56 2003
301 dc21
2003007062

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

Thomas Hylland Eriksen
2. Several Sites in One

Ulf Hannerz
3. Ethnography and the Extreme Internet

Daniel Miller and Don Slater
4. Global Places and Place-Identities – Lessons from Caribbean Research

Karen Fog Olwig
5. Into Our Time: The Anthropology of Political Life in the Era of Globalisation

Christian Krohn-Hansen
6. Shifting Boundaries of a Coastal Community: Tracing Changes on the Margin

Marianne E. Lien
7. Considering Global/Local Relations: Beyond Dualism

Knut G. Nustad
8. Anthropologies in Policies, Anthropologies in Places: Reflections on Fieldwork ‘in’ Documents and Policies

Simone Abram
9. Commemorating Global Acts: A Norwegian Way of Holding an Emigrant World Together

Sarah Lund
10. Exchange Matters: Issues of Law and the Flow of Human Substances

Marit Melhuus
11. The Diffusion of Moral Values in a Global Perspective

Signe Howell
12. Epilogue: Studying World Society

Keith Hart
Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Most of the chapters that make up this book are based on papers presented at the workshop ‘Transnational Flows: Methodological and epistemological issues’, Oslo, 6–7 June 2001. The workshop was organised by the research project Transnational Flows of Substances and Concepts, which is directed by Marianne E. Lien and supported financially by the Norwegian Research Council in the period 2001–04.
Chapter 2 is adapted from the introduction to a book edited by Ulf Hannerz. Published only in Swedish (and entitled Flera fält i ett) the book showcases the breadth and scope of current transnational multi-sited research at the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm university. The references to Hannerz’s Stockholm colleagues generally refer to chapters in the book, and offer an insight into some of the accomplishments made, and some of the methodological problems encountered, in this pioneering research environment.
1 INTRODUCTION
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Although the term ‘globalisation’ has been common in anthropology and neighbouring disciplines only since around 1990, it has spawned an impressive range of books, journal articles and academic conferences. In the mid-1990s, it actually seemed more difficult to find a major sociology or social anthropology conference that did not feature the word prominently in its programme, than to find one that did.
In spite of the flurry of interdisciplinary activity around the term ‘globalisation’, the need for new studies will not go away until the phenomena they describe disappear. Moreover, there still remains necessary work to be done on the conceptual and methodological basis of globalisation studies. As can only be expected of a research field that has grown too fast, globalisation studies have yet to be connected properly to the disciplines and intellectual traditions they have sprung from. In the case of social anthropology, there has been a tendency to emphasise the newness of globalisation studies. The obligatory contrast to Malinowski’s fieldwork is perhaps drawn, some remarks are made about the interconnectedness of everything, the hybridity of cultural identities and the irrelevance of what we may perhaps call the ‘quadruple S’ (synchronous single-society study) – but rarely do we see a sustained attempt to show the continuities between current research on globally embedded networks and mainstream twentieth-century anthropology.
Perhaps for the sake of argument, it can be tempting to highlight and pick on statements and positions that are as far removed from one’s own as possible. This approach, perhaps underpinned by selected quotations, may offer striking and convincing contrasts between contemporary work and functionalism or structural-func-tionalism in Britain, and some of the dominant post-Boas schools in the USA, such as culture-and-personality and Geertzian hermeneutics. However, closer examination more often than not reveals that many of the problems grappled with today (flows, ambiguities, relativity of boundaries, etc. ) were by no means foreign to earlier generations of anthropologists. The contrasts are not spurious, but they need not be exaggerated.
The approach of this book does not, in other words, consist in advertising the newness of globalisation research. Rather, I will devote most of this introduction to arguing that the new empirical domains belong, in important ways, to the mainstream of anthropological research. Of course, we do not wish to argue that nothing has changed. The contemporary world is one of global embeddedness, ubiquitous rights movements and reflexive identity politics, universal capitalism and globally integrated financial markets, transnational families, biotechnology and urbanisation; in a word, it is in substantial ways different from the world in which twentieth-century anthropology developed. It is a trivial fact that this must be reflected in research agendas. The question that we find it pertinent to raise concerns the implications of shifts in empirical concerns for theory and methodology. In order to begin to answer it, I now turn to an attempt to anchor studies of transnational processes to the mainstream in twentieth-century anthropology, showing eventually at which crucial junctions the present must depart from the past.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINEAGES
If the word is recent, the concerns that animate research on globalisation, or transnational flows, are not. The affinity between globalisation and early twentieth-century diffusionism is sometimes remarked upon (e.g. Barnard, 2000: 168), thus placing one of the latest fads in academia firmly in a lineage few are eager to see themselves as part of. The shortcomings of classic diffusionism – speculation about a patchily known past, poor contextualisation – can nevertheless easily be overcome in studies of contemporary transnational flows, provided the methodology is sound.
A less common, but hardly less relevant parallel can be drawn to evolutionism. Since studies of globalisation al