Globalization and Alternative Localities

Abstract

The mobility of capital, manufacture and labour and the increasing influence of technology and mass communications worldwide foregrounds globalization as arguably the dominant theme across the critical social sciences and humanities. However, while there is little disagreement concerning the importance of globalization to social change, scholars often disagree as to how we should make sense of influential global processes. Eric Wolf (1982,1999) suggests, for example, that globalization is the latest phase in capitalist development. He emphasizes, therefore, continuities in capitalist development and the tendency of capitalism worldwide to produce similar social and economic transformations through the capitalist appropriation of social labour. Arjun Appadurai (2002: 50-51) regards globalization, on the other hand, as a more novel process involving disjuncture and thus considerable social, cultural and economic differentiation within the capitalist world system (see also Knauft, 2002).I argue in what follows that the current dichotomy between homogeneity and diversity that typifies globalization discourse in the human sciences can be bridged through engaging dialectically the relations between culture as relatively autonomous, praxis or agency, and the positioning of human subjects historically in differentiated fields of practice and power. Such a theoretical move or option preserves Appadurai's emphasis on diversity while incorporating Wolf's emphasis on global politicaleconomy. This is, moreover, a theoretical option that is consistent with recent efforts among critical anthropologists (see, for example, Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992) to integrate political-economy as a global process with cultural theory articulated on the local level as formative human agency.Homogeneity and DiversityWolf bases his argument on globalization upon what he claims to be historical continuities in capitalist development that date from the formative period of European empires of the 14th and 15th centuries. In his celebrated Europe and the People without History, Wolf maintains that Europe in 1400 was weakly organized and not politically powerful until the ascendancy of Genoa and Venice as important mercantile centres. Trade through these two important northern Italian cities funded the warfare carried on by European monarchs and provided the capital for European expansion abroad. Wolf emphasizes though that it is not the circulation of commodities alone that launched Europe's new political destiny but rather transformations in the social relations of production. He distinguishes, moreover, the alternative paths of development between tribute-taking Portugal and Spain, dependent on foreign capital, from those of France and England. Wolf's historical narrative tacks back and forth between international political-economy and the local dynamics of small-scale populations. He thus presents a view of globalization that emphasizes the increasing importance of global markets, wage labour and the process of proletarianization that have similar but not identical effects in diverse world areas. However, as we shall see with respect to world systems theory, Wolf's emphasis on the uniform nature of capitalism has been criticized (Taussig, 1987) for ignoring human agency on the local level and thus acquiescing to the overdetermination of culture on the part of political-economy. While Wolf's (1999) final work addresses the above criticism by arguing for the relative autonomy of local culture with respect to the determinations of the world system of political-economy, in the end, it is social labour that endures as dominant in determining the articulations of both culture and power in social life.Appadurai follows, on the other hand, Lash and Urry (1987) in supporting a vision of capitalism as a disorganized process and thus maintains that we should view globalization from autonomous ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, fmancescapes and ideoscapes. …