Provincializing America

Abstract

The global eminence of the United States is diminishing relative to non-Western economic, political, and cultural formations. Despite its unprecedented military superiority, its compromised recent attempts to assert dominance through armed occupation and economic pressure underscore the growing importance of non-Western cultures and political economics. Amid the proliferation and permutation of neoliberalism abroad-including alternative forms of capitalist development and political and religious self-determination-American efforts to extend its hegemony in the Gramscian sense are opposed by national and transnational self-assertion, states of insurgency, and capitalist competition. Dynamics of resistance and resurgence in various world areas rival and recast American political, economic, and cultural influence. Understanding these emergent processes, which portend the provincialization of America, will be pivotal for sociocultural anthropology in the twenty-first century. Comprehending new developments will require fresh combinations of an anthropological perspective with comparative political economy, international relations, the ethnography of the state, geographies of cultural resistance, and networks of transnational, national, and subnational influence.