Quasi-urban citizenship: the global village as ‘Nomos of the Modern’

Abstract

The term global village, first coined by Marshall McLuhan in 1962, has come to signify a world peacefully united by electronic media. However, the term must be read in the context of McLuhan’s profound intellectual debt to the ethno-psychiatrist John Colin Carothers who was summoned to Kenya in the 1950s to advise on Britain’s war against the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA). Carothers recommended that villagisation—a system for detaining civilians in militarised camps—be reconceptualised as a psychiatric buffer, protecting Kenyan agriculturalists from the effects of modernisation and urbanisation. This article examines how villagisation worked as a device of quasi-urbanisation, and how its mechanisms of control were reflected in McLuhan’s concept of the global village.