The Ethnography of Transnational Social Activism: Understanding the Global as Local Practice

Abstract

Through a study of two contemporary U.S. religio‐political movements, I analyze globalization as a process in which social actors appropriate distinctive kinds of global imagery and rhetoric to create new forms of activism. I document and contrast the development of transnational identities among two groups of political activists and examine the unique but shifting historical conditions underlying these differences. Rather than begin with "globalization" as a structural given, I explore the "global" as itself a constructed context of political identity and practice. I include a discussion of my own discovery that my anthropological terms of analysis were often shared by the second group of political activists under study, and I explore how and why this happened, [globalization, social movements, political economy and culture, global civil society]