The Local in the Local

Abstract

Viewing the global in the local has become an increasingly central approach in recent anthropology as anthropologists have sought to explicate the ethnographic correlates of globalization. While this approach has produced some of the most important work in recent anthropology, it rests upon longstanding Western notions of space and time that dichotomize here and there principally by reference to capitalism and the state. Through an examination of transformed geographical models of and about Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya, it is argued here that this model is itself a global export and that a consideration of Samburu instantiations of ithow and why Samburu have adopted it, what they use it for, and the assumptions that they have adopted in the processserves to reflect aspects of anthropologists' own cultural constructions of the local. Recognizing the Western folk elements in globallocal models of time and space destabilizes discourses of globalization as a transcultural historical process through an acknowledgment of the cultural specificity through which we situate our own analyses.