Writing Against Globalization

Abstract

Books under review: Bridging Divides: The Channel Tunnel and English Legal Identity in New Europe. Eve Darian-Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 256 pages. Cities and Citizenship. James Holston, editor. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. 253 pages. In August of 1999, theme of venerable monthly publication, National Geographic, was Global Culture. That particular depiction of consisted primarily of portrayals of worldwide ubiquity of western consumer goods, along with a somewhat less comprehensive examination of ways in which non-western practices, ranging from feng shui to henna tattoos, had a habit of showing up in most unlikely of places. Popular journalism is one thing; anthropology, however, should be quite another. Reviewing dissertation proposals for one foundation last year, I was surprised by number of documents in which young scholars outlined their plans to examine manifestations of various cultural phenomena, from steady thrum of hip-hop to celestial vapors of transcendental meditation, as they have materialized in a variety of spaces all over world ranging from metropolitan to remote. They intended to do so, however, apparently without acknowledging that meanings of such practices are still significantly mediated (and thereby changed) by a number of rather important institutions that continue to exist between global and local. Anthropology's long-standing focus on such levels of analysis as nation, state, region, locality, city and village seemed to have dissolved into a notion of that risked becoming as amorphous and superficial as that presented by National Geographic. And, yet, although National Geographic article did acknowledge that, Cultures don't become more uniform; instead, both old and new tend to transform each (Zwingle 1999:33), in contemporary ethnographic imagination, the local now seemed meaningful only as either a waystation for consumption of western commodities, magically produced and conveyed on some enormous earthly assembly line, or as a place in which to examine penetration of foreign practices. Based on a partial survey of current work in anthropology, one might almost be tempted to argue that globalization has become master trope that now threatens to supplant that bedrock concept so crucial to practice of ethnography, of course, notion of has also withstood some sustained battering over past 15 years or so, and we might take some pointers from those debates as a way to begin to refocus our anthropological treatments of globalization. In one perceptive discussion, for example, Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) suggests that what anthropologists need to do is not to about culture but, rather, to against culture. She argues that since culture has been used as lens through which is viewed and by which is constructed, and as it is a conceptualization that continues to reify divide between anthropologist as self and native as other, an opposition whose probity was increasingly challenged in post-Writing Culture environment of 1990s, it is a notion to be textually resisted (see also Appadurai 1988; Gupta and Ferguson 1992). Abu-Lughod makes several useful suggestions for ways to write against as an alternative strategy for production of ethnography. These include refusing to make sweeping generalizations about people's lives; showing how experiences are constituted by actual individuals, who live in specific circumstances and possess particular histories; and incorporating into our texts a recognition of ways in which our informants, themselves, are also constantly engaged in questioning, interpreting, and re-interpreting their own lives and experiences (Abu-Lughod 1991:147-157). Abu-Lughod suggests that to against culture means to explore advantages of what I call 'ethnographies of particular' as instruments of a tactical humanism (1991:138). …