Global Worlds Research Articles

On the Fractured, Fragmented and Disrupted Landscapes of Conservation

Since Agenda 21, drawn up after the UN Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the merger of environmentalism and development has been pitched as a ‘win–win’ scenario often coined as ‘conservation-as-development’. By integrating local populations in the environmental projects ‘conservation-as-development’ claim to overcome negative aspects of the nature–culture divide. Using the arguments forwarded by Cortes-Vazquez, Turner, Semedi and Howell in this issue, the article critically discusses the development of these environmentalist efforts, exemplified by the UNESCO Biosphere reserves and the UN-REDD, to suggest that the natureculture divide keep cropping up in new constellations despite the official rhetoric. It is suggested that a solution is to be found in a serious, ethnographic approach that pays attention to the new social networks and material flows that tie local and global worlds together through these forms of environmentalist practices.

‘CREATE YOUR SPACE!’ LOCATING CONTEMPORARY DANCE IN OUAGADOUGOU

ABSTRACTSince the turn of the century contemporary dance has been gaining momentum as a pan-African artistic movement in which a new generation of performers is engaging. In contrast to more popular forms of ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ performance genres, this new movement has evolved within the cosmopolitan urban elite and is driven by processes of professionalization that lead to the creation of new, border-crossing artistic spaces. These spaces are characterized by new boundaries and inequalities, related to various modes of distinction reflecting the shifting grounds of social status – gendered, generational, knowledge-based and economic. Taking an artistic ‘capacity-building’ project targeting female dancers in West Africa as an entry point, the article analyses how the practice of contemporary dance in Ouagadougou leads to the emergence of a translocal social space embedded in a dense network of transnational relations and connected to global art worlds. It is argued that the unequal power relations characterizing the professional art world of contemporary dance reflect the tensions and contradictions of local urban societies in the making and at the same time contribute to a reconfiguration of urban spaces where new forms of rooted cosmopolitanism can be invented.

Navigating Local and Global Worlds: Opportunities and Risks for Adolescent Cultural Identity Development

This essay focuses on the opportunities and risks that adolescents face when developing cultural identities in the context of globalization. It starts by illustrating how globalization entails that adolescents increasingly have interactions with people from diverse cultures in myriad domains. Adolescents navigate local and global worlds, for example, with regard to language, diet, dating, and work. With the exposure to diverse cultures, new opportunities and risks arise. The nature of and evidence for three of these are highlighted. One is the risk of adolescent cultural identity confusion, with attendant internalizing and externalizing pathological behaviors. A second is the emergence of cultural gaps between adolescents and parents, a phenomenon that may constitute both a risk and a necessity. The third issue discussed is the way that globalization may open up more opportunities for youth civic involvement, even if such involvement sometimes aims to resist globalization.

Cultural Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Practice: Global Youth Communicate Online

Calls now abound in a range of literatures “philosophy, education, sociology, anthropology, media studies;” to reimagine citizenship and identity in ways befitting a global age. A concept predominant in many such calls is the ancient idea of cosmopolitanism. Refashioned now to serve as a compass in a world that is at once radically interconnected and increasingly divided, a cosmopolitan point of view remains resiliently hopeful, asserting that people can both uphold local commitments and take into consideration larger arenas of concern. This article animates theorizing about cultural citizenship, identity formation, and communication with an examination of what might be considered sites for cosmopolitan practice’ an online international social network and offline local programs designed to engage youth in representing themselves and interacting with the representations of others. Specifically, we report our initial research with a group of teenage girls in India, tracing their participation online and offline and their cosmopolitan imaginings of self and other. We hope that this work with young people worlds away geographically, culturally, and ideologically will speak to English educators in the United States who feel likewise compelled to support their students in developing twenty-first-century literacies’ both the technological competencies and the values, knowledge, and dispositions’needed to participate confidently and critically as citizens of local and global worlds.

Roman Loimeier et Rüdiger Seesemann. (dir.) The global worlds of the Swahili: Interfaces of Islam, identity and space in 19th and 20th-century East Africa. Berlin, Lit, 2006, X-409 p.

Roman Loimeier et Rüdiger Seesemann. (dir.) The global worlds of the Swahili: Interfaces of Islam, identity and space in 19th and 20th-century East Africa. Berlin, Lit, 2006, X-409 p. - Volume 64 Issue 4

Roman Loimeier and Rüdiger Seesemann (eds), The Global Worlds of the Swahili: interfaces of Islam, identity and space in nineteenth- and twentieth-century East Africa. Berlin: Lit Verlag (hb €34.90 – 3 8258 9769 9). 2006, 424 pp.

Roman Loimeier and Rüdiger Seesemann (eds), The Global Worlds of the Swahili: interfaces of Islam, identity and space in nineteenth- and twentieth-century East Africa. Berlin: Lit Verlag (hb €34.90 – 3 8258 9769 9). 2006, 424 pp. - Volume 79 Issue 2

On the global distribution and dissemination of knowledge

Our article centres on the question in the sense in which it may be possible to speak of global knowledge, in the first instance. Is it the necessary outcome and the intellectual mark of an age of globalising knowledge societies or is the global demand for the dissemination of knowledge systems trying to answer universally perceived problems? What changes occur to knowledge as it travels and for whom does its globalisation yield benefit or harm? Knowledge must be differentiated from mere information and its locally embedded nature poses serious challenges to opportunities and obstacles for its horizontal and vertical dissemination. Further, global worlds of knowledge raise questions over the ownership of knowledge. Intellectual property claims should be discussed with reference to opposing views, such as those concerning the thesis of knowledge's self‐protective character. Some political and certain idealistic conceptions regard knowledge as common property par excellence. While trade in services and products as well as the digital communications revolution are identified as major vehicles for the dissemination of knowledge, it is yet an open question as to whether they will result in the unhindered dissemination of knowledge or in concentrating it. The second section of the article overviews and introduces the articles in this volume.

The Global Worlds of the Swahili: Interfaces of Islam, Identity and Space in 19th and 20th-Century East Africa

The Global Worlds of the Swahili: Interfaces of Islam, Identity and Space in 19th and 20th-Century East Africa

The first Islamist republic: development and disintegration of Islamism in the Sudan

Adding a new dimension to the ongoing scholarly and political debate about Islamism or political Islam within the context of modern politics in Africa, the Middle East and the Muslim world, this study details the development and disintegration of the Islamists' Republic in the Sudan. The Islamists' regime in the Sudan has propagated a distinctive ideology whose declared aim was to create a primary model of an Islamist state. This book is the story of the social world of Islamism. Based on extensive field work inside and outside the regime, it provides an entry point into its local and global worlds as they interact and collide with each other. The book places considerable emphasis on the theoretical development and growth of Islamism to address the profound transformations within political Islam. Political scientists, sociologists interested in religion and Middle Eastern and African scholars should read this book.

Disability in Local and Global Worlds

Ingstad B, Whyte SR, eds. Berkeley, CA 94704, University of California Press, 2007, paperback, 324 pp, illus, ISBN: 978-0-520-24617-1, $22.95. The purpose of this book is to present a view of disabilities all over the world; from developed countries, such as Japan and Israel, to underdeveloped or developing countries, such as Uganda and India. This book is divided into 2 parts. Part 1 focuses on living and coping with disabilities in a town or village and on what happens when a group of people with disabilities hold an event, such as the implications of their …

The Global Worlds of the Swahili: Interfaces of Islam, identity and space in nineteenth- and twentieth-century East Africa, edited by Roman Loimeier and Rudiger Seesemann

This book is the fruit of a collaboration that produced a series of conferences and workshops under the aegis of a project – ‘Local Agency in Africa in the Context of Global Influences’ – based at the University of Bayreuth. As its title suggests, the scope of the volume is wide; indeed, there is something here for everyone. In their introduction the editors underscore the ‘multiple worlds’ character of the Swahili by way of a survey of the contributions. They then discuss the dichotomies of Swahili society, focusing specifically on the opposition of dini and mila, ‘religion’ and ‘custom’. Binary pairs have long underpinned studies of the Swahili, from the hoary old ‘Are they African or are they Arab?’, through land/sea, hinterland/coast, town/country, Muslim/washenzi, wanyeji/wageni, seemingly endless lists of oppositions that are apparently an immutable feature of Swahili life. The editors take pains to stress that Swahili culture is more fluid than such binaries might imply, but their proposition that the concepts of dini and mila be described as a continuum suggests a lingering reluctance to relinquish this particular theme. While these oppositions are indeed relevant in their contexts, an overemphasis on their importance tends to obfuscate the more nuanced interactions in Swahili society (what becomes of binaries in the complexity of inter-communal relations in Zanzibar, for example?), as this collection shows most effectively.

Disability in Local and Global Worlds, by B. Ingstad and S. Reynolds Whyte (Eds.)

Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-520-24617-1 To say that this second anthology of disability-centred research edited by Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Reynolds Whyte, Disabil...

Disability in Local and Global Worlds (review)

Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Reynolds Whyte, eds. Disability in Local and Global Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 324 pp. Disability is realized through a complex web of human, structural, and ideational interactions that turn bodies and ailments into subjects, citizens, and/or statuses, at times providing benefits, at other times denying opportunities or preferred futures. The essays in Disability in Local and Global Worlds, edited by Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Reynolds Whyte, convey this complexity. The contributors explore disability in local contexts, at the levels of individual, kin, and community, and at the same time, also consider the ways in which disability experiences are influenced by global forces, institutions, advocacy and rights movements, nonprofits, and governments, to name a few. Building upon themes covered in their 1995 co-edited volume on disability (Disability and Culture), the editors provide a timely and critical look at definitions of abnormal and of normal, ideals about the body, belonging and marginality, the politics, both near and far, of identity formation, and the implications of meanings derived from those identities. Ingstad and Whyte define disability broadly: anthropologists are interested in people's own experiences of what is disabling in their world rather than in some universal definition (11). They intend this collection to be a contribution to both disability studies and anthropology, and stress that policy-makers, healthcare professionals, scholars from various disciplines, NGOs and advocates, and others seeking to understand disability must consider the wide range of cultural contexts in which the disabled person is situated. Without feeling forced or tendentious, the volume has an applied element, as many studies in medical anthropology do. Ingstad and Whyte hope that, ultimately, the descriptions and analyses presented in the volume will prompt scholarship and debate (25). They assert that for the study of disability, there is still a need for work that provides a more radically comparative perspective through the juxtaposition of ethnographies and the questioning of global (9). The volume is divided into two parts, the first, Locating Embodied Entities, includes six chapters, each of which deal with disability or disabling conditions in different contexts, demonstrating that what is disability is often unique to a community's cultural ideals regarding normalcy, completeness, correct functionality, or acceptability of the body. These chapters explore the ways in which some-bodies experience themselves and their world through interacting with other subjects and imagining horizons (Ingstad and Whyte 2). Hilde Haualand, for example, analyzes the Deaf Olympics (Ch. 1) as a ritual gathering, where a dispersed, transnational community comes together in one place to form a brief community, reaffirm their identities and sense of belonging, and in a sense transcend the everyday boundaries of disability. In an essay on the changed meaning of female circumcision to Somali women immigrants to the UK, Aud Talle (Ch. 2) makes a notable contribution to our understanding of the contextualization and interpretation of bodies, and the impact these processes have on marked persons. For Talle, the reterritorialization of a local practice such as female circumcision in the global setting of a human-rights discourse may help us theorize 'disability' one step further (57). In Egypt and India, as Marcia Inhorn and Aditya Bharadwaj explain in Chapter 3, new biomedical technologies available to treat infertility signal a change in opportunities among a socially stigmatized group still living in the context of traditional expectations. Infertility is now experienced in both old and new ways, as sufferers negotiate the socio-cultural implications of fertility treatment options. These first three essays help to broaden notions of what disability is, and how it is experienced, by relocating familiar topics within new or unexplored contexts. …

Global pathways. Working class cosmopolitans and the creation of transnational ethnic worlds*

The current interest in new diasporas and globalisation processes raises the question of what a transnational subjectivity might be like? What does it mean to be, in some sense or other, at home in the world? The present article responds to debates on cosmopolitans and transnationals, hybridity and globalisation through a consideration of the transnational world created by south Asian migrants. It argues that labour migration forges global pathways, routes along which people, goods, places and ideas travel. The need is, the article argues, to recognise the class dimensions of this movement and the significance of both strong and weak ties in determining emergent forms of cultural transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. The ethnic and religious worlds discussed in the paper – of Pakistani Muslim religious sufis and working class Pakistani ‘cosmopolitans’ – cut across national boundaries and are centred beyond Europe. The global highways along which Pakistani labour migrants travel also carry goods, brides and tourists. Like the Melanesians of whom Strathern writes that they make places and sentiments ‘travel’, Pakistani migration involves the metonymic movement of ceremonial objects such as food, clothing, cosmetics and jewellery which personify moral ‘places’. And it is through these that new global ethnic social worlds are constituted. Global families and trans-national marriages reconfigure the local through global connections, while still being marked by economic class and status.

(A)broad Teacher Education

In this article, the implications of international students undertaking teacher education in Australian universities are discussed as an example of global teacher education and its consequences for teacher educators and students. Increasing numbers of international students come to Australia to qualify as teachers and this has consequences for the practices of teacher educators and also for the behaviors of the international teacher education students. We contend that the practice of undertaking teacher education in another country produces future teachers who are cosmopolitans who value diversity and embrace change and uncertainty, rather than producing fundamentalists who adhere rigidly to tradition and ritual truths. Drucker's (1993) concept of living simultaneously in global and local worlds forms a central element in the theoretical framework. Studying teacher education in global settings is seen as having positive outcomes and practical consequences at a number of levels.

Vernacular Security: The Politics of Feeling Safe in Global, National and Local Worlds

Tracing the political history of the concept of ‘security’ through a variety of global, national and regional inflections, this article argues for the analytical usefulness of the concept of ‘vernacular security’. Entailed by this concept is a proposal to treat ‘security’ as a socially situated and discursively defined practice open to comparison and politically contextualized explication, rather than merely an analytical category that needs refined definition and consistent use. While the ideas and politics of security associated with the rise of global governance are built on late-modern ideas about what it means to be safe, global governance is not seamless in its extension. The apparent universalism of the ontology and politics of global security therefore breaks down into a more complex pattern upon closer inspection. Based on material from Indonesia, the article suggests that the ‘onto-politics’ of security have global, national and local inflections, the interplay of which requires re-examination.

Globalisering og "forestillede verdener": En kvalitativ undersøgelse baseret på børnetegninger fra to landsbyer i Peru

Globalization and ’’Imagined Worlds’’: A Qualitative Study of Children’s Drawings from Two Villages in Peru
 
 Globalization is sometimes described in terms of flows delivering resources for the construction of virtual, global worlds. However, the relation between the presence of flows and the actual construction of new imagined worlds is often only assumed and lacks empirical exploration. By analysing drawings made by children in two settlements in Ayacucho, Peru this article initiates such an exploration. The children were asked to draw pictures of how they would like their community to be in the future, and they were interviewed about these drawings. Using an adapted form of Grounded Theory, the analysis “reads out“ an understanding of the children’s imagined communities. It shows that there were vast differences between the drawings from the two settlements. However, these differences cannot be related to the differences in the presence of television in the respective villages, and thus to a “global flow“, in one of the communities. This result questions the link between global flows and the construc-tion of imagined worlds. The article concludes by arguing for additional qualitative research on globalization.

Global Complexities

During the second Gulf War, people around the world were inundated night and day with television images of smart bombs, shock-and-awe, and network-centric warfare, bringing them closer than ever before to events unfolding thousands of miles away. Tanks, missiles, pilotless surveillance planes, bombs, helicopters, and gunships circled Baghdad, but these instruments of war were equally present—if not equally destructive—to people elsewhere. In a world with one billion television screens and nearly one billion Internet users, it is impossible not to confront “distant proximities” of some sort on a daily basis. According to James Rosenau, ours is not “one world” (see Ohmae 1990), but neither is it a world of distant “little boxes” that can be kept isolated and at arms length. Rather, as the title of Rosenau's new book suggests, ours is a world of Distant Proximities. This massive and, in places, magisterial volume seeks to make sense of a world that is turbulent, uncertain, ambiguous, contradictory, and dynamic—a world replete with newly empowered individuals and nongovernmental agents of change. What animates people, Rosenau argues, is less a commitment to abstract ideals and national identities than an orientation to various near and distant local, private, and global worlds. Individuals have become central to the course of events, and Rosenau draws on structure-agency theory from sociology to better understand how people make history, albeit not always in circumstances of their own choosing (see Giddens 1984). Rosenau seeks, in effect, to sociologize international relations by describing and analyzing the complex local–global intersections of various near and distant worlds. In the process he hopes to absolutely undermine the notion that the global order is comprised principally of intersecting sovereign states.

Distant Proximities: Dynamics beyond Globalization

List of Figures and Tables ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xv Part One Theoretical Perspectives: Recasting Global Life 1 Chapter One An Emergent Epoch 3 Chapter Two People, Collectivities, and Change 18 Chapter Three Sources and Consequences of Fragmegration 50 Chapter Four Local Worlds 79 Chapter Five Global Worlds 118 Chapter Six Private Worlds 153 Chapter Seven Movement among Twelve Worlds 170 Chapter Eight Emergent Spaces, New Places, and Old Faces: Immigrants and the Proliferation of Identities 184 Part Two Conceptual Equipment: Retooling the Storehouse 203 Chapter Nine Normative and Complexity Approaches 205 Chapter Ten The Skill Revolution 232 Chapter Eleven The Information Revolution: Both Powerful and Neutral 256 Chapter Twelve Structures of Authority: In Crisis or in Place? 273 Chapter Thirteen Spheres of Authority 293 Part Three Issues, Processes, and Structures as Distant Proximities 315 Chapter Fourteen Progress toward Human Rights 317 Chapter Fifteen Retreat from Human Rights: The Challenge of Systemic Hatred 336 Chapter Sixteen Corruption as a Global Issue 348 Chapter Seventeen Prosperity and Poverty 369 Chapter Eighteen Governance in Fragmegrative Space 390 Part Four Postscript 403 Chapter Nineteen A Transformed Observer in a Transforming World: Confessions of a Pre-Postmodernist 405 Author Index 421 Subject Index 427

Business Enterprises and Global Worlds

The role of business enterprise in integrating economies is one of the central historical themes of the last two centuries. Although globalization—both in its current iteration and in its nineteenth-century form—has been widely studied, the role of the firm, as opposed to macroeconomic forces, has yet to receive sufficient attention. Many research questions remain, including the role of the United States as a host country, the place of multinationals based in emerging markets, and the importance of understudied sectors such as retailing. Business historians should shift the focus of queries from “why” to “how” and go beyond the discipline's traditional organization along national lines to study the behavior of firms worldwide.