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CA4 Globalisation summary lectures
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CA4 - Summary LecuturesLecture 1 - The Anthropology of Globalization
Baby sharks shows that culture is changeable and is changing fast, and the relation
between the local and the global.
Globalisation refers to the intensification of global interconnectedness, suggesting a
world full of movement and mixture, contracts and linkages, and persistent cultural
interaction and exchange (2002).
- Adding of 2007: it implies a fundamental recording of time and space →
anthropological perspective.
→ Eriksen: compression, about the experience/awaring of this
change/compression.
Key concepts globalisation (Eriksen):
1. Disembedding = about the disconnection of social and local context and the
disconnection of cultural forms and manifestations and actual physical
locations.
2. Speed = about acceleration and simultany.
3. Standardization = about things become more standardized all around the
world.
4. Connections = about the acceleration of translocal and transnational
networks.
5. Mobility = about the expansion of movement of people.
6. Mixing = about people mixing around the world.
7. Risk = about the increasing inability of people and groups, because
of outside influences → is productive, move people.
8. Identity politics = about figuring out who you and others are →
identity repertoire has expanded.
9. (Alterglobalisation = about a critical response on the dark side of
globalisation.)
- All are indications of globalisation and depending on scale and intensity (and
speed).
Since the 1980s, global transformation and changes in the anthropological
perspective on culture.
- Globalisation itself is nothing new (Eriksen).
Common ingredients in definitions of globalisation:
1. Neoliberalism of global trade and economic interdependence.
2. Redefined role nation-state: transnational flows.
- Not limited anymore because of nation boundaries.
, 3. Contact and exchange (technological advancement).
4. Intertwinement local and global processes.
- Experiences are more and more shaped by global phenomena.
- Confrontation with a variety of cultural influences.
New global cultural economy (Appadurai)
- All ways of thinking about culture are inadequate in a globalized world.
- Look at the relationship between culture, politics and economy → different
today.
- Imagined worlds: people today live in a world where communities are
largely imagined → make stories of/about the world (fictive/formative) to
understand the outside.
- 5 scapes, building bricks of imagined worlds → (land)scapes as
‘perspectival constructs’.
1. Ethnoscapes = landscapes of persons or groups, about social
networks and identities.
2. Financescapes = landscapes of the capital market.
3. Technoscapes = landscapes of information and technology which are
borderless.
4. Mediascapes = spread of possibilities to produce information and the
images which circulate as a result.
5. Ideoscapes = landscapes of ideologies and debates.
- The scapes are nog objective factual forms, but define perspectives out
of different positions.
- Imagined worlds form a framework for the new global cultural
economy.
- Scapes lack a clear and stable shape, but are fluid.
- Scapes are no longer arranged in an orderly fashion, but evolve
independently.
- Result: the world appears to be highly dynamic, fluid and chaotic.
Overview anthropological eras: slide 14 powerpoint.
The modern era: formative anthropology (late 19th century -1900)
- Armchair anthropologists: studies ‘exotic’ cultures on the basis of the writings
of others (explorers, missionaries, colonial officials, etc)
- Peoples and cultures with boundaries, tied to a territory.
- Strong link between a people, a culture and a territory.
- Stressing differences between Us and Them = othering.
- Evolutionary perspective on culture → e.g. Ota Benga and the human
zoos.
Modern era: classical (late 1900-1945)
- Malinowski: participant observation = learning by joining/emerging.
, - Cultural relativism: opposition to ethnocentrism.
- World divided into separate isolated groups with distinct ‘cultures’: world as a
mosaic, culture is territorialized.
Essentialist/culturalist perspective on culture:
- Culture is a thing with essence, it is reified/concrete.
- Culture is static/unchangeable.
- Culture is homogeneous → enculturation in similar ways.
- Cultures are clearly bounded units to a group, with a stable territory.
- Culture explains behavior; powerful force.
→ Cultures were not really like this.
Nation buildings (late 18th century - first half 19th century):
- Romanticist image of people (‘das Volk’) and territory → Johann Gottfried von
Herder (1744-1803)
- Belief that people, in a primordial way, are tied to a nation or ethnic group,
one with a distinct culture and a territorial claim: ‘this is our land’.
- Nation-state = connection between state (geographical unit) and nation
(‘Volk’, single ethnic group).
The late modern era: modern anthropology (1945 - 1980)
- Interested in intergroup interaction and influence.
- Frederic Barth: processes of bordering are more important than the ‘cultural
stuff’ inside.
→ Not accepting the static boundaries anymore.
- Modernization paradigm: continuation of evolutionary perspective on
development, but also dependency theory & world system theory: criticizing
global distribution of power.
- For the first, focus on the relationship between societies → between local
and global.
Postmodernity: transitional anthropology (1980 - 1990)
- Self-reflection within the discipline.
- Optimism (from the modern days) had faded:
- After two World Wars and the Cold war.
- Modernization did not result in the expected rise in wealth.
- Critical perspective on the ‘Modernity project’ and the conceptualization of
progress.
Postmodernism in social sciences:
- Rejecting grand theories/‘meta-narratives’.
→ Rejecting assumptions that imply generalization (e.g. modernism,
liberalism, etc.).
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