Bookreview Overheating, ISBN: 9780745336343 Cultural Anthropology 4: History And Theory Of Anthropology (201100013)
Book review of Eriksen's Overheating (CA3/CA4)
Samenvatting CA3 (nu CA4): Overheating van Thomas Eriksen
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Culturele Antropologie en Ontwikkelingssociologie
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Overheating – Eriksen
1. Le monde est trop plein de wereld is te vol
(spreekt over begin globalisatie na val Berlijnse muur, maar in Globalization zou het iets zijn al ver
voor deze tijd?)
Antropologische studies focussen te veel op bepaalde aspecten van globalisatie en op lokale
realiteit die andere studies negeren.
Accelerated growth is een kenmerk van de hedendaagse wereld.
- Groei internet
- Groei migratie
- Groei toerisme
- Groei internationale handel
Twee veranderingen die relevant zijn om hedendaagse wereld te begrijpen
- Groei van populatie
- Groei van energiegebruik pollution and environmental degradation
2. A conceptual inventory
‘in order to understand globalization it is necessary to look at how crisis is dealt with in local
context’
To demonstrate the ubiquity of overheating effects, it is necessary to compare between very
different locality.
Anthropocene humanity placing it’s stamp on the planet
De natuur wordt tegenwoordig als iets gezien wat zwak is en bedreig, maar het is ook sterk en
bedreigend. De mensen maken natuur deels kapot, we zijn over presteerders.
Neoliberalism ??
Runaway processes reinforcing growth processes which eventually will collapse unless a ‘third
instance’ enters into the process and changes the relationship.
Treadmill syndromes treadmill competition is simultaneously a premise for an integral part of
and a outcome of the runaway processes that create an overheated world.
Double bind a self-refuting kind of communication as when you say two incompatible things at
once. A person trying to act on the base of a double-bind will never do it right, since no matter what
they do, it can be objected.
Flexibility uncommitted potential for change
Reproduction the ability of a person, a system or a social field to continue on its path without
constantly having to adjust to exogenous changes.
Scale a feature of social organization
- Social scale; the reach of your networks
- Physical scale; the compass of an infrastructural system
- Cognitive scale; the size of your perceived world
- Temporal scale; the time horizon you imagine, forwards and backwards, when taking
decisions and making plan
Clash of scales; when intersection of two or more levels of scale leads to a contradiction, a conflict
or friction.
3. Energy
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, Coal double bind of growth and sustainability
The environmental organizations live in parallel worlds from the decision making about the
environment. The energy market operates in global scale but it is disconnected from considerations
about long-term unintended consequences, which are discussed in other areas.
The relationship of energy to human condition remains understudied, even if it is crucial for an
understanding of contemporary modernity, its historical trajectory and its current predicaments.
Scarce energy societies less inequity or conflict
The small scale of green communities can, in other words, exist in parallel to the large scale of
corporate capitalism and mainstream society, without either of them influencing each other to any
noticeable degree.
Sometimes it is necessary to slide up in order to see the global consequences of your actions; at
other times it is necessary to slide down I order to understand the local implications of large-scale
processes.
- Food energy
Solastalgia environmentally induced distress
Distress produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly
connected to their home environment.
Coal is still modernity
4. Mobility
Traffic on a multi-lane highway exists in only three main forms, which may serve as a metaphor for
some of the implications of overheating processes: free flow, synchronised flow and the traffic jam.
Second, there is sometimes a direct relationship between overheating and cooling down: Although
the sun shines, some places will be left in the shade, obsolete and forgotten. Third and finally, as
Margaret Mead said already in her study of cultural change in Manus Island following the Second
World War, ‘different parts of a culture change at different speeds’
They tell different, but complementary stories about the contemporary world, both growing fast,
and both lead to characteristic overheating effects, but the global elites view them in diametrically
opposing ways.
The anti-tourists, recently reinvented as cultural tourists, make up a significant proportion of the
total numbers and, in their guise as native Europeans, they have for decades worried about the
impact of mass tourism on their own culture.
Since the turn of the millennium, tourism has changed its character, and has become a prime
example of overheated modernity.
Laments about the disenchantment of the world owing to increased mobility, the spread of modern
institutions and, not least, tourism, are not new, and the expanding niche of anti-tourism, or cultural
tourism, draws on exactly this nostalgia.
The most dramatic qualitative change in international tourism has been neither growth nor
differentiation, but the fact that tourism has in many areas passed a tipping point, where local
communities increasingly exist for the benefit of tourists.
No wonder that a major new trend in research on ethnicity concerns the commercialisation of
identity (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) and attempts to achieve copyright in cultural products,
material as well as immaterial, in order to be able to commercialise them locally rather than being
overrun by large-scale companies, seen locally as cultural pirates (Kasten 2004).
The increase in tourism and tourist-like modes of existence is a paradoxical result of a
globally integrated economy, heightened mobility for the well off (but not for the less affluent),
striking inequalities and a middle-class culture focused on consumption rather than production.
Global tourism is simultaneously an important part of, and made possible by, the
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