The Anthropology of Globalization: Cultural Anthropology Enters the 21st Century

Abstract

Kalb reviews The Anthropology of Globalization: Cultural Anthropology Enters the 21st Century by Ted C. Lewellen.

The Anthropology of Globalization: Cultural Anthropology Enters the 21st Century. Ted C. Lewellen. Westport: Bergin and Garvey, 2002. 282 pp.

Ted Lewellen has written a useful textbook on the anthropology of globalization-a daring undertaking. He acknowledges that globalization is about almost everything at once and that there is no room for facile demarcations, neither in slices of the social pie nor in space. Moreover, it requires a reconstruction of the anthropological vision and method, as well as a fusion of earlier theoretical critiques within the discipline that do not lend themselves easily for discussion in the format of a textbook. Lewellen succeeds quite handsomely. In 13 chapters, he integrates a plethora of empirical subjects (issues of identities, migrations, local and global relationships, peasants, gender, development, as well as theoretical debates on postmodernism, ethnicity, dependency, and method) into a book that at first seems meant for class use at undergraduate or graduate levels. Lewellen's matter-of-fact writing style helps reduce complex subject matter to manageable proportions. He also largely avoided the transdisciplinary "great globalization debate" (Held 2000) that would have foreclosed the whole idea of a specific anthropology of globalization and could have inspired a totally different book.

Lewellen's treatment of the anthropology of globalization is threefold: theoretical, migration, and local and global relationships. In the section on theory, he discusses basic issues, such as whether or not globalization, as the shrinking of space, is something new. Referring to Eric Wolf and others, he argues that it is not but that there is a difference of degree caused by technology (media, travel, communication) and neoliberalism. He correctly notes that neoliberal global governance of the IMF, World Bank, and G7 would make any Roman emperor jealous in its extraordinary powers of global imposition. He also notes that the consequences of their actions must enter into any considerations, calculations, and imaginations that dependent local populations can master. As a result, most of the subsequent actions that local populations take will be defensive, whether they culminate in migration, local action, entrepreneurialism, identity switches and multiplications, or protest. Lewellen offers well developed examples of this. He also discusses issues of methodology (fieldwork, multisited ethnography, and other genres of data collection); the perennial question of culture (bounded, open, or dynamic); the dilemmas of development theory (discourse, power, dependency, etc.); and postmodernism and the construction of identities. The authors discussed in this book range from Jonathan Friedman, Arjun Appadurai, and Ulf Hannerz to Arturo Escobar, Néstor García Canclini, James Ferguson, Michael Kearney, George Marcus, and James Clifford.

In sections two and three he discusses much of the relevant literature in anthropology (but not outside its confines) on migration, and local and global linkages. Lewellen elaborates on numerous examples, both from his own experience and from the work of others. These selections are very good illustrations of what are new in the current context of globalization. I especially liked the one on local and global, which comprises a chapter on tribal cultures and one on peasants. This last one, in particular, gives graphic illustrations of the forceful local spirals set in motion by neoliberal global and national governance.

The book is rooted largely in work by U.S. anthropologists and is somehow one-sided in its regional orientation on Latin America. Lewellen bravely tries to venture out of this regional limitation but his knowledge diminishes as he crosses the oceans. This leads to irritating errors, such as the remark that ethno nationalism, in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet empire, spiraled out of control in Czechoslovakia and not in Yugoslavia or in his discussion on the Asian crisis in the early nineties, which actually happened in 1997. These errors stand for a larger problem within the field of anthropology and this reviewer is not entirely satisfied with the treatment of it in this book. Are anthropologists local specialists on identity? I would vote against it. The great globalization debate precisely underscores how essential it is that an education in anthropology allows students to develop a clear grasp of what Eric Wolf would have called "macroscopic history," and what others would now designate as global history. The globalization phenomenon has a history in itself: as a fact, as a mantra of U.S.-imposed neoliberalism, as a new grand narrative, and in its implications and consequences on the ground in the South as well as the North. Starting from this wider problematic and its regional consequences, and not from the largely postmodern study of local identities that U.S. anthropology has largely taken as its definition, would have produced a more interdisciplinary text with more global reach (including the North) and partially different emphases. An example is the work of anthropologists of postsocialism, which is entirely absent here, even though these territories are arguably the most graphic cases of globalist onslaught. Their ethnographies (e.g., Hann 2002) of privatization and property, state dedine, nationalism and ethnicity, gender, and civil society (good governance) offer critical perspectives on globalization, as well as on anthropology conceived in the dominant U.S. mode (the Blackwell reader on the anthropology of globalization edited by Rosaldo and Inda neglects them, too). But more importantly, a more comprehensive global starting point would have allowed for closer integration with the great globalization debate outside of anthropology and a keener appreciation of what Lewellen rightly sees as anthropology's insufficient grasp of the state: The downside of neoliberal globalization is indeed the destruction and increased circumscription of all but the most powerful states. Globalization is also "black hole making," and the withdrawal of states from the national and global peripheries and into the hubs of the transnational system. Civil society, private property, and good governance are little remedy against that and its consequences are huge and growing. Counter-mobilizations are growing too. The great globalization debate would have put these issues explicitly on the anthropological agenda. Lewellen's book is a feat. Sections two and three were a pleasure to read, and it is certainly useful for undergraduate classes (the Blackwell reader is not). But it is also a book that has only gone half-way.

References

REFERENCES CITED

Hann, Chris, ed.

2002 Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge.

Held, David, and Anthony MacGrew

2002 Globalization and Anti-Globalization. London: Polity Press.

Inda, Jonathan Xavier, and Renato Rosaldo, eds.

2002 The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.