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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....