Is Globalization Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble?

- Mauro Guilln
Is it really happening? Does it produce convergence / homogenization? Is everywhere becoming the same? (Wilson) Does it undermine the authority of nationstates? (Pun) Is globality different from modernity? (Tsing) Is a global culture in the making? (Condry)

Globalization is an ideology with multiple meanings and lineages.

What does it mean? Associated w/ neoliberalism, economic development and reform. Cross-border advocacy networks and organizations (human rights, environment, womens rights, world peace) Religious & political movements (Christianity, Islam, Marxism)

Globalization is an ideology with multiple meanings and lineages.

When did it start? 1500s: first circumnavigation of earth 16th century: expansion of European capitalism and colonialism Turn of 20th century: growth in international trade before WWI End of WWII: renewed expansion of trade and investment, emancipation of colonies, economic rise of Northeast Asia

Globalization Studies
One of the persistent problems afflicting the study of globalization is that it is far from a uniform, irreversible, and inexorable trend. Rather, globalization is a fragmented, incomplete, discontinuous, contingent, and in many ways contradictory and puzzling process (238). Enormous increase in publications on globalization (anthro lit is smallest)

Guillns Conclusions
Globalization is changing the nature of the world, but is neither an invariably civilizing nor a destructive force. (Tsing: extreme poles of light and dark) Globalization is neither a monolithic nor an inevitable phenomenon. Its impact varies across countries, societal sectors, and times. The complexity of globalization requires further research, especially in developing perspectives that bridge the micro-macro gap; that move across levels of analysis from the world-system to the nation-state, the industrial sector, community, organization, and group. (call for interdisciplinary work)

The Global Situation - Anna Tsing

World-making flows are not just interconnections but also the recarving of channels and the remapping of the possibilities of geography. The charisma or seduction of globalization (like the charisma of modernization); how these ideas capture the imagination. As globalization becomes instituted in the academy, corporate policy, politics, and popular culture, it is important to pay attention to these sites to understand what globalization projects do in the world.

Global Enthusiasms
How has the idea of the global excited and inspired social scientists? How does the charisma of globalization produce effects in the world? How can we investigate globalist projects and dreams without assuming that they remake the world just as they want?

Features of Global Imaginings

Futurism: the ability to name an era and predict its progress (problem: creates stereotypes of the past against which global futurism defines itself) Conflations: varied projects, such as populist and corporate, all seem wrapped up in the same energetic movement (problem: varied global projects create different forms of subjectivity and agency; we need to look at this multiplicity) Circulations: rhetoric of overcoming boundaries appears positive for everyone (problem: focusing on the movement of people, things, ideas, or institutions alone does not show us how movement depends on scales or units of agency)

Scale as an Object of Analysis

Through joint attention to ideologies of scale and projects of scale making, it is possible to move into those cracks most neglected by unselfconscious reliance on global futurism, globalist conflation, and global circulation (347). An enthographic study of the global needs careful attention not only to global claims and their effects on social life but also to questions of interconnection, movement and boundary crossing that globalist spokespeople have brought to the the fore (351). Focus on interconnections between global-local rather than absolute distinction between global and local.

Tourism & Collecting

Today we go back to the late nineteenth century to consider the travel and collecting practices of another era and their implications in the development of modern understandings of cultural difference. Collections are archives or vocabularies filled with the objects / images / signs / words with which we construct narratives of ourselves on both personal and social levels. In amassing collections, private or public, personal or shared, categories become essential ways of organizing and thereby making sense of things.

Looting Beijing, 1860, 1900

What is the linguistic and legal etymology of the word loot? How do the meanings and values attributed to loot shift according to context? What is the difference between loot, curiosities, curios, and souvenirs? What function does collecting serve as a well-acknowledged practice and desire of travel and tourism? Why do we collect? Is collecting a form of conquest, market trade, or knowledge production? How are these forms related?

QuickTime and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompre ssor are neede d to see this picture.

Longfellows Tattoos
Who were the globe-trotters and why did they travel? What were some of the technologies of travel they employed? What political and economic factors underlay the American trend of travel to Japan? How is gender important to both travel practices and cultural representation? How does Guth try to characterize travel encounters as mutual interactions? What does her focus on the biography of Charles Longfellow enable in the analysis of early American collecting and tourism? What are some of the ironies of tourism that Guth begins to lay out? Why is authenticity prized, and how is it constructed?