Counterworks

Managing the Diversity of Knowledge

Richard Fardon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134840809
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Globalization is often described as the spread of western culture to other parts of the world. How accurate is the depiction of 'cultural flow'? In Counterworks, ten anthropologists examine the ways in which global processes have affected particular localities where they have carried out research. They challenge the validity of anthropological concepts of culture in the light of the pervasive connections which exist between local and global factors everywhere.

Rather than assuming that the world is culturally diverse, this book proposes that culture is itself a representation of the similarities and difference recognized between forms of social life. The authors address issues of globalization in terms of diverse histories and traditions of knowledge, which may include the construction of difference as cultural.

In its attention to specific local situations, such as Bali, Cuba, Bolivia, Greece, Kenya, and the Maoris in New Zealand, Counterworks argues that the apparent oppositoin between strong westernizing, global forces and weak concept of culture, which supposes cultures to be integrated and possessed of essential properties, needs rethinking in a contemporary world where a marked sense of culture has become a wide-spread property of people's social knowledge.

The book will have wide appeal to anthropologists, to students of comparative studies in history, religion and language, and to anyone interested in the phenomenon of postmodernism.

1IntroductionCounterworks

Richard Fardon

The papers collected here address the status of ‘global’ and ‘local’ as organizing terms of social knowledge with imagination and subtlety, but I shall begin literally and simple-mindedly¹ with an invitation that seems to involve…

‘TAKING SIDES’ IN A TROPE

The sides in question are the global and the local polarity and, on one reading, the invitation is to act as ‘western’ sociology’s significant other in a debate over the globalization of (largely western) culture. Given how ‘local’ in sociological agendas is often conflated with non-western, and that anthropology’s historical concern has been largely with non-western peoples, it is irresistible to note that-according to the latest report from the UN Population Fund (The State of the World Population 1993)—forty years ago ‘developing countries’ accounted for 77 per cent of world population growth but now they account for 95 per cent of it; global population is set to reach 6.25 billion by the end of this century. If sociology wishes to concede 95 per cent of the increment to anthropology, being local may be the only global option. But this is a gross argument from gross figures: perhaps, strategically useful on occasions when anthropologists need to dispute their own marginality on university committees, it begs questions about the categories of ‘developing’ and ‘non-western’ countries and, if these hurdles were negotiated, leaves intact the common impression that anthropology remains specifically about such places. The massiveness of the numbers does, however, underline both the massive and changing context we might mean by global—not to mention the size of some localities—and the sense of the world as a finite space that motivate an emergent style of social knowledge concerned with spatial relations and expressed in a language itself saturated with spatial images.

More troubling about the global/local contrast is the knowledge that it is going to work and, thus, the suspicion that what it appears to illuminate is already present in the terms it offers us. If knowledge, as Marilyn Strathern suggests (Strathern 1995), can be treated as the capacity to transform perceptions, we know at the outset that we shall manage to show (among other things) that global is also local and vice versa. The terms work off one another through mutual provocation (literal calling forth of one another) neither makes sense alone. This is an initial referent of my title, ‘counterworks’. The same distinction between global and local could have been applied, though not to identical effect, almost any time in the last two, even five, hundred years (Said 1993). So, of what is the contemporary prominence of the pair symptomatic? I think it is a matter of the varied conjunctures of unequally empowered processes and imaginings that are localized conceptually as figures against the ground of a global space that is both traversed and simultaneously classified, possessed and defended exhaustively. In consequence, it is a matter—even shorter—of the complexity of agency recognized in particular places. The counterworks ineluctably provoked by the terms ‘global’ and ‘local’ demand contests over the scale of units of analysis and the definition of their boundaries symptomatic of our turn-of-the-millennium times; and these concerns with spatial relations are themselves articulated through concepts and metaphors so imbricated with spatiality that the difficulty of distinguishing between real spaces and the allegorical spaces of theory has become a distinguishing feature of a post-colonial, political agenda cross-cutting the disciplinary boundaries of the humanities and social sciences. It is unnecessary, therefore, to reach agreement about the exact referents of ‘global’ and ‘local’ to argue that things look different in these terms than they did in terms of—just-as-contested—ideas of society and culture. If we give ourselves some elbow room with respect to the present, these preoccupations with space and locality, both as real and theoretical, and with how things occur in spaces and how they seem, appear symptomatic of the same condition.

To search only for definitional stability in such key terms as ‘global’ and ‘local’, or ‘society’ and ‘culture’, risks missing their significance as lexical markers of the fuzzier currents of ideas that are a backdrop to the intellectual contests occurring in particular disciplines (for instance, as Herbert 1992 argues for culture). The early promise of key terms may accrue through definitional slippage that allows them to resonate with widely felt intellectual and moral concerns. But as the range of potential definitions, and the consequences of defining a term this way or that, are worked through, slippage comes to seem more like sleight of hand. Each use of the terms involves all the problems that previous usage has made familiar. Culture and society reached this pass after a century of intensive use but, remarkably, the terms local and global—which have been called upon to qualify or even replace them in some usages—were problematic from the instant of their popularization.

Perhaps not so remarkable, though: anthropologists are all too sensitive to the traces of binary thinking (courtesy of structuralism), the pitfalls of essentialization (courtesy of deconstruction), and thinking through spatial metaphors (courtesy of tropic analyses). Scant wonder if the global/local pair in action promises few surprises, since it has characteristics of all three of these old friends. In common with other spatial analogies for social conditions (right/left; east/west; north/south; up/down; centre/periphery…), global/local crystallizes matters not just by the attraction of its poles but by their unequal strength. This metaphorical strategy invites the constrained, somewhat mechanical but nonetheless effective, subversions: of inversion, akin to switching the charges on the poles,² or else of demonstrating ‘resistance’, a kind of friction model. However, the wider frame (which makes both inversion and resistance discernible as tactics or strategies) derives from overall positional images that orient by placing interacting parties within a theoretical landscape (Salmond 1982) the envisaged topography of which influences what is able to be said about relations between them. This is of more than intellectual curiosity, because the notion of orientation (getting one’s bearing from the east, or—literal-mindedly—‘occidentation’ for movements which take their bearings from the ‘West’, Carrier 1992) is the prelude to organizing directed movement. Defining entities and placing their interaction in a non-neutral space prejudges the meaning and likely outcome of whatever occurs. Particular metaphors of emplacement and movement are readily spotted once the trick is learnt (Hobart, Chapter 3); and they may as easily be essentializations of those whom anthropologists study as of anthropological theory (Herzfeld, Chapter 6). Metaphor is already party to this, since it is predicated etymologically on movement and containment. This much is familiar, but are there peculiarities of a world in globalization as the thinkable space in which real interactions occur?

As a concept, the globe blurs distinction between space, as suppositional to trope making, and place, as a trope of the particular. The globe is all the space that most of the members of a methodologically agnostic discipline are likely to be concerned with professionally. In this sense, the global context encompasses and produces all differences, rather as if it were thought itself. This ‘globe’ is shorthand for conceptual totality. But the globe is also a place that can be envisaged from a variety of perspectives—and sometimes seen from as close to ‘nowhere’ as our contemporary imagination permits, as here by the geographer Doreen Massey,

Imagine for a moment that you are on a satellite, further out and beyond all satellites; you can see ‘planet earth’ from a distance and, rare for someone with only peaceful intentions, you are equipped with the kind of technology that allows you to see the colours of people’s eyes and the number on their number-plates. You can see all the movement and tune-in to all the communication that is going on. Furthest out are the satellites, then aeroplanes, the long haul between London and Tokyo and the hop from San Salvador to Guatemala City. Some of this is people moving, some of it is physical trade, some is media broadcasting. There are faxes, email, film distribution networks, financial flows and transactions. Look in closer and there are ships and trains, steam trains slogging laboriously up hills somewhere in Asia. Look in closer still and there are lorries and cars and buses and on down further and somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa there’s a woman on foot who still spends hours a day collecting water.

(1993:61)

Within a unitary place, the populations of the globe are unequally globalized technologically (what Massey calls the ‘power-geometry of time—space compression’), and this can be represented in terms of the trails they leave on the face of the globe, as well as in terms of the resources they extract unequally from within it. The moral is well taken and neatly pointed, but the trope is interesting in itself. Whoever is crewing the satellite has a quite different view of proceedings from the African water-carrier—or anyone between. And we have to be asked to suspend disbelief that anyone with that kind of totalizing vision, even after the Cold War, harbours only peaceful or disinterested intentions.

Human co-occupation of the world materially transgresses any pre-supposition of equality. In their ability to operate at a distance, some people(s) effect more, finite, global space than do others. And there is no imaginable, vacant ‘somewhere else’—as there once was—where these others could rectify the fact. Conceptually, globalization is transgressive in related senses. Writers have described the globe as a shrinking space—undergoing time/space compression (Giddens 1981) or the annihilation of space through time (Harvey 1993 following Marx).³ Concurrently, the scope of the local is described as expanding (for instance through electronic mediation (Appadurai, Chapter 10)). Spatial polarities—having, as it were, reached maximal logical extension in the contrast between global and local—finally collapse. What’s more, the collapse is precipitated from both poles: since locals are shown to harbour projects of global scope, while global schemes are revealed in their provinciality. Simultaneously, locality itself (Appadurai) as well as the globe, comes to seem increasingly fragile. Social interaction within this fragile world of unreliable contexts is sometimes attributed characteristics reminiscent of Durkheim’s notion of dynamic density—a concentration of energy channelled into exchanges that are becoming homogenized with the effect of producing a global culture within a world system (Robertson 1991). But this is only half a picture, and its plausibility rests on a contrary imagining it only seems to contest.

BOUNDARIES: ONCE—SOCIETY AND CULTURE; NOW—NATION, ETHNICITY, IDENTITY

One effect of a conceptual shift in favour of the relational parameters of global and local has been to make fixity seem intrinsic to anthropology’s middle-range concepts of society and culture (1995 ). To continue to write as if societies and cultures were stable spatializations risks irrelevance in the form of perverse attachment to conventions that fly in the face of the way the world now seems to be pictured credibly. The disappearance of anthropology’s subject in this manner would involve not the demise of the exotic, which Malinowski foresaw, but rather the demise of societies and cultures describable distinctly. Another way of becoming irrelevant, however, would involve letting go of the assumption of the exotic—what resists comprehension by being outside one’s previous experience. If to nothing else, the epithet ‘exotic’ seems appropriate to the opaque imaginings—good or bad—of a common global future. But if the exotic, both present and future, is no longer exogenous then existing concepts of society and culture do not seem appropriate spatializations in which to figure it. Bounded ideas of society and culture tended to produce an image of the inhabited world as a patchwork quilt, but the dialectic of global and local portends either final synthesis, as distinctions collapse and dissolve into a homogenized global culture, or unresolvable contradiction, as cultures shadow one another in mutually defined antipathy.

A sense of pervasive transgression results from retaining an attachment to the older tropes of society and culture while at the same time conceding the normality of the global/local pair. For some writers things appear increasingly to be out of place, or else chaotic such that there is no place where things might any longer belong. Evocative talk of jumbling, mixture and juxtaposition, or of hybridity and mongrelism, is symptomatic of this sense, but the effect occurs not as a raw reflection of the state of the world but as a consequence of the simultaneous appeal of two different ways of spatializing facts about it.

There are alternative ways of dealing with this. The simplest is to suggest that a world once made up of distinct cultures and societies is moving through a phase of transition towards becoming something different. Argument then revolves around the time-depth required to account for this change historically, as well as identification of the factors responsible for it. More radical is the suggestion that the world was never accurately described as an array of cultures and societies, but that people were once predisposed to see it that way. Argument then might concern why it was so imagined and—given the inaccuracy of that imaginary—in what respects the present really is different. A third, or at least the last, possibility I wish to consider here is that both spatializations make partial sense of different aspects of connection and distinction between populations, but the propensity to privilege one or the other, and the criteria made prominent by any particular way of doing this, require senses to be discovered for the two pairs of key terms (society and culture; global and local) such that their combination (global society; local culture etc.) does not simply compound the problems each term might beg singly. In all three cases, making sense of the world seems to involve addressing the relation between these two ways of spatializing facts about it; but only the third concedes that how the world is, and how it seems, are aspects of the same condition, and that recognition of partial global con nections does not imply the existence of a privileged account to which all, however positioned, might be expected to subscribe.

Theoretical limitations of some notions of society have been widely debated of late (GDAT 1989; Kuper 1992). In some hands, ‘society’ has been employed as an essentialist, totalizing term, with the effect of precipitating a dichotomy between society and the individual prejudicial to understanding people who do not recognize any such antinomy (and, as tellingly, prejudicial to arguing sensibly with those who do essentialize in that fashion). On this issue, I am in sympathy with those who find concepts of sociality irreplaceable in anthropology (and politics) but seek to avoid totalizing ideas of society (Fardon 1992:35-36). My own preference is for attempts to define analytic notions of sociality which throw ‘native’ categories of ‘individual’ and ‘society’ into sharp relief (partly because natives who classify like this, and with whom I disagree, live in my neighbourhood). Apart from remarking in passing that when the ‘natives’ (here or elsewhere) disagree one cannot ag...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: counterworks
• 2. Self and other in contemporary anthropology
• 3. As I lay laughing: encountering global knowledge in Bali
• 4. Against syncretism: ‘Africanizing’ and ‘Cubanizing’ discourses in North American òrìsà worship
• 5. Knowing the past: plural identities and the antinomies of loss in Highland Bolivia
• 6. It takes one to know one: collective resentment and mutual recognition among Greeks in local and global contexts
• 7. Latticed knowledge: eradication and dispersal of the unpalatable in Islam, medicine and anthropological theory
• 8. Whose knowledge and whose power? A new perspective on cultural diffusion
• 9. From cosmology to environmentalism: shamanism as local knowledge in a global setting
• 10. The production of locality
• Name index
• Subject index