Book Review: "Globalization and Change in Fifteen Cultures" edited by G. Spindler & J.E. Stockard
This anthology is the latest installment in the Case Studies in Anthropology Series, in print since 1960. According to the editors, the aim of the series is to ‘introduce students to cultural differences, as well as to demonstrate the commonality of human lives everywhere’ (p. xv). This encapsulates nicely the dynamic between the universal and the particular, and between the global and the local, so important in contemporary discussions of culture.
What makes this latest anthology different from previous volumes in the series is its purported emphasis on globalisation and change, and its move away from examining cultures in relative isolation. It aims to show students, via ethnographic case studies, some of the local effects of globalisation. The strength of the ethnographic method, and the value of its emphasis on everyday lived experience as a lens with which to understand wider contextual changes and dynamics, is indeed showcased in this collection.
The editors have divided the fifteen case studies into four parts, each focussing on a different dimension of cultural change: Challenges to identity and power, changing gender hierarchies, new patterns of migration and mobility, and the effects of economic change and modernisation. Within these themes, the sweep of case studies featured in the anthology is extremely diverse. In one sense, this diversity is useful for readers in being able to discern commonalities in the ways in which different cultures have resisted, coped, adapted, or accommodated change over time. However, the vast historical sweep covered by the anthology includes processes of change not usually lumped together, but rather, analysed separately under the rubrics of colonialism, modernisation (or nation-building), and globalisation. Whereas modernisation is concerned with national integration, globalisation usually refers to tendencies toward global integration. Yet, in this anthology, the editors have uncritically conflated the two.
In the first chapter, Frances F. Berdan, who combines ethnography and archaeology, looks at the effects of Spanish colonialism on the Aztecs in Mesoamerica, beginning in 1521. The colonial encounter was also a theme taken up by Gilbert Herdt and Birgitta Stolpe in their study of the Sambia people of Papua New Guinea, and by Richard B. Lee in his chapter on the Ju/'Hoansi people of southern Africa. In these two cases, the discussions on colonialism also moved into analyses of the modernising pressures and assimilationist imperatives of the nation-state project, post-independence. In a similar vein, William and Jean Crocker’s case study focussed on the pressures that the Canela people are facing as an indigenous minority within the Brazilian nation-state. These chapters, although extremely interesting, seemed strangely incongruous in a collection purportedly about globalisation. As a further example, Evelyn Blackwood’s chapter on the matrilineal society of the Minangkabau was more concerned with the pressures being imposed by the Indonesian state, not with the supra-national pressures usually associated with globalisation, though there was a cursory reference to export cash-cropping.
What Dru C. Gladney, in his case study of ethnic minorities in China, was able to skillfully do, however, unlike the aforementioned chapters, was to link the homogenising, nationalist imperatives of the nation-state to the interests of neo-liberal globalisation. After Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and the country’s admittance into the World Trade Organisation, China could certainly be seen as part of the neo-liberal club; the difference being that, contrary to neo-liberal ideology, China maintains an extremely large state apparatus. Neo-liberal ideologues elsewhere have also been shown to be contradictory in this regard. One only need look at border protection regimes around the world in light of the ‘war on terror’.
Other contributors to the anthology examined globalisation as it is more commonly understood; that being, as a range of interlinked processes (varyingly political, economic and cultural) all related to increasing global inter-dependence, including the rise of a single world market. So, for example, Cindy L. Hull discussed the linking up of local and global markets on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico; principally around the tourism and manufacturing industries. Naomi H. Bishop and William C. Young, meanwhile, examined the dependence of capital on migrant workers and the effects of these labour migrations on the migrants’ communities of origin, in Nepal and Sudan respectively.
A little more theory on globalisation would have greatly benefitted this collection; not the sort that would seek to reduce complexity, allowing us to ‘tame’ reality and gain a false sense of mastery over it, but rather, that which would render the complexities transparent. While the concept of culture change was certainly tackled more than adequately (see, for example, Robert Tonkinson’s excellent theoretical exposition on pp. 229-31), the concept of globalisation was left somewhat bafflingly unattended to, with most chapters remaining completely disengaged from the current debates surrounding it. Leo R. Chavez’s contribution was a standout exception in this regard, having done an excellent job in examining all of the theoretical complexities associated with transnationalism and migration. On the whole, however, I believe that the editors, in eliding critical reflection about what globalisation means, have done their readers a disservice. And if, by globalisation, the authors did mean to lump colonisation, modernisation, and neo-liberalism together, at least this could have been explicated. For sure, all of these processes are interrelated, but there are also significant discontinuities in the ways in which they operate which could have been brought to light.
Taken as stand-alone pieces, most of the chapters in this anthology are of high-quality scholarship, providing rich ethnographic data on cultural change taking place the world over. Unfortunately, however, they do not work very well as a collection; at least not under the rubric of globalisation. Taking into consideration the fact that cultural change was much more of a common binding theme in the anthology than was globalisation, perhaps the ‘g-word’ could have been omitted from the title altogether and the collection simply called instead, Cultural Change in Fifteen Cultures.
As a point in closing, although the case studies were diverse, it is a shame that this same diversity was not evident in the range of contributors to the anthology, who were overwhelmingly white and/or American. The Japanese anthropologists Toshiyuki Sano and Mariko Fujita provided a refreshing and much-needed departure from this. Their very interesting chapter on the changing cultural makeup of small-town United States, however, was relegated to the very back of the collection, almost as if the inclusion of non-western viewpoints was an afterthought on the part of the editors.
Just a little more care and thought put into the collation of the chapters would have gone a long way.
Posted by J A G U A R I T O (Marco Hewitt)
What makes this latest anthology different from previous volumes in the series is its purported emphasis on globalisation and change, and its move away from examining cultures in relative isolation. It aims to show students, via ethnographic case studies, some of the local effects of globalisation. The strength of the ethnographic method, and the value of its emphasis on everyday lived experience as a lens with which to understand wider contextual changes and dynamics, is indeed showcased in this collection.
The editors have divided the fifteen case studies into four parts, each focussing on a different dimension of cultural change: Challenges to identity and power, changing gender hierarchies, new patterns of migration and mobility, and the effects of economic change and modernisation. Within these themes, the sweep of case studies featured in the anthology is extremely diverse. In one sense, this diversity is useful for readers in being able to discern commonalities in the ways in which different cultures have resisted, coped, adapted, or accommodated change over time. However, the vast historical sweep covered by the anthology includes processes of change not usually lumped together, but rather, analysed separately under the rubrics of colonialism, modernisation (or nation-building), and globalisation. Whereas modernisation is concerned with national integration, globalisation usually refers to tendencies toward global integration. Yet, in this anthology, the editors have uncritically conflated the two.
In the first chapter, Frances F. Berdan, who combines ethnography and archaeology, looks at the effects of Spanish colonialism on the Aztecs in Mesoamerica, beginning in 1521. The colonial encounter was also a theme taken up by Gilbert Herdt and Birgitta Stolpe in their study of the Sambia people of Papua New Guinea, and by Richard B. Lee in his chapter on the Ju/'Hoansi people of southern Africa. In these two cases, the discussions on colonialism also moved into analyses of the modernising pressures and assimilationist imperatives of the nation-state project, post-independence. In a similar vein, William and Jean Crocker’s case study focussed on the pressures that the Canela people are facing as an indigenous minority within the Brazilian nation-state. These chapters, although extremely interesting, seemed strangely incongruous in a collection purportedly about globalisation. As a further example, Evelyn Blackwood’s chapter on the matrilineal society of the Minangkabau was more concerned with the pressures being imposed by the Indonesian state, not with the supra-national pressures usually associated with globalisation, though there was a cursory reference to export cash-cropping.
What Dru C. Gladney, in his case study of ethnic minorities in China, was able to skillfully do, however, unlike the aforementioned chapters, was to link the homogenising, nationalist imperatives of the nation-state to the interests of neo-liberal globalisation. After Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and the country’s admittance into the World Trade Organisation, China could certainly be seen as part of the neo-liberal club; the difference being that, contrary to neo-liberal ideology, China maintains an extremely large state apparatus. Neo-liberal ideologues elsewhere have also been shown to be contradictory in this regard. One only need look at border protection regimes around the world in light of the ‘war on terror’.
Other contributors to the anthology examined globalisation as it is more commonly understood; that being, as a range of interlinked processes (varyingly political, economic and cultural) all related to increasing global inter-dependence, including the rise of a single world market. So, for example, Cindy L. Hull discussed the linking up of local and global markets on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico; principally around the tourism and manufacturing industries. Naomi H. Bishop and William C. Young, meanwhile, examined the dependence of capital on migrant workers and the effects of these labour migrations on the migrants’ communities of origin, in Nepal and Sudan respectively.
A little more theory on globalisation would have greatly benefitted this collection; not the sort that would seek to reduce complexity, allowing us to ‘tame’ reality and gain a false sense of mastery over it, but rather, that which would render the complexities transparent. While the concept of culture change was certainly tackled more than adequately (see, for example, Robert Tonkinson’s excellent theoretical exposition on pp. 229-31), the concept of globalisation was left somewhat bafflingly unattended to, with most chapters remaining completely disengaged from the current debates surrounding it. Leo R. Chavez’s contribution was a standout exception in this regard, having done an excellent job in examining all of the theoretical complexities associated with transnationalism and migration. On the whole, however, I believe that the editors, in eliding critical reflection about what globalisation means, have done their readers a disservice. And if, by globalisation, the authors did mean to lump colonisation, modernisation, and neo-liberalism together, at least this could have been explicated. For sure, all of these processes are interrelated, but there are also significant discontinuities in the ways in which they operate which could have been brought to light.
Taken as stand-alone pieces, most of the chapters in this anthology are of high-quality scholarship, providing rich ethnographic data on cultural change taking place the world over. Unfortunately, however, they do not work very well as a collection; at least not under the rubric of globalisation. Taking into consideration the fact that cultural change was much more of a common binding theme in the anthology than was globalisation, perhaps the ‘g-word’ could have been omitted from the title altogether and the collection simply called instead, Cultural Change in Fifteen Cultures.
As a point in closing, although the case studies were diverse, it is a shame that this same diversity was not evident in the range of contributors to the anthology, who were overwhelmingly white and/or American. The Japanese anthropologists Toshiyuki Sano and Mariko Fujita provided a refreshing and much-needed departure from this. Their very interesting chapter on the changing cultural makeup of small-town United States, however, was relegated to the very back of the collection, almost as if the inclusion of non-western viewpoints was an afterthought on the part of the editors.
Just a little more care and thought put into the collation of the chapters would have gone a long way.
Posted by J A G U A R I T O (Marco Hewitt)
posted by Alice at
Thursday, March 08, 2007
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