The Anthropology of Globalization (with Notes on Neomedievalism, and the End of the Chinese Model of the Nation-State):Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism.;Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts.;The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader

Introduction

Anthropological interest in critical studies of class, system, and inequality has recently been revitalized. Most ethnographers have done this from “below,” while studies of financial, political, and other professional elites have tended to avoid the language of class, capital, and inequality. This themed section draws together ethnographies of family wealth transfers, philanthropy, and private sector development to reflect on the place of critique in the anthropology of elites. While disciplinary norms and ethics usually promote deferral to our research participants, the uncritical translation of these norms “upward” to studies of elites raises concerns. We argue for a critical approach that does not seek political purity or attempt to “get the goods” on elites, but that makes explicit the politics involved in doing ethnography with elites.

Estranged states

This article offers an anthropological perspective on international relations by studying ‘macro-structures’ as the effects of elite-conducted contingent practices. It draws on Der Derian’s genealogical explanation of diplomacy as a second-order mediation among ‘estranged states’. This view sets up the argument that national minorities are constructed as international security concerns within diplomatic discourse because they obstruct nation-states from mutually securing themselves through diplomacy. Thus, each state has a vested interest in supporting other states as stable actors with established national identities. As Others in the nation-state, national minorities threaten the inter-state system as they destabilize any given nation-state’s identity as a diplomatic actor. This situation ostensibly obstructs diplomacy whereby European nation-states seek mutual security by approximating the putative pre-Westphalian unity from which they emerged after Christendom’s collapse. The argument is demonstrated through a critical analysis of post-Second World War international agreements and ethnographic research among western diplomats working on Estonia’s minority integration policy.

Talking about Culture

Culture talk, when analyzed from and within the powerful combination of globalization and human rights discourses, is not exclusively or necessarily a gloss for racism or xenophobia. Rather, as the universally accepted criterion for human belonging and the rights that it confers, culture emerges as the primary means for gaining positive recognition and a valuable place in the emerging global community. People everywhere, as they contend with global flows, express desires for dignity and claim human rights, are therefore invoking, manipulating and solidifying their culture to accord with contemporary discursive demands. Conversely, recognizing its fragmented, invented and historicized nature, many anthropologists are rejecting the reification of culture as they search for alternative ways to express cultural process and human creativity. Following a contextualized analysis of Russians’ talk about their culture, and the Black Hebrews’ assertions of their once-lost, now-found heritage, the article ends by suggesting that anthropologists reinsert culture into the center of anthropology. But now, instead of an impossibly metaphysical concept or reified trait inventory, culture and its genealogy should be interrogated and studied both as it is described and practiced from the natives’ point of view and as embedded within wider social processes of discourse, power and history.

Anthropology in Area Studies

▪ Abstract  After 1989, the interpretation of a complex set of disputes and exigencies settled into a conventional narrative of paradigm shift, in which the intellectual past became essentialized as “traditional area studies” and “classic anthropology.” This approach obscures the processes of engagement (including dispute) by which disciplinary change occurred. The Area Studies1 engagement with interdisciplinary colleagues and voices from the “area” has been critically important over several decades. Necessarily, the intellectual terms for addressing other interlocutors about regional conditions and events have differed according to the experience of the area in changing universalist politics and analysis. The area/anthropology intersection is examined for Africa (where race is basic to disputes), Latin America (where the place of culture and race in political economic arguments is central), and Europe (where culture and nation are at issue). During the 1990s a collective approach to areas emerged. Anthropologists, and particularly scholars of Asia, played a major role. The varied angles from different areas are linked by a broadly shared concern with the formation of emergent political communities and with themes of governmentality. Although the wider circulation of these ideas is promising, does it risk losing the grounding and accountability that Area Studies imposed (like it or not)? The events of September 11, 2001 and those that followed have made starkly clear the poverty and the dangers of essentialism, and the importance of focusing on the loci from which terms of argumentation in relation to power arise. Middle Eastern Studies is briefly discussed as “epicenter” for defining such an approach.