Anthropology and the global

In different ways, anthropologists have more often than not been involved with subjects related to what we call globalization today. A discipline that ambitiously sees itself as concerned with everything that is human, past and present, has been characterized by different efforts to understand interlocal relationships and to grasp what is universal and what is particular in a great quantity of human life-ways. It has depended on abstract notions such as humanity and culture(s) to make sense of humanity’s sameness and differences all over the planet. Its effort to encompass in a unique complex vision both the evolution of the species and its cultural diversity made anthropology, within the family of modern academic disciplines, the most elaborated research, methodological, and theoretical effort dedicated to understanding alterity while keeping a single vision of what it means to be human.

The interest in the different moments of the dynamics of biocultural evolution and in the worldwide diffusion of Homo sapiens and its culture(s) opened the anthropological imagination to different possibilities of the human experience in huge temporal and spatial scales, which propitiate a veritable comparative planetary history. The interest in understanding alterity also opened anthropology to distant others, led anthropologists to different interpretations of diverse human experiences, and turned them into travellers, into cosmopolitans who developed a cosmopolitics that envisaged the West as part of a much larger world of interconnections, exchanges, and power relations. I agree with Ulf Hannerz, who sees a true interest in, and engagement with, alterity as the core of cosmopolitanism.Footnote ³ In fact, for me, anthropology is a Western cosmopolitics that is a set of ‘discourses and modes of doing politics concerned with their global reach and impact’ and of ‘discourses that attempt to make sense of human diversity and of alterity’.Footnote ⁴ I also view ‘anthropology as a cosmopolitics … that pretends to be universal but that, at the same time, is highly sensitive to its own limitations and to the efficacy of other cosmopolitics’.Footnote ⁵

In this perspective, anthropology is the Western cosmopolitics specialized in alterity and in the importance of diversity for humankind that became a formal academic discipline in the North Atlantic by the end of the nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that some of the most interesting works on the history of anthropology – that by Ángel Palerm, for instanceFootnote ⁶ – include precursors such as the Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who studied world history, and Friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1500–90), who wrote on ancient Mexico. These precursors also formulated cosmopolitics and interpretations of alterity.

Early involvements with the global

Before proceeding, I want to avoid any anachronistic reading of what follows. Identifying anthropology’s early days with an interest in issues of global scope does not amount to saying that nineteenth-century anthropologists were studying globalization. But it does mean that their unit of analysis was the globe, and that they inscribed in the discipline an interest in planetary issues, and in questions that went far beyond anthropologists’ own Western ways of life. This is a heuristic characteristic that distinguishes anthropological thought.

It is not by chance that evolutionism was the first great theory that anthropologists formally developed and embraced. It was in tune with larger visions of progress, which dominated science and society in a Victorian era aware of England’s centrality in the world. Evolutionism provided an organized vision of humankind on a planetary scale, one in which ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’ represented the past, and the West represented the climax of the development of all previous societies. It also showed the disposition that anthropologists have had, since the very beginning of their discipline, to establish interdisciplinary dialogues, and to borrow notions and visions from other fields. At that point in time, the natural sciences legitimated all claims to truth. Indeed, evolutionists aimed to prove that mental, social, historical, and cultural phenomena could be interpreted by means of laws, in ways similar to those in which the natural world was scrutinized.

Evolutionists performed a contradictory double operation. On the one hand, they ethnocentrically placed ‘savages’ in another time, seeing them as a kind of laboratory of humanity in its pristine, primitive moment, and made claims about the inferiority of non-Western peoples. It is also true, as Eric R. Wolf wrote, that nineteenth-century evolutionism ‘furnished seemingly rational grounds for inequalities of all kinds and supported arguments for why savages and barbarians needed civilized guidance and missionary benevolence, or should be eliminated altogether’.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, the involvement of anthropologists with colonialism is a well-known fact in the discipline’s history.Footnote ⁸ However, the impact of anthropological research on colonial policies is not clear. The use of anthropologists in war and espionage remains a controversial issue in the present,Footnote ⁹ but it is a ghost that particularly haunts imperial anthropologies, and is far from being a universal problem for practitioners across the globe.

However, evolutionists affirmed, in a kind of proto-relativist and anti-racist perspective, the humanity of the savages. They admitted the ‘psychic unity’ of humanity (see, for instance, James Frazer’s statements, in 1908, on the similarity of the functioning of the human mind in all racesFootnote ¹⁰ ), and believed that civilization had developed from the barbarians. In the same direction, they claimed that laws and religions of civilized countries were derived from normative and supernatural experiences of ‘primitives’ (magic, for example). Edward Tylor clearly discarded the ‘bodily configuration’ and skin and hair colours as explanatory factors: ‘it appears both possible and desirable to eliminate considerations of hereditary varieties or races of man, and to treat mankind as homogeneous in nature, though placed in different grades of civilization’.Footnote ¹¹

The universal vision of human potentialities and the attempt to understand the psychic unity were based on a wide range of comparisons, and implied a great effort of generalization to understand humankind’s past and present. As Robert Carneiro has shown, evolutionists used comparisons of synchronic data to draw diachronic conclusions.Footnote ¹² Edward Tylor in England and Lewis Henry Morgan in the United States, two of the most prominent representatives of evolutionism in anthropology, well illustrate the drive to make global comparisons and cross-cultural studies. Tylor ‘amassed a large body of data drawn from some 350 societies’, while Morgan conducted a ‘worldwide study of kinship systems’.Footnote ¹³

Evolution(ism) was not confined to the English-speaking intellectual world. It was a strong European ideology, and was reinterpreted by thinkers of the Enlightenment, who brought forward interpretations that reflected earlier ideas delineated by the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE) and the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius (99–55 BCE).Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, notions of social evolution preceded Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) explanations about biological evolution, and had a great impact on social thought. Their repercussions are also noticeable in the early moments of French anthropological and sociological thought in the work of the illustrious French Sociological School. The influence of Auguste Comte’s (1798–1857) oeuvre in Émile Durkheim, the great intellectual leader of the Année sociologique, is responsible, among other things, for the understanding that humanity has progressed through different stages into civilization. Comte, the father of positivism, proposed the law of three stages: the theological stage, the metaphysical stage, and the positive stage. The last is the most complex moment in global history, the apex of rationality and science as modes of knowledge production. For Durkheim and his renowned nephew Marcel Mauss, the simple develops into the complex, and the study of the primitives allows us to better understand how society works. Mauss and Durkheim’s article ‘Primitive classification’ (1903), and Durkheim’s efforts to interpret the Elementary forms of religious life (1912) in order to make universal sociological and anthropological claims, illustrate this kind of vision.Footnote ¹⁵

For the sake of my arguments in this article, what is important is that, at anthropology’s foundational moment, anthropologists formulated a debate on human history and an orderly vision of the globe. One of evolutionists’ major problems was, of course, that the ranking of people in evolutionary stages meant a simultaneous glorification of the West as the centre of the world, in a time of major colonialist expansion. Thus, to a great extent, this theory is highly unsatisfactory because of its ideological underpinnings.

In spite of major conceptual and theoretical criticisms, the influence of evolutionism did not completely disappear, either in society or in academia. Its resonances can be noticed in most discourses on development that, after the Second World War, classified nations with such terms as ‘underdeveloped’, ‘backward’, or – in an attempt to clearly alleviate the negative connotations of such biased vocabulary – ‘developing countries’. Strong scholarly criticism paralysed evolutionism’s influence in academia. However, it started to resurface, especially in its multi-lineal version, in the late 1930s, in American anthropology, in the work of Leslie White, who, in 1939, presented a paper on ‘the evolutionary approach’ at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association.Footnote ¹⁶ In the following two decades, White wrote other influential pieces defending evolution. Julian Steward was another leading ‘figure in the resurgence of cultural evolution’ in the late 1940s and throughout the 1960s, together with ethnologists such as Kalervo Oberg and Elman Service.Footnote ¹⁷ Currently, the great questions about humanity’s cultural, social, economic, and political evolution remain as important issues, mostly tackled by archaeologists.Footnote ¹⁸

Anti-evolutionism was equally central in the history of anthropology, and was strongly based on a competing nineteenth-century explanation of the global development of humankind: diffusionism. This theory was interested in understanding how the world has been structured and changed by the spread of culture traits from identifiable central sites (origin points) to other places, through cross-cultural borrowings that resulted from different kinds of contacts and interconnections (such as trade, warfare, and migration). Here the focus is on interactions and exchanges. Diffusionism was first elaborated by Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), a German geographer who challenged the idea that equal solutions or inventions were found in different places because of the psychic unity of humankind. He ‘is credited with positing the historical unity of humanity, which sees all human culture as a product of global interaction’.Footnote ¹⁹ Diffusionism shows, again, that in the discipline’s early days anthropologists were thinking on a global scale. The echoes of its influence can still be felt, not only in anthropology but in all the social sciences. In current studies of how things, people, capital, and information move on a global scale, diffusionism reverberates in terms such as ‘flows’ and ‘dissemination’, which are commonly found in many approaches to globalization.

Anti-evolutionism lasted for decades, with the criticisms and growing influence of one of the most important thinkers in the history of anthropology, Franz Boas, the German-born anthropologist, who is often considered the father of American anthropology. Although his work and that of his many students is more commonly known as historical particularism, Boas, originally a geographer trained in Germany, was also concerned with innovation and diffusion, a typical diffusionist agenda. But he limited the explanatory power of diffusion ‘to areas relatively near to each other, where it was possible to reasonably reconstruct the history of cultural transmissions’.Footnote ²⁰ Boas’ influential critique of the uses of comparison, the heart of evolutionist methodology, was published in 1896.Footnote ²¹ He favoured interpretations based on empirical evidence, and his historical method called for ‘a well-defined and restricted territory’.Footnote ²²

The interest in local-level descriptions, and the ensuing methodological emphasis on ethnography, had a major impetus with the paradigmatic influence of Bronislaw Malinowski, who published his classic The Argonauts of the western Pacific in 1922.Footnote ²³ However, in spite of the growth of an empiricist approach, anthropologists did not lose their interest in universal generalizations, or in exchange as a major feature of human populations. Suffice it to say that the kula exchange, described by Malinowski in Argonauts, was a sophisticated system of circulation of things and values. It provided an important source for one of the best-known general theories in anthropology, posited by Marcel Mauss in an equally classic essay originally published in 1925 in the journal Année sociologique.Footnote ²⁴ It is a magnificent exploration of the role of the gift and of reciprocity in social life.

I am arguing that the turn to the local, to the community, or better to the thorough ethnographic examination of each context, happened against the background of the assumption of, and dialogue with, the universal character of the human experience. The emphasis on the local did not preclude the wider, comparative, global, anthropological gaze. It is possible to say that the history of anthropology is a movement that alternates or combines tendencies with greater emphasis on the local and an understanding of societies as closed units, with others that emphasize the supra-local or the local and its interconnections seen as part of a larger web. In 1992, the sociologist Roland Robertson introduced in the academic literature the neologism ‘glocalization’ to go beyond the mechanical distinction between the global and the local, and to indicate the simultaneity of universalizing and particularizing trends in current social, political, and economic life.Footnote ²⁵ I would like to advance the idea that, more often than not, ‘glocalization’ has been a key issue for anthropologists because relationships between the local and the supra-local, or the inter-local, as well as between particulars and universals, have largely been, in one way or another, a preoccupation or a critical object of debate throughout the discipline’s history.

Supra-local interests, levels of integration, and Marxists

The American anthropologist David Nugent has shown how the growth of world studies in the social sciences in the United States was backed by powerful foundations and related to processes of empire formation.Footnote ²⁶ He pointed to the importance of the interwar period, and emphasized the central role that ‘area studies’ played during the Second World War and the Cold War to establish a new ‘geography of knowledge’, which was highly in tune with American military’s needs. According to Nugent, ‘area studies in war were designed to help address the short-term security concerns of US military government. Area studies in peace were meant to serve the long-term security interests of Cold War, global governmentality.’Footnote ²⁷ While the influence of area studies in the opening of American academia to study the regions of the world is undeniable, not all trajectories and scholarly projects can be reduced to it.

The importance of Robert Redfield, an anthropologist working at the University of Chicago, for the establishment of global studies is thoroughly explored in Katja Naumann’s essay in this issue.Footnote ²⁸ In the 1940s and 1950s, Redfield encouraged anthropologists to develop stronger relationships with history and sociology, to look beyond ‘folk societies’, and to do comparative analysis of world cultures that were critical of Eurocentrism. Sol Tax was another anthropologist who participated in this effort with Redfield in Chicago. Interestingly enough, Tax, a child of Russian Jewish migrants, would later incarnate ‘the world mission of liberal democratic anthropology’ and move ‘firmly into the role of master impresario of world anthropology’.Footnote ²⁹ In 1959, Tax founded a ‘world journal’, Current Anthropology; in 1973, he organized and chaired the ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Chicago.

In the 1950s, Julian Steward, who, as mentioned before, was one of the authors who reintroduced evolutionist perspectives in anthropology, clearly brought supra-local agencies back to the anthropological toolbox. He coined the notion of levels of integration to describe influences of supra-local agencies and agents, especially those related to ‘the culture of a modern nation’, on the communities that anthropologists observed. He argued that ‘a total national culture’ should be divided into ‘two general kinds of features: first, those that function and must be studied on a national level; second, those that pertain to sociocultural segments or subgroups of the population’. The latter are capable of being studied by the ethnographic method but ‘a great many different methods must be used to study any national culture in its totality’.Footnote ³⁰

Although Steward’s propositions were somewhat schematic, they opened a window that allowed a former student of his, Eric R. Wolf, to develop, in 1956, a more encompassing and dynamic interpretation. Wolf based his notions on his research experience in Mexico. He thought that ‘communities and national institutions’ were ‘components of an encompassing web of relations’, within which ‘the personnel of national institutions reached down into communities, while individuals and groups within communities forged ties to controllers of resources and power outside them’. Wolf was more concerned with ‘the bonds that connect groups on different levels of the larger society’, and recognized that the ‘traditional models of communities and national institutions’ had become ‘obsolete’. He thus noticed the importance of ‘brokers’, concrete social agents who acted as middlemen between ‘larger systems’ and people enmeshed in local, community life. He theorized that the study of brokers would ‘prove increasingly rewarding, as anthropologists shift their attention from the internal organization of communities to the manner of their integration into larger systems. For they stand guard over the crucial junctures or synapses of relationships that connect the local system to the larger whole.’Footnote ³¹ By pointing out the existence of brokers, Wolf was also indicating, perhaps unwittingly, the possibility that this kind of agent could be studied by the ethnographic method. The influence of Marxist thought and of a wider vision of historical interconnections were features of Wolf’s scholarship that would only accrue with the passage of time. Indeed, Marxists were well aware of how capitalist global expansion was crucial for the understanding of the world. Romain Lecler, in his article in this issue, shows how The communist manifesto (1848), written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, anticipated many of the issues that would later be analysed by scholars of globalization studies.Footnote ³²

McCarthyism spread fears of communist influence in the US from the late 1940s through the 1950s, and created several, mostly invisible, negative effects in teaching, writing, and funding practices that marked the development of American anthropology in the Cold War. In his book about McCarthyism and American anthropology, David Price states that ‘anthropologists during the early Cold War were keenly aware of the dangers of openly applying Marxist analysis in their work, and many altered their work accordingly. … Other anthropologists simply avoided considering Marxist approaches to social phenomena altogether.’Footnote ³³

Outside the US, during the 1960s and 1970s, there were strong developments of Marxist anthropologies, especially in France and Latin America. The centrality of the concept of social reproduction in the work of Maurice Godelier and of other French Marxists in the 1970s played an important role in ‘the movement in the direction of a global systemic anthropology’. It is a concept that ‘implies both systematicity and historical transformation’; methodologically, one needed to ‘simply ask whether the population in question reproduces itself based in its own resources or whether its reproduction is part of a larger regional or even wider set of relations and flows’.Footnote ³⁴

The 1970s also saw other important theoretical advances. Dependency theory, for instance, became a highly influential sociological theory. It was strongly elaborated in Latin America, especially at CEPAL (the Spanish acronym for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), in Santiago, Chile, and was crucial for a reformulation of development theories, and for the understanding of capitalism, its worldwide expansion, and its articulations in national settings. In 1974, the Marxist sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein published his landmark work, The modern world-system, a book that impacted all the social sciences and beyond.Footnote ³⁵ The echoes of dependency theory are clear in Wallerstein, who posited that the world was organized in terms of relations between centre, semi-peripheries, and peripheries. Global capitalist expansion had been a classical subject of Marxist theory since the works of Karl Marx himself and of other influential authors, such as Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.Footnote ³⁶ However, perhaps Wallerstein’s most important contribution was to show that, starting in the fifteenth century, capitalism created a framework within which an unequal history of economic and political power unfolded, in a world where boundaries were relativized. A historical approach is another central hallmark of Marxism. It is thus no surprise that several Marxist anthropologists turned to history to do their studies, and found in the world-system approach a useful and productive notion. They thus became pioneers of the studies of globalization in anthropology.

This was precisely the case for Ángel Palerm, Sidney Mintz, and Eric Wolf, who had developed a close relationship over the years: ‘They gave priority to mapping interconnecting spaces and evolutionary trajectories through people’s lives and purposes rather than reducing people in the periphery to passive anonymous social groups … and dared to understand the larger forces of the modern world system according to local responses.’Footnote ³⁷ Ángel Palerm was a Spanish-born anthropologist who developed a prominent career in Mexico. He wrote, among other subjects, about the importance of Mexican silver in feeding the world system under the Spanish flag, concluding that ‘silver did not place Mexico in the margins of capitalist development but in its centre, although with a specialized and dependent role’.Footnote ³⁸ Sidney Mintz, another student of Julian Steward, and Eric Wolf, were two of the most important and prolific American Marxist anthropologists, and they were life-long friends. They finished their doctoral studies at Columbia University in 1951 after participating in the famous Puerto Rico Project, led by Steward. Mintz’s book Sweetness and power (1985) focused on how another commodity, sugar, was crucial for the development of long-distance interconnections, new industrial opportunities, capital accumulation, and flows of people, and for the creation of the global market.Footnote ³⁹ Another distinguished Mexican anthropologist, Arturo Warman, would focus on the history of corn as a commodity, its global dissemination, and its importance for the ‘founding of the modern world and the world system’ marked by unequal exchanges.Footnote ⁴⁰

Wolf’s 1982 magnum opus, Europe and the people without history, is widely seen as the first anthropological work on globalization. It is an anthropological history of capitalist expansion from the fifteenth century to the twentieth. Anthropologists who study globalization, such as Michael Kearney, Jonathan Friedman, and Thomas Hylland Eriksen, praise, from different perspectives, the importance of Wolf’s work.Footnote ⁴¹ Keith Hart considered it to be ‘the most impressive achievement of Marxist synthesis in late twentieth-century anthropology’.Footnote ⁴² Europe and the people without history is a book about historical interconnections, flows of people and commodities, and the articulation of forms and modes of production on a global scale. It reveals how the structuring of the world capitalist system encompassed, in contradictory and conflicting ways, a great number of ethnic segments over a period of five centuries. It takes the reader on a journey to all continents, and shows how capitalist expansion, whether in its voracity for new commodities or in its voracity for new sources of labour power in the form of African slaves, or indentured Indian workers, for instance, changed the configuration of the world. Modes of production are a central concept in the book. Wolf discusses the existence of three modes of production – capitalist, tributary, and kin-ordered – and remarks that:

The book concludes by suggesting the concept of ‘ethnic segmentation’, a historical and anthropological notion that is useful for interpreting labour flows and the diversity they create. It is helpful to see the internal ethnic diversity of large-scale political and economic units, such as nation-states, or of smaller ones such as labour markets – those of a factory or of a large infrastructure project, for instance – as end results, historically constructed by capitalist needs for labour power in different conjunctures and areas of the world. In Europe and the people without history, flows of labour migrants from Africa, Asia, or Europe are interpreted within the framework of a world system managed by capitalist interests. The capitalist mode thus creates homogeneity and heterogeneity everywhere. It generates ‘a wider unity through the constant reconstitution of its characteristic capital–labour relationship’, and at the same time it creates ‘diversity, accentuating social opposition and segmentation even as it unifies. Within an ever more integrated world, we witness the growth of ever more diverse proletarian diasporas.’Footnote ⁴⁴ Eric Wolf wrote a tour de force, the reading of which is central for all those who wish to understand globalization, in a time when this notion did not exist.

At the end of the 1980s, another Marxist made a very important contribution to nascent studies of globalization. In 1989, in the midst of the discussion on postmodernism, David Harvey, a geographer who at the time worked at Johns Hopkins University, published The condition of postmodernity.Footnote ⁴⁵ ‘Time–space compression’, a notion that Harvey coined in this book, is essential for the understanding of structural material processes that have fuelled what he called the ‘shrinking of the world’ and the emergence and interconnections of global fragmented spaces, as well as the (re)organization of the relationships between places. Time–space compression is a concept based on the development of the transportation and communication industries, which annihilate space through time. The great boost in speed and simultaneity unleashed by the Industrial Revolution was responsible for the transformation of the world into a smaller entity, one where the entanglements and interconnections rapidly and constantly increase. In consequence, the influences of faraway places in a myriad of loci further increase, generating more complex flows of peoples, information, and commodities, as well as more complex social, economic, cultural, and political entanglements. Coincidentally, Harvey would later move from Johns Hopkins to the PhD Program in Anthropology of the City University of New York, where Eric R. Wolf worked for decades.

It was at around the same time that the sociologist Saskia Sassen published her equally influential The global city: New York, London, Tokyo.Footnote ⁴⁶ Her book was particularly important because it showed that there were specific territories, metropolitan centres, in which global phenomena – such as highly dynamic digitized international financial flows, migratory movements, and increased ethnic segmentations – occurred or were structured. Sassen coined the expression ‘decentralization with centralization’. This important oxymoron revealed the contradictory and intricate nature of the networks of the spatially dispersed but integrated geography that globalization was generating. Her book also showed the need for specific territories which were capable of intermediating different functions organic to the development of globalization. Both Harvey and Sassen, prolific writers, would continue to make important contributions to the study of globalization. Their works have been and are widely used by anthropologists; in fact, they transcend disciplinary barriers, clearly showing the interdisciplinary nature of the debates on globalization.

Studying ‘real globalization’ and transnationalism

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, signalling the end of a bipolar world. The 1990s are thus the decade when ‘real’ globalization started: that is, when the period of a triumphant capitalist world began. The capitalist world system was able to spread to new areas previously beyond its reach, reorganizing global geopolitics, ideologies, and utopias. Notions of an unbounded, decentred, and deterritorialized world, of flows, dispersion, dissemination, transnationalism, and fragmented identities, started to become popular among anthropologists. Postcolonialism joined postmodernism as an influential scholarly approach in the 1990s. Postcolonialism’s critique of Western knowledge imperialism was consistent with anthropology’s age-old critique of ethnocentrism. The vision of a postcolonial world, in which hybridity was central in both the metropolises and the peripheries, was sure to attract the attention of anthropologists, many of them highly involved in multicultural theories and politics.

Two journals dedicated to the study of globalization were founded: Public Culture in 1988, and Identities in 1994.Footnote ⁴⁷ A piece by Arjun Appadurai, first published in 1990 in Public Culture, which is perhaps the most cited article on globalization written by an anthropologist, may be considered a landmark in anthropological debates on the subject.Footnote ⁴⁸ Appadurai proposed thinking about globalization in terms of five ‘scapes’ that kept disjunctive relationships among them: ethnoscapes (the increase in complexity in ethnic flows and segmentations across the globe), mediascapes (how the media create and disseminate information, imagined worlds, and ways of understanding them), technoscapes (the influences of technology in the construction of global interactions and exchanges), financescapes (the global flows and hegemony of financial capital), and ideoscapes (the global flows of Western discourses and worldviews of the Enlightenment, such as freedom and democracy).

Appadurai’s visual and combinatory metaphor allowed for the interpretation of globalization as a result of processes that unevenly merge, according to how they are indigenized in different places by concrete agents and agencies. It clearly pointed out that globalization and its results are not uniform. As a visual metaphor, ‘scape’ also indicated that, depending on subject positions, globalization could be ‘seen’, lived, and understood from diverse angles, and changed in different ways. Heyman and Campbell later criticized Appadurai’s work from a political economy perspective. They argued that his approach comprised a formless globalism that failed to see the structuring role that capital played in globalization. For them, the emphasis on disjuncture was another form of reductionism.Footnote ⁴⁹

Ethnography and globalization

A recurrent field of debates in anthropology revolves around ethnography as a crucial method for the discipline. Since ethnography was traditionally associated with delimited territories that could be observed and in which researchers could participate in several aspects of local life, the anthropological interest in globalization meant a challenge to this distinguishing disciplinary feature. George Marcus elaborated a well-known response to this conundrum in articles published in 1991 and 1995, for instance.Footnote ⁵⁰ He proposed multi-sited ethnography as a way of emphasizing ‘the continued value of participant observation but covering a greater range of sites’ as an ‘ethnographic approach to the capitalist world system’.Footnote ⁵¹ The goal was to go beyond the empiricism that bounded ethnography to unique places, and to do research into as many connections and loci as possible that were important for the understanding of the subject under scrutiny: ‘Multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography.’Footnote ⁵²

Pablo Lapegna wrote an interesting piece on the discussions and problems that anthropologists face when doing ethnography on the global scale. He contrasts Marcus’ multi-sited approach with another, which he calls ‘global ethnography’. Among other criticisms of multi-sited ethnography, this approach posits that there is a need to see ‘how sites are produced, which politics of scale mould them and what hierarchies are (re)created in the process’, as well as to note that ‘the multiplicity of sites could be one among other strategies to investigate the causes and consequences of global process’. For global ethnographers, nothing hinders researchers from understanding how a single location became enmeshed with global dynamics, and has undergone historical changes, or was created as ‘local’.Footnote ⁵³

Ethnography is obviously not the only feature to distinguish anthropology as a discipline. While discussing keywords in transnational anthropology, Ulf Hannerz shows that preoccupations with proving that the ‘weakest’ exert cultural influences on the ‘strongest’, with multicentrality, asymmetric flows, and counterflows, are not new.Footnote ⁵⁴ I agree with the criticism of ‘global ethnographers’, according to which ‘the assumption of a single world-capitalist system should not preclude questions about its heterogeneous formations and the diversity of projects involving global processes’.Footnote ⁵⁵

In this vein, based on ethnographies developed in different parts of the world, I have proposed the existence of a ‘non-hegemonic world system’ that is a result of economic globalization from below.Footnote ⁵⁶ It is a set of production processes and trade chains that have generated a great number of cross-border flows and market places in which global gadgets, toys, clothes, watches, sunglasses, electronics, videos, and many other commodities – mostly unauthorized copies of luxury goods – are sold worldwide. China is the central node of this system, which has different ramifications all over the globe. This non-hegemonic world system is (re)produced by millions of people across the world who, from subaltern subject positions, take advantage of several forces unleashed by globalization (the internet and cell phones, for instance) in order to have access to flows of global wealth. It is far from being separated from the hegemonic world system, the operators of which strive to regulate and control the non-hegemonic one, but it also profits from its existence in different ways, as the importance of money laundering and fiscal paradises in the global economy demonstrates.Footnote ⁵⁷

Globalization and transnationalism: migrants, development, global capitalism, and governance

The relationships between globalization and transnationalism are complicated. The definitions of the two concepts often overlap in diverse ways and are differently used in the literature. There are two major modes for understanding what transnationalism is: one weak and the other strong. The weak mode emphasizes the existence of a world without borders: that is, the manipulations that various agents and agencies impose on borders. The strong mode emphasizes how the ‘national’ – that is, those experiences determined by the existence of the nation-state – increasingly loses power of structuration in the face of the dynamics of political, economic, cultural, and social forces that operate beyond the reach or control of nation-states. I subscribe to the mode that views transnationalism as a set of phenomena in which the power of structuration of the nation-state is irrelevant or non-existent.

Anthropologists such as Néstor García Canclini, one of the most well-known Latin American interpreters of globalization, often call attention to the fact that transnationalism is more complex than internationalization. The latter is seen as historically associated with the early processes of capitalist expansion and of nation-building since the sixteenth century. While transnationalism was certainly preceded by other ideologies, such as cosmopolitanism, it is envisaged as being related to more recent events, especially to the intensification of globalization brought on by the acceleration of time–space compression and the concomitant development of the new communication and information technologies of the late twentieth century. These movements have favoured a truly global integration, the planetary hegemony of financial capital, and a ‘more complex and interdependent interaction among dispersed loci of production, circulation and consumption’.Footnote ⁵⁸

In the 1990s (and later), transnationalism became a great concern for anthropologists. Migration and identity studies became an especially fruitful area of research for inquiring about fragmented identities in a ‘borderless world’. The effects of the rapidly growing European Union, of new communication and information technologies, and of new migratory flows prompted visions of a fluid society made up of cosmopolitans who seemed to handle a multicultural world on their own behalf. In anthropology, the book Nations unbound: transnational projects, postcolonial predicaments, and deterritorialized nation-states, published in 1994, by Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, drew attention to transnational migrants and posited the following:

This perspective allowed, among other things, the ethnographic study of transnationalism, as well as the practice of multi-sited ethnographies that took into consideration, for instance, the experiences of Haitian migrants in both New York City and Haiti. Indigenous migrants, peasants from the state of Oaxaca, in Mexico, living in California could now be seen as producers of global spaces, and were analysed by Michael Kearney as members of Oaxacalifornia. This is an approach sensitive to the intertwining of the local and the global, to the imbrication of different places and their importance for the (re)production of migrants’ changing identities and political and economic lives.Footnote ⁶⁰ The influence of this perspective was felt beyond anthropology and beyond the United States, and is still present today. Take, for instance, the comparative studies by the Mexican anthropologists Federico Besserer and Raúl Nieto on what they call the ‘transnational city’, a concept that describes ‘the city made up of connections among urban margins, the city where globalization from below is practised, a demographically much larger city with a huge social and cultural density’.Footnote ⁶¹

Anthropologists in other countries also consistently developed different interests in globalization and transnationalism. In Sweden, Hannerz published Transnational connections in 1996, a book in which he developed path-breaking analysis on cosmopolitanism and cultural diversity. Hannerz’s notion of transnational cultures led him to posit the existence of ‘physical centres’ of transnational culture.Footnote ⁶² This, in turn, inspired me to do research on the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington, DC. Based on a year’s field research, I analysed the ethnic segmentation of the Bank’s labour force, which was structured by global elite migratory flows based on education and on the command of the English language. I also analysed the political ethnic organizations of the Bank’s employees, and concluded that ‘development’ operated as a global discourse, which, besides pretending to be universal, unified an otherwise highly diversified migrant population.Footnote ⁶³

The World Bank and the development debate were not new to me. I had previously written a critique of development based on another ethnographic research, carried out on the border of Argentina and Paraguay, during the construction of a major dam on the Paraná river, the Yacyretá Hydroelectric High Dam.Footnote ⁶⁴ At that point I coined the notion of ‘consortiation’ to describe the series of changing alliances that transnational, international, national, regional, and local agents and agencies made, in order to create consortia and to guarantee the appropriate political and economic environment for the construction of the multi-billion dollar project. I also analysed a unique transnational fragmented identity, that of the ‘work site animals’, the label that the Argentinian workers applied to the migratory labour force controlled by major international civil engineering corporations, which was made up of hundreds of foreigners. These labour migrants rotate around the world, constructing large-scale projects in different continents, gradually losing their identifications with their countries of origin. They live in ethnically segmented labour camps built by the corporations in isolated areas, and they usually marry foreign women whom they meet in their migratory experiences. In Yacyretá, the lead construction firm was Italian. In consequence, children of the Italian project elite went to an Italian school set up by the corporation in the labour camp. I concluded that what was then called a ‘development project’ did not really bring ‘development’ to all involved in the initiative, especially not to local people, who were employed as cheap labour or suffered the consequences of forced resettlement caused by the large-scale construction project and the huge reservoir that it generated. In fact, the anthropological critique of ‘development’, represented by the work of other authors such as Arturo Escobar and James Ferguson, can be considered as one of the areas of global studies to which anthropologists have made major contributions.Footnote ⁶⁵

Anthropological contributions to ‘postdevelopment theory’ started to develop in the 1990s with the acknowledgement that ‘development’ is a discourse that is anchored in the unequal power existing among loci of the world system, and that is meant to legitimize capitalist expansion on a global scale. Since development discourses reflect Western ideologies, notions of an objectified and commoditized nature, and unilineal conceptions of progressive time, the anthropological critique concluded that development cannot be seen as a universal proposition floating above other notions of good life and destiny. Instead, it should be seen as a mechanism of control that aims to ‘modernize’ and promote changes in native societies around the world. The formulation of notions such as vivir bien and buen vivir by indigenous intellectuals in Bolivia and Ecuador, and their incorporation in these countries’ constitutions (2009 and 2008, respectively), reinforced anthropologists’ long-standing claims regarding the importance of respecting local peoples’ systems of knowledge and notions of destiny within development encounters and republican life. Such claims had previously made important impacts on global policy-making in the field of development, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, decades that were marked by the influence of environmentalism and ‘sustainable development’ within global governance agencies. Anthropologists working in the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington, for instance, played a relevant role in advocating that people should be a priority in development encounters.Footnote ⁶⁶

The idea of finding agents, agencies, and places that can be effectively studied by the ethnographic method has taken anthropologists to carry out research in scenarios that hardly correspond to the image of a discipline dedicated to interpreting the ‘savage slot’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Karen Ho’s work is a fine example.Footnote ⁶⁸ Instead of abstractly discussing the prominence of financial capital in the globalized world, she carried out an ethnography on Wall Street: ‘the concentration of financial institutions and actor-networks (investment banks, pension and mutual funds, stock exchanges, hedge funds and private equity firms) that embody a particular financial ethos and set of practices, and act as primary spokes-people for the globalisation of U.S. capitalism’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Rather than naturalizing the conflation of US capitalism with Western and global capitalism, she contended that ‘capitalist actions are always already constructed through complex, contested, and locally specific cultural ethos, motivations, and practices that change overtime’; and she showed that it is the location of financially dominant capitalism ‘at a distinctly American centre of financial power – Wall Street investment banking – that enables its global recognition, spread, and dominance’.Footnote ⁷⁰

This ethnographic gaze oriented towards the study of globalization is perhaps also what led Ulf Hannerz to conduct research on foreign correspondents:

The ‘globalization of consciousness’ can be driven by global governance institutions, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations. In France, Marc Abélès is a leader of anthropological globalization studies and has published extensively on the subject.Footnote ⁷² He coordinated a team of international anthropologists from Argentina, Canada, China, France, Germany, and the United States, to ‘carry on an anthropology of transnational governance’ based on research done within the WTO’s headquarters in Geneva. They focused on the organization’s most ‘characteristic features’: multiculturalism, negotiation, attitudes towards trade, and consensus.Footnote ⁷³ With a different motivation, another senior French anthropologist, Irène Bellier, conducted field research in the United Nations headquarters in New York, to understand how Indian activists became part of international movements and participated in the formulation of global policies concerning autochthonous peoples’ rights.Footnote ⁷⁴ She investigated the globalization of identities and how the interplay of the global and the local impacts the ways ‘in which indigenous issues are unfolding on the world stage and the ways in which they return to the local level, through development programmes and projects funded by various multilateral organizations and NGOs’.Footnote ⁷⁵

The impact of the internet

The advent of the internet in the 1990s, masterfully interpreted by Manuel Castells in books such as The rise of the network society, opened up another area of interest highly relevant to globalization studies.Footnote ⁷⁶ Anthropologists and other social scientists turned their attention to what seemed to be the beginning of a new world. Arturo Escobar, in his pioneering article ‘Welcome to Cyberia’, posited that his point of departure was the belief that ‘any technology represents a cultural invention, in the sense that it brings forth a world; it emerges out of particular cultural conditions and in turn helps to create new ones’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Castells addressed a similar question, as noted by the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who reproduces a lengthy passage of Castells’ book End of millennium:

As Carmen Bueno Castellanos states, what Castells calls the space of flows ‘has overtaken the conception of georeferenced space. In the network society, alternative modes of accumulation are based on economic strategies that are diluted within a relational logic, taking on a kaleidoscopic morphology in constant expansion and contraction. The idea of “place” disappears, making room for the social and relational construction of discontinuous spaces.’Footnote ⁷⁹ The flexible qualities of cyberspace, a borderless virtual space where a myriad of subjects located in different areas of the world can gather, prompted me to call the internet the techno-symbolic basis of the ‘transnational virtual-imagined community’. I was inspired by Benedict Anderson’s well-known interpretation of the relationship between print capitalism and the emergence of nationalism.Footnote ⁸⁰ I have argued that cyberspace made the transnational level of integration visible and manageable, and it gave political agents the possibility to practise ‘witnessing at a distance’ and ‘political activism at a distance’, thus creating ‘cybercultural politics’ as a contemporary transnational political force.Footnote ⁸¹ More recently, I have published on the ‘hegemony of electronic-computer capitalism’ in order to explain how Google and Facebook came to be among the most powerful corporations and dominate today’s hearts and minds by transforming words into a new commodity as well as by exploring the virtual crowds’ work and creativity for free.Footnote ⁸²

Anthropologists’ interest in the internet has developed over the years and, as we should expect, has also involved discussions on ethnography, as many researchers started to study different virtual worlds. Tom Boellstorff’s work is particularly outstanding. He wrote an ethnographic account of Second Life, the virtual world owned by Linden Lab, to study virtual worlds in their own terms, and to contribute to the understanding of new forms of sociality within cyberspace.Footnote ⁸³ He also wrote with other colleagues a book on methodological aspects of doing research in virtual worlds and co-edited one on big data.Footnote ⁸⁴

World anthropologies: thinking anthropology on the global level

Besides highlighting the agency of the ‘global South’ in the production of theory,Footnote ⁸⁵ anthropologists have used their accumulated knowledge on globalization and Western dominance to analyse their own discipline’s internal global hierarchies and the flows of power and visibility within the ‘world system of anthropological production’, as the Japanese anthropologist Takami Kuwayama calls it.Footnote ⁸⁶ In the early 2000s, a movement called the World Anthropologies Network (WAN) posited the need to redefine the relationships among anthropologists and anthropologies on the global level.Footnote ⁸⁷ The WAN criticized the hegemony of Anglo-American anthropology, and its agendas and styles, advocating the need for more horizontal, heteroglossic relationships among world anthropologies.Footnote ⁸⁸ The goal was to intervene in the global flows of anthropological knowledge, and to benefit from a more complex cross-fertilization. The discipline’s own diversity would counteract the trend towards a monological anthropology dominated by Anglo-American production. A first and urgent task was to make visible the histories of the anthropologies without history, to use the ironic expression coined by the Mexican anthropologist Esteban Krotz.Footnote ⁸⁹

The WAN made theoretical contributions to the understanding of anthropology’s global dissemination and reproduction. Among such contributions I will highlight the notions of metropolitan provincialism, the closure of the disciplinary centres to knowledge produced elsewhere, and provincial cosmopolitanism, the opening of the non-hegemonic centres to a plurality of loci of enunciation of anthropological knowledge.Footnote ⁹⁰

The WAN also inspired practical initiatives to construct the newly envisaged scenario. In 2004, influenced by the world anthropologies’ debate, another network, the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA) was founded in Recife, Brazil, in a meeting attended by fourteen presidents of national and international anthropological associations. The presidents of the national associations of Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States were present. The Japanese association sent its director of international relations. The following international associations also attended the meeting: the European Association of Social Anthropologists, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), the Latin American Association of Anthropology, and the Pan-African Anthropological Association.

The WCAA aimed to change the global disciplinary politics to construct a more plural global anthropology. Its online journal, Déjà Lu (Already Read), republishes, in any language, articles of international interest that have appeared in anthropological journals across the globe; the 2018 issue had forty-four articles, freely available online. More than fifty associations are currently linked to the WCAA, which, in 2018, came together with the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) to found a new bicameral organization, the World Anthropological Union (WAU). According to Thomas Reuter:

When acting politically to develop a more heteroglossic discipline that takes advantage of its own global diversity, anthropologists have consistently taken into consideration the interplay and tensions between local and global processes in order to frame new transnational disciplinary worldviews. Johannes Fabian rightly noted that the WAN’s project cannot be reduced to the issue of fostering the visibility of non-hegemonic, national anthropologies.Footnote ⁹² Rather, ‘the idea is to give voice to critical transnational and cosmopolitan anthropologists to construct global alliances and promote cooperation’.Footnote ⁹³

Twenty-first-century anthropology and globalization

Since the beginning of the discipline in the nineteenth century, anthropologists have been interested in understanding a multiplicity of subjects. In this endeavour, they have used various methods and have been influenced by different theories and concepts. In consequence, anthropology has developed relations with archaeology, biology, cultural studies, economics, gender studies, geography, history, linguistics, literary analysis, media and internet studies, philosophy, political sciences, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and statistics. Additionally, many of us, who ‘wish to understand our moment in history’, know, like Keith Hart does, that we ‘need a global perspective on humanity’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Furthermore, I cannot but agree with Marc Abélès, who, in his book on the anthropology of globalization, refuses the image of a discipline practised by ‘the last zealots of a world without history’ and relegated to contemplating the ‘inertia of tradition’. This perspective assigns to economists, sociologists, and experts in international relations the power to understand globalization, while anthropologists are destined to the margins, to the periphery, to understand the local, the idiosyncratic, the vision of the vanquished. He concludes that we need ‘to think of globalization … as a fabric of interactions that is possible to be apprehended in localized sites and in the analysis of phenomena capable of being the object of fine ethnographies’.Footnote ⁹⁵

I also agree with Ulf Hannerz, who, in a review for the American Anthropologist of the book Global assemblages: technology, politics and ethics as anthropological problems, published in 2005 and edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, wrote the following:

However, anthropologists have also retained their interest in the emblematic issues of the discipline. They have reacted and criticized the intolerance that can be said to be feeding the beginning of a post-multicultural era.Footnote ⁹⁷ For instance, in 2016, Polish anthropologists issued an anti-discrimination manifesto that was internationally acclaimed. In a representative passage, they said:

Current political and economic dynamics also affect the practice of the discipline. In different national contexts, anthropologists – both as researchers and as professors – are being affected by the destructive policies of neoliberal globalization. Some of the structural processes characterizing these movements within academia are the so-called ‘audit culture’ and ‘productivism’. These measures are applied worldwide and mean the control of scholarly production based on quantity. Anthropology, with its need for long periods of ethnographic practice, has been particularly affected. The British anthropologist Marilyn Strathern edited a book and wrote about ‘audit culture’, making this expression internationally known.Footnote ⁹⁹ Other anthropologists, such as Cris Shore and Sue Wright, have consistently researched the changes brought by neoliberalism in different university and scientific milieus, namely the end of academic autonomy and the transformation of higher education into a business more ‘responsive’ to market forces, ‘commercial interests and private providers’. In a special issue of the Italian journal Anuac on this subject, Shore and Wright agree with the Indian anthropologist Satish Deshpande that neoliberalization means the death of the public university. They argue that ‘this model is having a transformative effect, not only on the core values and distinctive purpose of the public university, but also on academic subjectivities of the professional ethos that has traditionally shaped academia’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ They also identify the establishment of an emerging entrepreneurial culture within the universities.