Paul Stoller is professor of anthropology at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. His latest book, Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2002.
Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and
Imaginations in a Postmodern World
by michael burawoy et al
Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000. 410 pages
Hardback: UK £30, US $48. Paperback: UK £11.50, US $17.95
The idea of globalisation is becoming increasingly like the weather: a topic of everyday conversation. Television news commentators debate its pros and cons in panel discussions. Anti-corporate protesters stage demonstrations against it in places where financial titans or leaders of industrialised countries meet to discuss economic policy. Academics, of course, are no strangers to globalisation. They analyse it—often in dull, inaccessible prose—in terms of new transnational information societies, the onset of postmodernity, the implosion of space and time, the emergence of global cities and the extension of global ethnoscapes. From various theoretical vantages, scholars suggest that globalisation has created profoundly fluid transnational and transcultural communities. This varied debate has raised many questions, and also provided much confusion. Is globalisation a primarily economic phenomenon, or is it profoundly political? What can globalisation teach us about the ebbs and flows of contemporary social worlds?
As with debates about “culture” or “society”, discussions of globalisation are now so various that it has become difficult to understand what the term means, let alone what it implies for future social dynamics. A fundamental shortcoming of this ongoing debate is that it has been deliberated from the heights of rarefied abstraction. Viewed from “above”, globalisation seems to comprise three sometimes mutually exclusive, sometimes inter-connected components: flexible accumulation, global–local synergy, and social movements. Flexible accumulation refers to economic transformations such as de-industrialisation, the expansion of multinational capital and the reorganisation of production. Scholars focusing on this aspect of the global consider the macro-economic and macro-sociological impacts of these signal changes—the explosion, for example, of transnational immigration. Global–local synergy concerns the double-sided political tensions that global forces now generate. In this regard, academics consider the political consequences of new socio-economic regimes, such as the end of socialism in Eastern Europe. New social movements, the third component of globalisation, involve the cultural changes triggered by contemporary global dynamics. Here, the focus is on how the new socio-economic order has destabilised traditional class and gender divisions. These have been replaced by single and/or multiple issue social movements that call for radical social transformations. Environmentalists, for example, want policymakers to wake up to the transformed world and confront its dangers.
From a distance, this set of orientations appears impressive, but as Michael Burawoy and his Berkeley colleagues demonstrate, much of it lacks empirical foundation. In their anthology, Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World, they describe how ethnographic data confounds previously held ideas about globalisation. They also call for a more nuanced theorisation of global dynamics—a theorisation based upon the multiple vicissitudes of social life in contemporary communities.
The anthology is the product of the Global Ethnography Project, a University of California at Berkeley dissertation working group directed by Michael Burawoy. The guiding theoretical and methodological principles of the group’s sociological work are identified in Burawoy’s cogent and persuasive introduction. With great clarity, Burawoy criticises sociology’s intellectual edifice. He describes forcefully the shortcomings of that discipline’s two major theoretical frameworks: functionalism and Marxism. He then tells the story of his own intellectual path, which was profoundly influenced by a Marxism tempered by the scrupulous empiricism of the Manchester School of social anthropology, most of whose practitioners produced densely grounded ethnographies of social change in southern and eastern Africa. As Burawoy points out, his brand of empirically inspired Marxist ethnography has been marginal to mainstream sociological thought. As a result, the reigning paradigm has been framed by (1) the construction of philosophical discourses that underscore increasingly refined interpretations of classical social theory, or (2) self-consciously sophisticated quantitative studies—informed by survey research—that pay great attention to methodology and data analysis. Such approaches, he argues, create a lack of specificity in most sociological works on global processes. They also tend to obscure the ground-level political realities of life in the global–local nexus. “Instead of reaching for a global theory of the Global Postmodern,” Burawoy writes, “we should try to map out its distinctive and emergent political terrain” (p. 349).
The papers constituting the anthology attempt to put Burawoy’s ideas into practice, and on the whole succeed admirably. The book is divided into three parts: Global Forces, Global Connections, and Global Imaginations. The papers in Global Forces consider how new forms of globalisation—recent economic, political and technological changes that have “shrunk” the world and increased economic integration—both shape and alter the social lives of individuals. Lynne Haney examines how the neo-liberalism of global economic forces has eclipsed the protections provided by state socialism in Hungary. Teresa Gowan and Joseph A. Blum look at the impact of neo-liberalism on homeless people and shipyard workers in the United States. In Hungary, state health services for marginal women have been restricted. In the United States, union protections and entitlements have been undermined. Workers, marginal women and homeless people have been obliged to organise in order to reclaim the rights and respect that have evaporated into the global miasma.
In part two, Global Connections, the focus is on the transnational and transcultural nature of global dynamics—how the global creates spaces for increased inter-connectedness across a diversity of boundaries and groups. Sheba George describes how the recent immigration of Indian nurses to the United States has created economic opportunities as well as producing gendered social tensions. Seán Ó Riain discusses the impact of local culture on Irish software developers engaged in transnational economic exchange and co-operation. Millie Thayer explores the highly selective appropriation of feminist discourses that enhances a gendered citizenship in Brazil.
Part three, Global Imaginations, looks at those groups for whom globalisation has been more ambiguous, for whom the global reveals hidden social dimensions and creates new conflicts. Steven H. Lopez considers the effect of global dislocations on Pittsburgh public service workers. Zsuzsa Gille describes how global environmental networks have been used to challenge state-sponsored pollution in Hungary. Maren Klawiter discusses the multifaceted politicisation of breast cancer, linking it ultimately to pollution caused by corporations and the state. These essays illustrate how local groups contest the meaning of “the global” through political action.
The ethnographic foundation of these essays is rich, revealing the local-level complexities that large-scale, more theoretical studies of global dynamics generally overlook. The essays are also politically committed. The authors, as should be expected, identify with their subjects—marginalised, politically progressive groups struggling for rights and dignity in a neo-liberal world. As Nancy Scheper-Hughes remarks in a back-cover endorsement, the book exemplifies “the best traditions of radical Berkeley scholarship”. There is something admirable about a politically committed ethnographic sociology, but such commitment can sometimes cloud critical judgement. It should be remembered that the Berkeley view of the social is just one of many orientations in a world of endlessly increasing perspectives. In this sense, the essays have an almost myopic, parochial feel to them.
In the same vein, the authors, sociologists all, seem to have limited knowledge of how anthropologists—for whom qualitative field research is the defining element of their discipline—have confronted globalisation during the last fifteen years. Burawoy accuses anthropologists of abandoning ethnography for comparative literature: “To embrace the global, they have substituted travel for dwelling, vignettes for theory” (p. 341). That may have been partially true in the mid-1980s, but during the 1990s many scholars, especially urban anthropologists, engaged in multi-site ethnographies to grapple with the very issues Burawoy considers central to global ethnography. Steve Gregory’s Black Corona and Roger Sanjek’s The Future of Us All, both of which epitomise the kind of theoretically informed, detailed studies that Burawoy advocates, are cases in point.1 He also ignores an important set of anthropological studies on immigration and transnationalism authored by Sarah Mahler, Nancy Foner, Maxine Margolis and others. These omissions are unfortunate.
Global Ethnography is an important addition to the sociological literature on global processes. Its greatest strength is its emphasis on grounding our global ruminations in empirical data and nuanced interpretation. Its greatest weakness devolves from a kind of academic parochialism that generates disciplinary myopia. As the essays in the volume clearly demonstrate, scholars need to encourage and maintain multidisciplinary perspectives on increasingly complex global processes.
Endnotes
1. Steve Gregory, Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); Roger Sanjek, The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998).
