Below is a theme summary, with annotated bibliography at bottom. For IG posts related to this theme, see the LocalGlobal category archives, or the recent posts at right.
Theme Summary
Some objects are small and close to us; others are big and farther away. So, it’s understandable to believe that “local” and “global” are two different things…but in many ways they’re not—thus, for instance, “glocalization” and a variety of recent hybrid terms. The local/global theme reminds us that imagining the global necessitates imagining the local as well, because they often are two sides to the same coin.
The local and the global are connected in all sorts of ways. Many physical or biological patterns we see in our immediate vicinity, for instance, are interpreted by scientists as a part of larger processes: for instance, local weather is affected by regional and global climate. Then again, not all local weather is fully predicted by larger climate patterns; nor, clearly, would local cultural practices be fully explained with recourse to some generalized human culture.
There is thus debate over whether global-scale processes, such as those analyzed via earth system science or world-systems theory, are sufficient in explaining local-scale phenomena (e.g., Hornborg & Crumley 2007). And some academic fields tend to focus more on global patterns and processes, whereas the focus of others is more local. In general, the nomothetic impulse that undergirds a great deal of the sciences tends toward seeking law-like universal (“global”) statements, whereas the idiographic impulse more typical of the humanities is generally more interested in particular (“local”) details. In brief, the interaction between local and global is also a function of one’s scholarly perspective.
Perhaps the biggest reason that local and global are connected in many ways today is the phenomenon of globalization, a well-known but often vague term spanning economics, culture, technology, and other realms. In its naive sense, globalization suggests some progressive homogenization (or “McDonaldsization“) of the world. In a more refined sense, globalization has been theorized by scholars such as David Harvey (1989) or Anthony Giddens (1990) as involving space-time compression, a speeding up and disembedding of social and other connections. One notable globalization scholar, Immanuel Wallerstein (e.g., 2004), has theorized a world-system, a structured relationship between core and peripheral regions of the world, that has existed for centuries. Globalization thus need not imply homogenization, but it certainly means greater connection. As but one example, globalized tourism mixes “global” tourists, capital, labor, and culture with real but questionably authentic “local” destinations in sites such as east Africa (Bruner 2001) and the Caribbean (Wood 2000).
Globalization’s specter of gradual control over the world’s underclass by the powerful few has prompted critique by anti-globalization activists such as Vandana Shiva (e.g., 2005), and a wide range of anti-globalization movements. But globalization has clearly not been an unmitigated evil: with greater connection have come economic, political, and cultural opportunities, as noted by advocates such as Thomas Friedman (2007). And, as noted above, globalization has not erased the local.
One scholarly movement that addresses the local/global dynamic is known as cosmopolitanism: most contemporary commentators seek to embrace the paradox of human particularity and difference vs. our connectedness across the world. For instance, Kwame Anthony Appiah (2007) adopts a dual definition emphasizing both obligations to distant others (the global) and the value of particular human lives (the local), and Ulrich Beck (2006) identifies a suite of defining characteristics (p. 7):
The principle of the experience of crisis in world society…
The principle of recognition of cosmopolitan differences…
The principle of cosmopolitan empathy…
The principle of the impossibility of living in a world society without borders…
The mélange principle…that local, national, ethnic, religious and cosmopolitan cultures and traditions interpenetrate… cosmopolitanism without provincialism is empty, provisionalism without cosmopolitanism is blind.
Cosmopolitanism as developed above is principally a normative idea of the global; but it has also enjoyed considerable popularity in anthropological and related literature as a more descriptive idea, i.e., how local cultural practice arises from a web of global connections and not just a relatively isolated set of traditions. Doreen Massey (1991) has brought the two together in her argument for the reality and desirability of a “global sense of place.” Whether viewed in the descriptive or normative sense, these cosmopolitan writers challenge us to make sense of our own local places and experiences, and the places and experiences we encounter in our scholarly adventures, in a more connected, “glocal” context.
Annotated Bibliography
Note: All abstracts below are unmodified from article source database or Google Books.
Appiah, Anthony. 2007. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. W. W. Norton & Company.
Abstract: Kwame Anthony Appiah’s landmark new work, featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, challenges the separatist doctrines espoused in books like Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. Reviving the ancient philosophy of “cosmopolitanism,” a school of thought that dates to the Cynics of the fourth century BC, Appiah traces its influence on the ethical legacies of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Raised in Ghana, educated in England, and now a distinguished professor in the United States, Appiah promises to create a new era in which warring factions will finally put aside their supposed ideological differences and will recognize that the fundamental values held by all human beings will usher in a new era of global understanding.
Beck, Ulrich. 2006. Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge U.K.: Polity.
Abstract: In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used concepts of second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into a radical new sociological analysis of the cosmopolitan implications of globalization. Beck draws extensively on empirical and theoretical analyses of such phenomena as migration, war and terror, as well as a range of literary and historical works, to weave a rich discursive web in which analytical, critical and methodological themes intertwine effortlessly.Contrasting a ‘cosmopolitan vision’ or ‘outlook’ sharpened by awareness of the transformative and transgressive impacts of globalization with the ‘national outlook’ neurotically fixated on the familiar reference points of a world of nations-states-borders, sovereignty, exclusive identities-Beck shows how even opponents of globalization and cosmopolitanism are trapped by the logic of reflexive modernization into promoting the very processes they are opposing. A persistent theme running through the book is the attempt to recover an authentically European tradition of cosmopolitan openness to otherness and tolerance of difference. What Europe needs, Beck argues, is the courage to unite forms of life which have grown out of language, skin colour, nationality or religion with awareness that, in a radically insecure world, all are equal and everyone is different.
Bruner, Edward M. 2001. “The Maasai and the Lion King: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Globalization in African Tourism.” American Ethnologist 28 (4): 881–908. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2001.28.4.881.
Abstract: In this article, I analyze how the Maasai of Kenya are presented in three different tourist performances—postcolonial, postindependence, and postmodern. Each site tells a different story, an alternate version of history, with its own perspective on the role of ethnicity and heritage within the nation-state and in the world community. Using a method of controlled comparison, I expand the theoretical dialogue in tourism debates by departing from the monolithic discourse that has characterized so much of tourism scholarship, [ethnic tourism, Maasai, globalization, performance, authenticity, ethnography, media images]
Friedman, Thomas L. 2007. The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Macmillan.
Abstract: This Independence Day edition of The World is Flat 3.0 includes an an exclusive preview of That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, on sale September 5th, 2011.A New Edition of the Phenomenal #1 Bestseller “One mark of a great book is that it makes you see things in a new way, and Mr. Friedman certainly succeeds in that goal,” the Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote in The New York Times reviewing The World Is Flat in 2005. In this new edition, Thomas L. Friedman includes fresh stories and insights to help us understand the flattening of the world. Weaving new information into his overall thesis, and answering the questions he has been most frequently asked by parents across the country, this third edition also includes two new chapters–on how to be a political activist and social entrepreneur in a flat world; and on the more troubling question of how to manage our reputations and privacy in a world where we are all becoming publishers and public figures. The World Is Flat 3.0 is an essential update on globalization, its opportunities for individual empowerment, its achievements at lifting millions out of poverty, and its drawbacks–environmental, social, and political, powerfully illuminated by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford University Press.
Abstract: In this major theoretical statement, the author offers a new and provocative interpretation of institutional transformations associated with modernity. What is modernity? The author suggests, “As a first approximation, let us simply say the following: ‘modernity’ refers to modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence.” We do not as yet, the author argues, live in a post-modern world. The distinctive characteristics of our major social institutions in the closing years of the twentieth century suggest that, rather than entering into a period of post-modernity, we are moving into a period of “high modernity” in which the consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalized and universalized than before. A post-modern social universe may eventually come into being, but this as yet lies on the other side of the forms of social and cultural organization that currently dominate world history. In developing a fresh characterization of the nature of modernity, the author concentrates on the themes of security versus danger and o trust versus risk. Modernity is a double-edged phenomenon. The development of modern social institutions has created vastly greater opportunities for human beings to enjoy a secure and rewarding existence than in any type of pre-modern system. But modernity also has a somber side that has become very important in the present century, such as the frequently degrading nature of modern industrial work, the growth of totalitarianism, the threat of environmental destruction, and the alarming development of military power and weaponry.
Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Wiley.
Abstract: In this new book, David Harvey seeks to determine what is meant by the term in its different contexts and to identify how accurate and useful it is as a description of contemporary experience.
Hornborg, Alf, and Carole L. Crumley, eds. 2007. The World System and the Earth System: Global Socioenvironmental Change and Sustainability since the Neolithic. Left Coast Press.
Abstract: In this benchmark volume top scholars come together to present state-of-the-art research and pursue a more rigorous framework for understanding and studying the linkages between social and ecological systems. Contributors from a wide spectrum of disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, geography, ecology, palaeo-science, geology, sociology, and history, present and assess both the evolution of our thinking and current, state-of-the-art theory and research. Covering ancient through modern periods, they discuss the complex ways in which human culture, economy, and demographics interact with ecology and climate change. The World System and the Earth System is critical reading for all scholars and students working at the interface of nature and society.Contributors: Thomas Abel, BjArn Berglund, Chris Chase-Dunn, Alfred Crosby, Carole L. Crumley, John Dearing, Bert de Vries, Nina Eisenmenger, Andre Gunder Frank, Jonathan Friedman, Stefan Giljum, Thomas Hall, Karin Holmgren, Alf Hornborg, Kristian Kristiansen, Thomas Malm, Daniel Mandell, Betty Meggers, George Modelski, Emilio Moran, Helena Aberg, Frank Oldfield, Susan Stonich, William Thompson, Peter Turchin.
Massey, Doreen. 1991. “A Global Sense of Place.” Marxism Today 35 (6): 24–29. http://www.aughty.org/pdf/global_sense_place.pdf.
Abstract: The world is increasingly dominated by movement – of people, images and information. Doreen Massey examines the nature of mobility in the era of globalisation and what this means for our sense of place.
Shiva, Vandana. 2005. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. South End Press.
Abstract: A leading voice in the struggle for global justice, Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental activist and physicist. In Earth Democracy, Shiva updates the struggles she helped bring to international attention–against genetic food engineering, culture theft, and natural resource privatization—uncovering their links to the rising tide of fundamentalism, violence against women, and planetary death. Starting in the 16th century with the initial enclosure of the British commons, Shiva reveals how the commons continue to shrink as more and more natural resources are patented and privatized. As our ecological sustainability and cultural diversity erode, so too is human life rendered disposable. Through the forces of neoliberal globalization, economic and social exclusion ignite violence across lines of difference, threatening the lives of millions. Yet these brutal extinctions are not the only trend shaping human history. Struggles on the streets of Seattle and Cancun and in homes and farms across the world have yielded a set of principles based on inclusion, nonviolence, reclaiming the commons, and freely sharing the earth’s resources. These ideals, which Shiva calls Earth Democracy, serves as an urgent call to peace and as the basis for a just and sustainable future.
Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Abstract: In World-Systems Analysis, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach that he pioneered thirty years ago to understanding the history and development of the modern world. Since Wallerstein first developed world-systems analysis, it has become a widely utilized methodology within the historical social sciences and a common point of reference in discussions of globalization. Now, for the first time in one volume, Wallerstein offers a succinct summary of world-systems analysis and a clear outline of the modern world-system, describing the structures of knowledge upon which it is based, its mechanisms, and its future. Wallerstein explains the defining characteristics of world-systems analysis: its emphasis on world-systems rather than nation-states, on the need to consider historical processes as they unfold over long periods of time, and on combining within a single analytical framework bodies of knowledge usually viewed as distinct from one another–such as history, political science, economics, and sociology. He describes the world-system as a social reality comprised of interconnected nations, firms, households, classes, and identity groups of all kinds. He identifies and highlights the significance of the key moments in the evolution of the modern world-system: the development of a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth-century, the beginning of two centuries of liberal centrism in the French Revolution of 1789, and the undermining of that centrism in the global revolts of 1968. Intended for general readers, students, and experienced practitioners alike, this book presents a complete overview of world-systems analysis by its original architect.
Wood, Robert E. 2000. “Caribbean Cruise Tourism: Globalization at Sea.” Annals of Tourism Research 27 (2): 345–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0160-7383(99)00073-0.
Abstract: Caribbean cruise tourism provides a particularly illuminating vantage point for understanding the processes of globalization in the world today. After documenting the rapid expansion of this business, the paper explores three central manifestations of globalization at work in the Caribbean cruise industry: the restructuring of the industry in the face of global competition, capital mobility, and labor migration; new patterns of global ethnic recruitment and stratification, including their incorporation into the product marketed to tourists; and deterritorialization, cultural theming, and simulation. The paper asserts that this “globalization at sea” illustrates the contradictions, ambiguities, and unchartered course of contemporary globalization processes.