Friedman and Ekholm Ameth 2013 Fin

JONATHAN FRIEDMANEcole des Haute Etudes en Sciences Sociales and University of California, San Diego

KAJSA EKHOLM FRIEDMANLund University

Globalization as a discourse ofhegemonic crisis:A global systemic analysis

A B S T R A C TGlobalization discourse is deeply flawed in its veryconception, expressing a gratuitous assumption ofthe emergence of a new era that is discontinuouswith the past and whose conflicts are primarily theproduct of those who resist this development:nationalists, racists, localists. This discourse is itselfan ideological product of a cosmopolitan eliteidentity that has emerged (again) in recent yearsand which can be accounted for, in turn, by anotherapproach. A global systemic perspective situatescosmopolitan discourses in periods of hegemonicdecline, which are also periods of economic, social,and cultural fragmentation in the hegemonic zonesas well as of vertical polarization that creates a newrootedness at the bottom and acosmopolitanization at the top. While theseprocesses are underway today in the West,something quite the opposite is occurring in theemergent new hegemonic centers to the East. Aglobal systemic approach also offers a model oftodays crisis that is absent in globalizationdiscourse. [globalization, global system, class,culturalism, neoliberalism, cosmopolitanism]

Following an American Ethnological SocietyCanadian Anthro-pological Society panel in which people so kindly discussed andcritiqued our then-recent publication The Anthropology of GlobalSystems (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a, 2008b) and afterwe decided to publish those proceedings, colleagues suggested

that we put more emphasis on the need to create a new understanding ofthe contemporary world, especially in this era of crisis. We first embarkedon the project of charting a global systemic anthropology more than threedecades ago, more than ten years before the global became popular.Our engagement was not with what became the keyword assumptions ofglobalization discourse but with the more general argument that socialorders are reproduced within larger complexes of relations on whichtheir very form and existence are dependent. This was an argument fora global framework of analysis, a general proposition about the nature ofsocial reproduction. While globalization is indeed a real phenomenon,our contention has been that it is not some world-historical stage atwhich we have finally arrived but a phase phenomenon within the lifecycles of global systems.1 In this approach, globalization as an empiricalphenomenon is an aspect of more-encompassing processes, which alsoinclude de-globalization. Thus, globalization, as we argue below, is not anevolutionary stage, not any more than modernization or what we, again,after 50 years, call modernityterms that globalization discourse inher-ited uncritically and that it has included in the replication of what appearsas the old developmentalist framework. This evolution toward the globalwas already present in Julian Stewards work on the contemporary world,as a level of socio-cultural integration. In the work of Karl Marx and someMarxists, the global was also understood as a limit case of capitalist accu-mulation, not so much in world-historical terms but as a tendency withincapitalist development itself.2 Imperialism was also a fundamental con-cept in 20th-century Marxist analysis, a notion that, since the fifties, has

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 244257, ISSN 0094-0496, onlineISSN 1548-1425. C 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/amet.12017

Globalization as a discourse of hegemonic crisis American Ethnologist

developed beyond dependency theory toward a theory ofthe world market and geographical shifts of capital accu-mulation. But the takeoff of globalization thinking appearedin the wake of the decline of Marxism, along with the entiremodernist paradigm, with the rise or return to dominanceof culturalism and (neo)liberal thought.

Globalization is certainly a keyword in political jargonaswell as in academic discourse. As a term, it refers to some-thing thatmany people experience as immediately obvious.It seems as if the whole world is now (finally) connected.In communication terms, this is clearly very much the caseand can be documented. But whether the world is global-ized in other senses is much less clear. However much suchinterconnection is assumed, it is worth considering what itis that is globalized and how much globalization there ac-tually is, not least in contrast to previous historical periods.We have argued that the concept leapt into the conscious-ness of academics during the 1980s, when something verynew seemed to be happening (Friedman 2007a). But wherewas it happening, and what was it that spurred the explo-sive entry onto the scholarly scene of the G-word, which hassince been embellished through its pairing with terms suchas neoliberalism, millennium, and even Giorgio Agambens(2005; Schmitt) exception?

Its introduction in business economics in the eight-ies by Keniche Ohmae (1989) was related to the realprocess of economic deregulation and a desire for itsfurtherance to the point of relegating the nation-state to ob-solescence. Capitalists were already out there doing theirbusiness in the wider world, so the nation-state must haveoutlived its usefulness. Of course, this is more than a mereepochal experience, since capitalists have always been outthere, sometimes evenmore so than today. FernandBraudel(1977) had argued, in contrast, that globalization and theweakening of state power were historical phenomena re-lated to the decline of hegemonic centers and their financ-ing of new centers by the export of capital. Braudel also ar-gued that capitalism, as opposed to a mere market regime,is an alliance (a bloody one at that) between the stateand capital, one he referred to as contre-marche (anti-market; 1979:197) and that led to the brutal expansion offlag and trade that has created modern empires and, aswe have argued, most of the historical empires and im-perial orders of the past (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman1979, 2008a; Friedman 2000). Without the benefit of histor-ical perspective, the new globalization appeared as some-thing quite unprecedented. It resonated among and withina number of disciplinesgeography, political science, cul-tural sociologyand it rooted itself in the foundation ofcultural studies. To be sure, some disciplines maintaineda critical and distanced understanding of the new term andits application. This is certainly the case for the work ofDavid Harvey (2005) and Neil Smith (2005) in geography aswell as of others. Harveys take on globalization, for exam-ple, is congruent with our own approach: a shift from one

global system (hierarchically organized and largely con-trolled politically by the United States) to another systemthat was more decentralized and coordinated through themarket, making the financial conditions of capitalism farmore volatile and far more unstable (2005:8). This is cer-tainly not an argument for evolution.

Cultural sociology ran something similar to a global dif-fusionist argument in relation to the cultural imperialismapproach of the 1970s (Ritzer 1996; Robertson 1992). Withthe work of Manuel Castells (2000), we witnessed a gener-alized theoretical approach to globalization linking techno-logical change to a new social order. There is also the relatedand important work of Saskia Sassen (1994, 1996) on globalcities, but her analysis encompasses muchmore than glob-alization even if she does pay heed to the concept. We haveargued that the concept ought to be an object rather than aframework of analysis (Friedman 2007b). The common as-sumption in the above approaches is the evolutionary no-tion that new forms of technology, not least those related tothe Internet but also the increase in the speed of transportin general, have led to a compression of global space. Thisis, of course, a notion invoked by Braudel, as expressed inHarveys timespace compression, but technological ac-celeration has occurred quite a few times in the past, so it isdifficult to gauge its differential significance today.

Globalization in anthropology, as in cultural studies,which also partakes of the evolutionary bias, is quite dif-ferent in content from the above approaches. We argue be-low that it is less a question of the analysis of an empiri-cal process and more a normative discourse requiring a re-configuration of the field of understanding, a moral morethan an intellectual critique of what are understood as tra-ditional and culturally imperial categories and an attemptto establish (intellectually) a new globalized and hybridizedworld. An adequate understanding of the emergence ofcultural globalization discourse, unlike that of the geogra-phers, sociologists, and political scientists, is, as we arguebelow, related to the emergence of a new cosmopolitaniza-tion. The allure of the cosmopolitan and the reidentificationof elites and wannabe elites is about the formation of anideological vortex rather than a theoretical matrix. We havesuggested in several publications that the contents of glob-alization discourse replicate the content of cosmopolitanidentity in Western societies, in which national bound-aries are treated with scorn by self-identified citizens of theworld, who explain in interviews that they feel at homeeverywhere largely because they have property in manyplaces. Work on Freemasonry discusses this aspect of aparticular identity that combines a liberal anti-nation-stateideology with an ideology of humanism, that sees the worldas one, under its aegis. Recent work by Michel Pinconand Monique Pincon-Charlot (1996, 2001) and by Anne-Catherine Wagner (1998, 2007) has developed these ar-guments empirically. Globalization ideology is, in socialterms, a variety of this discourse and can be found among

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media elites, members of international diplomatic circles,UNESCO in Paris (which represents itself as the beacon ofcultural cosmopolitan, boundaryless humanism but whoseheadquarters sports a high-security entrance and some ofwhose functionaries inhabit gated communities where liv-ing room walls are decorated with global ethnographicart). This is also true among academics and, sometimes,artists whomaintain the samemodel even if not always thesame income. And, of course, we are not essentializing herebut merely pointing to a particular tendency that we our-selves and others have documented.While there is no roomhere to develop this argument, it implies, if accepted, thatthe analysis of such discourses has two components. Onethat is our primary focus here concerns intellectual content.Another, which is quite crucial, is a focus onwhat is, indeed,ideology, whose source of production lies in the social order,more specifically, in the emergence of self-identified cos-mopolitan elites. The cosmopolitan perspective is one thatis positioned above the fragmented world below and en-compasses its differences within its own identification withthat world. Thus, while real globalization is a phenomenontypical of decline, the cosmopolitan discourse that it trig-gers is more of an invariant in the ideology or even cos-mology of state systems, one that can become dominant inperiods when real globalization resonates with increasinglymobile elites. This is, of course, an area for further research(Friedman 1997, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2002, 2007a, 2012).

Globalization discourse and its pitfalls

The founding premises of globalization discourse appear toinclude the following propositions:

1. Theworld used to be divided into smaller politicalcultural units that were more or less self-sufficientand rather closed, so that culture, society, andeconomy formed a unity available for study. Thiswas the ideal object of traditional ethnography.

2. This is no longer the case, because globaliza-tion has begun to move everything around atever-quicker pacescommodities, money, peo-ple, technology, and so ona phenomenon cap-tured by Arjun Appadurais (1990) divergent scapes.And, of course, culture has now liberated itselffrom place and is spilling over and flowing freelythroughout the world. In its current form (i.e.,Hannerz 1992, 1999), in particular, but also as de-scribed in the earlier work of Roland Robertson(1992), globalization of culture ismore or less iden-tical to what anthropologists used to call diffu-sion, which is apparently worthy of resurrectiondespite its theoretical and empirical weaknesses.3

3. If anthropology was formerly based on the as-sumption of the fusion of society, culture, andeconomy, then we need to reformulate the basic

conceptual apparatus of the discipline to adapt itto the modern situation, one in which divergenceand nonsynchrony are conceived as rampant andeven paradigmatically so (Appadurai 1990).4 Thisis presented as a true description and not merelya hypothetical proposition. The social world is orhas becomemessy and incoherent. There is nowayin which it can be understood by using anythinglike holistic models. It is not only globalization dis-course in anthropology that has eschewed system-aticity. This is amore general tendency in the socialsciences, inwhich structure is being replaced by as-semblages (of course, this is an ambivalent change,as can be seen in Manuel de Landas [2006] takeon assemblages, which is reminiscent of systemstheory, whereas in anthropology the term refers,rather, to the lack of system and more to the merefact of juxtaposition).

The world is defined as new, not as part of a complextrajectory of historical processes but as a general evolu-tionary stage. This impending epoch was first celebratedas a coming together of all humanity in new hybrid forms(of culture). Now, after a brutal prise de conscience, it ap-pears that globalization is not so nice after all and not re-ally a coming together in social terms. Thismay explainwhythe term globalization has been prefixed or suffixed withor even replaced by terms such as neoliberal and millen-nial capitalism. The epochal nature of the present is stilldominant, but it is no longer just fun and games; rather, itis something a bit more sinister. These changes have beenprovoked very much by the media, which have been so in-strumental in the forging of the image of globalization. Thespiral of violent conflicts and now-rolling crises that beganin the United States and have spread to Europe has made itdifficult to maintain globalized optimism. For advocates ofglobalization discourse, all of this is something of a tragedy.

It is not that we have been forced to change our minds,or the ways we work, but the gap between the time ofthis books conception and its context of publication islarge. The reassertion of borders and the closing downof multiple perspectives in the current political climatehas undone the progressive potential of the terms withwhich we were to engage. We began this work in 2000,when, given the cultural promises of diaspora andhybridity, it was still possible to discern the beginningsof a transformation in the cultural certainties of thehomogeneous, autochthonous nation. A hesitant butreal expectation heralded the advent of hybrid formsof culture, working at the point of cultural translation,which many believed were going to disturb the settledformations of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy(to borrow from bell hooks). We have agreed to showtraces of this optimism, which may still be foundin parts of this book, but on the whole, our gaucheenthusiasm has been dashed in the face of the globalwar on terror, the inauguration of new fear-driven

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security clampdowns, extra-legal detentions andincarcerations, bombing raids and imperial occupa-tions. [Kalra et al. 2005:1]

We read the above quote as a recognition of acertain failure of perspective. But perspectives do not justdisappear when they fail. They can be modified. The in-terpretative scheme is still based on the premise of glob-alization as an evolutionary process. The understanding ofincreasing conflicts, violence, enclavization, and segrega-tion in this view is reduced to a reaction to or against glob-alization itself. This can be referred to as the Jihad vs. Mc-World perspective (Barber 1995). It was an early way ofdealing with phenomena such as Islamic revolution but hasbeen extended and generalized. Thus, the explosive devel-opment of sorcery in parts of Africa (Comaroff and Co-maroff 1999; Geschiere 1997) is seen as a reaction to theglobalization regimes in those areas, a disjunction of offerand effective demand, of so many commodities to buy andno money with which to buy them, which, in turn, encour-ages magic as a coping mechanism and sorcery as a dis-course of resistance or contention. And, if not the prolifer-ation of commodities, the movement of people is creatingfear of physical intrusion. For Peter Geschiere (2009), indi-genizing movements in Africa as well as extreme national-ist movements in Europe are precisely evidence of a Jihadvs. McWorld fear of the other, which translates a fear ofglobalization.

Globalization discourse and the dark sideof evolution

In Fear of Small Numbers, Appadurai (2006) tries to cometo terms with the conflicts and contradictions that seemglaringly obvious since the late eighties and nineties, whenthe more celebratory version of globalization discourse ap-peared. He refers primarily to the increasing violence in theworld as well as to the more recent massive proliferationof economic and political crises. Appadurai interprets thesetrends in terms of a conjuncture of two processes. First, thenational economy is all but disintegrating under the forcesof globalization, leaving only the ethnic component andthe compensatory focus on purity, boundaries, and bor-ders. Second, the unfettered force of global capitalism, es-pecially financial capitalism, which is linked to the UnitedStates, its main driver and ideologue, has led to increasingpolarization.5

It is doubtless this apparent link between implodingnational economies, runaway financial capital and therole of the United States as the main driver of the ide-ologies of business, market and profit that has createda new sort of emotional Cold War between those whoidentify with the losers in the new game and those whoidentify with the small group of winners, notably the

United States. The widely remarked sense that some sortof justice has been visited upon the United States evenamong those who abhorred the brutality of 9/11 is nodoubt anchored in moral outrage driven by the logic ofeconomic exclusion. [Appadurai 2006:2324, emphasisadded]

The new state of affairs is accounted for in terms ofa major change in the world, the emergence of cellularalongside what Appadurai calls vertebrate organization,a kind of metaphoric extension of the earlier Deleuzianmetaphor of arborial and rhizomic structures, or of verti-cal corporate organization and horizontal network organi-zation. The two are opposed to one another but are alsocomplementary, existing in a state of tension. The cellu-lar refers to a whole range of transnational organizationsfrom capitalist to diasporic to terrorist, which threaten theintegrity of vertebrate organizations like the nation-state. Inthis new world, leaky financial frontiers, mobile identities,and fast-moving technologies of communication and trans-action, together produce debates, both within and acrossnational boundaries, that hold new potentials for violence(Appadurai 2006:37).

This situation in its turn inspires fear among those whoare still incarcerated within the nation-state, the fear ofsmall numbers, of minorities, which refers here to immi-grant minorities. Thus, globalization is not all good inso-far as it does produce inequalities between regions, primar-ily driven by the United States for its own benefit, but alsowithin societies, that is, between classes, something quitenew in the rhetoric of globalization. This is why Appaduraiunderstandsmuch of terrorism as the expression of a strug-gle between the haves and have-nots of the world, whichhardly corresponds to what we know of the class position ofleading terrorists or even their goals. Nor does it matter thatthemass displacement of people is summarized by the termmobile identities, which simply assumes, in a strange es-sentialism, that the identities of migrants are maintained intheir very movement via the substantialization of the timespace trajectory (i.e., diasporization). There is, after all, con-flict in conditions in which competing identities occupy thesame space, something that can only happen in the absenceof integration or assimilation.6 But the latter phenomenonis not part of globalization discourses, in which the move-ment of population is assumed to be identical with the in-delible movement of culture or identity. In the end, we arestill faced with themodel outlined above, in which contem-porary violence is a product of resistances to globalization,and the primary problem is the majorities of nation-statesthemselves and their fear of minorities, which inspires therampages against transnational minorities.

All of this is still seen as a general evolutionary phe-nomenon, although Appadurai finds it necessary to jus-tify his position, one that was unquestioned some years

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ago. In view of frameworks such as our own, in which thecontemporary is continuous with the past, it is neces-sary to argue for the historical discontinuity of globaliza-tion. So what is new? Financialization (at high speeds),the information revolution, and new kinds of migra-tion (Appadurai 2006:37). But these are precisely thekinds of phenomena that characterized the period from1880 to 1920, so one might ask just how unprecedentedthey are (Friedman 1998, 1999a, 1999b).7 This is an is-sue that we addressed almost two decades ago (EkholmFriedman 2008b; Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a;Friedman 1992, 1994, 1995) but that has never been seri-ously discussed in the globalization framework, since thenewness of globalization appears to be sacred ground, partof what is implied in the prophetic posture of the dis-course. To maintain the predictive or, perhaps, oracularcontent of the globalization paradigm, all of the dark side,which in fact reflects the failures of the perspective, isnow blamed on specific actors who have done everythingin their power to halt the progress of globalization itself.For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), it is the lo-cal fascists,8 who are the not-strange bedfellows of liberalglobalizationthat is, indigenous peoples, local communi-ties, whitemale supremacists, even those struggling againstterrorism9who are all to blame for the failure of global-ization to generate a new world. It is interesting and some-what shocking that no heed is given here to the rest of thestory: that there is increasing violence, not just by the state,or racist groups, or majorities.

Another perspective

We (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 1980, 2008a, 2008b;Friedman 2007b) have gone to some lengths in contextu-alizing the differences between globalization discourse andour own global systemic approach. The latter is concernedwith the historical dynamics of expansion and contractionof imperialhegemonic centers, the shift of such centers,and the articulation between such processes and social, po-litical, and cultural orders in both centers and peripheries.Our work developed in parallel with that of authors suchas Eric Wolf (1982) and, especially, Jane and Peter Schnei-der (see Schneider 1977; Schneider and Schneider 1976),although our perspective developed somewhat differently,since we extended our research to ancient world systemsand arrived at somewhat different interpretations, espe-cially of historical capitalism, if closer to the Schneidersthan to either Wolf or Immanuel Wallerstein. We have ar-gued on the basis of a number of empirical investigationsthat globalizations occur in specific historical conjuncturesand that they are neither permanent nor evolutionary phe-nomena (Ekholm Friedman 2008b; Friedman 1994, 1995).They have occurred previously, and the inverse process,deglobalization, is equally well documented, for example,

from the 1920s to the 1950s. It is also possible to documentthe shifts of accumulative power that have characterized thehistorical process of global systems and that we arewitness-ing today. The phenomena that we have linked to the cur-rent phase of globalization are as follows:

1. Massive capital export, decentralization of capitalaccumulation, and the rise of new competitive cen-ters, large and small, in a period in which the olderhegemony no longer reigns supreme. In economicterms, capital moves along the vectors of the gradi-ent of profit in the world arena, from lowest to po-tentially highest.A. The export of productive capital is linked to the

increasing shift of nonexported capital into fi-nancial sectors that replace industrial produc-tion as the main dynamic and rapidly becomea speculative apparatuswhose extreme expres-sion is the derivative (which Robert Shillercalled a naturally occurring Ponzi process[2001:78]).

B. Capital accumulationmoves from Fordist, ver-ticalized processes to a division between fi-nancial hubs and proliferating flexible (post-Fordist) subcontracting and outsourcing units,a process that increasingly saturates all sectorsof the social order, not least the state itself.

2. An increase of both horizontal and vertical po-larization. Ethnicization and new culturalpoliticalmovements occur at the same time as increasingpolarization between the wealthy and the poor andbetween elites and masses.A. Horizontal polarization is expressed in in-

creasing conflict generated by sharper culturalidentification. Its most common form is eth-nic, but it can be regional, religious, and evengender based.

B. Vertical polarization is the product of increas-ing class differentiation between the top andthe bottom of the social hierarchy, expressedin the classical Gini indexes, which has in-creased markedly in the Western world. In-cluded in this trend is a process of downwardmobility among large portions of the mid-dle classes and an upward mobility amonga smaller segment of the same classes. Itis accompanied by shifting identification:cosmopolitanization at the top and indige-nization at the bottom.

3. An increase in emigration from areas of rampantpolitical and military instability. But the recipientcountries for the new immigrants are in economicdecline, leading to newcomers marginalization aswell as conflicts on the ground among immigrants(including second- and third-generation descen-dants) and between immigrants and downwardlymobile nationals.

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Globalization is a historical phenomenon that is re-versible rather than a stage in a unilinear development.In the systemic approach, globalization is part of a largertransformation in the global arena. The globalizationapproach, which has today assimilated assumptions ofneoliberalism, cannot account for the simple fact thatwhile post-Fordism and flexibilization associated with ne-oliberalism are rampant in the West, China seems tobe dominated by an old-fashioned Fordist configuration(Appelbaum 2006). So the concomitants of globalizationare not across-the-board phenomena, and the regional dif-ferentiation linked to the decline of the West and the riseof the East cannot be accounted for in this framework.Whereas quite a few African states have declined into eth-nic violence and been transmuted into gangs or priva-tized states (Bayart et al. 1999; Ekholm Friedman 2008a), inChina andmost of East Asia, states have become stronger interms of centralized governance. China, an absolutist statecapitalism (see, e.g., Arrighi 2007), succeeded in introduc-ing liberalized markets (not neoliberalism) and foreign in-vestment coupled to rapid growth rather than flight capi-tal, to massive overexploitation of workers and productiveexpansion, all as a product of what is called the era ofglobalization. But the recipe is extraordinarily similar (ex-cept for the direct intervention of the state) to the trans-formation England underwent in the 18th and 19th cen-turies from rural impoverishment andmigration to Dicken-sian urban poverty coupled to industrialization and empirebuilding.

Similarly, the set of phenomena including ethniciza-tion (autochthonization in the sense used by Geschiere[2009]), the proliferation of sorcery accusations (Comaroffand Comaroff 1999), and the emergence of religious funda-mentalisms and smaller-scale religious cults in large partsof the world is not a reaction to globalization but relatedto the articulation of global process and local social or-ders, their cosmological and ontological schemes. Ethni-cization is very much related to the decline in the assim-ilative or ordering power of central hegemonic states ineconomic decline, just as neoliberalism is nothing morethan an adaptation to a decentralization of the organiza-tion of capitalist accumulation in chronic crisis. Sorcery ac-cusations, in Central Africa, at least, are related to the col-lapse of incomes, the disintegration of public sectors aswell as kin groups, and the increasing competition for thebreadcrumbs left behind by rentier state-classes (EkholmFriedman 1994, 2008a). But this occurs in terms of local so-cial logics that are not deducible from the global, just as an-tiwitchcraft cults and magic emerge to fend off the sorceryitself. The conditions in which these phenomena developare related to the increasing precariousness of human exis-tence and quite variable cultures of fear that are elaboratedin such conditions. The rise of neonationalist parties in Eu-rope is also directly related to economic downturn, to the

decline of the state-based public sector and of the assimila-tion machine that was dominant in the previous period ofexpansion, associated with the golden age of the welfarestate. But the local logics in Europe are quite different fromthose in Central Africa.10 The reconfiguration of culturalidentification specific to such a period is one in which alter-native identities emerge, in which the loss of the modernistfuture ignites a scramble after roots that seem more en-during in a world in which the modernist agenda has evap-orated. Re-identification in cultural terms is rehabilitatingfor those so engaged, but it also implies the multiplicationof new borders and potential conflicts among groups whohave taken up the new or renewed identities. It is notmerelyan ethnic issue but a more general phenomenon that per-vades the entire field of potential collective identity forma-tion. An account that interprets such phenomena as reac-tions to globalization itself is very different from one thatsituates the phenomena within systemically altered con-ditions of existence of people and their culturally specificstrategies of survival. No glossing as alternativemodernitycan erase this crucial difference. Ordinary lives do not con-front the global as such. They face more immediate issues.

The current crisis and the transformation of thestate

The current crisis, which can be traced back to the early1980s, is also comprehensible in this framework. It is inthe eighties that we witness a catastrophic decline of prof-itability that led to massive export of capital; to increasingunemployment, declining real wages, and the beginningsof a wholesale shift to neoliberal solutions; and to post-Fordist flexibilization in employment, production, and ac-cumulation. These developments led to critical reactionsamong union leaders and some economists to the move to-ward the dismantling of the Western industrial economy,which began long before the end of Fordism (Bluestone andHarrison 1982; Kotz et al. 1994; Vernon 1971). There weremoral reactions to the massive export of capital, and someeven saw it as imperialistic (i.e., the violent capitalizationof the globe), whereas others bemoaned the loss of growthto other parts of the world. But this criticism soon vanishedamong the discourses of globalization, which stressed theunification of the world rather than the decline of certainregions to the profit of others. The era of globalization, asit is called, was something more specific: the decline of Eu-rope, the United States, and Japan and the rise of new zonesof accumulationChina, India, and the new industrial sup-ply zones in Southeast Asia as well as certain other coun-tries such as Brazil. This process has continued unabatedsince the eighties despite financial bubbles and has led tothe current hegemonic crisis that has become glaringly evi-dent since 200708 in the collapse ofWestern financialmar-kets (Dumenil and Levy 2011).

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Hegemonic decline ignites a proliferation of disinte-grative processes with respect to the state and the ram-pant growth of networks of violence, to trafficking in peo-ple, arms, and terror. And this, in a geopolitical shift awayfrom the centrality of the West, feeds internally and exter-nally orchestrated occidentalisms in which progressivesare filled with self-loathing and even praise for brutal ide-ologies as long as they are directed against the beast-is-us.Some Islamists look forward in both East and West to animagined new caliphate that includes Europe and to theestablishment of global sharia. At the same time, more-powerful states farther to the east are growing ever morerapidly into the futureworkshops of theworld and engaging(especially China) in a new colonization of former Westernperipheries. And, in interviews, we have encountered state-ments of the type, I dont care how bad they are, let themrule us because we are even worse and deserve it.11 Thecontent of these developments can hardly be understood asglobalization.

Issues of culture in globalization discourse are con-cerned with flows and mixture, with border crossing andthe critique of boundedness, pace CNN.12 This has becomeone of its central themes in relation to the debates concern-ing the nation, the core of essentialism. Globalization in re-lation to migration is not an opening up of borders to al-low people to move more freely. It is the result of the dis-integration of political regimes in the Third World, to in-creasing conflict and violence and a resultant emigrationof peoples from zones of violence and collapsed conditionsof existence to the declining yet still wealthier zones of theWest. And even this is also only a very partial truth, sincemost of this movement is confined to the local regions in-volved. In any case, to characterize it as the advent of anepoch of nomadism that has replaced a more static past isan immense and cynical misrepresentation of underlyingrealities.

It is difficult to reconcile the tragedy of this movementwith the liberating discourse of what can only be under-stood as a new-fashioned liberalism celebrating the joysand virtues of migration. This discourse entails a shock-ing disinterest in the reasons for mass migration and ina politics that might serve to ameliorate peoples condi-tions of existence in such a way as to ultimately curb suchmigration.13 Can such discourse be characterized as pro-gressive? In any case, it includes a predisposition to rub-bish any conception of cultural or political unity in thatghastly phenomenon the nation-state, which is, as indi-cated above, redefined here as an essentialization machineresponsible for most of the woes of the contemporaryworld.

Here we should recall that what is homogenized in thenation-state is the public sphere, not individual subjects.Cultural difference is not eliminated at all but relegated tothe private lives of its inhabitants. This situation does imply

that the cultural character of the public sphere might wellbe Christian or occidental, and this is surely a product ofparticular histories and themajorities that have been gener-ated in those histories.Wemight argue, then, that the publicsphere is essentialized in respect of its values and institu-tions. How could it be otherwise unless a self-defined we,a royal we, decided to do ceremonies of state in mosquesor Buddhist temples, accepting sharia law for some groups,Buddhist doctrine for others, and Christian for yet others?This would be a gesture in the direction of pluralism butnothing new, since it characterizedmost empires of the pastas well as more recent colonial regimes (Furnivall 1948). To-days identity politics certainly heads in the direction of eth-nicization of the public sphere. It is interesting to note herethat Tariq Ramadan, who is a hero to many for his allegedattempt to adapt Islam to Europe in what is called Euro-Islam, apparently says quite different things in Arabic thanhe does in English or French, suggesting that Europe shouldbecome part of Islam rather than the converse.14 Is thisall a mere question of the evolution of globalization or astrong tendency toward fragmentation of the national pub-lic sphere?

What is, then, the proper image of the current globalsituation? Can it be adequately understood in terms of thevocabulary of globalization, that is, as the transgressing ofboundaries, the concomitant breakdownof the nation-stateand its essentialist assumptions, the increase of mixing andhybridity as differences are thrown together in global meet-ing places such as Davos, in which the world is becomingan upscale cosmopolitan canopy (Anderson 2011)? Or issomething else happening in which all of the above are partof an elite-based imaginary rather than an emergent reality?We suggest that the latter is very much the case.

1. Nation-states are indeed coming undone but notas a result of the penetration of the forces of glob-alization. Rather, they are, by and large, in a state ofbankruptcy in which the formermachinery of inte-gration no longer works, not only in relation to thenew immigration but also even in relation to theolder order of the nation-state itself. This is demon-strated by the revival of ethnic identities that werepreviously integrated into larger national spheres.In this process, the state has emerged strong andunscathed, but the nation has suffered a great deal.Bereft of state support, it has become reduced toethnic status, whose reinforcement has lent it aclear nationalist profile but in a period in whicheveryone else is celebrating their particular ethnicidentities.

2. The cultural mixture is primarily found in dis-course, especially elite discourses. On the streets,there is enclavization and segregation as well asthe violence of turf wars. And, of course, Elijah An-dersons (2011) message is that the cosmopolitan

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canopy is amomentary respite in a larger context ofgeneralized segregation, just as the famed bazaris in the plural society of John SydenhamFurnivall.A. In addition to cosmopolitan canopies, there

are also middle-class professional communi-ties in which multiculturalism might seem towork, but this is often the result of anotherencompassing identity related to the profes-sions themselves, for example, being part ofSilicon Valley (English-Lueck 2011). Here wecan surely speak of identity testing and hy-bridity, as well as of situations of peace be-tween separate communities, where there arealso limits to tolerance and evenmore so to so-ciality, but they can become ideological instru-ments among those who participate in suchnetworks. This is, however, a particular class-based phenomenon in a larger world markedby less amicable relations. It parallels the cos-mopolitanism of elites although it does notgenerate an ideology.

3. We have argued that the above phenomena are ac-companied by a complex of systemically relatedprocesses, including:A. The ethnicization of all of the social cate-

gories of the nation-state: regional minorities,transnational populations (diasporization), in-digenous populations, and national popula-tions themselves.

B. The vertical polarization of class relations andcultural relations between elites and masses.The elites have become increasingly cos-mopolitan, identifying out of the nation-state,and the masses have become increasingly in-digenized, seeking roots either defined by thenation-state (and its territories) or by othersubnational (regional, indigenous, migrant)categories.

C. The unification of fragments in networksof transnational exchange, sometimes orga-nized in ethnic or in strictly organizationaleconomic terms. These include the networksthat organize three major global trades: inarms, drugs, and people. Network society inthis framework is a product of the decline ofvertical organization of both political and eco-nomic entities.

D. Neoliberalism in all of this is not, as we sayabove, an epochal invention, the final victoryof Friedrich Hayek and that other Friedman.It is simply a reflection of the unfettered mar-ket in centers of accumulation, the normalstate previous to and following the short Key-nesian interlude. More important is that theliberalization is primarily a shift to a financiallybased regime of accumulation in which pro-duction has moved substantially to East andSouth Asia and a few other regions, in which

Western hegemony has declined and financialaccumulation has gotten out of control for per-fectly logical reasons. While it is more com-plex and savage, this shift represents a secondwave (in the past century, there were similarwaves) of what Rudolf Hilferding (1981) a cen-tury ago called finance capitalism. Of course,speedup due to technological advances hasmade the process more pronounced, complex,vicious, and even insane, but the basic logichas not changed.

Cultural process

What happens to culture in this framework? Many are crit-ical of an approach like ours that is occupied by political-economic processes, as if such a concern were a kind of be-trayal of the field. Our argument here, however, is that it isprecisely the cultural orders within which capitalism devel-ops that promote the political economy to a dominant po-sition. We have proposed that there are two major aspectsof the cultural. The first refers to themere distinctiveness ofsocial processes and is not a representation of those pro-cesses or a scheme that organizes them. It is, rather, theproperties of the processes themselves, that is, particularways of producing, dominating, accumulating, and so on.The second is culture as representation, code, or scheme,as structures of meaning produced on the basis of socialexperience in historical conditions that articulate preex-isting historical configurations with particular existentialsituations. Thus culture is never ex nihilo but appears al-ways as a historical transformation. Its significance within apopulation is related to the fact that it makes sense in par-ticular circumstances as it connects to historically consti-tuted shared social experiences. Cultural production in-volves objectification, and in this process it can become de-terminant in the sense that it can be used to socialize sub-jects or organize social situations. As the locus of meaningproduction, it is dependent on the existential conditionsfromwhichmeaning originates, but it can take on a life of itsown in the sense attributed to it by Marshall Sahlins (1976),as a scheme of meaningful organization.15

Particular schemes in this view must always be under-stood in their larger context, and it is this larger context thatconditions such schemes in the long run. In such terms,capitalism, for example, is a cultural phenomenon in thetrivial sense that all social phenomena are simultaneouslycultural, simply because they are specific in form. But thediscourses of capitalism, whether Keynesian, neoliberal, orsocialist, are produced out of the differential experientialconditions of life within capitalist processes. The forms ofthe capitalist state are historically variable transformationsof earlier state forms in articulation with capitalist pro-cesses. The categories that we discuss herecosmopolitan,

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indigenous, ethnic, class, diaspora, migrantare all gener-ated within processes of constitution of states and gover-nance, and this extends to NGOs, the United Nations, theWorld Bank, and other similar global forms. All of these cat-egories have a historical existence and display propertiesthat are part of a longue duree of the global systems that wehave discussed.

As we have also suggested, globalization as reality andas discourse is also a derivative set of forms in relation tothe reproductive logics of global systems. This does not im-ply that culture is a global product in the sense that glob-alization theorists might have it. On the contrary, sincethe global is itself derivative of local interactions, it is al-ways embedded in social fields that are local in experi-ential and practical terms. The life of the most high-endglobal populations is encapsulated within forms of so-ciality that, even if they cross national borders, are quitelocal as social fields. These populations are characterizedby endosocialityshared forums, clubs, hotels, vacationspots, schoolsand often display a pronounced degree ofendogamy. This form of globalism does not require the ex-istence ofmodern individuals in the usual sense of thewordsince what is shared need not be the specific distancing thatis characteristic of the individualized self. However, it mightbe suggested that cosmopolitanization does tend to lift per-sons out of whatever social networks they were formerlyembedded in.

If cosmopolitan culture or cultures are local, then allthe other cultures must be local as well. A diaspora is lo-cal in social terms. As such, it generates an identifiable setof repertoires that its members can practice. And indige-nous populations who are accused of being inauthentic arejust as authentic as any other populations, no matter howmuch they might deviate from some anthropologically es-tablished norm. Culture is about the structures of existenceand the imaginaries and representations that weave them-selves around such structures. This is why a global systemicapproach does not eliminate the local or place it on a lowerlevel where it is generated by the global, which is assumedto be a different, higher, sphere. The global is not a separatesphere or the abode of prophets of the future. It is nothingmore than the structural properties of the field of interac-tion of local social actors. But the fact that these proper-ties are structural implies that they harbor logics that arenot reducible to those of the actors themselves. On the con-trary, they refer precisely to the nonintentional propertiesof systemic processes of social reproduction that escape in-dividual intentionality. They constitute, instead, the field ofpossible interactions and their outcomes.

Rethinking the global

We argue that the discourse of globalization is inadequateto an understanding of the contemporary world because

it participates actively in and is partly constitutive of thatworld, a perspective that has taken on the character of amoral imperative. Thus, despite what is referred to as thebackside of globalization, understood as the resistance ofnationalists, sovereigntists, and other such dangerous peo-ple, globalization appears as a fulfillment of a positive evo-lution of humanity if we can only get rid of the drawbacks ofthe social stratification that is its neoliberal component.16

Instead, as repeatedly set out in our writings (EkholmFriedman and Friedman 2008a, 2008b), we stress the ne-cessity of a broader perspective that begins by locating thediscourse itself within a larger global historical arena. Theillusion of global unification is produced among elites ofthe declining center itself, but it is accompanied by a num-ber of other reconfigurations: the decentralization of ac-cumulation expressed in the reintegration of smaller unitsinto larger networks of capital flow, the rise of financialcapital and speculation, the criminalization and privati-zation of states, the increase of intrastate violence in theWest simultaneous with the (sometimes violent) consoli-dation of states and regions in the East, the class polariza-tion that produces globalizing elites, the rise of occidental-ism in the wake of declining orientalism, and the breakupof former hegemonic political-economic power, leading tocultural and social segmentation and competition. Thesephenomena cannot, as we have said, be understood interms of globalization or reactions to globalization. First,they represent quite opposite tendencies in different partsof the world, decline in one area and simultaneous ascen-sion in another. Second, the rise of new identificationsindigenous, regional, ethnic, religious, nationalare ex-pressions of decline in the West (and Japan) and itsperipheries and the simultaneous emergence of new al-liances such as the BRIC17 pervaded by new nationalismsand regional consolidations that are quite opposite tenden-cies. Similarly, the emergence of global Islamism and thegeneral occidentalism referred to above are expressions ofa set of logically related processes but clearly not reducibleto globalization. Third, globalization discourse itself is un-derstood as the product of a particular elite positioning intheWest, one that is a subset of a cosmopolitan identity andthat is logically complementary to the inverse indigeniza-tion that occurs among declining middle and lower classes.

Conclusion

Globalization is a historical phase within a global systemand not a stage of world-historical development. The con-nectivity of the world may have increased in the long term,but it is not clear to what extent this is qualitative change ormere speedup or timespace compression. No one, in anycase, has made a concerted effort to produce an argumentfor qualitative change, one that requires more than simplecorrelations and labels.

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The critique of the closed model of society was the ba-sis of the global systemic approach, but it was a general cri-tique. It did not claim that now that the world has becomeglobalized, the older single-society models no longer work.On the contrary, it claimed that such models have neverworked because all societies are constituted and repro-duced within larger complexes of relations and processes.18

Thus, the entire critique of local bias, as presented, for in-stance, in the work of Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson(1997), is already present in the global systemic critique ofthe 1980s, in which the nation-state in formation is seenas the locus of production of closed social models of func-tion, dynamics, and transformation (Ekholm Friedman andFriedman 1980; Friedman 1997).

Similarly, the issue of borders, which has beenbroached in recent literature, needs to be inverted, sincethe production of borders has to be accounted for to be-gin to understand their transgression. We note again thatthis approach never reduced the local to the global. The lo-cal was always understood as simply the social fields withinwhich historical processes work themselves out. The histor-ical processes are simply, or, rather, complexly, the articu-lation between global and local processes, but the local isthe locus of transformational history, nomatter how large itmight be, whether a village or a continent. It is the processesthat count and not the locality as such. Thus, the global isnot a higher level even if it refers to a specific set (thus, lo-calized in theoretical space) of properties. The latter are as-pects of interlocal relations rather than a higher spatial or-der of reality. Their character as such is what enables ethno-graphic research on global processes. The World Bank andthe World Economic Forum are just as local as the villagepub, but the properties of their activities are quite differentin terms of their scope.

Our insistence on such a framework is not new, but itis baffling to us that there have been no related discussionsor debates. Thus, when Appadurai stresses (above) the new-ness of globalization as the dominance of financial capital,the rapidity of transaction speed, and the massive move-ment of people, he cannot be unaware that these are pre-cisely the phenomena that are used tomark the period from1880 to 1920 in Europe and theUnited States.Maybe there ismore financialization today, maybe the transactions are in-finitely more rapid, and maybe migration is greater in per-centage terms (hardly the case). But are these quantitativechanges enough to define a new world? Is there any con-certed effort to make this point? Or is such a conclusion,as Bertrand Russell put it, intuitively obvious to the mostcasual observer? It would seem that there is no such ef-fort because there is no field of debate, and the new ideasin academe are not, as previously defined, hypotheses tobe falsified but truths to be sanctified. This new doxa iswhat we have sought to challenge in our work by suggest-ing a more encompassing account. This doxa is the direct

expression of an emergent dominant ideology of the global,and, as we have argued, it needs to be understood criticallyin terms of its internal propositions aswell as in terms of thelocus of its production among rising global elites of declin-ing hegemonic centers.

Postscript: Response to Don Kalb and Don Nonini

First, we must express our gratitude for having been sub-jected to such thoughtful engagement, for the critical com-ments and suggestions in what we see as a longer-termelaboration of a common set of research issues.

Don Kalb (this issue) raises very important critical ar-guments in relation to our approach. It is true that MaxWeber looms large in our discussions, but this is for Marx-ist reasons. The Marx of volume 3 of Capital is concernedwith the autonomous dynamic of fictitious capital in rela-tion to real accumulation, and this volume is, for us, themajor theoretical component in his work, one that leavesthe idea of the labor theory of value behind and, instead,understands that the accumulation of abstract wealth con-tains the core contradiction of capitalist reproduction. Thislogic can be extended backward in time in the followingsense: Capitalism is about turningmoney intomoremoney.It becomesmodern industrial capitalism in specific histori-cal circumstances, but the accumulation of abstract wealthremains a structure of the longue duree. After all, why pro-duce when you can just make money? Financial capitalismis thus not merely a phase of capitalist accumulation but itslogical framework. Exploitation and appropriation of valuein the form of other peoples labor is, of course, crucial asis the linkage to the real economy, but it is not in suchrelations that we can find the source of the capitalist dy-namic (only its contradictions). This argument is opposedto what Kalb calls the class approach, in which the logicof capital is somehow reducible to the labor theory of valuepresented in volume 1 of Capital and popularized by a cer-tain Marxist perspective in which money is mere ideologyrather than the real abstraction that is the dominant op-erator of capitalist process. That Weber understands capitalas autonomous in relation to labor is, in our view, a mereextension of Capital volume 3. Money capital is not a mererepresentation of what people like to call the real econ-omy. Nor are classes, however important as the principalstructure of exploitation in industrial capitalism, directlycausal in historical terms, except insofar as class strugglechanges conditions of existence and thus of the costs ofcapitalist reproduction.

Modern industrial capitalism is, of course, a historicallyspecific phenomenon, but it has existed tendentially in thepast. It is not an essence waiting to be realized in the phe-nomenal world but a historical complex that has been rela-tively short lived and quite partial. The specificity of indus-trial capitalism is the systemic dependence that emerges

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between fictitious and real accumulation, one that is thefoundational contradiction of modern capitalism. Thus, wewould agree on the specificity of industrial capitalism, butwe would see it as one in a family of historical capitalismswhose logics are related even if there are clear differences.As for the role of the state, the argument that true capitalismis an unholy alliance between commercial capitalism andstate power is the view stressed by Braudel, who clearly dif-ferentiated market economies from capitalism. Here, how-ever, a case can be made that this alliance is not specific tomodern capitalism but is quite typical of ancient forms aswell. The Dutch state was a military machine, and its em-pire was based on mass appropriation of wealth via a vari-ety of forms of exploitation. Just as Athenian slaves repro-duced themselves via wages or sales of their products, sothe worlds precapitalist capitalisms were based onmassivedislocations, enslavements of populations of dependents inthe forced service of their goals of wealth accumulation.And in all of this, it is not, we argue, the logic of capitalaccumulation that accounts for the new spaces but thepolitical logics and strategies of states. The logic of capitalaccumulation can never explain the nature of the imperialorders within which it is encapsulated.

Our use of Weber, who cannot be said to have ignoredclass relations, is limited to his notion of capital as abstractwealth and his analysis of accumulation in ancient China,inwhich he saw amajor contradiction between state classesand capitalists, with the former dominating and, thus, lim-iting capitalist development. Our stress on reproductionrather than production, then, is derived from Marx ratherthan Weber. Classes are not autonomous actors in this ap-proach. Rather, they are deeply embedded in a Kafkaesquedrama in which control of the actual dynamic is less thancomplete and oftenmystified. Classes, in this approach, aregenerated by the logics of accumulation itself.19 Here, thereis the same difference in perspective with Kalb, who takesa more classical position that classes in capitalism are col-lective and autonomously defined actors locked in struggle.We stress that classes themselves are generated in the ac-cumulation process, which can exploit slaves, freeholders,and peasants without themediation of the capitallabor re-lation understood as a wage relation. The relation betweencapital accumulation and other institutions and processesof the social world is not of a Hegelian or essential nature. Itis thismisunderstanding that is at issue in the erroneous as-sumption that capitalism emerged out of feudalism or thatit began with industrial capitalism at the end of the 18thcentury. We argue that the latter was a particular historicalprocess within an already-existent global system based onmercantile accumulation, and it occupied only a portion ofthe total space of wealth accumulation.

Don Nonini (this issue) provides an entirely new anal-ysis of the local-food and food-security movements in rela-tion to what might be declining hegemony, and he explores

the contradictory aspects of the cosmopolitan, localist,national, and antiglobalist positions that have developedin these movements. I have recently become acquaintedwith an interestingly similar development in northern Italy,where elements of the classic slow-food movement, clearlyan elite phenomenon, and the local-foodmovement, whichis based on a reorientation to self-sufficiency but stressesthe issue of quality, have formed at least a temporarycoalition that displays some of the same kinds of tenden-cies discussed in Noninis comment. The complexity ofthe movement, which is transected by class, is the kind ofphenomenon that we have not dealt with ourselves butthat expresses the commonalities of Noninis and our ap-proaches. We would probably be more self-critical in thiscase since the cosmopolitanlocal identities implicit inthese movements are not dealt with clearly in our ownmaterial, an issue whose analysis would certainly benefitgreatly fromdeveloping amore dialectical understanding ofthe crosscutting relations between class and cultural iden-tification. In terms of global transformations of social con-ditions, it is possible to discern a number of differentiationsand even oppositions that stretch fromnational to local andthat are configured by an articulation between the elite con-sumption of upscale local quality and the more politicizedanticosmopolitan goal of self-sufficiency. In Europeancountries, the latter has expressed itself in policies aimingat national self-sufficiencywithin a green agenda, as inNor-way (Flaten and Hisano 2007).

We thank our friends who have critically contributedto what we see as a collective project to continually re-think anthropology in the broadest sense, one that refusesto eschew the materialities of capitalism or of imperialrealities and their logics any more than it does the cultur-ally specific and the existential. Such an endeavor works tosupport and develop a general anthropology for our times.

Notes1. We are not referring to the mere existence of either connec-

tions or diffusion, which have no specific structural properties.Such properties are crucial for this approach, since they accountfor the differences between colonization, diffusion, and globaliza-tion, even if these processes all result, superficially, in some similaroutcomes.2. The evolutionism inMarx was not about the ultimate unifica-

tion of the world but the progression of forms of production andreproduction.3. Diffusionism, whatever its defects and in whatever guise, has

at least the virtue of allowing everyone the possibility of exposureto a world larger than their current locale (Appadurai 1988:39). Seealso Hannerz 1992:218.4. For example, Appadurai notes, The global relationship

among ethnoscapes, technoscapes, and financescapes is deeplydisjunctive and profoundly unpredictable (1996:35). Or as JosiahHeyman and Howard Campbell put it, He [Appadurai] be-lieves that focusing on disjuncture provides a powerful criticismof Marxist models that give ordered causal priority to capital

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accumulation and class relations because they are inadequatelyquirky (2009:133).5. This second process is interesting in terms of our subsequent

argument in this article that the United States is itself in steep eco-nomic decline. It also resonates with statements that the colossushas become so weak that it no longer deserves its former respect.6. Onemight argue that integration of culturally distinct minori-

ties is not a contradiction, which is, of course, true, but the condi-tions it implies include a higher-order state identity and not amerenegotiated tolerance or even fusion.7. In the late 19th century, as in the late 20th century trade was

booming, driven upwards by falling transport costs and by a floodof overseas investment. There was also migration on a vast scalefrom the Old World to the New (Economist 1997).8. For Hardt and Negri, todays celebrations of the local can be

regressive and even fascistic when they oppose circulations andmixture, and thus reinforce the walls of nation, ethnicity, race, peo-ple and the like (2000:362).9. The war against terrorism is an ambivalent case here, since

Appadurai claims that there is a serious question of moral indig-nation, cited earlier in this discussion, by the have-nots but thenignores the strongly fundamentalist ideology of Islamism, which isnot particularly positive to globalization.10. The assertion of differing local logics is not, of course, to es-

sentialize place but simply to recognize that differential histori-cal processes produce different social forms over time, which hasnothing to do with the greatly feared essentialism of the globaliz-ers.11. We conducted these interviews in conjunction with two

projects on the transformation of the nation-state during the pe-riod 200310. They were made with politically active youth andwith numerous middle-class (in the European sense) professionalsand academics.12. CNNhas taken to advertising itself as truly boundary busting

with proliferating exclamations of going beyond borders.13. Or must we assume that people all want to move and that

they have been somehow hindered throughout world history untilthe epoch of globalization?14. See, for example, Fourest 2004. There is a larger literature on

this issue.15. But such schemes are always secondary elaborations in this

approach.16. In this sense, elite representatives have taken to distinguish-

ing between good and bad globalization.17. BRIC refers to Brazil, Russia, India, and China.18. This argumentwas based on the concept of social reproduc-

tion and implied that if a society reproduced itself entirely on thebasis of local resources, then one could deal with it as a single au-tonomous entity. However, this is only very rarely the case, often aproduct of collapse, evasion, or isolation.19. We find it difficult to understand how Kalb can assert that

we are engaged in anthropologizing and universalizing Max We-ber on Protestantism and individualism. On the contrary, we sim-ply suggest that in periods of strong capitalization in the past, forexample, classical Athens or Rome, there were also tendencies to-ward the emergence of strong forms of individualism, a model thatis quite the opposite of that of the Protestant Ethic. We certainlyappreciate debating points, but this is really quite exaggerated.

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Jonathan FriedmanDirecteur detudesEHESS (IRIS)96 boulevard Raspail75006 Paris, [email protected]

Dist. ProfessorDepartment of AnthropologyUCSD, 9500 Gilman Dr.La Jolla, CA [email protected]

Kajsa Ekholm FriedmanProfessor EmeritaLund UniversityLilla Fiskaregatan 8A222 22 Lund, [email protected]

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