Notes on Contributors
Thomas Biolsi teaches Anthropology at Portland State University in Oregon. He has been conducting fieldwork on Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota for 20 years, and his research interests center on the history of United States Indian policy and the politics of Indian-White relations. His most recent book is ''Deadliest Enemies'' Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation. Elizabeth Colson is retired from the Department of Anthropology, University of California,...
David Nugent
This chapter develops a critical commentary on Weberian and post-Weberian approaches to the state. Drawing on ethnographic material from the northern Peruvian Andes, it shows the importance of distinguishing state in the Weberian sense from governmentality in the Foucauldian sense . Most scholars have treated the governmental states of Western Europe as normative, and in the process have obscured the broad range of forces that have sought to order national societies in relation to the...
Nina Glick Schiller
Past scholarship that normalized and naturalized the nation-state hindered the emergence of transnational studies and distorted the study of migration. Stimulated by contemporary globalization, a transnational perspective on migration has emerged. The new perspective highlights the significance of transnational social fields, differentiating between ways of being and ways of becoming. However, the emergence of transnational studies may impede analysis of new global concentrations of imperial...
Saskia Sassen
The organizing theme of this chapter is that a focus on cities allows us to see a variety of processes as part of globalization in a way that the typical focus on macrolevel cross-border processes does not. What are often barely visible or recognizable localizations of the global assume presence in cities. The global city in particular enables global corporate capital, by providing specialized capabilities and world-class supplies of professional workers. But it also can function as a space of...
Elizabeth Colson
The political implications of the massive population displacements characteristic of the current world are a challenge to those concerned with how people engage with one another in political action. Political anthropologists who study displacement deal with questions of identity, processes of estrangement and stigmatization, definitions of boundaries and citizenship, the strategic resources of diasporas, and how all of this impacts upon evolving definitions of an international political order.
Jane C and Peter T Schneider
Attempts to analyze ''mafias'' in general rely on a market model that pays scant attention to differences among groups, or to their respective political and cultural contexts. This approach makes it easy to imagine the coalescence of many organized crime formations into a global criminal network - the underside of capitalist globalization. Anthropological analyses of organized crime point rather to significant differences among criminal traditions, and to the importance of specific processes...
Aihwa Ong
Against the background of debates that globalization has led to claims for mutlicul-tural citizenship, this chapter considers how neoliberal techniques are remaking the spatial, social, and moral borders of the nation. The capacity of entrepreneurial figures to manipulate and transform borders into values of trade and production has restructured the value of capital and labor across transnational space, leading to a ''splintering'' of citizenship. Two alternative interventions to the...
Ulf Hannerz
There is a cosmopolitanism of culture and a cosmopolitanism in politics - is there a connection between them This chapter explores that issue, and several other questions relating to this complex concept and its place in an interconnected world. Are cosmopolitans always members of the elite, or are the social bases of cosmopolitanism now changing Can cosmopolitans have roots Does cosmopolitanism in politics aim at a world government, or are there other alternatives in building an acceptable...
Jonathan Friedman
This chapter focuses on the relation between class formation and the dynamics of global process. It suggests that class is an extremely important parameter of analysis that has been overlooked by most of the anthropological literature on globalization. After arguing that class relations have a definite cultural content and are susceptible to ethnographic scrutiny, the chapter locates class as a process in relation to larger global processes, suggesting that class structure in European states...
Ann Laura Stoler 1
Much of colonial studies over the last decade has worked from the shared assumption that the mastery of reason, rationality, and the exaggerated claims made for Enlightenment principles have been at the political foundation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial regimes and should be at the center of critical histories of them. We have looked at what colonial authorities took to be indices of reasoned judgment and the political effects of policies that defined rationality in...
Gavin Smith
A term made important in social science and the humanities by Antonio Gramsci, hegemony refers to the complex way in which power infuses the various levels of the social world social reproduction, social practices, and the constituting of the social person. Beginning with an understanding of how the term emerges from the historical context and epistemology of Gramsci's writings, the essay then explores the possible usefulness and limitations of the term for current social and political...
Richard Ashby Wilson
Cultural relativism in the Boasian tradition obstructed the anthropological study of human rights in the years immediately after World War II, but the rise of Marxism and opposition to the Vietnam war raised the profile of social justice issues in the discipline. This focus became more explicitly rights-oriented in the 1990s with the rise of globalization literature and global justice institutions such as the UN International Criminal Courts. Anthropological studies during this time have...
Akhil Gupta
This essay revisits theories of nationalism by focusing on questions of time and temporality, in particular, the question of whether the ideas of time central to Anderson's influential work on nationalism may not be usefully rethought from the perspective of Third World nationalism. Accordingly, notions of homogeneous, empty time, the modularity of the nation form, the seriality of the contingent, contested effort to forge a hegemonic nationalism, and the impact of late capitalism on national...
Marc Edelman and Angelique Haugerud
''Development'' is a slippery concept that has attracted attention from an astonishing array of scholars. This essay explores the Enlightenment roots of debates about development the clash of radical and mainstream paradigms such as twentieth-century theories of imperialism, modernization, and dependency and the rise of economic neoliberalism. Anthropology absorbed the seismic changes of the new free-market regime partly by culturalizing and dehistoricizing globalization, and by downplaying its...