The Local & the Global

PPT offered by Oana Anghelachi

Global-local connections

• Notions of the global as well as the local can be overly objectified, homogenized, or naturalized.

• What is globalization? • Is the global any easier to identify than the

local? • Globalization vs transnationalism

Globalization: flows & mobility

• Global flows of capital, commodities, people, technologies and ideas, did not appear suddenly in the last few decades but have existed for centuries.

• Long term processes such as: the Agricultural Revolution and postindustrial transformations have sustained globalization.

• What is new are the volume and velocity of such flows and the financial mobility.

• That is globalization and the retreat of the state have been propelled by the accelerated mobility of capital and technological change.

Economic globalization

• Though economic globalization has a wide impact, its real reach in some respects is limited;

• For example, by one estimate approximately 80% of the more than 5 billion (1996) people in the world live outside global consumer networks

• In any case, globalization produces highly unequal effects in different parts of the world, with global competition impoverishing some areas and enriching others.

Global and local: A false opposition?

• Globalizing and localizing processes often are seen to be at war with one another, with a common assumption that only one – most likely globalization – will win out.

• Some suggest that if these two contradictory tendencies are to accommodate one another, individuals will have to recognize that their search for psychic comfort in collectivities can occur simultaneously in local, national, and transnational domains.

The Disappearing Local

• The “local” is construed in contradictory ways:

As a residual category overtaken by development

As a haven of resistance against globalization As a historical/ cultural construct

The Local

• There are at least two senses in which the local sometimes appears to disappear:

1. the familiar postwar development paradigm of modernization theory, nation building, import substitution, and a belief in technological progress.

2. when it is viewed as a historical/cultural construct.

The local as a historical construct

• That is, the “local” is not a fixed, bounded, or natural geographic space.

• Instead of spatially fixed identities or clearly marked centers and peripheries, we have diaspora, hybridity, imagined localities and peripheries imploding into centers.

• In short, the local is a historical product, one that both shapes and is shaped by global processes.

• The boundaries of the local are more political, rhetorical or social than natural or geographical.

• It is not the local as entity but rather the local in its historically constructed relational field that makes global restructuring processes concrete

Global – local dichotomy

• Rather than reinvocations of global-local dichotomies – and their reinscripion in false oppositions between social science theory and area studies – is exploration of the historically contingent ways in which there two domains constitute one another.

• Localizing initiatives (boundary accentuation or closing of borders) may provoke globalizing reactions (boundary expansion or transgression)

Globalizing reactions

• The intensification of world wide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away

Transnationalism

• Transnationalism overlaps globalization but typically it is more limited.

• Whereas global processes are decentered from specific national territories and take place in a global space,

• Transnational processes transcend one or more nation-states.

• Thus, transnational is the term of choice when referring for example to migration of nationals across the borders of one or more nations.

• Similarly, transnational corporations operate worldwide but are centered in one home nation.

Global Theory

• Globalization mediated by migration, commerce, communication technology, finance, tourism entails a reorganization of the bipolar imagery of space and time, expressed in modern anthropological theory.

• Globalization entails a shift from two-dimensional Euclidian space with its centers and peripheries and sharp boundaries, to a multidimensional global space with unbounded sub-spaces.

Conclusion

• What is lost in this binary division is precisely the fact that the parameters of the local and the global are often indefinable or indistinct – they are permeable constructs.

• How one separates the local from the global is difficult to decide when each thoroughly infiltrates the other.

• The world as a mosaic of separate cultures