Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (original) (raw)

2004, American Anthropologist

Understanding globalization is probably the most crucial task facing social scientists today and many scholars are confronting the challenge. One can battle over which perspective is the most fruitful, but Arjun Appadurai's claim in his edited volume, Globalization, is to use all possible methods and tools to comprehend the changes that are on us. This ingenious collection, many chapters republished from Public Culture, ranges from analyses of art and textiles to political economy. Appadurai cites the urgency of the situation, as well as the historical patterns of inequality, to incorporate a wide variety of perspectives and methods. Although most of the articles explore new areas from unusual angles, perhaps the one kind of article missing from this collection is the "on the ground" ethnography of the banking practices of the elite or grassroots resistance from below. I am concerned about the scholarly and social implications of the postmodern emphasis on images, imagineries, tropes, financescapes, ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, and mediascapesapproaches that skim the exotic, colorful, and glittering surfaces of globalization. Appadurai has previously avoided locating power or defining empire or the corporate forces of privatization and investment, which characterize globalization in the second millennium. Nevertheless, recently Appadurai appears to have landed lightly on earth, both in his recognition of capitalist predation in his introduction and in his research on Mumbai (to be found in later issues of Public Culture). His introductory remarks in Globalization read with an appropriate sense of urgency. There is concern for the gravity of the subject and the wrongs being perpetrated through a continuing process of capital accumulation by dispossession. But you will still not find in these pages any systematic analysis of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or the World Trade Organization. Nor will you find any explicit recognition of the ongoing demonstrations against globalization or, apart from Saskia Sassen's analysis of the state, any detailed examination of the increasing gap between rich and poor. You will not read much about the persistent injuries of uneven development or the ongoing destruction of working-class communities. Although the chapters collected by Appadurai fall short of grappling with the institutional structures and inequities that make globalization perhaps the primary problem now confronting anthropology, the collection nonetheless pro