Blackwell
Companion to Global Anthropology (forthcoming)
by Aihwa Ong and
Stephen
J. Collier
Rationale for such a volume
After a decade of research on globalization, the time seems ripe for
anthropology to assess past approaches and to define new directions
of research on our global futures. In recent years a spate of volumes
have emerged on globalization, ranging from broad synthesizing and programmatic
work to collections of case studies that insistently point to the "plural"
nature of "global phenomena." Almost as quickly as "globalization"
gained salience in anthropological discussions, however, its precise
meaning was recognized to be quite elusive. Little consensus has emerged
concerning the nature of these "global phenomena," their specificity,
or, most importantly for present purposes, anthropology's purchase on
them. Yet anthropologists continue to find the term meaningful in the
new domains of inquiry they are tackling. In short, the term is pertinent
and important, but badly in need of specification and focus in contemporary
anthropology.
Departing from this observation, the proposed volume does not seek to
provide a "definition" of globalization for all of anthropology
in terms of fixed and essential characteristics. Rather, it will present
methodological, conceptual, and empirical points of reference relevant
to a cluster of anthropological approaches related to new spatial articulations
of science, bureaucracy and technocracy, capitalism, and governmentality.
We will be interested in work that focuses on the way in which the human
modern anthropos is at stake in these articulations, and which provides
concepts and methods that leading scholars and younger researchers find
relevant to producing logoi of anthropos in this context.
We are struck by the extent to which contemporary scholars still find
that capitalism, bureaucracy, and bio-technical power (in their classic
elaboration in Marx, Weber, and Foucault) remain the critical contexts
in which modern anthropos is constituted and transformed in contemporary
societies, but that these forms are changing. They are emerging in different
relations to each other, and in dramatically new spatial articulations,
and in relation to dramatically new domains of affect and ethics. The
volume identifies four emerging domains in which the meaning of the
human today—as object of knowledge of administration, as subject
of action, as ethical subject and subject of dignity—is problematized.
These include:
(1) New technologies and technocratic practices, including bio-technology,
information technology, industrial quality standards, securities standards,
and legal regimes, to name only a few. Technologies and organizational
forms in these domains have been evolving and expanding through various
channels at an astonishing rate.
(2) Regimes of ethics and affect including human rights, nationalist
discourses, ethnic discourses, environmental consciousness and politics,
bio-ethics.
(3) Reconfigrations of the social in which the above are being articulated,
with questions emerging concerning the roles of national versus sub-national
versus supra-national governments, private versus public organizations,
and the forms of accountability and governance which exist in these
different scales.
(4) Changes in the relationship between these emergent domains and new
forms of capitalism. The Companion will provide a definitive overview
of the varied ways that the human is at stake in these emergent domains,
as a rational actor, a national subject, an ethical subject, a biological
being, a social being, a holder of rights in globalizing modernities.
The Editors
Aihwa Ong received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1982. She is currently Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (SUNY Press, 1987); Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Duke University Press, 1999); and the co-editor of Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia (Univ. of California Press, 1992); and Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (Routledge, 1995). Her forthcoming book is called Buddha in Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, and the New America (University of California Press, Public Anthropology Series). She recently received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship to study risk, sustainability, and citizenship in Asian global cities.
Stephen J. Collier received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2001 and is presently a fellow at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. His dissertation, entitled Post-Socialist City: The Government of Society in Neo-Liberal Times, studies the interaction of new governmental technologies with existing substantive orders. His current projects include work on anthropological methods, and comparative historical work on modern governmentality.
MedAnthro
Lecture Series
Emeritus Lecture Series