REVIEW ARTICLES

'Globalization'
Ibrahim Aoude, Andrew Davidson, Sergio Fiedler, Michael Humphrey,
Owen Sichone.
Books Reviewed:
Jonathan Friedman, Cultural Identity & Global Process. (London: Sage
Publications, 1994). Reviewer: Ibrahim Aoude.
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999). Reviewer: Andrew Davidson.
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
Reviewer: Sergio Fielder.'
Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences. (Cambridge:
Polity, 1998). Reviewer: Michael Humphrey.
Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalisation is Reshaping Our
Lives. (London: Profile Books, 2000). Reviewer: Owen Sichone.

Introduction
This review explores the uses of the concept, globalization, in a selection
of books over the last decade. Also included are books that use the term
'globalization' implicitly but has as their subject, globalism. They all contribute to an analysis of the transformation of the relationship between the
global and local resulting from globalization. Individuality, culture, identity.
Social Analysis, Volume 46. Issue 2, Summer 2002

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and freedom (empowerment), rather than markets are the issues explored to
reveal the dynamic between the global and the local. Jonathan Friedman's
focus is cultural identity. He argues that the integration of the local in the
global occurs at the expense of its fragmentation. The formation of cultural
identity in the era of globalization is therefore intimately tied up with the
larger processes of the world system. Bauman makes a similar observation
stating that the local loses its characteristics as a location of meaning, social
autonomy and durability. Sen explores the relationship between the global
and the local through the concept of development. His key point is that
globalization will not be beneficialbring real developmentif the freedom of the market is not matched by individual freedoms (social and cultural rights) supported by a protective and caring state. Appadurai's analysis
of the global and the local is his reconfiguring of sodal space through his
postnational 'landscapes'spaces constituting new forms of social relationships and identities.
What is distinctive about the books selected is the division between
those which develop their analysis of globalization in the contexts of earlier paradigms of developmentFriedman's use of world systems and Sen's
focus on development theoryand those which explore globalization as a
question of the transformation of modernity to postmodernityAppadurai,
Bauman, Giddens. In Appadurai's case this involves a reconceptualization
of sodal space and identity; however, in the case of Bauman and Giddens,
it is a discussion about the consequences for social forms of modernity.
Bauman's central theme is the social effects of time/space compression.
Giddens is more concerned with the consequences of the erosion of the
social premises of modernity.
One of the difficulties very apparent in these reviews with the concept,
modernity, is its level of abstraction and the generality with which it is
applied. Interestingly, two of the books reviewed hereBauman's and Giddens'are quite short. The tendency towards abstraction apparently facilitates brevity, but not without some serious shorting comings, as Sichone
points out.

Jonathan Friedman, Cultural Identity & Global Process. (London: Sage

Publications, 1994). Reviewer: Ibrahim Aoude.
The dominant paradigmatic discourse on globalization focuses on global
markets and the world economy. Glorification of the 'New Economy' has
taken center stage despite the fact that much of the world is sinking deeper

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and deeper into political and economic chaos, as witnessed most recently
in the political economic affairs of Argentina and Brazil. More chaos is sure
to follow if the war on 'terrorism' takes an ugly turn towards full-scale war
against Iraq, as the Bush Administration is threatening to do. In the Bush
Administration's world vision, culture figures only as a source of polarizing
conflict, Huntington's 'clash of civilizations.'
Usually, the critique of the dominant globalist paradigm operates
within a narrow political economic framework, leaving culture outside the
globalization discourse. Friedman's book, a collection of essays written
between the late 1970s and early 1990s, offers a different approach to
understanding the concept of culture in a global world. Friedman deconstructs many of the myths perpetrated on academe in the name of intellectual rigor and openness to new ideas (read the new ideology of the
marketglobalism). As a collection of anthropological essays on culture,
modernity, postmodernism, and identity, the book offers a social science
model to understanding culture and identity in ways that disciplines in the
social sciences and humanities, because of their intellectual parochialism,
have been unable to fulfill.
Addressing the problematic of cultural identity, Friedman is confronted
with the weight of anthropological practice ranging from the modern to the
postmodern. His critique of structural functionalism allows him to debunk
"the linear relation between the anthropologist from the center and his
object in the periphery ... (p. 7]." Instead of ossifying the subject in an
ahistorical study of social institutions, Friedman proposes to begin conceptually with social reproduction, in order to allow us to focus on social
process and social transformation.
It is instructive that Friedman utilizes the terms of "center" and "periphery" as he points out the necessity of understanding cultural identity within
a world system's approach. He does so at a time when Andre Gunder Frank
ignores these terms in his ReOrient. TWo points need to be made here: firstly,
the study of culture and identity has to be understood in the context of the
world system. Whether one agrees with Wallerstein (that the capitalist world
system dates back to 1500) or with Frank (that the world system has been
around for five thousand years) seems to be immaterial to the study of cultural identity. Be that as it may, Friedman's sympathies are closer to Wallerstein than they are to Frank. His whole notion of the capitalist system and
his use of global systems clearly indicate that to be the case. Secondly, that
the world system/global systems have regional and local structures, including "center/periphery."

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The second point above is critical since global systems possess cultural
properties. Cultural identity is about differences and similarities. But cultural process can only be understood through the study of hegemony, of
dominant and "subaltern" discourses. Hence the center is the point of
departure "since it is in the geographic expansion of the system that its cultviral properties emerge" (p. 25).
A related and conceptually essential point is the interplay between the
local and the global in the study of cultural identity and globalization or,
more precisely, global systemic processes. The local is indispensable to
take into account because the integration of the local area in the global
occurs at the expense of the fragmentation of the local. In this sense, the
local is a function of the global because "local processes are aspects of the
larger global process (p. 198)." The dialectic of fragmentation/integration
is absolutely essential for understanding contemporary cultural identity.
This appreciation of the dynamic articulation between the global and local
is markedly different from that (mis) understanding of modernist anthropologists and cultural theorists who look at identity as an attribute of a
group or individual subject.
Equally important to recognize is that under conditions of capitalist crisis, fragmentation of the global system gives rise to new identity construction. Friedman's deconstruction of culture sets him apart from Ceertz's
understanding that there is no such thing as culture; only "specific cultures" exist. For Friedman there is a difference between "generic culture,"
shared by all Homo sapiens, "that is specific to human behavior" (p. 72)
and "differential culture," which "is merely the realization of generic culture in its historical and spatial specificity" (p. 73). In other words, "differential culture" constructs/identifies the Other.
The resulting cultural pluralism (multiculturalism) of a crisis-ridden
global capitalist system is the postmodern reality of a fragmented system
in which assimilation and homogenization have failed. If hegemony
brought about global integration of fragmented local areas, then, in view
of capitalist crisis, de-hegemonizadon accelerated the process of "differential culture." We now witness de-hegemonization as cvdtural essentialization in the form of ethnicity and even racism, both expressions of a
global system in the stage of disintegration. In this way the modern transforms into the postmodern.
Postmodernism is not the (re) solution of the modern; instead, it is the
condition of a system in crisis. This reality implies that everything in the
system experiences crisis, including the individual who becomes fragmented as well.

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Friedman constructs his arguments with the aid of specific examples

from his extensivefieidvifork,demonstrating the power of relying on material conditions of existence. These examples also show that the material
conditions of existence reside in the study of production and reproduction,
of processes rather than social institutions. Social institutions in the mode
of structural functionalism categorize and dehistodcize the subject and render it timeless, but lifeless.
In its fascination with the primitive, the postmodern detracts from what
is essential to bring about a solution to the crisis. Friedman is quite critical
of postmodernism and this is well and good. His sober analysis of cultural
identity and global process shows the possibilities of new projects coming
to the fore. But these remain within a dominant modernist project (East
Asia, the Pacific Rim, etc.,) adapting to crisis in various ways and putting
up with cultural pluralization (multiculturalism) in one form or another.
This is utter chaos; but under conditions of empire nonetheless.
Friedman's contribution to our understanding of global systems is quite
significant. However, it is imperative thiat we should look into the interplay
between social movements, cultural identity and global processes in order
to be more specific about "potential new projects" (p. 252) that could challenge a crisis-ridden global capitalist system and not merely adapt to it.

Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1999). Reviewer: Andrew Davidson.
Social scientists have been exploring the historical and comparative organization of contemporary capitalism for a long time. A central theme of these
studies has been what is development and what kinds of social relations
should it engender. The debate, as Sen reminds us in Development as Freedom, is not as clear-cut as it may seem. The consensus that has emerged
about the basic processes underlying contemporary patterns of development and goals has been realized at rather a disengaged distance. As Nair
(1999) observes:
Max Planck, the originator of the quantum theory of physics, once said that science makes progress funeral by funeralthe old are never converted by a new
doctrine; simply replaced by a new generation. In the social sciences it often
takes several generations to dislodge obsolescence. In the meantime, serious
mistakes can and are made, hurting the lives of millions of hapless people. In
poor countries, like India and Pakistan, the mistakes can be costly. And the
funerals premature cind unnecessaryfunerals, not of socicil scientists, who

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usually operatefroma safe haven, but of the designated beneficiaries of development policies formulated on the basis of faulty premises and paradigms.
What does this portend for the analysis and understanding of development, especially in today's increasingly interconnected or globalized world?
Although Sen does not explicitly use the concept, globalization, his
understanding of development is clearly articulated against the backdrop of
global realties, and represents an interesting contribution to contemporary
thinking about globalism and global processes. Originally prepared as a
series of discussion papers for the World Bank, Development as Freedom
directly challenges the shibboleths of development economics. Sen quickly
departs from long-standing economic thought, taking issue with development fetishism and its focus on economic growth to the exclusion of individual economic well-being and political freedom, or more aptly phrased,
unfreedoms that leave people little choice and opportunity to exercise "their
reasoned agency" as "citizens and participants in the social, political and
economic life of the community." To this end. Sen presents a wide-ranging
account of development that integrates ethics, values and economic theory,
drawing inspiration from what the anthropologist Levi-Strauss termed
hricolage by bringing together diverse ideas in a way that exceeds the
boundaries imposed by conventional wisdom.
While the globalized capitalist economy is not new, contemporary globalization is a different phenomenon. In this respect, the debate over development in a globalizing world, as Sen so lucidly shows, is not simply about
the mechanics or rhetoric of ongoing transformations within capitalism. At
the forefront are contested images of what constitutes 'the good life' and
whether development is "expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy."
Sen is particularly concerned with the types of social relations, institutions
and human values upon which freedom is conceived, both as the means to
and as a goal of development. It has been commonly assumed that checking social and political rights is a luxury that society can ill afford, until
some critical level of economic prosperity is first achieved. According to
Sen, this is clearly wrong. To the contrary. Sen argues that both social and
political freedom are in fact conducive to economic growth. Located within
this perspective. Freedom as Development can provide an expansive reflection on the relationship between development and globalization.
Globalization and its supportive norms comprise some of the more
puzzling ontological scapes in development theory, especially the enigmatic
division of economy, society, culture, and polity, as well as between structure and agency. Discourses on globalization (and development) have been

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framed from both within a modernist framework of grand narratives and

total structures, and from within postmodernism, emphasizing the primacy
of location and diversity through an actor/agency approach. In Sen's view,
development is both global and local, but his emphasis is on individual
freedoms, characterized by people having the "freedom to lead the kind of
lives they value, and have reason to value." Nevertheless, Sen makes clear
that market freedoms by themselves are insufficient to the task at hand
because individuals are not free if they suffer hunger, illiteracy, homelessness, or illness. He does not naively accept what he calls the new superstition of absolute faith in market solutions. Instead, Sen argues strongly for
the socially constructive role of the state in addressing issues of education,
health, social assistance, and unemployment. In short, he supports the
state's role in creating a protective and caring social environment to enable
individual freedom.
Sen provides a unique blend of classical economic thought with moral
philosophy, reminiscent, in Sen's own characterization, of the integrative
approach propounded by the likes of Adam Smith and Marx. The dominate
theme running throughout Sen's book is quite simple; people's social and
economic circumstances or freedom, determines what goes on their plate,
clothes their bodies, fills their minds, hears their complaints, and heals
their illnesses. But therein lies the rub. To achieve development, according
to Sen, requires the removal of poverty, tyranny, lack of economic opportunities, social deprivation, neglect of public facilities, and the mechanisms
of repression. According to Sen, successful development captures the complex inter-relatedness of economic, social, political, and cultural variables,
and requires that all are addressed simultaneously. These freedoms are
interconnected and together provide a synergy to generate and sustain
development. This multi-pronged strategy for development is a daunting
endeavor, but worth the effort.
For Sen, development cannot occiir through the freedom of markets
alone. It must be matched by real individual freedoms. This may be news
to those bunkered within the World Bank, but for most social scientists and
development practitioners he is 'preaching to the converted.' Perhaps it is
not what he says but who he isa respected economist and Nobel prize
winnerthat makes his critique powerful in the era of globalization.
Themes of empowerment, equity, and freedom have been around for many
years; sadly few seemed to listen. Nearly thirty years ago, Geoffrey Currey,'
an Australian economist, proved all too prescient when he wrote:

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But development is basically about people, and it ought to be defined as such.

In this sense, development could be defined ... as the expcinsion of opportunities for the realisation of human creative potential, the giving to all its members
of society the greatest possible latitude for the exercise and expansion of their
faculties. It is a liberating process of change.

NOTE
"The Definition of Development," in Showcase State: The Illusion of Indonesia's 'Accelerated' Modernisation, ed. R. Mortimer. Sydney, 1973.

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of

Globalization. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
Reviewer: Sergio Fielder.
Appadurai's Modernity at Large provides a cultural perspective on the
impact and political possibilities of globalization. As an academic bom into
a middle class family in Bombay, but now working at a U.S. university,
Appadurai positions himself as a postcolonial intellectual. He writes about
the subject as someone whose own identity and professional life has been
affected by the cultural instabilities and displacements engendered by globalization. He points out, like others have done before him, that globalization is not a new process: modem capitalism has always been a global
system. Appadurai, however, is distinctively interested in the Global Now.
That is, in the ways in which over the last twenty years there has been a
drastic rupture in the pattem of social relations globally. For him, therefore,
the Global Now calls for a new political and theoretical imagination to
make sense of the almost ubiquitous effects globalization now exercises on
people's lives.
Whereas earlier cultural analyses of globalization, such as Friedman's,
attempted to locate cultural and identity formation within a world systems
approach, Appadurai attempts to conceptualize the global from the perspective of the local. He explores the impact of globalization on everyday
worlds, and above all, on the question of how poptdar imagination is transformed within the context of a globally embedded everyday life. In this
respect, he problematizes three major dimensions of community life as it is
affected by the Global Now. nationalism, violence, and social justice. He
displaces the political and theoretical narratives of modernity, but makes no
attempt to offer an integrating framework to analyze or offer a solution for

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the crises of sovereignty, conflict, and social polarization. Moving away

from the political "architecture of modernization theory" provided by the
nation-state, he resolutely argues for a postnational perspective.
The impact on the everyday of the electronic media, and the proliferation of grassroots micro-narratives of new social movements are features of
the Global Now. which are radically upsetting the boundaries and the possibilities of what constituted national identities. To hold on to national identity as a cultural response to and defense against globalization amounts, for
Appadurai, to a nostalgic desire for the dignity of a past that never was. He
stresses instead the emergence of new spaces, which are transversing the
national, and are characterized by their mobility, juxtaposition, and difference. Drawing on the spatial metaphor of landscapes, he puts forward a
typology of five "global cultural flows" anchoring the "imagined world" of
the new postnational subject. He calls them ethnoscapes, mediascapes,
technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes.
Ethnoscapes refers to landscapes inhabited by those human groups
who live constantly on the move even if they have to settle in a single place.
This space includes a variety of nomadic individuals ranging from refugees
to tourists. Mediascapes are produced by the mass 'mediatic' systems and
productssuch as newspapers, magazines, films, among otherswhich
disseminate information at a global level. Technoscapes are those landscapes dominated by the diffusion of both mechanical and informational
technologies around the world. Financescapes, on the other hand, form the
transnational texture of economic relations created by the increasing flow
of capital movements. Finally, ideoscapes refer to the landscape of political
ideologies and imagery often associated with a particular state or social
movement, and include the different discourses about freedom, democ-.
racy, human rights, and so on.
By using these concepts, Appadurai stresses that within the new global
flows there has developed a global public sphere and new forms of social
imagining which are fundamentally disassociated from the territoriality of
the nation-state. Like capital and mass communications, nations themselves are becoming diasporic and hybrid. To be a Hindu,' a Tamil or a Chinese today is not necessarily to embrace a national identity that takes place
within the civic institutions of a modern state, but a flow of communication and identification that can cross many borders. Accordingly, Appadurai vigorously argues against any return to "primordialist" assumptions
about cultural identity, where ethnicity is simply understood as built on
strong collective feelings of group identity and boundaries drawn from primary affective relations, such as those of kinship and place. For him, pri-

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mordialism presumes an unsurpassable cultural bridge between different

ethnicities and national groups. Thus, Appadurai's explanation for interethnic violence is national implosion, not irreconcilable primordialist differences. Ethnic violence then is the product of a collective strategy of
solidarity in a desperate attempt to find security. He suggests that the
founding ground for ethnic violence is product of the impact of global
forces on the local, and the need to secure an identity, not the "enclosed"
nature of ethnic groups.
For Appadurai locality can never be disembedded from the global. In
fact, the localincluding its ethnic dimensionsis itself produced by the
overlapping, interaction, and tension between the different types of landscapes outlined above. His perspective certainly presents a major challenge
to ethnography which has often tended to research the local as an ontologically self-contained entity.
Although Modernity at Large gives privileged attention to the cultural
aspect of globalization, it does not adopt the "culturalist" approach of Cultural Studies. Appadurai still anchors the emerging forms of postnational
subjectivity in larger political and economic processes. However, although
he makes an ethical argument for a postnational politics, he provides few
clues as to what that politics might entail. As a consequence Appadurai
runs the risk of endorsing in the postnational a vision resembling that promoted by ideologues of neo-liberal globalism. He does not share the same
imagination and project, but his critique of the nation-state and primordialism might well be construed as an attack on discourses and strategies
of power that the globalizing forces of capital have already displaced.
Despite these concerns. Modernity at Large represents a crucial work of
scholarship for those interested in understanding the cultural implications
of the global processes of the last twenty years. That is the reason why, in
this book, Appadurai's attempt to conceptualize the postnational remains
an inescapable point of reference for all those researching culture in the
new global context.

Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences. (Cambridge:

Polity, 1998). Reviewer: Michael Humphrey.
Bauman's approach to globalization is to explore the way key themes of
modernitytime and space, surveillance, territorial sovereignty, population
movement, estrangement, and orderhave traveled from modernity and
postmodemity. Bauman unpacks "the social roots and social conse-

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quences" of globalizing processes. The key idea is that space/time compression captures change in the human condition. Historically, space has
been transformed by technologies of mobility. In traditional societies the
unmediated human body largely determined the limits of command and
control. With the emergence of the modem state, the organization of space
was liberated from the constraints of the human body, and produced as
modern engineered space. The third space, cyberspace, has been produced
above "organized space," collapsing spatial dimensions through a global
web of information. Bauman argues that exploring the social origins and
outcomes of that compression reveals that globalization divides as much as
it unites. While globalization means greater freedom for some, it means
entrapment for others.
While emphasizing that speed and mobility are the central characteristic of globalization, Bauman reveals that globalization is not merely producing a hyper-modernity through the intensification of the relationships
and patterns of the past. Bauman's proposition is that globalization is eroding the cultural, political, and social forms of modernity leading to stratification, segregation, and exclusion. The relationship between the global
and local is not merely "glocal"the global being mediated through the
local( Robertson 1992). The resulting social transformations are fragmentary, producing neo-tribalism and fundamentalism of local cultures as
well as the hybridization of cosmopolitan culture. Globalization is producing a polarization between the globalized and localized worlds, between
top and bottom, with the resulting breakdown in communication. Increasingly meaning and values are more and more "extraterritorial and emancipated from local constraints" (Bauman 2000: 3). The cultural consequences
are the bifurcation and polarization of human experience between comfort
and anxiety. The need to subdue these fears and neutralize discontent only
reinforces further polarization. In response to the complexity of globalizing
processes is their simplification and management as "law and order"
issues. Cases falling below the idealized norm are criminalized. Safety
focused on the body, and possessions becomes "overloaded" with wider
concerns about insecurity and uncertainty.
The technological 'annulment of space' through globalization produces
more than a stratified distance between the 'globals' and 'locals.' It is challenging the very possibility of the autonomy of local life. The deterritorialization of power produced through globalization has enormous
consequences for the local organization of life, social cohesion, and community. The very capacity to generate social meaning is at stake: "Some can
move out of the localityany localityat will. Others watch helplessly the

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sole locality they inhabit moving away from under their feet" (p. 18). In
cities, public space is being eroded through its privatization or through
redesign as restrictive and filtered "interdictory spaces," This erosion of
public space contributes to "the disintegration of locally grounded forms of
togetherness and shared communal living" (p. 21). The very possibility of
community, local leadership or local opinion is increasingly denied.
The legibility and transparency of space has been a key element in the
administration of populations by modern bureaucracies. Foucault's Panopticon encapsulated the idea of total surveillance as the basis for administrative control. The intensification of surveillance involved going beyond
merely mapping existing space, to designing space to increase legibility
and therefore order. Forced legibility through urban development and
renewal has had enormous impact on local lives. The social cost of uniformity is conformity "and conformity's other face is intolerance" (p. 47).
Urban social homogeneity limits the capacity to cope w;ith human difference and situations of uncertainty. Once built for security to protect its citizens from outsiders, the city itself is now the source of fear and concerns
with fortification of house and privacy.
Whereas the Panopticon was designed to impose discipline and uniform behaviorthe few watched the manynow surveillance is used to
exclude. Panoptic data sorts use cross-matching database to confirm the
credibility of people, their reliability as consumers. Moreover, there is now
a shift to the Synopticon of the mass media where the many watch the few.
Previously, the "Panopticon forced people into a position where they could
be watched. The Synopticon needs no coercionit seduces people into
watching" (p. 52). Watching serves to detach people from their localities.
Locals watch the globals, celebrities of all kinds, whose authority is secured
by their distance and extraterritorial identities.
While the technological intensification of surveillance and mapping
has eclipsed the prerogatives of state sovereignty it has not been replaced
by another political center. In fact, as Bauman points out:
the deepest meaning conveyed by the idea of globalization is that of the indeterminate, unruly and self-propelled character of world affairs; the absence of a centre, of a controlling desk, of a board of directors, of a managerial office (p. 59).
Globalization seems to refer to global effects, not what we hope to do but
'what is happening to us' (p. 60).
Yet despite the transnational processes challenging it, the nation-state
remains the principle framework for economic management and political
action. Bauman points out that globalization is diminishing sovereignty yet

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proliferating new nation-states. Historically, few societies ever had the

resources and size to aspire to statehood. Now the nation-state is withering
because of the erosion of the "tripod of military, economic and cultural sovereignties" (p. 61). Consequently, all states are forced to seek alliances and
voluntarily surrender ever more bits of their sovereignty. Thus, Bauman
argues 'globalization' and 'territorialization' are not contradictory, but complementary processes. Greater freedom of movement of capital and trade
goes hand in hand with political fragmentation and de-regulation. Thus,
globalization has led to the demise of politics as a strategy of collective
action, by weakening the regulatory capacities of the state.
Political deregulation through the proliferation of states is part of the
process of global re-stratification of the wealthy and poor countries. While
the wealthy get greater life choices the life of the poor becomes more fateful. Glocalization, the unbreakable unity between globalizing and localizing
pressures (Robertson 1992), is actually experienced as producing radically
separated social worlds having little to do with each other. Nor does media
communication about the first and second worlds reveal the relationship
between enrichment and impoverishment, but only serves to polarize and
segregate these polarized worlds. And when the worlds do come into contact, such as when asylum seekers begin arriving in large numbers at the
borders of the first world, there is a denial of any relationship and any
moral responsibility for those socially displaced people.
Another profound cultural shift accompanying globalization is the
emergence of 'consumer' society. This has produced enormous changes in
social perspectives on social and cultural life, especially the idea that nothing is forever. Forgetting is preferable to learning. The very impetus to consume creates an environment in which there are endless shifts in the object
of desire. The consumer is 'on the move' looking for new attractions,
already bored by what they have had, in a world transformed by the consumer market. Yet the aspirations to consume are not matched by the ability, another dimension of global stratification. Movement as consumers is
made easier for those in the first world while those in the second are controlled by immigration controls.
The celebrated cultural face of globalization is "geared to the tourists'
dreams and desires" (p. 93). The cultural hybridization of the globals is
mirrored by the cultural disempowerment of the locals. Wealth is to mobility as poverty is to immobility. Those unable to be assimilated are confined,
suspending communication and deepening estrangement. Bauman notes
that formerly confinement, especially prisoners, was a disciplining strategy.
Now confinement has to do with exclusion rather than rehabilitation.

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Moreover, with the increasing failure of political solutions to insecurity

and uncertainty, condensed anxiety about safety has become a focus of
state manipulation. The 'law and order' program to fight crime is everywhere becoming a spectacle of symbolic state power. Endemic insecurity
and uncertainty manifest in post-modernity coincides with the 'cut down'
version of state sovereignty under globalization. After all, criminality is not
the prerogative of the poor but they, unlike the transnationally mobile
elites, are translocal.

Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalisation is Reshaping Our

Lives. (London: Profile Books, 2000). Reviewer: Owen Sichone.
This little book is based on the author's BBC Reith Lectures for 1999, and
sums up the main points in what is a complex and on-going process of
study and debate. Although short, it nevertheless reveals enough for us to
be able to disagree with his approach. Giddens, like most sociologists, is
terribly ethno-centric, and, try as he might, fails to understand globalization from a non-European perspective. His study of globalization confirms
what anthropologists like StoUer have previously argued; that global social
science needs to be multi-sited, multidisciplinary, and collaborative. Giddens' definition of globalization can be summed up as the issue of
increased integration through 'Westernization'processes emanating from
the West. From a sociological point of view however, processes of Easternization and Africanization are invisible, traditional or anti-democratic,
whereas those that involve Westernization are privileged and inevitable.
Hart has argued that:
capitalism has become virtual (i.e., as good as) in two main senses: the shift
from material production (agriculture and manufactiiring) to information and
services, and the corresponding detachment of the circxilation of money from
production and trade. This in turn is an aspect of the latest stage of mechanisation, the communications revolution of the late twentieth century. The question is whether the same developments that have been responsible for the
recent Integration of the world society are also the cause of its increasing polarisation. The answer is yes (2001:313).
For those economies that still rely on bananas, copper wire bars or
even crude oil for their foreign exchange earnings, for farmers who still rely
on hand tools or even animal draught power, and for districts and provinces
that missed out on the steam locomotive, all-weather roads and water-

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bome sanitation, will the internet, satellite communications and hand-held

computers reverse their marginalization or worsen it? The human development statistics speak for themselves. The 1998 Human Development Report
showed that:
225 of the richest men (and they are men) own more than $US1 trillion, the
equivalent of the annual income of the poorest 47 per cent of the world's people. Three of them have assets worth more than the gross domestic product of
the 48 least developed countries. The West spends $US37 billion a year on pet
food, perfumes and cosmetics, almost the estimated additional cost of providing basic education, health, nutrition, water and sanitation for those deprived
of them ... World consumption has increased six fold La the last 20 years, but
the richest fifth account for 86 per cent of it.
Money markets have made a few people very rich, and they have also
ruined the lives of many. Corruption, mismanagement and even genuine
errors in the banking industry have turned billions of paper assets into
worthless investments, and pauperized millions of people in the process.
Free markets have failed before, and it has taken state intervention to moderate the economics of greed, but the state has never been weaker, and people in government are even more ignorant than those in the banks about
how the new capitalism works. Unable to regulate e-commerce, the governments have turned their attention to putting up fences in order to prevent the poor from migrating to the wealthy cities.
Given that only one in fifty people are likely to leave the countries in
which they were born, and although increasing rapidly, only one in sixty
people had access to the internet by 1998, it is obvious that most people
will be economically tied to old fashioned agriculture and manufacturing
industry rather than money markets and service economies. Inequality
threatens both economic well-being and political stability, but it is only an
irresponsible government that will allow genetically modified foods produced by big corporations to replace peasant farmers' bananas, sorghums,
and vegetables. Equally irresponsible is the government that leaves welfare
matters to charitable organizations, at a time when education and health
interventions are required to prevent the destruction of an entire generation
of young Africans.
The Tliesday September 11 terror attack in America showed that there
is no Chinese Wall separating the barbarians from the civihzed world. The
American treatment of Guantanamo Bay prisoners-of-war, and the ethnic
profiling at home that has made Muslims, Arabs, and Middle-Eastern types
less American than before has opened a Pandora's box. In a way, the treat-

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ment of terror suspects in America and Europe suggests that we are all savages now, and that the moral high ground necessary for 'the end of history'
to be realized has been lost. If there is a single explanation for the new 'terrorism' it is that some people are angry, and the anger of the French man
or Swedish youth hurling rocks through the windows of fast food restaurants is not very different from that of the hijackers. They are not opposed
to individual freedom, but to the lack of choice that fast food restaurants
represent. This is the same point about freedom that Amartya Sen makes.
The violence from below and violence from above are equally barbaric. The
confident claim that "there is world order" is certainly going to be tested
during current so-called "clash of civilizations" as the difference between
the just wars fought against Saddam Hussein or an absolutized and banalized 'Terror' become more and more difficult to discern in the eyes of the
majority (Hardt and Negri 2000).
Giddens' examines globalization through the following familiar concepts
and in a unilinear model used by sociologists to explain the emergence of
modernity tries to do the same for postmodemity or postindustrial society.
Globalization
Giddens' highlights the role of new media such as the internet over that of
the printed magazine, and that of Indian internet experts over that of the
Hollywood actor, Indian restaurants or alternative therapists and Gurus in
the global village. The references to CNN, cellular telephony, electronic
money markets, and jumbo jets always ignores the way the majority of the
human race lives. In a way, the quiet manner in which the average Taj
Mahal or Great Wall restaurant blends in with its environment, and the
loudness of the yellow and red of McDonalds misleads many people into
thinking that there are more American influences around the world than
there are Chinese, Indian, or Thai. As far as restaurants are concerned,
globalization is more Eastemization than Americanization. While admitting
that globalization is only partly Westernization, Giddens nevertheless labels
Eastemization as reverse colonization, rather than an integral part of the
same process.
Risk

While Giddens accepts the external risk experienced by people in traditional society, he has difficulties comprehending that people without
nuclear power stations can also experience risk created by the very impact
of our developing knowledge upon the world. Many people have long been
concerned that so-called nattiral disastersfloods, plagues and famines are

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really the product of human actions. What is poison gas but a pesticide writ
large? Whether the poison is put in a well and wipes out a village or is
delivered by missiles and kills millions the crime is the same. Giddens
apparently has not recovered from the belief that capitalism, science, and
liberal democracy were responsible for the beginning of modern history, in
the same way that the end of the Soviet Union marked an end of history.
He thus sees risk as a peculiarly modern response to hazards.
In contrast, Mary Douglas has no difficulty in switching from the here
to the U.S. Risk is socially constructed. The actuarial reckoning of risk is
modem hut this does not necessarily make it an adequate way to assess
risk. The major difference is between communal risk [sins that affect all
generations), and individual risk whereby technology is to blame. In both
communal society and high modernity there are no accidents and although
risk is experienced differently, it is an ever-present fact of life. Whether a
drought is believed by scientists to result from global warning or by diviners to be caused by incest in the royal familynatural processes or magical onesit is human agency that is blamed. Why should the scientific
explanation be more important?
Unlike Mary Douglas, Giddens is trapped in western paradigms. His
analysis of globalization is Eurocentric, even when he makes references to
life in other parts of the world as a way of highhghting the differences.
Where in the past, the sociology of industrial society was a well-developed
discipline, today the sociology of globalization is an inadequate social science unless it can be comprehensively multilingual.
Jhidition
All traditions are invented traditions. Giddens makes this sound like a great
discovery and maybe it is. Sociology has tended to teach us that tradition
ends where modernity starts, and that therefore invention is an attribute of
modernity. But to invent is human and even though nothing is ever invented
whole, but partly inherited or learned, the key issue with traditions is present ownership not origins. It has little to do with the past in practical terms.
The influence of custom and tradition on our behavior will not shrink precisely because we will all continue to invent new customs. Sahlins once
joked that when new cxiltural expression emerges in Europe it is a renaissance, but when it happens elsewhere it is the invention of tradition. As
with risk, tradition is everywhere, only it is produced differently. But as with
risk, Giddens suggests that in medieval society they did not need the concept because all they knew was what was tradition and custom.

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In high modernity, people become addicted to work, food, sex or love

because these activities are much less structured by tradition than they
once were. But does this not ignore the invention of tradition? To suggest
that the communal past influences the present through tradition and the
individual present through addiction is to ignore the extent to which one
person's addiction can become as communal as any traditional event. Are
abusive parents not said to have been abused as children? Is such a 'family tradition' not problematic because the rest of society disapproves? Gid-'
dens is correct to say invented traditions are genuineall traditions are
invented. Where he errs is to see tradition as conservatism. In another
sociological tradition, that of Islamic scholar, Ibn Khaldun, cyclical 'return
to basics' campaigns waged by fundamentalists were responsible for a circulation of elites and re-invented traditions. Indeed, if the modern state
were not so strong militarily as a result of international support, the majority of Middle Eastern countries may well have continued with this tradition.
We can even suggest that on a global level, the terrorism of the Osama Bin
Laden might bring about a change in the seat of power in the same way
that desert warriors used to shake up lethargic city civilizations. In short,
tradition, like fundamentalism, is about the present influencing the present,
and legitimating itself by referring to the past.
Family

In many traditional societies, but not all, a woman might have ten pregnancies. If she was part of a polygynous household where babies were
breast-fed for several years, and strict taboos about combining sex with
nursing were observed, this would be very unlikely. Having said correctly
that tradition is recent, Giddens nevertheless falls into the trap of seeing the
always pregnant and always barefoot peasant woman as a product of a non
previous society, and not a product of modernity. Female virtue in its Ghristian guilt-ridden format is hardly what all traditions axe about, and much
sexual banter and license was encouraged in many non-westem societies.
Similarly, homosexual activity may be widespread but they all call it by different names. By universalizing his own meaning, that is, by being so
monolingual, Giddens cohfirms that what people dislike about globalization is the inability to hear other voices. Giddens can show that the European traditional family was, in fact, a transitional phase from the 1950s, but
cannot say the same for the Indian or African models. But have we not
already established that tradition is invented? Is the present not always
transitional? Why does Giddens assume now that sex and reproduction
have been divorced, and the final family form has arrived? Coupledom and

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single person households that appear in Social Trends are surely an economic fact. When and why are residence, family and employment not
linked? Sexual equality and democracy are good, but they too manifest
themselves in many different forms; that is what human life creates. Sexual equality is believed to be new, and incompatible with the 'traditional
family,' by which is meantin Europe, the peasant family. There has
always been a great variety of marriage forms and sexual practices. Gidden's sociological repertoire is just too limited to do justice to the great variety of human inventiveness and this has nothing to do with current global
integration. If, for example, African children lacked rights (in relation to
their parents) this did not apply to all adults. In relation to grandparents or
uncles, they enjoyed many rights and privileges. Furthermore, childhood
need not be a status acquired through agebut a relational one. A ten-yearold boy could be uncle or classificatory father to a twenty year old. Once all
these alternative configurations are, the confident claim that modernity liberates sounds quite arrogant. Even polygamous recognized marriage can
liberate and empower women from frequent pregnancies, domestic, and
other chores, which assume their most exploitative form in the monogamous peasant family. The experience of many children in different parts of
the world similarly suggest that it is not the children growing up in the traditional family who are at risk, but those without families.
As he shows for homosexuality, its growth and acceptance in the West
is due more to the separation of sex from reproduction than from a growth
in liberal tolerance. Despite his awareness that traditions are invented and
re-invented, Giddens relapses into describing a time, in the past, when tradition was the normand "a bit like a state of nature" (p. 60). But it has
always been more complex than that, and even though the Reith lectures
do not allow him to cover everything, I strongly suspect that part of the
problem lies in having limited non-western sources. There are many different democracies of the emotions and globalization as universalization has
been trying to outlaw non-western models. Needless to say many battles
are going to be fought over this one.
Democracy

The battleground of the twenty-first century, Giddens suggests, will pit fundamentalism against cosmopolitan tolerance. But why should the cosmopolitans be the good guys. And in any case, what makes this a peculiarly
twenty-first century scenario? As already mentioned, Ibn Khaldun demonstrated how fundamentalism replacing corrupt city rulers followed regular
cycles for centuries. Fundamentalism does not imply backwardness or even

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Stagnation; a potential outcome of the battle against moral, political or

spiritual corruption is renewal. The fundamentalism of Osama Bin Laden
is, in many ways, similar to that of Milton Friedman or Margaret Thatcher,
in suggesting that there is no alternative to their view of the world. Tolerance of different perspectives is the antithesis of this approach, hut it is also
found in the places where Giddens does not look villages, refugee camps,
and non-western democracies. The study of globalization it would appear,
demands a new sociology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hardt, M. and A. Negri, Empire. Cambridge, 2000.
Hart, K. "Money in an unequal world." Anthropological Theory 1, no. 3 ( 2001):
307-330.
Moyo, S. Land Reform Under Structured Adjustment in Zimbabwe. Uppsala,
(2001): 140-143.
Nair, K. In Defense of the Irrationcd Peasant. Chicago, 1999.
Robertson, R. "Glocalization," in Global Modernities, ed. M. Featherston et al.
London, 1992.
Stoller, P. "Globalizing Method: The Problems of doing Ethnography in
Tl-ansnational Spaces." Anthropology and Humanism 11, no. 1 (1997): 91.
The Post < www.post.co.zm > Thursday, 19 September 2001.