Globalization

The Key Concepts

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000189674
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

For the first time in human history, the vast majority of the world's population is connected through trade, travel, production, media and politics. Ours is an era of ubiquitous mobile communication, economic outsourcing, mass migration and imported consumer goods. At the same time, people everywhere are concerned to keep their identities rooted and sense of place in the face of momentous change.This new edition of Thomas Hylland Eriksen's concise and engaging landmark textbook outlines the main debates and controversies around globalization, and develops a unique perspective to show how globalization is an inherently double process, taking place both from above and below. Each chapter is supported by boxed case studies and bullet points summarizing the core information, suggestions for further reading, and essay and discussion questions, making this the ideal guide for both the classroom and independent study. Focusing on key concepts of globalization and drawing on international examples, this book is essential for anyone wishing to understand the fundamental processes underlying the contemporary world and the consequences these have for all of us.

1
Disembedding

Disembedding is the most abstract of the key terms of globalization, and this stands to reason, since it in fact refers to the historical movement towards a more abstract world. When something is disembedded, it is moved from a concrete, tangible, local context to an abstract or virtual state. Money is disembedded value; clock time is disembedded time; writing is disembedded language. For globalization to integrate people all over the world into a shared system of communication, production, and exchange, some disembedding common denominators are necessary.

In August, 1989, I visited San Juan, Puerto Rico. I was in the middle of anthropological fieldwork in Trinidad and took a break in order to familiarize myself a little with the wider Caribbean region. At the airport, I was on my way to an exchange office when I came across an ATM with a VISA symbol up front. Tentatively sticking the card into the machine and typing my PIN code, I was uncertain as to what to expect, but after a few seconds, the machine duly presented the required greenbacks and—even more impressively—a receipt, which told me my exact (meager) bank balance. My money no longer had a physical form; it had been moved to cyberspace (a term coined five years earlier in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, 1984). The money had been disembedded, removed from a tangible, physical context.

As a rule, anything that can be accessed anywhere is disembedded. It could be a clip on YouTube, an international agreement, a stock exchange rate, or a soccer game (provided its main audience watches it on TV and not at the stadium). One main contemporary form of disembedding is deterritorialization, which takes place when something is “lifted out of” its physical location (Giddens 1990: 21). Before we delve more deeply into the concept and its implications for the real world, let us consider a famous example of deterritorialized warfare.

When, in September 2001, the then U.S. president George W. Bush announced his “war on terror,” it may have been the first time in history that an actual war was proclaimed on a nonterritorial entity. Unlike metaphorical wars on drugs or wars on poverty, this was meant to be a war fought with real weapons and real soldiers. The only problem was that it initially appeared to be uncertain where to deploy them, since terrorism was potentially anywhere. The ostensible goal of the war was not to conquer another country or to defend one’s boundaries against a foreign invasion but to eradicate terrorism—that is, a nonterritorial entity.

The cause of the declaration of war was the terrorist attack on the United States, where three civilian airplanes were hijacked by terrorists belonging to the militant Muslim al-Qaeda organization and flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A fourth plane, with an uncertain destination, crashed en route. Rather than seeing this as a large-scale crime, the U.S. government defined the event as the beginning of a war. However, it was not to be a war between territorially defined units, such as nation-states. Several of the hijackers lived and studied in the United States. Most of them were of Saudi origins, but they were not acting on orders from the Saudi state. The organization on whose behalf they acted seemed to have its headquarters in Afghanistan, but the members were scattered—some living in North America, some in Europe, some in Pakistan, and so on.

The nation-state has unambiguous boundaries; it is defined in Benedict Anderson’s famous terms as being imagined as “inherently limited and sovereign” (1991 [1983]: 6). Wars are fought by the military, whose mission it is to protect the external borders of the country. A nation-state thus has a clearly defined inside and outside. The events of September 11 were a shocking reminder that the boundaries of a nation-state are far from absolute. Nations are effectively being deterritorialized in a number of ways through migration, economic investments, and a number of other processes, and the war on terror illustrates that this is now also the case with war. America’s enemies can in fact be anywhere in the world and operate from any site, since American interests are global.

A few days after the September 11 events, a thought-provoking photo was reproduced in newspapers worldwide. It depicted military guards watching over the entrances to New York’s Grand Central Station. The image was a reminder of two features of globalization: The boundary between police and military becomes blurred even in democracies where the military is not normally visible in the streets and suggests a partial collapse of the boundary between inside and outside. (This blurring of the inside/outside boundary is also evident in the military patrolling of EU borders along the northwest African coast and the military’s role in typical transit areas, such as the Canary Islands. The division of labor between police and military is negotiable and uncertain in these regions.) Second, this image is suggestive of vulnerability in a world society where everything travels more easily than before, including weapons and the people carrying them.

The war on terror is instructive as a lesson in the form of a disembedding characteristic of the global era, where the disembedding mechanisms of modernity, which create abstract common denominators and thus conditions for global communication and comparability, are used transnationally. A main form of disembedding is deterritorialization—that is, processes whereby distance becomes irrelevant.

Globalization and Distance

A minimal definition of globalization could delimit it simply as all the contemporary processes that make distance irrelevant. A major body of work in globalization studies is, accordingly, concerned with disembedding (Giddens 1990) and its effects on social life and the organization of society.

Disembedding entails the “lifting out” of phenomena (things, people, ideas . . .) from their original context. Writing, it could thus be said, disembeds language just as an ATM disembeds money, and the wristwatch disembeds time. This concept (and its close relatives) draws attention to the relativization of space engendered by development in communication technologies and the worldwide spread of capitalism. In the early nineteenth century, newspapers in North America reported from the Napoleonic wars in Europe weeks and sometimes months after the event. News had to be transported, erratically and unpredictably, by sail ship. Travel, even in the relatively developed Western Europe, was slow, cumbersome, and risky. Most goods were, for practical reasons, produced in physical proximity to the markets. With the development of global financial networks, transnational investment capital, consumption mediated by money in all or nearly all societies, and not least the fast and cheap means of transportation typified in the container ship, goods can travel, and often do travel, far from their site of production. When it doesn’t matter where something was made or done, it has been disembedded.

However, disembedding has a deeper and more comprehensive meaning; it does not merely, or even primarily, refer to the shrinking of the globe as a result of communication technology and global capitalism. Anthony Giddens defines disembedding as “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space” (1990: 21). Put in everyday language, it could be described as a gradual movement from the concrete and tangible to the abstract and virtual. Think of the global financial system as an example. Values registered on a stock exchange, or the value of a particular currency, are somehow related to tangible goods and services but in an abstract and general way.

Disembedding processes are associated with modernity and are indeed a central feature of it. Some important disembedding processes evolved in premodern times, but the central argument of this chapter is that global modernity, or the globalization of modernity if one prefers, can be described as a series of disembedding processes with a transnational and potentially global reach.

Towards a More Abstract World

The most important disembedding revolution of premodern times was arguably the invention of writing. Through writing, and especially phonetic writing (alphabets rather than pictographic systems, such as hieroglyphs), utterances were separated from the utterer and could, for the first time in human history, travel independently of a given person. The utterance became a permanent, moveable thing. First developed in what is now Turkey and Mesopotamia, writing was invented independently in Mesoamerica and China.

Writing made it possible to develop knowledge in a cumulative way, in the sense that one had access to, and could draw directly on, what others had done. One was no longer dependent on face-to-face contact with one’s teachers. They had left their thoughts and discoveries for posterity in a material, frozen form. The quantitative growth in the total knowledge of humanity presupposes the existence of writing. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) could, working in a European monastery in the thirteenth century, spend a lifetime trying to reconcile two important sets of texts—the Bible and Aristotle’s philosophy—which were already then considered ancient. Explorers travelling in the Black Sea area in the sixth century C.E. could compare their observations with Herodotus’s descriptions from the fifth century B.C.E. Mathematicians and scientists could draw on Euclid’s Elements and written works by Archimedes as points of departure when setting out to develop new insights. Writing makes it possible to stand firmly and rationally on the shoulders of deceased and remote ancestors (Goody 1977). This would also be the case in other parts of the world with writing systems; the mature versions of Chinese philosophy, Indian mathematics, and Mayan astronomy were clearly the results of long, cumulative efforts presupposing a technology capable of freezing thought.

A nonliterate society has an oral religion where several versions of the most important myths usually circulate, where the extent of the religion is limited by the reach of the spoken word, and where there is no fixed set of dogma to which the faithful must adhere. A literate society, on the contrary, usually has a written religion (often in the shape of sacred texts), with a theoretically unlimited geographic reach, with a clearly delineated set of dogma and principles, and with authorized, correct versions of myths and narratives. Such a religion can in principle be identical in the Arabian Peninsula and in Morocco (although it is never this simple in practice; local circumstances impinge on it, and oral traditions never die completely). The three great religions of conversion from West Asia (the Abrahamic religions) have all these characteristics, which they do not share with a single traditional African religion. (In real life, nonetheless, oral and literate cultures mix in one and the same societies. The orally transmitted little traditions live side by side with the fixed great traditions; the former, often dismissed as superstitions or heresies, have proved remarkably resilient over the centuries, even in societies dominated by powerful, literate traditions.)

A nonliterate society, further, has a judicial system based on custom and tradition, while a literate society has a legislative system based on written laws. Morality in the nonliterate society depends on interpersonal relations—it is embedded in tangible relationships between individuals—while morality in the literate society in theory is legalistic—that is, embedded in the written legislation. Even the relationship between parents and children is regulated by written law in our kind of society.

In a nonliterate society, knowledge is transmitted from mouth to ear, and the inhabitants are forced to train their memory. The total reservoir of knowledge, which is available at any particular point in time, is embodied in those members of society who happen to be alive. When an old person dies in a small, nonliterate society, the net loss of knowledge can be considerable.

Most nonliterate societies are organized on the basis of kinship, while literate societies tend to be state societies where an abstract ideology of community, such as nationalism, functions as a kind of metaphorical kinship. In certain nonstate societies, the “religions of the Book” (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) have historically worked in a similar way, creating a disembedded, or abstract, community encompassing persons who will never physically meet.

At a political level, the general tendency is that nonliterate societies are either decentralized and egalitarian, or chiefdoms where political office is inherited. Literate societies, on the other hand, are strongly centralized and tend to have a professional administration where office is, in principle, accorded following a formal set of rules. In general, literate societies are much larger, both in geographic size and in population, than nonliterate ones. And while the inhabitants of nonliterate societies tell myths about who they are and where they come from, literate societies have history to fill the same functions, based on archives and other written sources (Lévi-Strauss 1966 [1962]).

Writing, in this way, has been an essential tool in the transition from what we could call a concrete society based on intimate, personal relationships, memory, local religion, and orally transmitted myths, to an abstract society based on formal legislation, archives, a book religion, and written history. I shall mention four other innovations in communication technology, which, together with writing, indicate the extent of disembedding in the social life of modern societies.

Abstract Time and Temperature

The mechanical clock was developed in the European medieval age, partly due to a perceived need to synchronize prayer times in the monasteries. (The calls of the Muslim muezzin and the Christian church bells are contemporary reminders of this initial function of timing technology.) Calendars are older and were developed independently in many more societies than writing. In general, however, calendars in nonmodern societies were not a technical aid to help societies make five-year plans and individuals to keep track of their daily schedules and deadlines but were rather linked with the seasons, ritual cycles, astronomy, and the agricultural year. The clock is more accurate and more minute (literally) than the calendar. It measures time as well as cutting it into quantifiable segments. In spite of its initially religious function, the clock rapidly spread to coordinate other fields of activity as well. The Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) formulated a moral maxim, which illustrates this. Grotius is widely known for his contributions to political philosophy, but he is also sometimes mentioned as the first postclassic European to defend a moral principle completely divorced from religion: “Punctuality is a virtue!” (“Time is money” is a later refinement of this principle, sometimes attributed to Benjamin Franklin.)

In the same way as writing externalizes language, clocks externalize time. Time becomes something existing independently of human experience, something objective and measurable. This was definitely not the case in traditional societies, where inhabitants live within an event-driven time structure in their everyday existence. Events regulate the passage of time, not the other way around. If a traveler, or an ethnographer, to an African village wonders when a certain event will take place, the answer may be: “When everything is ready.” Not, in other words, “at a quarter to five.” But today, there are no clear-cut distinctions. Even in societies where clocks and timetables have made their entry long ago, it may well be that they are not directly connected to people’s everyday life. A colleague who carried out anthropological fieldwork in the Javanese countryside told me that one day, he needed to take a train to the nearest town. So he asked a man when the train was due. The man looked at him with the proverbial puzzled expression and pointed to the tracks: “The train comes from that direction, then it stops here, and after a little while it continues in the other direction.” End of account.

Clock time turns time into an autonomous entity, something that exists independently of events. An hour may exist (in our minds) in an abstract way; it is an empty entity that can be filled with anything. Hence, it is common to speak of clock time as empty, quantified time. It is chopped up into in accurately measured pieces, like meters and deciliters. These entities are presupposed to be identical for everybody, anywhere and anytime. Living in our kind of society sometimes gives us the feeling that we were somehow obliged to sign a contract the moment we were born, committing us to lifelong faith in clock-and-calendar time.

Mechanical time measurement turns time into an exact, objective, and abstract entity, a straitjacket for the flows and ebbs of experienced time perhaps—for this kind of time will always pass at varying speed; as everybody knows, five minutes can last anything from a moment to an eternity. The philosopher who has developed the most systematic assault on this quantitative time tyranny is, doubtless, Henri Bergson (1859–1941). In his doctoral thesis from 1889, Sur les données immédiates de la conscience (“On the immediate givens of consciousness”), rendered in English as Time and Free Will, he se verely criticizes the quantitative, empty time that regulates us from the outside, instead of letting the tasks at hand fill the time from within.

The clock also has the potential to synchronize everybody who has been brought within its charmed circle. Everyone who reads this is in agreement regarding what it means when we say that it is, say, 8:15 P.M. Everybody knows when to turn on the television to watch a particular program, and they do it simultaneously, independently of each other. If the program has already begun when one turns it on, it is not because the TV channel fails to meet its commitments, but because something is wrong with the viewer’s timepiece. Coordination of complex production in factories and office environments would also, naturally, have been unthinkable without the clock, as would anything from public transport to cinema shows.

The thermometer does the same to temperature as the clock does to time. Under thermometer-driven regimes, it is not acceptable to state merely that it feels cold when one can walk over to the thermometer and obtain the exact number of degrees. If it shows more than 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit), it is not the air temperature, as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: A Shrinking Planet
• 1 Disembedding
• 2 Speed
• 3 Standardization
• 4 Connections
• 5 Mobility
• 6 Mixing
• 7 Risk
• 8 Identity Politics
• 9 Alterglobalization
• Afterword: An Overheated World
• Bibliography
• Index