Lecture 4 (2009)
- Another theorist who offers us a critique and an alternative approach to the dominant discourse of globalisation is James Ferguson. While he writes from the discipline of anthropology, the criticisms he makes of fellow anthropologists offer us in sociology a means of grappling with how to theorise modernity and globalisation from Southern Africa and Africa. Starting from a critique of contemporary anthropologists for failing to contribute to the growing discourse on globalisation and ‘the global’ through their fixation on local experiences and cultural difference, resulting in a meaningless cultural relativism, Ferguson argues that their main fault lies in their separation of cultural experience from socio-economic experience, and thus their failure to acknowledge how cultural experience and production is so closely linked with socio-economic inequality in the world. This, for Ferguson, results in the failure of a very important concept contributed by anthropologists, that of ‘alternative modernities’, being mobilised in discussions and characterisations of globalisation. While Ferguson acknowledges the value of an approach that begins with an understanding that there are different understandings and experiences of modernity in the world, he argues that it is just as important to understand how modernity as imagined and represented by the west also figures in particular places outside of the west, as symbols of progress and individual success. His greater task, however, is to show how globalisation may be understood (read) and written (narrated) in ways that do not homogenise experience/s. He speaks of the need to write against the ‘convergence narratives’ on globalisation.
- In the reading prescribed for this course, Ferguson argues that the representation of ‘Africa’ in the dominant discourse of globalisation neglects its heterogeneity as a place with different people and different experiences. Firstly, he argues that Africa, as a place with over 800 million people, is generally left out of mainstream writings about globalisation. And, then when it is referred to it is portrayed as a place of lack, backwardness, ‘a dark hole’ (quoting Castells). There is also the suggestion that globalisation acts on Africa, with all parts of Africa being changed by the arrival of McDonalds, Coca Cola and other forms of western culture. Ferguson argues, instead, that we need to understand the experience of ‘the global’ in Africa as uneven and different according to particular place, and proceeds to refute all homogenising claims made about globalisation’s effects on Africa through examples. One example given is the ways in which capital moves. Ferguson illustrates how, rather than capital flowing smoothly through Africa, as suggested by the dominant discourse of globalisation, capital hops and skips from point to point and over vast areas in Africa as it finds those locations most suitable for the making of profits and the expansion of capitalism. He also argues that different places and people in Africa contribute to the way in which ‘the global’ is being made. He states that the arrival of Coca Cola in India in no way marked the end of Indian culture. Rather there is a process of incorporation of new forms and ways into ‘the local’ through global networks and exchanges, and contribution towards ‘the global’ from ‘the local’. Ferguson borrows from Hannerz to speak of a process of ‘creolisation’ in which there is a mix and two-way borrowing between different locales through global connections, and so the production of global ways of being and relating socially, culturally, politically and economically. Examples – hip-hop; ‘world music’; fusion food; African artefacts in clothing on New York fashion ramps. In this way globalisation is not something that acts on something called Africa, but global processes and relations are to be understood as being the product of complex interactions between ‘the local’ and ‘the global’, with different communities and individuals in Africa contributing towards the shaping of these global processes and being shaped in turn by them.
- Gillian Hart – In the title of her book, ‘Disabling Globalisation’, Hart implies both that globalisation is a discourse and process that is disabling, and that globalisation can be disabled or dislodged. She argues that dominant discourses of globalisation can be described as conforming to an ‘impact model’, with ‘global forces’ described as acting on ‘the local’, setting up the binaries of global/;local; active/passive; dynamic/static; economics/culture; time/space, that can be mapped onto each other. Hart argues that it is analyses based on such impact models that have been used to promote the mantra that ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) to those political and economic policies characterising globalisation that have been called neoliberal; Instead, she puts forward an alternative methodology for the study of society today, one in which she calls for us to acknowledge the ‘multiple trajectories of meaning’ that contribute to the makings of place and space today = power-laden processes and practices of producing the world and its truths by which we each live. Hart speaks of ‘globalised places’ rather than ‘the local’ or ‘the global’. Her own research into life in Ladysmith-Ezakheni and Newcastle-Madadeni and its connections with life in Taiwan is then offered as an example of this methodology.
- Globalisation as a disabling discourse – neglects agency; neglects questions of subjectivity; neglects resistance.
Hart and Ferguson encourage us to read and write globalisation differently – acknowledging the ‘subjugated knowledges’ that contribute to its shaping. And, to acknowledge the central place of power/power relations in the determination of how our multiple trajectories of meaning play themselves out in an increasingly globalised world today.
