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Global Processes, Local Systems
E. Paul Durrenberger
2003
Urban Anthropology Vol 32(3-4):253-279
Abstract
I analyze factors at work in the global political-economic system to situate ethnographic treatments of local processes. After showing how the classic upward spiral of capitalist development can turn into a downward spiral, I analyze the relationships among interest rates, government borrowing, social programs, inflation, jobs, taxes, foreign loans, prices of export and import goods to show how their interactions result in a quasi-random system. I show how finance gains power over productive capital in this system and how this contributes to global randomness so that we can understand these processes without being able to predict them with any degree of accuracy.
Key Words: globalization, political economy, finance, random systems, complexity.
Global Processes, Local Systems
Humanity has been awash in global flows since we started walking, but they became exponentially faster with boats and printing, then with airplanes and telegraphs, and now with electronic, fiber optic and wireless networks and computer technology. Nowadays cultural artifacts move across the planet at the speed of light. Pálsson and I (1996) asked how such categories as ethnicity and nation are generated, what are the economic and political realities that lead to ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and homicidal and suicidal terror and war. Rather than asking why people were willing to die and kill for ethnic notions such as nations, we proposed asking what the alternatives are for the people in those landscapes, what interests they contest, who defines the issues and alternatives and by what means, what power, and what relationships stand behind and ratify that power. In this paper, I want to take another step toward answering some of these questions.
As in the past, the challenge to ethnography in the post-modern age is to locate relevant systems, understand their components and relations, and the people in them without giving up the strengths of classical anthropology (Durrenberger and Pálsson 1996). The information revolution makes possible networks of relationships based on global markets for capital. This in turn enables corporations to invest in distant lands to integrate productive processes as intramural transactions. This defines supra-national levels of technical and economic organization that dis-articulate rather than integrate local, regional and national economic systems, the bases of governmental control. These processes alter social relationships and cultural representations, undermine local bases of social cohesion, and make local politics and economic systems less relevant. The bases of identity and livelihood change with the dislocations of people, wealth and relations of production and power. The chaotic and quasi-random global flux of culture and cultures based on the new technologies and economic and political realities is one foundation of post-modern ideologies and theories.
This article is not ethnographic. It is an attempt to understand the relationships among parts of the global system, why they are chaotic and quasi-random, and how that affects what we do as anthropologists. I start with a theoretical discussion, move to a description of the complexities of a chaotic global system, and then discuss ethnographic consequences. While my discussion of the complexities of the global system is abstract, I return in the third section to concrete ethnographic examples.
The subject matter may be somewhat frustrating because it does not entail linear relationships—ones in which results are proportional to causes—double the input, double the output. Such relationships are highly structured. At the other end of the continuum of structure to non-structure is the lack of relationship or structure that we call randomness. Structures that we can understand in terms of deterministic relationships but which are so complex and irregular that we cannot predict them to any extent are chaotic. Chaos theory is the attempt to describe and understand such systems. Such systems are deterministic, but sensitive to their starting points or initial conditions. Slight differences at any time can lead to can lead to very different end end-results. Some systems are so sensitive that we cannot measure the variables sufficiently accurately to predict their trajectories.
Some of the relationships are self-intensifying. An increase in the value of one variable causes an increase in the value of another. The increase in the second variable in turn causes an increase in the first. The classic example is the population of dividing organisms such as yeast. An increase in population causes an increase in progeny which causes an increase in population. The more yeast there are, the more they make. So the population of yeast is self-intensifying, characterized by an exponentially rising curve. No such exponential curve is sustainable. Self-intensifying systems cause their own collapse.
The more yeast, the more their waste-products—alcohol—until they poison their environment and all die. So in this paper I shall discuss chaotic systems, some of which entail self-intensifying processes, systems which are therefore not sustainable. They are not predictable, but they are understandable, and that is the objective of this paper.
It is increasingly clear that some of the important topics that anthropologists must understand are not accessible to our classic ethnographic approach. States and global systems are two of them. Because those are two of the central concerns of this paper, it is not very ethnographic. That does not mean that I advocate a retreat from ethnography, as I hope will be clear by the end of the essay, but I do advocate a supplement to ethnography.
Anthropological theory
Eric Wolf (1999) argued that understanding cultural forms is only half the task of anthropology. In addition to specifying ideologies in cultural terms, we must also know how these cultural forms engage with the material resources and organizational arrangements of the world they try to affect or transform. Wolf wrote his book (1999) to explore the connection between ideas and power because he thought that anthropologists have only rarely grappled with the ways cultural configurations articulate with the power that arranges the settings and domains of social and economic life, especially the allocation and use of labor. He points out the mutuality of culture and power—powerful people shape culture and culture defines realities, even for the powerful. His goal was to understand and analyze the ways the power relations that organize economic and political systems also shape how people make the world intelligible through their cultures and symbols. Like Sahlins (2000), he returns to the necessity for ethnographic treatments.
Hannerz (1996) suggests that anthropologists celebrate the vitality and resistance of the local and conceptualize globalization in terms of a relationship between global and local. He concludes that the central questions are, though, how to identify the component relationships of emergent social structures that may cover great distances and cross national boundaries and understand how these relationships are related to one another. That is the goal of this paper. I start with an observation of minor local results of global forces.
While I was studying union locals in Chicago, I heard a story of a raccoon hiding out under the porch of a suburban resident’s house and causing all manner of mayhem. The very next Sunday the there was a story about it in the Chicago Tribune (July 11, 1999). The Russian Ruble had collapsed with the collapse of the Russian banking system, and with it, the price of raccoon pelts. Illinois had been one of the top wild fur exporting states sending 80% of its 300,000 raccoon pelts every year to Russia. When the price of pelts dropped from $30 in the 80s to $15 in the 90s to $3, trappers quit. In 1997 Illinois issued 25,000 trapping licenses; in 1999 fewer than 4,500. With less trapping there were more raccoons--a population explosion--and the raccoons started looking for homes in the suburbs with the yuppies. This story has a happy ending. The trappers who got $4 for a pelt now can get $75 to remove a pesky raccoon from an attic and don’t have to skin the animal and prepare the pelt (Smallwood 1999).
Select any area—Thailand, Mexico, Korea, Japan, Mississippi, Alabama, Chicago, Iowa--select any topic--fisheries, agriculture, manufacturing, services, rural, urban--and similar global forces are at work.
With today’s communication and media connections, some anthropologists such as Appadurai (1996), focus on the global as an autonomous realm of experience. Appadurai discusses relationships among flows of persons, technologies, finance, information and ideology that animate global cultural systems. Ethnography, he suggests, must deal with the changing social, territorial and cultural reproduction of identities as groups migrate, regroup, construct and reconstruct their histories, and are no longer associated with localities. If ethnography produces thick descriptions of knowledge in locales, what of perspectives that transcend the local? Severing links among wealth, people and areas changes the basis for the reproduction of culture so the subject matter of cultural studies is the relationship between expression and economic, social, and political realities. Appadurai focuses on the imagination and suggests that to describe the role of imagination, ethnography must focus on the complex lives of individuals rather than on locales.
Appadurai (1996:27) calls our attention to "the facts of the modern world,” but struggles ambivalently with notions of causal relationships. Because he brings no empirical methods to bear he cannot draw any conclusions except to suppose that "our current theories of cultural chaos are insufficiently developed to be even parsimonious models . . . much less to be predictive theories . . . " (1996:47). That is, after all, not the point of chaos theory. It cannot predict. It can understand, it can explain, but it cannot predict because it is not possible to know all possible outcomes of all possible trajectories of all determining forces. That’s what chaos theory is about. The point is to understand how the complex components of systems interact, even if we cannot predict outcomes. Appadurai's quandary is a consequence of his postmodern ideology’s disdain for empirical methods.
Using Kroeber’s idea of the ecumene to designate an “interwoven set of happenings and products,” Hannerz (1996:7) asks how transnational connections in the organization of meanings and actions hang together. The impinging of previously separate populations and social structures on one another’s living conditions and the global flows of meanings challenge the idea of culture as a set of organic relationships among populations, areas, political organizations, languages and coherent assemblages of meanings--a notion that derives from nationalism. Cultures are not integrated wholes with edges. Different symbolic modes have different boundaries. Hall (1997) for instance, shows the different boundaries of political-military relations, bulk goods trading, prestige goods exchanges, and information in world systems.
Hannerz (1996) argues that thinking of culture as what we learn by participation in social life does not require borders. Writing against culture, he argues, is no help. He makes the case that understanding other people and cultures does not imply any disrespect for them. Thinking of culture as our internal representations of our everyday life, he argues, does require that we recognize that everyday processes generate even such seemingly obvious and axiomatically true ideas as individuality. The concept of individuality is itself not an observable fact of nature but rooted in our experience. Our experience is shaped and determined by historically given systems of relationships.
It has become commonplace to observe that like the people we study, anthropologists are afloat in a sea of global capital, labor, and images. But the commonplace is the subject of our discipline and it has become obvious that if we would understand people anywhere we need to understand these global processes and how they affect everyday lives.
I think this is the end result of a long process of our struggle to transcend the local to understand the details of our ethnographic observations. The trade and traders, mission and missionaries are peripheral in Malinowski’s (1922) work but focal in the Comaroffs’(1992). Leach (1954) did not write of Kachin villages but of the whole region as a means of understanding particular villages as well as larger geographic and temporal processes. Julian Steward thought in terms of even wider contexts. Consider his contemporary-sounding words published in 1963 as a foreword (vii) to F.K. Lehman’s study of Chin in Burma:
This larger context today obviously includes the many-faceted influences from the emerging world industrial culture—a complex that includes developing technology, mass production, increasing occupational specialization, greater transportational facilities and education, enhanced social mobility that arises from ever changing occupational specialization, and new ideologies that relate to the altered underpinnings of society. Such features are affecting all parts of the world. . . .
Wolf (1957) analyzed the characteristic forms of community life common to Java and Mesoamerica as consequences of colonial policy. Robert Murphy and Julian Steward (1956) showed how groups in Brazil and Canada developed similar forms in response to markets and suggested that the tendency for aboriginal peoples to give up their crafts to devote efforts to producing trade goods to obtain industrial goods is so regular that any departures would require special explanations. More recently Lucian Hanks (1972) described the dynamics of a Thai village in terms of global events, while Sidney Mintz’s (1985) understanding of the history of sugar is global in scope.
As greater economic and electronic integration affect social organization and culture, Wilk (1997) suggests that the core issue in globalization is the relationship between culture and economy. He argues that a myth blinds us. The myth is that there are natural integrated autonomous and bounded local cultural-social-economic-ethnic systems. The myth continues that outside forces have transformed these systems to create new cultural forms. This myth blinds us to how economic integration affects local groups so that we don’t link our local studies into an understanding of global processes. Instead, he argues, we maintain our romantic dichotomy between the local autonomous system and the impact from outside.
Blanton and Peregrine (1997) point to Malinowski’s understanding of a complex intergroup process from the perspective of one local system rather than as a system in itself. This set the stage for a wider failure of anthropologists to contribute to theories about extra-local systems.
When Julian Steward found that he could not understand Puerto Rico in terms of local ecological factors, he viewed extra-local interactions as another environment for the adaptation of households and communities but failed to develop any insights about the extra-local system itself. Blanton and Peregrine find that all such studies of economic analyses beyond local systems share the assumption that some features of any social formation may be consequences of interactions across local boundaries. They argue that the consequences of these interactions vary in time and place, but they avoid the assumption that sociocultural change is primarily a result of endogenous causal factors. They urge an understanding of the larger systems themselves rather than from the point of view of local systems.