"...this useful compendium on "this frontier subject" of anthropology and globalization addresses
theories of globalization and their antecedents and considers the changing context of anthropological practice....Care
has gone into crafting a book that is accessible to undergraduates but also valuable to more advanced scholars.
Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above."
-- Choice
Greenwood Publishing Web Site, September, 2003
Summary
Lewellen gives us the first analytic overview of an important new subject area in a field that has long been
identified with the study of relatively bounded communities. "Globalization" refers to the increasing
flows of trade, finance, culture, ideas, and people brought about by the sophisticated technology of communications
and travel and by the worldwide spread of neoliberal capitalism. Unlike dependency theory and world systems analysis,
which tended to assume a bird's-eye perspective, globalization offers a down-and-dirty, ground-up approach in which
ethnographic research is not marginal but essential.
Through multiple examples, selected from the latest ethnographic research from all over the world, Lewellen examines
the ways that globalization impacts migrants and stay-at-homes, peasants and tribal peoples, men and women. A crucial
theme is that the global/local nexus is one of unpredictable interaction and creative adaptation, not of top-down
determinism. Theoretically, globalization studies have become the focal point for the convergence of interpretive
anthropology, critical anthropology, postmodernism, and poststructuralism, which are combined with a tough empiricism.
For the casual reader or the classroom, this work draws together the ethnographic studies and cutting-edge theories
that comprise the anthropology of globalization.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Who Is Alma?
Globalizing Anthropology
Slouching Toward Globalization
The Anthropology of Globalization
Development, Devolution, and Discourse
Constructing Identity
Globalization and Migration
Migration: People on the Move
Transnationalism: Living Across Borders
Diaspora: Yearning for Home
Refugees: The Anthropology of Forced Migration
Global/Local
Globalization from the Ground Up
Tribal Cultures: No Longer Victims
Peasants: Survivors in a Global World
Afterthoughts, by Way of Conclusions
Bibliography
Index
