Tag Archives: Globalization

A Special Offer and a Note About Blogging

Everyone’s arguing lately about Savage Minds — it’s “civil society” or lack thereof, its institutional position in the field of anthropology, it’s Euro-Americano-centrism, and so on. What’s missing, I think, is that while Savage Minds is a “place”, a “publication” of sorts, with some cohesiveness, it’s also a somewhat random collection of individual anthropologists bound together by no shared theoretical orientation, area specialization, political stance, or academic genealogy. I think it’s clear that we don’t always agree — in fact, we’ve disagreed quite sharply at times. More to the point, we not only blog about different stuff but we blog for different reasons.

For me, Savage Minds has always been a place to “mess around”, anthropologically speaking. A place to try out new ideas and thin hypotheses, a wall to throw stuff onto in order to see what sticks. A place where I could try my hand at the kind of argument Yehudi Cohen makes in Disappearance of the Incest Taboo (that’s an AnthroSource link, for those with access) and string together some ideas about the end of marriage, or muse about the moral underpinnings of anthropology. A place to incubate arguments and positions — and to receive feedback from my peers both inside and outside of the field.

It’s been invaluable to have this kind of forum, away from the main channel of academic thought — the journals and academic presses that are our disciplinary mainstream, even if many of them have lower readerships than Savage Minds. So valuable, in fact, that I felt it absolutely necessary to include Savage Minds in my “Acknowledgements” when I published Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War. Here’s what I wrote:

Over the years, two online communities have proven invaluable as both a source of new ideas and a place to rehearse my own fevered anthropological imaginings. To the members of ANTHRO-L (especially Ron Kephart, John McCreery, Richard Senghas, Jacob Lee, Richard Wilsnack, Anj Petto, Ray Scupin, Robert Lawless, Wade Tarzia, Lynn Manners, Martin Cohen, Bruce Josephson, Richley Crapo, Tom Kavanagh, Scott MacEachern, Mike Pavlik, Thomas Riley, and Phil Young) and my fellow Savage Minds, (Alex Golub, Kerim Friedman, Chris Kelty, Nancy LeClerc, Kathleen Lowery, Tak Watanabe, and newbies Thomas Erikson, Maia Green, and Thomas Strong) I offer both my gratitude and respect.

In the end, I’m not sure I could have written Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War without having had this forum to develop those ideas. The other Minds and the many people who comment here not only helped me to refine my thoughts on anthropology and its role(s) in society, but to rethink myself as an anthropologist.

By way of gratitude, then, I asked my publishers if I could offer at least a little something back to this community which has offered me so much. They responded enthusiastically, providing me with a discount code to offer Savage Minds readers. So here’s the deal:

  1. Order Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War from U Mich Press.
  2. At checkout, enter the coupon code: WAX08UMP
  3. Enjoy a 20% savings!

With the coupon code, the US price is $26.00 instead of the usual $32.50. As far as I know, this offer is not limited to US buyers, but I’m pretty sure the price of international shipping will eat up any savings over buying the book at full price locally. The coupon code expires on May 30, 2008.

For more information about the book, check out the review by Penny Howard at the Socialist Review. More reviews and information about the book will be posted at my personal site on the book page as it becomes available.

And if you’re not interested, for whatever reason (maybe your mother was cruel to you as a child?), that’s cool, too — I offer you as a member of the Savage Minds community my thanks.

But really, buy the book. Buy the book or I shall plug at you a second time! Tphptptptptp!

On Frictionless Scale-Making

I was actually thinking along very similar lines to CKelty [PDF] when I began looking at the literature on scale-making this week. In the world of the internet scale-making is all about scalability, about the ability to go from a website which can handle a few hundred users to one which can handle millions. Google recently launched a new service, App Engine, based around the promise that you’ll have Google behind you if your application takes off and needs to scale.

The reason I was thinking along these lines is that I recently finished Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody. Shirky argues that one of the defining features of the internet (once it has become a ubiquitous and prosaic part of our lives) is that it reduces the barriers to collaboration and collective action. But while the ridiculously easy group formation fostered by the internet makes it easy to form a group, the very fact of scale no longer serves as an index of group-strength. He gives this example from Howard Dean’s presidential campaign:

because Meetup makes it easier to gather the faithful, it confused people into thinking that they were seeing an increase in Dean support, rather than a decrease in the hassle of of organizing groups — the 2003 Dean Meetup simply brought out a much larger percentage of Dean supporters than would have shown up previously. We’ve seen this sort of effect before, as when written correspondence on letterhead stopped being a sign of a solvent company, thanks to the desktop-publishing revolution.

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Scale Making Revisited

Thanks to everyone who responded to my last post. In response to my queries, I was able to track down some excellent overviews of the human geography literature where the keyword to search for is “politics of scale.” (See especially here and here.)

In that post I failed to link to Rex’s piece from last year, where he wrote:

In fact most of what we anthropologists talk about when we talk about ‘scale making’ is not an investigation of regional or global processes. We do not attempt to discern how many places we will have to travel to to examine these processes. Instead we talk about how people in the localities that we do our fieldwork ‘make scale’.

Having spent the better part of the last few days going over this material, I better understand the distinction Rex was making. Indeed, it seems that the way the term is used by human geographers often suffers from assuming that scale is an ontological category. Rex is more interested in looking at “the imputation of agency to collective subjects versus individual ones.” And I am more interested in the contested ideologies of scale which define the “local” in Taiwan in relation to the Austronesian linguistic sphere versus the Chinese one. Both of these projects relate to the making of scale through social action as opposed to the operation of individuals at pre-defined levels of scale.

However, having already spent some time going over the literature on scale within human geography, I think it would be a mistake to either abandon the term entirely (as Rex seems to suggest) or to ignore its genealogy outside of anthropology (as Tsing chooses to do). As Richard Howitt’s excellent review shows us, we have a lot to learn from the various debates over the use of the term within that discipline. For instance, too great an emphasis on process and human agency might blind us to the very real constraints on scale created by existing corporate, legal, and political institutions. In his sections on “the idea of scale” and “empirical studies of scale” Howitt shows how geographers have struggled with social-constructionist approaches to the concept of scale in ways which seem to anticipate some of the issues anthropologists have tackled in thinking about these issues.

“Scale Making” In My Ear

Two years ago Savage Minds, together with our readers, spent the summer reading Anna Tsing’s book Friction. Although I was somewhat underwhelmed by the book at the time, I have to admit that certain ideas have crawled in my ear and wrapped themselves around my cerebral cortex like a ceti eel. Specifically the notion of “scale making” discourses. At the time I criticized her use of the term for emphasizing vertical relationships over horizontal networks, but for various reasons I won’t go into now, the concept of scale is very useful for thinking about my current research with indigenous communities in India and Taiwan. For this reason I decided to investigate further.

Tsing is not particularly forthcoming about the genealogy of the term , but I’ve recently discovered that Google Scholar is an excellent way to identify the most widely cited source for a particular academic keyword. A search for “‘scale making’ globalization” yielded up two very useful essays. Both from 2000: The first is Sallie Marston’s “The social construction of scale” (Sage subscription or purchase required). And the second is an article by Tsing herself, entitled “The global situation” (Scribd iPaper link).

I’ll discuss Tsing first. I realize I must be one of the few idiots who hasn’t already read this piece – so I apologize to all our erudite readers for whom this reference is obviousness itself. But I want to say how much I loved this article. It is clear, insightful, and critical. It is especially critical of the triumphalist and “charismatic” discourses of globalization which so prevailed in 90s anthropology. It made me a Tsing fan in a way that Friction had not. But while the article elaborates her theory of “scale-making” it still doesn’t give us much of a sense of the genealogy of the term.

For that, I had to turn to Sallie Marston’s workmanlike piece. Marston, a human geographer, is well situated to give us this genealogy since it seems to have first caught on in English within that discipline. She traces it back to the work of Henri Lefebvre (a nice article on Lefebvre by Stanley Aronowitz can be downloaded here) and places special emphasis on the work of Neil Brenner (lots of downloads available there) and Peter Taylor (alas, no downloads). (Taylor is the only name from this article which appears in Tsing’s bibliography from the same year.)

In the last decade it seems that the term has really taken off – and has even begun to be criticized for its various inadequacies. I’m still exploring this literature and trying to figure out how to make use of it in my own work. I’m sure our readers will berate me for overlooking some obvious and important sources in my quest to trace the origins of this particular academic meme – and I look forward to it!

Seeing Like an Economist

Brad DeLong (a huge fan of Savage Minds) has posted a review of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, in which he castigates Scott for not more openly acknowledging his intellectual debt to the Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell has replied by pointing out that markets require real trade-offs and “we should acknowledge the costs of markets” even as we tout their benefits. While I applaud Henry for cautiously pointing out the costs of markets, I think that both he and Brad both underestimate the extent to which Scott is correct when he states:

the conclusions that can be drawn from the failures of modern projects of social engineering are as applicable to market-driven standardization as they are to bureaucratic homogeneity

A good example is the recent failed attempt by aid organizations to employ markets to distribute much-needed mosquito nets:

In doing so, Dr. Kochi turned his back on an alternative long favored by the Clinton and Bush administrations — distribution by so-called social marketing, in which mosquito nets are sold through local shops at low, subsidized prices — $1 or so for an insecticide-impregnated net that costs $5 to $7 from the maker — with donors underwriting the losses and paying consultants to come up with brand names and advertise the nets.

When Kenya started giving nets away for free instead of charging for them coverage increased dramatically and the “deaths of children dropped 44 percent.”

Both David Harvey’s book, A Brief History of Neoliberism, and Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine discuss numerous cases where the (often forced) imposition of markets have had disastrous consequences. Perhaps not as disastrous as some of the famines discussed in Scott, but still pretty bad. Like the examples in Scott’s book, these free-market ideologues like to make use of political instability in order to conduct their social experiments. Case in point, Iraq, where the first order of business by Paul Bremer was to privatize Iraqi business and lift trade barriers. (As well as dismantling the trade unions, one of the more important pillars of Iraqi civil society.)

Below is a video for Naomi Klein’s book made by Children of Men director, Alfonso Cuarón. While I haven’t read her book yet, it seems as if it popularizes many of the arguments found in similar books by Harvey, Stiglitz and others. For a more thorough filmic treatment of these themes, I highly recommend Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt.

Tribes or diasporas?

I recently read a piece at Gamasutra entitled “The Academics Speak Out: Is There Life After Worlds of Warcraft”:http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1675/the_academics_speak_is_there_life_.php. It features both wiley veterams such as Henry Jenkins and Edward Castronova and up-and-comers like Florence Chee and Jeff McNeill attempting to predict the future of MMOGs. Your mileage may vary on this piece — a lot of the answers are variations on “who knows?” — but I was struck that two of the five authors described gamers as being organized into “tribes”. Although Chee at least credits the idea of a “retribalization” of gamers to McLuhan, I was struck that this term was used, since it has such a long and troublesome genealogy in kinship studies.

What struck me as more sensible was Jenkins’s description of MMOG players as a “diasporic community” — a much more interesting image. We’ve known users of a computer network aren’t in the same place at the same time, but I never thought about comparing Warcraft with, say, Samoa, and my living room as, say, Auckland. But perhaps someone has already drawn out these metaphorical associations more clearly?

Sports as Embodied Culture

With the centrality of athletes’ bodies in competition, sports provide a unique perspective in understanding what Susan Brownell refers to as body culture, “a broad term that includes daily practices of health, hygiene, fitness, beauty, dress and decoration, as well as gestures, postures, manners, ways of speaking and eating, … the way these practices are trained into the body, the way the body is publicly displayed, and the lifestyle that is expressed in that display” (from Susan Brownell’s 1995 book
Training the Body for China Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic, pp.10-11). In her ethnographic study of Chinese women track and field athletes, Brownell develops the concept of body culture by combining Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of habitus and Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary technologies together, showing how objective structures such as the nation-state and everyday practices inscribe a particular cultural discipline onto the bodies of Chinese women. Western political and social leaders from the late 19th and early 20th century such as Theodore Roosevelt and Sir Robert Baden-Powell (founder of scouting) understood how sports could be used to instill a particular set of values on citizens, presenting sports as essential to building character for citizens of a vibrant civilization in what has been called “muscular Christianity.” Sports were an integral part of the “civilizing mission” of Westerners in their efforts to transform non-Western societies into colonial subjects. Of course such efforts could be turned on its head, as the other made sports their own. I’m sure this is a familiar theme — what would introductory anthropology classes be like without the classic film Trobriand Cricket? At a more theoretical level, Arjun Appadurai makes this precise argument about Indian cricket as well.
I think looking at sports as embodied culture is particularly useful in two areas – gender and childhood/education. Children have become a particular target for cultural politics, as competing groups seek to implement their visions of the future by shaping education and other childhood experiences (for more on this, see the volumes edited by Sharon Stephens or Nancy Sheperer-Hughes; I have written an essay on children myself in a study of Kentucky Fried Chicken in Beijing, and a full-length ethnography on Chinese children has been written by Charles Stafford). Pierre Bourdieu emphasized the role of sports in education as a specific site for the imprinting of political philosophies through embodied culture in France. The importance of college sports in the United States, an athletic system that is quite different from university-level education in other societies, has also been the subject of intense study and debate. Noel Dyck therefore concludes that parents and local communities invest significant time and money in childhood sports because of the rationale that sports are essential in instilling cultural values deemed positive such as high self-esteem, hard work, team play, and playing by the rules.
In terms of gender, the implications of sports in defining masculinity and femininity are clear; but different studies have reached surprising conclusions. In the United States, sports and gender issues are also highly politicized, largely because of debates over Title IX, a federal law requiring equal opportunities for boys and girls in educational institutions, including school sports (and of course, there is the continuing legacy of Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King). There are so many works out there on women and sports; one that I would recommend is Laura Spielvogel’s Working Out in Japan.
From my own work, I am making a case that Sherry Ortner’s classic dictum “female is to male as nature is to culture” should be reversed in our contemporary globalized environment of commodification and consumption. I am sure I do not need to fully summarize Ortner’s classic work, but I would like to point out that her argument is based on three lines of argument: 1) a woman’s body and its function (especially reproduction) place her closer to nature; 2) a woman’s social roles are of a lower order of culture than a man’s; and 3) a woman’s traditional social roles creates a psychological structure that is seen as closer to nature. Without going into the messy ethnographic data (OK, I am still editing all of that), looking at sports in popular culture today reveals that the reverse seems to hold today. First, the emphasis on athleticism as a measure of masculinity (size, speed, agility, dexterity) makes men’s bodies and its functions more important, and closer to nature (think of the media coverage on sports injury reports). Second, this emphasis on sports and athleticism stresses the more natural aspect of masculinity, instead of the more cultural aspects of femininity; the growing gender imbalance in American higher education, as well as the wider culture of anti-intellectualism, is an outgrowth of this. Think of the more widely held meaning of academic, as in “it’s only academic” (a useless, after-the-fact exercise). Third, this makes men rely on psychological perspectives that are seen as more natural, instinctive, aggressive. I would like to take this argument further into a theoretical exploration of the cultural underpinnings of globalization. I believe that a Hayekian free market ideology rewards such gender roles, and helps to explain why men are increasingly judged by their bodies. I obviously have a lot to work to do to make such an argument, but that’s at least where my thinking is headed. As an aside, this same argument can be made through an analysis of Harry Potter, focusing on the three main protagonists: Harry, Ron, and Hermione!

Understanding Modernity Hiply

A graduate student sent me this video with the note “It may be the best ‘text’ on modernity I’ve seen in a long time.” There are some great subtle moments in it. Whoever made it has read far too much Edward Tufte.

Anthropology does IPR, Part 3 (final)

organigram.jpg
A striking development that has come out of the last decade’s concern with indigenous IPR and, more broadly, with the world’s mad scramble for rules of cultural ownership is the rise of global initiatives to identify and protect anything defined as “heritage.” UNESCO is the single biggest player here, but UNESCO discussions have spawned new bureaucracies in many parts of the world.

Some experts close to the process see this as a good thing. Their argument is largely a pragmatic one: at least the world is talking about this stuff and finally taking measures to protect heritage from IP piracy. If you want to get the general flavor of this, click here to read about South Korea’s current efforts to define and preserve whatever it defines as its cultural heritage.

Although I’ve met many people involved with heritage protection and generally find them smart and motivated by the best of intentions, I’m a heritage protection skeptic, which puts me in good company. For a bracing critique full of tart humor, check out David Lowenthal’s article “Heritage Wars,” published in a UK online magazine last year. Other recent contributions to the skeptic’s position include Rob Albro’s 2005 essay “Making Cultural Policy and Confounding Cultural Diversity,” as well as a recent essay by Dorothy Noyes called “The Judgment of Solomon: Global Protections for Tradition and the Problem of Community Ownership,” accessible here.
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Random thoughts on scale

Human geography — and particularly Marxist human geographers such as the work of Harvey, Smith, and LeFevre — have developed the notion of ‘scale’ that have found their way into anthropological theory. Thus we have notions of scale making and scale jumping percolating into the works of Tsing, West, and so forth. These concepts have always seemed naggingly imprecise to me although it is difficult exactly to say why. I want to take a stab at explaining why here, even though I’m hardly an expert on this literature.

Scale, technically, is the representative fraction that indicates the relationship of a unit of distance on a map to a distance on earth — one inch to a mile, and so forth. ‘Issues’ of scale arise when geographers enter the realm of (as Neokantians might put it) problems selection and focus — what ‘scale’ is appropiate for a particular research topic? That of the country, the region, the city? Since geography is (almost by definition) catrographically inclined, issues of research focus and design are expressed in spatial terms.

This is all well and good, but when anthropology begins adopting these terms this spatial metaphor for problem selection — appropriate for cartographic endeavors — gets stretched to the point where it becomes a hinderance rather than a help. This is particularly true, I feel, in the case of the literature on globalization.
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Should we outsource anthropology?

I just got back from the latest Allen Chun production at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica: “Culture in Context: Pragmatics, Industries, Technologies, Geopolitics.” Allen regularly hosts thought provoking interdisciplinary conferences. One cool Savage Minds connection was made this year, as frequent SM commentator John McCreery was the chair on one panel and I was the discussant on another.

My panel was entitled, “Flows and Boundaries, Real or Imagined,” and I had the honor of discussing papers by George Ritzer and George Marcus. Allen instructed us to discuss all the panel papers together, rather than taking them each separately. With one paper a survey on outsourcing, and the other a meditation on anthropological methodology, it at first seemed like an impossible task; however, I decided to have some fun with it and people seemed to enjoy the result. Since the papers are available online, and all my references are online as well, I thought it would be appropriate to post the full text of my discussion here on Savage Minds.

I urge everyone to please take the time to read through Ritzer and Marcus’ original papers before reading my commentary since it was written with a certain contextual setting in mind.
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Taiwanese Bridal Photography

You might have seen this article in yesterday’s Washington Post. Titled “For Wedding Photos, Chinese Couples Strike a Western Pose” the article focuses on the “Western” garb adorned in Chinese bridal photography:

With names such as Paris, Love in New York and Rome Style Life, the mostly Taiwanese owned studios that dominate one of Beijing’s busiest shopping districts have capitalized on a Chinese obsession with Western-style wedding pictures.

For the equivalent of $375 to $750, packages include at least five costume changes and a trip to pose in front of a nearby Roman Catholic church, even though most couples aren’t Christian. “It fits the Western style of the dress,” said Huang Ling, 23, director of the Miracle Love Marriage studio.

Before we go any further, I encourage everyone to look at some of the photographs online. I bookmarked these for my students when I was teaching Bonnie Adrian’s Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry last year. (Bonnie informed me that she had wanted to include more in her book, but it would have made the cost prohibitive.)

There is no denying that there is something “Western” about these images, just as there is something “Eastern” about Yoga. But women in designer paisley outfits doing yoga at the local gym are as separated from the “Eastern” origins of Yoga as Chinese brides donning dress after dress at Taiwanese run salons. These photographs represent a Taiwanese notion of “glamor” and “romance” that is rooted in the global fashion industry, but takes a very particular East Asian form.

Most importantly, this particular kind of wedding photography is very much a Taiwanese product. Even Taiwanese I know in the United States go back to Taiwan to get their photographs done there because they feel that the Taiwanese industry is more up to date with the latest fashions than Taiwanese-run studios in the States.

It is a competitive industry as well. One of Bonnie’s biggest challenges was convincing her informants that she wasn’t planning on stealing their “secrets”:

Even with Xiao-lan to introduce me as an anthropologist, salon owners and photographers continued to assume that I intended to open a bridal salon of my own once I finished by doctoral degree. many anthropologists have been suspected of being CIA agents, development workers, or missionaries in disguise. That the bridal salon owner’s worst fear is industrial espionage by an American posing as an anthropologist is telling. It speaks to the self-confidence that some people in Taiwan can enjoy in globalizing processes, including the one that this book presents.

I find it unfortunate that Maureen Fan felt it necessary to spin this story as a Chinese obsession with the West, when it is the role of Taiwanese in shaping Chinese popular culture which strikes me as the real story here.

The Other Superhero Movie

I am crazy busy this week as I pack for a rather last-minute move, conveniently timed to coincide with the first week of my 4-week summer session (2 classes, each meeting 2 1/2 hours, 4 days a week, one in the morning, one in the evening). But I wanted to mention Henry Jenkins’ thorough and thoughtful discussion of Krrish, a Bollywood production being billed as India’s first superhero movie. ALthough the formula will sound familiar to Western movie-goers, Jenkins notes that Krrish is a distinctly Indian twist on the superhero pattern:

Much like the western Superman who has been read as an embodiment of national myths and ideals, there is much which speaks to the specifically Indian origins of this particular story.

For one thing, the early signs that young Krishna may have superpowers come when he turns out to be a protégé at sketching and then confounds the teachers at his local school with a spectacular performance on his I.Q. exam. The American counterpart would have led off with his strength, his speed, or maybe even his X-ray vision but having a superior intellect has rarely been a prerequisite for becoming a superpower in the western sense of the term. Throughout the film, in fact, the other characters consistently cite his “talents” but rarely his “powers” as if he were destined to become an extremely gifted knowledge worker (and indeed, it turns out that the ethics of knowledge work for hire are at the center of this epic saga.)

…

Westerners are going to be tempted to read the film as a symptom of cultural imperialism — taking a strongly western genre and trying to sell it back to the American market. But that’s too simple — especially given all of the ways I’ve identified above that the superhero genre gets reworked to speak to specifically Asian values and concerns and the ways it gets mixed with other genre elements which are more closely associated with the Bollywood tradition.

Krrish isn’t playing anywhere even close to Las Vegas (despite a growing Indian population here, I might add) so I’ll have to take Jenkins at his word, but it sounds like a Superman Returns/Krrish double-feature would be a great way to spend an afternoon. [Via BoingBoing]

Neoliberalism in Anthropology

Rex’s recent post on “neoliberalism” sparked some good discussion, but much of it was focused on trying to define the term rather than understanding the phenomenon. In a comment Rex tried to refocus the discussion:

Let me try rephrasing: is this conjunction of stuff indicative of a moment (perhaps passed) in anthropology? And if so, why are these two well-known authors thinking about it now, given that (as many of the comments on this channel have indicated) ‘neoliberalism’ has probably been around for decades?

One way of examining the question is to use the excellent database provided by AnthroSource. While somewhat limited in scope, it should be able to reveal broad trends in the discipline. Accordingly, I searched for all articles (in the past 100 years) that used “neoliberalism” in the title. The total number of results was 25 articles, of which over half were published in the past three years! Eleven were published in just the past year and a half. I’d say that’s a trend! The oldest article dates to 1996. [NOTE: Some of these are book reviews, I didn’t see any reason to treat them separately. The full list is below the fold.]

In my own comments on Rex’s thread I suggested that one of the reasons for this trend might be a rethinking of “globalization” and “transnationalism” in which scholars are moving away from issues of consumption and trying to focus on the impact of the organizations responsible for global governance, such as the IMF and WTO.

Of particular importance is the so-called “Washington Consensus“, defined by Wikipedia as:

a set of policies promulgated by many neoliberal economists as a formula for promoting economic growth in many parts of Latin America and other parts of the world. The Washington Consensus policies propose to introduce various free market oriented economic reforms which are theoretically designed to make the target economy more like that of First World countries such as the United States.

The Washington Consensus is the target of sharp criticism by both individuals and groups, who claim that it is a way to funnel economic productivity from less developed Latin American countries to large multinational companies and their wealthy owners in advanced First World economies. As of 2005, several Latin American countries are led by socialist governments that openly oppose the Washington Consensus, and many more are ambivalent. Critics frequently cite the Argentine economic crisis of 1999-2002 as the case in point of why the Washington Consensus policies are flawed, as Argentina had previously implemented most of the Washington Consensus policies as directed.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that over half of the articles using the term have followed in the wake of the Argentina crisis and the rise of left-leaning governments in Latin America. Although some of them date from all the way back in the 1990s, over half of the list of AnthroSource articles are related to Latin America.
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The Impact of Real Colonialism on Colonialism “Lite”

Arlene Goldbard has a scathing, and I believe justified, attack on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s recent New York Times Magazine article, “The Case for Contamination.” She writes:

Much of his work has opposed the idea that we are limited by arbitrary facts of identity –race, sexual orientation, and so on — which tend to become dictates; instead, he asserts the individual’s freedom from all imposed categories. From the perspective of individual liberty, I agree.

… But in his Times essay, Appiah elaborates an entire cultural policy based on nothing more than the individual’s right to make his own path by walking through the cultures of the world.

The Appiah article is an extended attack on UNESCO’s “Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.”

Appiah sets up a straw man to stand in for those who endorse the Convention. He calls them purists and compares their relationship to cultures under pressure from globalization to the anxious “assistant on the film set who’s supposed to check that the extras in a sword-and-sandals movie aren’t wearing wristwatches.” He says (without a shred of evidence) that those concerned to preserve cultures want to force people to “maintain their ‘authentic’ ways,” a goal I have never heard anyone espouse (and I am moderately well-informed on this subject). And he dismisses those who feel their own cultures are threatened by globalization as merely expressing discomfort with change: “[T]he world, their world, is changing, and some of them don’t like it.”

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