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1998-1999 Ethnohistory Workshop SeriesView our SpeakersGlobalization, Power, and CultureProspectusThe increasing global scope and impact of technology and political economy are built into modernity itself, and the methods and theories that we bring to the study of globalization from our disparate disciplines focus on globalization from the bottom up. Rather than looking at contemporary world history from the heights of global theory and model-building, we are concerned with forms of power that operate within a world-system with emphatically local meaning and clout. We are focusing on specific sites of power that interact in networks of interaction which always transgress the boundaries that are set up to control the mobility of people, ideas, material, and finance. Cultural boundaries are of a different sort, and following the general thematic orientation of the Ethnohistory Workshop over the years, we will pay particular attention to the sites, forms, regions, and dynamics of culture in the operations of power within globalization. Two challenges posed by the recent scholarship on globalization form a background for the workshop. First, the idea is emerging that globalization today is forming a single, universal context for all humanity, a new zone of culture and power that effectively negates the salience of older, more circumscribed cultural areas and thus the need for the kind of area-based knowledge that underlies area studies programs and much disciplinary work in the social sciences and the humanities. In this new world-system theory, the global present is seen as a radical rupture with history, and its analysts routinely dispense with old constraints of contextuality which had previously limited the scope of universal theory. More social science is using global totality to substantiate universal theory. The global economy is supporting universal economic theory, and global culture is supplanting regional and national cultures in the study of cultural change. Second, scholars have shown that cultural change and differentiation are spilling out of old geographical boundaries in which they had been confined intellectually (though not empirically) in the past. Cultural areas do not seem to be as coherent now as they did twenty years ago, both because their internal differentiation is better understood and because dispersed elements of culture have migrated and intermingled in widening spaces which now include countless diasporas and multi-cultural zones. The changing substance of cultural areas is more visible than ever before but scholars are also finding it to be typical in history for many centuries. The Ethnohistory Workshop will consider the global reach of capital, technology, and attendant powers of social and cultural change from the vantage point of particular localities and human experience rather than from a global perspective perched analytically at the height of an orbiting satellite. We are not concerned with global phenomena but rather with everyday life within contingent, shifting networks of human interaction that form slippery geographies and mobile histories, rather than erasing geography and history altogether. Speakers, 1998-1999Fall 1998 September 17, 1998: Julia Paley, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania October 8, 1998: Geeta Patel, Department of Women's Studies, Wellesley College November 12, 1998: Gita Rajan, Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Rochester December 2, 1998: Aihwa Ong, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley Spring 1999 January 28, 1999: Anne Norton, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania February 25, 1999: Katherine Verdery, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor March 25, 1999: Julie Mostov, Institute for the Humanities, Drexel University April 22, 1999: Gillian Hart, Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley |