Globalization: A Basic Text, 2nd Edition

APPENDIXDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO GLOBALIZATION

• Anthropology
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Economics
• Geography
• Psychology
• Literary Criticism (Postcolonial)
• Other Fields

This Appendix offers a brief overview of the approach(es) to globalization taken in a number of the social sciences (as well as in literary theory). While we will treat the disciplines separately below, there are those who move back and forth between two or more disciplines quite comfortably and to good effect.¹

ANTHROPOLOGY

A defining characteristic of the anthropological approach to globalization is its focus on culture (Friedman 1994: 67–7; Nordstrom 2007: 144). When anthropologists examine other spheres of the social world, they tend to look at them through the prism of culture (e.g. the political culture of a given society). Anthropologists, following the “Western model” (Hill and Baba 2006), have tended to see culture as tied to a particular place, or territory (e.g. a small tribe or a community). In the global age, many have come to recognize that culture has, at least to some degree, been torn from locale; it has been deterritorialized.² However, most anthropologists recognize that deterritorialized culture tends to be reinserted somewhere, perhaps in many places, although usually as a culture that is less stable than it had been in the past (Inda and Rosaldo 2008a: 3–46; Nordstrom 2004: 13). ...