240536 SE Slaves, Gold & Starbucks: Local Lifeways and Global Entanglements (P4) (2017S)

How do national and global relations, discourses and practices impact on the local lifeways of people? This question has in recent decades developed into an important focus of social science research, as attention has turned to the processes usually summarised as 'globalisation'. One paradoxical aspect of globalisation has been its tendency, under certain circumstances, to result in an emphasis on local difference or even separatist tendencies ('glocalization'). Overall, these developments have made it clear that local lifeways cannot be researched in isolation, no matter how much difference is stressed. The tensions and the social transformations in which they manifest themselves have become important in all sub-disciplines of anthropology: the anthropology of religion analyses the spread and local reformulations of Christianity; kinship specialists are interested in transnational relations in diasporic families and in relations that involve care and intimacy; 'global health' has to deal with epidemics, organ trade, or health tourism; local economic circuits depend on global markets; and political anthropology necessarily deals, for example, with resource exploitation and the consequences of global environmental problems, human rights, and the presence of the (postcolonial) state.
In this course, we will discuss these issues using ethnographic examples from different parts of the world, although the emphasis will be on the Pacific and Southeast Asia.

The obviousness of contemporary connections and the imperatives they impose upon analysis have had the effect of inducing a broader 'historical turn' in the social sciences. While some strands of anthropology have always considered global connections to be crucial to understanding local social forms (long before the term 'globalisation' became prominent), an anti-essentialist, decentred perspective on (world) history has become a widespread basis for postcolonial theorising and historical research on the 'Peoples without history' (Wolf 1982); But recently-developed perspectives have offered more powerful challenges to ethnographic practices and anthropological theory. The course will address all aspects of these exciting developments.

Mittwoch 7.6.2017

9.45 13.00
Introduction and overview: Local lifeways and global entanglements

Early contacts and first reports: Cannibals, heathens and the noble savage

Montag 12.6.2017

9.45 13.00
'Europe and the people without history'

Don Gardner: The spread and transformation of Christianity

Montag 19.6.2017

9.45 13.00

Mining and other large-scale capital intensive projects

Familification: the globalisation of the nuclear family

Montag 26.6.2017

9.45 13.00
Globalised intimacies: Care, sexualities and marriage

Methodological consequences: multi-sited ethnography

Final discussion