Understanding the Global, Harnessing the Local

Global Ethnography represents what Buroway defines as an accumulative effort to ‘represent a broader commitment to soft hermeneutic sociology’ to study today’s realities of transnational flows of population, discourse, commodities and power. What this collection aims to represent is the relationship between the macro and the micro, the nexus between the local and the global, through the use of a methodology traditionally used to study a specific phenomenon within a particular frame of time and space. Ethnography, with its focus on a detailed study of human cultures, is used by the authors to discover what is new about the global, to delve into the external forces of globalization and seeking its implications for the local, to explore the connections between different sites of similar occurrences and examine their transnational and transcendental nature. Simultaneously, using this kind of research methodology, the book aims to highlight the bottom up approach to globalization defined by Buroway as ‘grounded globalization’to explore the realities of the global political economy and its power to disenfranchise the local, while expanding the transnational social place to create and recreate social identities and relationships and allow for projections of the global imagination in the construction of new political projects and controversies.

Central to the project is the book’s assumptions on ideology which it argues is not merely a reflection of reality. In using ethnography as the entry point into the local-global nexus, it asserts that global discourses alone claim an autonomy and coherence of their own and become powerful ideological constructions that can arouse collective wills (p.342). In other words, to borrow Searle’s terms, global discourses, once unleashed create a new set of socially constructed realities within which individuals, communities, and movements not only seek their meaning and position, but also their legitimacy in relation to one another. The challenge ultimately of using a global ethnographic study seems to lie in being able to highlight the establishment of these newly emerging relationships that are no longer confined within national boundaries.

At this juncture, a few threads of commonality throughout the book need to be highlighted. First, the different kinds of ethnographies and case studies projected highlight not only the tension between the local and the global, but also the dialectics of the global political economy, the economic and social costs of such a large-scale venture and the blurring of the lines (as was reflected in Dirty Nurses and Men who Play) between those who benefit and those who lose out in the new constantly constructed narrative. Second, the book is successful in highlight the reconstitution of identities whether it be the men who recycle, the Indian families who recreate cultural, social and political norms and expectations in very different geographical settings or the evolution of social movements from the local to the global such as the breast cancer movement to claim legitimacy and voice on a larger platform as both a consequence as well as a constituent in the global phenomenon. Third, global ethnography as a methodological approach captures the uncomfortable relationship that emerges between those who have not been destroyed by globalization, yet benefit from it and use its forces as a means of furthering their own agendas, or challenging the status quo that it creates in terms of power and hegemony in the new world.

Yet, despite the strengths of this work, what remains unclear is what the constituents of a good ethnographic study really are, what questions need to be asked and answered before developing such a research methodology to study a global phenomenon. In this regard,

a rich array of questions can be posed given the range of issues tackled in this collection, relating to the effectiveness of using a micro level approach to a macro-level phenomenon.

First, would you agree with the assertion that the value of global ethnography lies in its ability to reveal social dilemmas as aspects of a contested terrain of globalization rather than as inevitable outcomes of an apolitical process? What form of alternative research methodology could provide a similar insight into the processes and dialectics within globalization and its relation to the local if not ethnography? Is ethnography the only approach to provide a multilevel understanding of the dynamics within globalization and reconstitution of social identities and relationships as a consequence of globalizing forces?

Second, how can one arrive at the appropriate level of analysis within a context where all boundaries are porous and identities constantly capable of changing in relation to one another? Does the global ethnographic approach with its focus on global forces, connections and imaginations provide the methodological toolbox that is required to study multilayered and multinuanced variables which are inextricably connected to each other?

Third, Global Ethnography argues for an understanding of global forces that views the process of globalization as being in transition. Do the narratives provided in the next highlight this assertion?