Moore, Henrietta L. (2004) "Global Anxieties: Concept-metaphors and pre-theoretical commitments in anthropology," SAGE Publications, Vol.4, London: 71-88
Every day we become more and more involved in the process of globalization, its effects and implications. Many say that we no longer live in a world where ‘local’ impacts our everyday lives, instead we live in a world that is all about the ‘global.’ Globalization is not just a term with one definition, like a one-size-fits-all baseball hat, it is very much a fluid concept with multiple angles and multiple definitions. It is possible to use these multiple definitions and apply the concepts of Globalization to any method of study. In history we talk about the history of globalization from World War I to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Political Science we talk about globalization and its impact on the now international political arena. Finally, Anthropologist use globalization and this new world order to link the old ‘local’ to the new ‘global’ culture.
One such anthropologist who hails from the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK), is Henrietta L. Moore. Through the lens of ‘concept-metaphors,’ “whose purpose is to maintain ambiguity and a productive tension between universal claims and specific historical contexts,” Moore defines the ‘global’ as being “a space of theoretical abstraction and processes, experiences and connections in the world, important not only to social scientists but now part of most people’s imagined and experienced worlds.”(“Global Anxieties,” 71) In this work Moore argues that globalization has yet to produce the ‘sameness’ that the local cultures tend to create. She in fact states that homogenization of culture through the increasingly globalized world is not possible because globalization needs cultural differences in order to be in existence. In point of fact the ‘global’ in the 21st century could not exist without local culture and local lives. The problem that the field of Anthropology comes across is not to admit the existence of a tie between global and local but rather to define this relationship and ‘operationalize’ it.
Where Moore explains that to answer this question of global-local you have to be able to ethnographically study the local and apply that to our conceptual understandings of the global, Inda and Rosaldo explain that globalization is not only a growing global interconnectedness from the local but it is also causing a “fundamental reordering of time and space.”(“Tracking Global Flows, 8) Essentially Moore is arguing that the global can not become homogeneous and Rosaldo/Inda are theorizing that the global is becoming increasingly homogenized.
Inda and Rosaldo use two main theories initially to support their own, that of David Harvey who argued a concept called “Time-Space Compression,” and that of Anthony Giddens who argued a concept call “Time-Space Distanciation.” Harvey on the one had argues that through globalization space on the map is shrinking and time is shortening and he argues that eruptions of time and space occur during periods of over-accumulation. He theorizes that this “Time-Space Compression” is due to the “general speed-up in the turnover time of capita [which] is rapidly shrinking the world.” (“Tracking Global Flows,” 9) Meanwhile, Giddens argues that “the intensification of worldwide social relations’ is causing the linking of ‘distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.”(“Tracking Global Flows”, 11) So, essentially the global and the processes of globalization have a big impact on the local.
Both Henrietta L. Moore and Jonathan Xavier Inda / Renato Rosaldo bring and interesting perspective to globalization and while their theories differ slightly in practice both seem to want to tie the ‘global’ to the ‘local’ and use this relationship to create an anthropological refined definition of globalization and what its impact on our lives is. In both of these readings on the process of globalization it seems more than clear that we can no longer live in a world of purely the ‘local,’ nor can we live in a world which is solely based on the ‘global.’ Instead, we are forced to live in the world of increasing interconnectedness and a growing global culture.
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