For my first analytical summery I decided to go through M. Kearney´s text The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism, because of its main concern about in population movement and its relation with information, symbols and other means related to the global and transnational arena, which now a day is very important to the topic of globalization and the specific identity of all the people that has direct contact with this process even thou they are sometimes victims of this new type of organization that has been constantly changing during the past decades.
From my perspective there are quite a few shifts that the author presents that must be addressed to understand the modern times. Kearney refers to a “multidimensional global space with unbounded, often discontinuous and interpenetrating sub-spaces.” (Kearney, p: 549) This is a very important observation because; it provides an insight to how people interactions take place now a days, permitting them to be connected in a much wider way to the information surrounding them, even from the most forsaken places in the planet. Communication allows this process to sustain what is called the dependency theory, which the author explains it to be as the relationship between nations and their colonies, or developed countries with underdeveloped ones (P: 550), that in this modern times is not necessarily the way it works, because the system has widen itself so much that many other actors are also involved. This new actor are accounted by the author in what he calls the world-system theory, where he displaces the analysis towards a much bigger view, where the global is exists within the nation-state in relation with many other units.
To better understand this relation portrayed before, the author makes many references to a variety of other authors’ researches, but, the one that enlightened me the most because it clearly explained the connections, was the one from Harvey D. (1989) called The Condition of Post-modernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Culture Change, which Kearny argues that even
Marked acceleration in a secular trend of time-space compression in capitalist political economy is central to current culture change. Time compression results from the imperative in capitalism to constantly shorten the average turnover time between investment and the taking of profit. During periods of capitalist restructuring, changes are made that markedly reduce turnover time by shrinking barriers to production, marketing, and profit taking, while also relocating production so as to disrupt worker solidarity. (P: 551)
What I take from all this is the direct relation to the topics discussed in class. In order to profit more, certain companies have become transnationals, taking their factories to underdeveloped countries where the salaries are much lower and where they can take advantage of the high unemployment rates, with the image of them being some kind of saviors that bring jobs to this needed zones, but in reality, what they’re doing is just taking advantage of a really serious situation, as it was for example shown in the Mexican border case discussed in class, as well as in many Asian countries that also welcome this transnational companies with the hopes of profiting from them, but in reality not really getting much benefits from this process, while dooming at the same time the people to keep closer to westernization, and the disappearance of their own territorial roots.
References:
Kearney, M. “The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 1995, vol. 24, 547-65