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"In this book, Appadurai follows up "Modernity at Large" with a look into the seamy side of globalization. Analyzing the growing inequalities and endemic violence of the past decade, he still sees signs of hope in less noticed trends of 'globalization from below.' These are important new thoughts from an influential thinker of our times."--Partha Chatterjee, Director, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York

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Fear of Small Numbers

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface...............................................................ix1 From Ethnocide to Ideocide..........................................12 The Civilization of Clashes.........................................153 Globalization and Violence..........................................354 Fear of Small Numbers...............................................495 Our Terrorists, Ourselves...........................................876 Grassroots Globalization in the Era of Ideocide.....................115Bibliography..........................................................139Index.................................................................143

Chapter One

This study is concerned with large-scale, culturally motivated violence in our times. Its chapters, whose arguments are previewed here, were drafted between 1998 and 2004. Thus, their principal arguments were developed in the shadow of two major kinds of violence. The first kind, which we saw in Eastern Europe, Rwanda, and India in the early 1990s, showed that the world after 1989 was not going to be entirely progressive and that globalization could expose severe pathologies in the sacred ideologies of nationhood. The second kind, officially globalized under the rubric of the "war on terror," may be marked by the cataclysmic attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia on September 11, 2001. This latter event bracketed the 1990s as a decade of superviolence, a decade characterized by a steady growth in civil and civic warfare in many societies as a feature of everyday life. We now live in a world, articulated differently by states and by media in different national and regional contexts, in which fear often appears to be the source and ground for intensive campaigns of group violence, ranging from riots to extended pogroms.

In the 1940s and for some time after, many scholars began to assume that extreme forms of collective violence, especially those combining large-scale killing with various forms of planned degradation of the human body and human dignity, were direct by-products of totalitarianism, notably of fascism, and were discernable in Mao's China, in Stalin's Soviet Union, and in smaller totalitarian societies. Alas, the 1990s have left no doubt that liberal-democratic societies, as well as a variety of mixed state forms, are susceptible to capture by majoritarian forces and large-scale ethnocidal violence.

So we are forced to ask and answer the question about why the 1990s, the period of what we may now call "high globalization," should also be the period of large-scale violence in a wide range of societies and political regimes? In referring to high globalization (with more than a gesture to high modernism), I flag a set of utopian possibilities and projects that swept many countries, states, and public spheres after the end of the Cold War. These possibilities were captured in a series of intertwined doctrines about open markets and free trade, about the spread of democratic institutions and liberal constitutions, and about the powerful possibilities of the Internet (and related cyber technologies) to mitigate inequality both within and across societies and to increase freedom, transparency, and good governance in even the poorest and most isolated countries. Today, only the most fundamentalist supporters of unfettered economic globalization assume that the domino effects of free trade and high degrees of cross-national market integration and capital flow are always positive.

Thus, this work is one more attempt to address the following question: why should a decade dominated by a global endorsement of open markets, free flow of finance capital, and liberal ideas of constitutional rule, good governance, and active expansion of human rights have produced a plethora of examples of ethnic cleansing on one hand and extreme forms of political violence against civilian populations (a fair definition of terrorism as a tactic) on the other? In the course of what follows, I shall occasionally take issue with some prominent efforts to tackle this question. Here, I confine myself to stating, in simple terms, the ingredients of a different sort of answer, an answer rooted in a preoccupation with the cultural dimensions of globalization. Some critics saw my earlier effort to characterize the (then) emerging world of globalization (1996) as perhaps a bit too harsh in its criticisms of the modern nation-state and as naively cheerful about the benefits of global flows. This essay addresses the darker sides of globalization directly.

To arrive at a better understanding of what globalization may have to do with ethnic cleansing and with terror I propose a series of interlocking ideas. The first step is to recognize that there is a fundamental, and dangerous, idea behind the very idea of the modern nation-state, the idea of a "national ethnos." No modern nation, however benign its political system and however eloquent its public voices may be about the virtues of tolerance, multiculturalism, and inclusion, is free of the idea that its national sovereignty is built on some sort of ethnic genius. We have just seen this point of view expressed with shocking civility by Samuel Huntington (2004), in an open call to alarm about the way in which Hispanic people in the United States are threatening to secede from the American way, seen as a narrow Euro-Protestant cultural doctrine. So much for the idea that ethnonationalist positions are confined to dark Baltic states, raving African demagogues, or fringe Nazis in England and northern Europe.

It has been widely noted that the idea of a singular national ethnos, far from being a natural outgrowth of this or that soil, has been produced and naturalized at great cost, through rhetorics of war and sacrifice, through punishing disciplines of educational and linguistic uniformity, and through the subordination of myriad local and regional traditions to produce Indians or Frenchmen or Britons or Indonesians (Anderson 1991; Balibar 1990; Scott 1998; Weber 1976). It has also been observed by some of our great political theorists, notably Hannah Arendt (1968), that the idea of a national peoplehood is the Achilles' heel of modern liberal societies. In the argument here, I draw on the ideas of Mary Douglas and other anthropologists, to suggest that the road from national genius to a totalized cosmology of the sacred nation, and further to ethnic purity and cleansing, is relatively direct. There are those that argue that this is only a risk in those modern polities that have mistakenly put blood at the center of their national ideology, but blood and nationalism appear to be in a much fuller and wider embrace in the world as a whole. All nations, under some conditions, demand whole-blood transfusions, usually requiring some part of their blood to be extruded.

This inherent ethnicist tendency in all ideologies of nationalism does not explain why only some national polities become the scenes of large-scale violence, civil war, or ethnic cleansing. Here we need recourse to a second idea, involving the place of social uncertainty in social life. In an earlier essay entitled "Dead Certainty" (1998b), I develop a detailed argument about the ways in which social uncertainty can drive projects of ethnic cleansing that are both vivisectionist and verificationist in...