INTRODUCTION

Jackie Assayag and C. J. Fuller

To say that globalization has become the global cliché of our time has itself turned into a cliché in academic writing on the subject. By the end of the twentieth century, however, most social scientists, including anthropologists, acknowledged that globalization is a genuinely important topic of enquiry and that – despite its often ill-defined, catch-all connotations – it does label a distinctive transformative process that appears to have taken hold in many parts of the contemporary world, including India.

Definitions of globalization abound, but paraphrasing Held and his co-authors (1999: 14–15), we may initially define it as the widening, deepening and speeding up of global interconnectedness, a spatio-temporal process of change that links local or national social relations and networks with worldwide, global ones and thereby transforms 'the organization of human affairs'. A particularly important aspect is the 'deepening enmeshment of the local and global', so that distant events may have more and more local significance, and vice versa (ibid.: 15). This aspect is one to which anthropologists can particularly contribute, and introducing their volume on the anthropology of globalization, Inda and Rosaldo point out that anthropology 'is most concerned with the articulation of the global and the local' (2002: 4), with how globalization interacts with particular societies and cultures, and how ordinary people themselves experience and understand the process.

In discussing the local and global, however, several pitfalls should be avoided. Obviously, no human being can be in more than one place at a time, and even if some people today really are 'hybrid' transnationalists, the vast majority of the world's population are not, because they continue to live and work in one locality only – and commonly do so for all or most of their lives. Secondly, and related to the last point, global interconnectedness is extremely uneven. At one extreme, some groups of people in some places engaged in some kinds of activity – international bankers, for instance – are globally linked with each other, whereas at the other extreme, many other groups – notably those formed by the marginalized poor – tend to be very isolated. Indeed, their marginalization, and hence their disconnection from even locally existing networks of people and resources, may be increasing as a direct consequence of 'structural adjustment' policies or other developments that are part of economic globalization.

Thirdly, and of more general relevance to the studies in this book, reified distinctions between 'local places' and 'global forces' need to be avoided, so that, as Tsing observes, we are not misled by 'globalist fantasies'. Instead, we must recognize that 'the cultural processes of all "place" making and all "force" making are both local and global – that is, both socially and culturally particular and productive of widely spreading interactions' (Tsing 2002: 477). Thus the local and global – and, a fortiori, the national, regional or other spatial levels – are always enmeshed or entangled, not separate and preformed, because they are always mutually constituted vis-à-vis each other through social relationships and cultural patterns.

As Inda and Rosaldo observe (2002: 4), most academic work on globalization is about large-scale economic, political and cultural processes, and the anthropological literature, though growing, is still fairly limited. Certainly this is true for India, where pronouncements about globalization in general are far more plentiful than detailed documentation about 'the different meanings and consequences that [it] may have for social groups located differently along the axes of caste, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality and so on' (Deshpande 2003: 155). On the whole, too, as Deshpande observes, even when the globalization literature mentions the need for such details, it still 'continues with business as usual' (ibid.: 156), so that the 'grass-roots' view from below – the 'folk understandings of the global, and the practices with which they are intertwined' (Tsing 2002: 469) – remain mostly neglected. Interrupting the usual business is the first objective of this book, which is designed to present a selection of ethnography that explores different aspects of globalization from below, and in so doing sheds light on the relationship between the different spatial levels on which globalizing processes unfold. The book opens with an essay on the history of globalization in India that supplies a context for the mostly contemporary material discussed in the subsequent chapters.

Held et al. distinguish three broad schools of thought about globalization, which they label 'hyperglobalists', 'sceptics' and 'transformationalists' (1999: 2). For hyperglobalists, contemporary globalization is an entirely new epoch mainly defined by global market capitalism and the consequent weakening of the nation-state. Sceptics, by contrast, contend that globalization is an exaggerated myth, because economic integration across the world today is not unprecedented and is probably less than it was in the late nineteenth century; nor are nation-states actually in decline. For transformationalists – among whom Held et al. effectively include themselves – contemporary globalization is genuinely new, but it is a 'long-term historical process which is inscribed with contradictions and which is significantly shaped by conjunctural factors' (ibid: 7); as they recognize, world history has seen a series of earlier phases of globalization (ibid.: 414–24), and the long-term history of globalization, punctuated by reduced integration during phases of deglobalization, has been carefully and critically examined in recent historical scholarship (Hopkins 2002). Moreover, contemporary globalization must be seen as 'a highly...