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Product Description
Provides an exciting approach to some of the most contentious issues in discussions around globalization—bioscientific research, neoliberalism, governance—from the perspective of the "anthropological" problems they pose; in other words, in terms of their implications for how individual and collective life is subject to technological, political, and ethical reflection and intervention.
- Offers a ground-breaking approach to central debates about globalization with chapters written by leading scholars from across the social sciences.
- Examines a range of phenomena that articulate broad structural transformations: technoscience, circuits of exchange, systems of governance, and regimes of ethics or values.
- Investigates these phenomena from the perspective of the “anthropological” problems they pose.
- Covers a broad range of geographical areas: Africa, the Middle East, East and South Asia, North America, South America, and Europe.
- Grapples with a number of empirical problems of popular and academic interest — from the organ trade, to accountancy, to pharmaceutical research, to neoliberal reform.
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Average Customer Review:
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Provocative Essential Reference for Understanding Complexity, 2007-11-14
This book is one I acquired in the University of Colorado bookstore last March, and it has been waiting for a suitably long trip. Published in 2005 this book impresses me greatly with its coverage (28 authors, all at the top of their game) and relevance. I am not an anthropologist, so some of the book I found to be arcane and a struggle, but on balance this is world-class original work and very helpful to my reflections where the distinct forms of human organization are going.
The book opens with "processes of reflection and action," and makes immediate mention of Canada's Ethical Technology Audit. I found ethics very deeply embedded in this book, in virtually every individual contribution that held my attention.
The overview tells us that the disarray of contemporary ethics can be traced to a breakdown in the practical wisdom in the context of a broken "polis" or political entity by which group decisions are made.
I write a note to myself early on that this book is packed with the nuances of globalization, technology, sociology, and "political" science, and offers us a sense of global versus localized non-state assemblages and "scapes" as in landscapes.
The authors in general tell us society, culture, and economies are all being transformed. Ethics emerges again when they discuss humanity as an object of knowledge, with a stress on biological, not just political technical, or ethical.
One line grabs me, where one of the authors says that trajectories of change are like "little lines of mutation." There is a focus on human life, the telos of living, is constituted and reconstituted.
One author stresses that banditry and trafficking in illegal substances are alternative forms of existence and co-existence.
There is emphasis on how the breakdown of states, the expansion of corporate power and corporate technology (and I might add, the reduction of government leverage of technology), as well as the explosion of private data that dwarfs government data, are all cause for concern.
There is a lament that "the good life" has been wiped out, with rationalization and exploitation repressing ethics and humaneness in too many corners. In the context there is a renewed call for a reconnection of faith-based practice and pragmatic (as opposed to ideologically exclusive) politics.
Every author makes a substantive contribution. A handful demand special notice. Bowker on "time, money, and biodiversity" open with a focus on money and lists as a means of managing complexity. He is good at crediting others like Serres on money as "zero degree of separation" (the same can now be said of the cell phone which can now inform the user at the point of sale of the "true cost" of any product). He cites O'Neil as observing that humans are the ONLY species that is "outside" the ecosystem and forcing costs on the planet that are unsustainable.
I have a note from one author, that Earth is valued at $33 trillion, yet nothing is being spent on preserving its value.
Another note reminds me that culture and corporation are short-term, nation and family can and should be but often are not long-term.
I completely agree with one statement to the effect that money is not the optimal instrument for helping complex groups reach accord (among other things, it can be stolen and hoarded). I write EARTHGAME, meaning that everyone should be able to play themselves with full access to all relevant information and no need for scarce money, only Open Money.
Vin-Kim Nguyen impresses me with a piece on therapeutic citizenship, the importance of "talking groups" (some call them Wisdom Councils) and new forms of orchestrated governmentality. I am reminded of the "home rule" demands sweeping America, now that neither the Congress nor the Executive are trusted to represent We the People. This author gets me thinking about the blending of organizations forms, the use of clinical data that can be traded for treatment.
Nancy Schepher-Hughes is utterly brilliant in her covert examination of the organ marketplace, a great deal of it illegal and being led by Israel.
A concluding piece worries me, talking about replacing the actual public with a "virtual public." That is what the Department of Defense wants to do, and it is a very bad idea. Only an inclusive EarthGame with "true cost" information and all public budgets loaded, will be fair to We the People.
Excellent piece on the roles of standardization versus commercialization (e.g. of former Soviet client states)
Koran forbids interest.
Soul of capitalism at risk.
Hierarchies of value.
Some of this is too arcane.
Bioethics matters.
How to guide aggregate spending of foundations, governments, corporations, in voluntary harmonization for effect rather than centralization of control?
Capitalism 3.0 (Natural Capitalism). Centers on sustainable design and eradicating any failure to represent "true cost."
Asset management ideas:
+ Biomimicry, biotech, bacteria for good
+ Green to gold, green chemistry
+ Measure industries and countries by degree of knowledge intensity
+ Partner with Yale and University of Connecticut to create Moody's for true cost--with six month lag between sponsor knowledge and market publication....
I put this book down in a very pensive mood. We need to make a huge leap forward, and I have the strongest feeling that sharing information, exposing information, and helping all the players make decisions on the basis of reality rather than ideology, will be critical.
See also each item below that has one of my summative reviews:
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
Catastrophe & Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series)
The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology)
Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik
Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy
The Future of Life
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
The best collection this decade, 2006-08-03
This book is a collection of the most exciting work being done in sociocultural anthropology and the social sciences more broadly. The innovation of this ethnographic research is that the authors examine their topics through very technical analyses, finding the ethical dimensions, often through expert interlocutors. A key premise of Global Assemblages is that epistemology (how to know) and ethics (how to act) are inextricably linked, a stance most academic disciplines currently reject.
We find that what are often portrayed as merely academic or philosophical debates (debates on objectivity versus social constructivism or the value of anecdotal evidence versus quantitative evidence, for example) are actually problems that people outside academia such as accountants, bandits, Alan Greenspan (or any other head of the Federal Reserve is), and securities traders face and find solutions to, sometimes on a daily basis.
The essays that stand out to me as the most interesting and groundbreaking are the ones by Bill Maurer on accounting, Janet Roitman on banditry, and Caitlin Zaloom on futures trading.
If you are a student in sociocultural anthropology this book is a must. It is also valuable for people from other disciplines who want to be part of the most exciting shift in the social sciences. Perhaps the best introduction to contemporary anthropology and ethnography is Anthropology as Cultural Critique by George Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, which is more accessible to most audiences because it was written with undergraduates in mind. Global Assemblages on the other hand may require more careful reading. Other important recent texts have been written by Paul Rabinow, Anna Tsing, George Marcus, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, among others.
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