AANB18009U The Anthropology of Global (Dis) Connections

This course examines the social, economic and cultural dynamics of global connections and disconnections, drawing on anthropological theory and ethnographic studies from around the world. Globalization is often seen as bringing with it new opportunities, and as a promise of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism; yet, it has also widened social and economic inequality, and decreased the possibilities for human migration and social mobility in both industrialized nations and the developing world. The phenomenon is usually understood as the rapid movement of capital, people, ideas, goods and services, creating new networks of global connections and cultural exchange. More recently, anthropologists have also tried to capture globalization in terms of assemblages, frictions and conjunctures, exploring the ways in which the global is articulated and scaled in different cultural contexts, and exploring more complex material and discursive relationships between the local, the global and ‘the glocal’. Throughout the course we will interrogate how the study of local encounters with processes of globalization have been reshaping anthropological concepts of regions and fields, and how these processes continue to reorient anthropologist’s fieldwork methods and frames of vision.