SSC 332 The Dynamics of Globalization

Content

The aim of this course is to give a holistic and multilevel analysis of globalization, connecting the economic to the political and cultural, and interrelating different local, regional, and global arenas. Mainly non-Western worlds will provide materials for the analysis. The course will be focused on the global division of labour and power (division of labour, migration, marginalisation, poverty and gender), regionalism (“new regionalism”, subregionalist responses) and coping with resistance to globalization (environmental resistance, and organized crime). Our emphasis will fall on the interaction between global structures and local outcomes and realities. What anthropologists offer in the understanding of the dynamics of globalization, is that, what is often lacking in other disciplines, is a concrete attentiveness to human agency, to the practices of everyday life, in short how subjects mediate the process of globalization. This is stressed in the two readers students have to study. Lectures will supplement these readings and also focus on wider processes of and theories about globalization. Students will be expected to prepare and organize seminars.

In Part one different theories and perspectives are discussed about globalization and its dynamics. Students learn to understand that globalization is not a single, unified phenomenon, but a syndrome of processes and attempt to capture the ontology of globalization. The manifestations of globalization include the reorganization of production and (cultural) consumption, which will be studied in different settings.

After having discussed the dynamics of globalization, i.e. the complex of effects, in the second part the focus will be on grassroots reactions towards global processes, i.e. the ways people protect their lands, cultural identities, and autonomy on the one side, and criminal organizations (including criminal states) on the other.

Instructor

Dr. Herman Tak

Period

Spring / 2009

Course Material

• Jonathan Xavier Inda & Renato Rosaldo (eds.) 2008. The Anthropology of Globalization. A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers (Second Edition) (pb.).
  
• June Nash (ed.) 2005. Social Movements. An Anthropological Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 1-4051-0109-1 (pb.).

Prerequisites

One needs to have followed one of the following courses in order to take this course:

• SSC 111 Introduction to Sociology
• SSC 131 Introduction to Socio-Cultural Anthropology
• SSC 211 Modern Sociology
• SSC 231 Anthropology and the Study of Politics
• SSC 232 The Development Encounter: Anthropological Perspectives
• SSC 233 Religion and Modernization: An Anthropological Approach
• SSC 313 Migration and Integration

Additional Prerequisites

In addition to the courses listed under prerequisites, students who have taken any other second or third-year SSC course can take SSC 332 after consulting with the instructor.

Required for

This course is an alternative requirement for the following course:

• SSC 300 Independent Research in Socio-Cultural Anthropology
• SSC 334 Advanced Cultural Studies