Historical Transformations: The Anthropology of Global Systems

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The Anthropology of Global Systems

Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman

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ALTMI\IFA PRESS

A division of

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham

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New York

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Toronto

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Plyn1outh,

UK

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ALTAMIRA PRESS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, MD 20706 www.altamirapress.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright

© 2008 by AltaMira Press

All rights reservei. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Friedman, Kajsa Ekholm, 1939-

Historical transformations: the anthropology of global systems I Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references � . nd index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7591-1110-3 (cloth: alk. paper)

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ISBN-10: 0-7591-1110-3 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Social change. 2. Globalization-Social aspects. 3. Globalization-Economic aspects. 4. Culture and globalization. 5. Transnationalism. I. Friedman, Jonathan. 11. Title. GN358.F75 2008 303.4-dc22 2007039646 Printed in the United States of America

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American

National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSIINISO Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

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Introduction Part I

Social Reproduction, Social Transformation, and Global Process

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1 Marxist Theory and Systems of Total Reproduction

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2 Crises in Theory and Transformations of the World Economy

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Jonathan Friedman Jonathan Friedman

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Global Process and Long-Term Change

3 The Study of Risk in Social Systems: An Anthropological

Perspective

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art 11

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Kajsa Ekholm Friedman

4 Notes toward an Epigenetic Model of the Evolution of

"Civilization"

Jonathan Friedman and M. J. Rowlands 5 "Capital" Imperialism and Exploitation in Ancient World Syste·ms

Kajsa Ekhobn Friedman and Jonathan Friedman

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141

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Contents

6 Structure, Dynamics, and the Final Collapse of Bronze Age

Civilizations in the Second Millennium

Kajsa Ekholm Friedman

7 Transnationalization, Sociopolitical Disorder, and Ethnification

as Expressions of Declining Global Hegemony

Jonathan Friedman Part Ill

1 63

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227

Structure and History : Transformational Models

8 External Exchange and the Transformation of Central African

Social Systems

Kajsa Ekholm Friedman 9 "Sad Stories of the Death of K ngs '': The Involution

of Divine Kingship

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255

Kajsa Ekholm Friedman 10 Notes on Structure and History in Oceania

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1 1 Morphogenesis and Global Process in Polynesia

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Jonathan Friedman

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Jonathan Friedman

Index About the Authors

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Introduction

The chapters in this volume represent the work of two decades of research into questions of the global. In a previous publication (Friedman 1994: 1 ) the trials and tribulations of the establishment of a global systemic anthropology are detailed. They are the outcome of an engagement that has permeated our lives, one in which anthropology is not so much a career as a calling. This is partly the result of living in an era in which intellectuals thought that they could get by, one in which demands on standards of living were at a minimum since life was relatively easy. Such is life at the end of empire, for the middle classes, at least. Our own orientations in the world were very much developed in a matrix in which we believed that the structures of social life could be altered in their very foundations. And such beliefs must be understood in a. global view�: one characterized by the cultural lag of declining empires, when mobil.j�y ... . is high, consumption is accelerating, and the future is j ust around· the _ben;�i:>: Today, when, for many, catastrophe is just around the bend, a clearer histori#,�i,. _ ._ : · perspective becomes evident. However one may be engaged in ch angin g th,e ·: . . world, it is now obvious that the world is both Kafkaesque and obstinately self-directed. Not only is it not easily susceptible· to revolution-, but revolution . h_as itself been part of the fantasy, the virtual reality, of systemic continuity. - The project of a global-anthroiiology.jl_ad_its begi�nings in the 1 970s. It . -· . began as a confrontation in the fi�J� between the assun1ed nature of_§.qf.ie!y__. as a cTosed' entity that can- be ·studied and understood in its own right and . a global reality that simply falsi(!��L!h!t _��-��!l.!!!P!ion. While the assumption of social ·c losure wa�.!���I!..for granted in anth�P5?�2_gy__��!?.:Q._ �j!!.fQ!�ed very much by the fi eldwork tradition itself, the stringent definitions of struct"ufaiist . -��arxism made it easier to see exactly what was wrong. This-·'is·--oet=ause of ..

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2

Introduction

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the concept of social reproduction that serves as the framework of analysis-, institUti

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Introduction

5

Sassen· or David Harvey and the work of the globalization school. Sassen sug­ gests a model of global transformation in which the globalization of capital plays a central role. Harvey provides a model of the globalization of capital that includes as instrumental the technological increases in speed that lead to "time-space" compression. These are not about the emergence of the global but about its transformation. Even in terms of migration and global consciousness we are not necessarily in a brave new world. Migration in percentage terms was equal or greater at the turn of the twentieth century, and global and multicultural consciousness has periodically become a central issue in the West, not least in the period of mass immigration to the United States, when concepts of cultural pluralism and transnationalism were employed in debates (Kallen and Chapman 1 956; Bourne 1 9 1 6). But if we look more closely at history, we find similar forms of consciousness in the Hellenistic world and Rome, when cosmopolitanism and localism were also common and where problems of immigration and multi­ ethnicity were significant issues. It was a pleasant surprise for us to find, some years ago, that a group of illus­ trious researchers in political science, economics, sociology, and history had joined in the development of a science of world historical systems. This group, the world historical systems group of the International Studies Association, has published a number of volumes and has made a concerted effort to establish cooperation among several disciplines (Frank and Gills 1 993; Denemark et al. /

2000).

Global systemic anthropology is about the history of the human species, the forms of its social life and culture, understood in terms of the structures of social reproduction that have guided its trajectories. This framework encompasses the . study of cultural forms, of symbolic structures of ritual practices of everyday . strategies of life. It does not aim to replace them, but to contextualize th�n1;�·:Jt: is this that allows a transdisciplinarity that reaches out to all subjects that��l�r,:.,_; ·. .:.:�:??�,:..-. with one or another aspect of the human condition. . . . ·. , ; ·

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ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE G LOBAL SYSTEM

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. The array of approaches to the global life of the species includes both the analysis of political economic structures and processes and the phenomenol­ ogy of everyday life. It is in its foundation existential but understands that the conditions of human life are bound up with processes that are profoundly nonhuman and even inhuman. The concept of culture in this . endeavor lies somewhere in between. It lies in the specificities of human existence, in the different products that are generated by different lives. But it is nowhere the ,

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Introduction

central problem for an anthropology that never heeded the powerful critique proffered by Radin against the false.abstractions that became the common fare of much of ethnography (Radin 1 9 87). The cultural anthropology that takes rituals as texts, that focuses on cultural products rather than lived existences, is a field that has lost contact with human existence. It becomes a collector's science texts, objects, commodities, symbols, meanings that take on a "su­ perorganic" existence, a reified reality that has become the tangible object of much anthropology. Much of the cultural globalization discour_se is based on such assumptions, which lead to a truly impoverished understanding of human life. Culture flows, mixes, hybridizes, and does things that it didn't do when it was more bounded in an imaginary past, when the cultural mosaic still existed, when culture was in its proper places. That all of these concepts are related to the way people in the relations of power in their social lives bind, unbind, fix, disintegrate, and move meanings is eliminated and replaced by a magical quality of culture as a dynamic substance in its own right, culture as subject. This is no mere error in anthropological thinking. It is a pervasive reality of anthropological practice, of a world of assumptions concerning the nature of the social world itself. . T�e culture concept�-'!�_§�L£f..E:!�£��J��d_rt:Jafue texts. is central to the entire construction of the discipline. Radin 's critique is ' tiffiel · not only a y correctiv-e·: ii"i8-�;n···eXpression- of that- wi11c�w'iis._rnarginalize�·mrfie�yery·-fotina'aii.���9.��·flie�·suojec1�'1fienofioif'lnaf�'aiiffiropofogy-·was

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