This project is part of the
New Geographies, New Pedagogies project at the Institute of International Studies; UC Berkeley. Funded by the Ford Foundation.
This project is part of the
New Geographies, New Pedagogies project at the Institute of International Studies; UC Berkeley. Funded by the Ford Foundation.
Interdisciplinary Workshop
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Aiwha Ong (Anthropology)
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Gill Hart (Geography)
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Recent scholarly and media accounts of Southeast Asia and Africa have converged on the language of "crisis." Increasingly, both regions are depicted in terms of crises of governance, economic chaos and instability, rampant corruption, political violence, and genocide. Representations of Africa in terms such as these have a long history. The relegation of Southeast Asia to the ranks of crisis and chaos is far more recent, but the parallels with African representations are remarkable. Either implicitly or explicitly, racist tropes often figure prominently in these discourses of crisis and disorder. Alternatively -- and sometimes simultaneously -- such crises are seen as general conditions or "impacts" of a single, inexorable, globalized capitalist system unfolding across distant sites.
We propose to counter such understandings by linking the theorization of power to critical ethnographic and historical work in both regions. The CSEAS and CAS jointly propose two workshops. The first, to be held in the spring semester 2000, will bring together anthropologists, geographers, and cultural theorists on campus to share their work and to explore interdisciplinary approaches to the critical study of globalization, neoliberalism, and state power. While this workshop builds on ongoing dialogues among faculty in CSEAS and CAS, we seek participation by faculty from the humanities and the social sciences working in other regions as well. The second workshop, to be held fall semester 2000, will bring scholars from elsewhere in the UC system and beyond for a conference open to the campus audience and the public.
Current approaches to globalization have been dominated by an abstract economistic approach on the one hand, and by a culturalist approach on the other. Our goal is to explore how ethnographic research combined with new understandings of spatial dynamics can provide a powerful strategy for studying the heterogeneous mechanisms and effects of globalizing forces. Key to this move is an appreciation that recent processes of globalization have reterritorialized power relations. Specific regional histories, geographies, and cultural formations are not surface reflections of a deeper logic of a single global system but are rather constitutive of globalization itself. By bringing scholars of Southeast Asia and Africa together, we will be able to explore how regionally specific patterns articulate with trans-regional connections. Our project will also bring anthropologists and geographers committed to detailed historical and ethnographical studies into conversation with one another in potentially fruitful ways. Whereas anthropologists have in many instances focused on the everyday practices with an inadequate sense of wider social configurations, geographers have tended to explore the respatialization of power at different scales but have not always attended sufficiently to everyday practices.
Second, the workshops aim to explore new perspectives on power and the varied regimes of ruling. We believe that the older resistance model of power as a two-tiered system of macro-level strucures and everyday insurrectionary subalterns is inadequate to the task of investigating the new power dynamics of neo-liberal global agendas, state responses, and social change. Drawing on Foucaultian insights on governmentality, we hope to discuss more complex and subtle analytics of power and the antagonisms of strategies at different levels of state, society, and economy. Furthermore, globalization has had a range of effects on state power, and we hope to specify which areas of state activities have been changed and what is the nature of governance, the modes of sovereignty, and the sources of citizenship in particular sites and regions, differently connected by globalizing forces.
Third, we propose interdisciplinary attention to questions of history as a crucial element of critical studies of globalization, as well as a key means of challenging discourses of generic "crisis" in Africa and Southeast Asia. Our argument that diverse regional trajectories are constitutive of broader global processes compels attention to the multiple, overlapping, but often divergent colonial and post-colonial histories within and across Africa and Southeast Asia. Serious engagement with conceptions of historical geographies is also a key means for linking anthropological attention to cultural change with geographers' concerns with respializaiton and rescaling of power. Discussion of how history is to be reconceptualiized may also contribute to critiques of common conceptions of capitalism and governance. In much of the literature, there is a tendency to rely on a sort of neo-Smithian world systems model, without consideration of the different historical trajectories, determinations, and articulations within and between regions.
In short, while this workshop is most directly concerned with challenging discourses of "crisis" in Africa and Southeast Asia, it will also contribute to charting new conceptual and methodological approaches to questions of globalizaton. It will provide opportunities for faculty to recast the contours of area studies, and to explore new ways of linking area studies and disciplines.
We plan a one-day workshop bringing together ten or more campus faculty (see list below) organized into three thematic panels on neo-liberalism, the state, and methodology. A central concern will be to demonstrate the critical insights that detailed ethnographic and historical works offer to contemporary debates on globalization while building on cross-regional dialogues. Among key faculty in CSEAS and CAS we will include scholars whose work converges around the conceptualization of power, space, and culture in diverse contexts. A key goal is to reflect upon the relationship between theory and methodology, with particular attention to interdisciplinary research, graduate training, and collaborative teaching.
Participating Faculty
This initial workshop will be followed by a conference in the fall of 2000. The precise group will be decided following the workshop, but we will give particular priority to younger scholars engaged in innovative research. We will also invite two scholars each from Southeast Asia and Africa. The conference of course will be open to sudents and the general public, and we aim to publish the papers.
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