Book Review: Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman, Historical Transformations: The Anthropology of Global Systems

Abstract

This book is a piece of research on the question of the global and the development of the global systems approach (alternatively global systemic approach or global systemic anthropology). The book is written in a clear and concise style and the arguments are made in a comprehensible form. It is an edited collection of articles originally written and published in the 1970s and shows the intellectual journey of Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman. The book is well structured in general terms although there are two problems: the lack of a general conclusion and the logic among the chapters is hard to discern without the connecting function of general and sectional introductions.The authors' main concern has been to understand the structures of long-term historical processes. They propose a conceptual framework that consists of two structures (social reproduction and centre/periphery relations) and a notion of society that criticizes the limitations of a single-society-based understanding characteristic of traditional anthropology. It also consists of a notion of 'long-term continuity' (the collapse of civilization) and a notion of 'articulation' (that explains the links between the local and the global). Starting from this conceptual model, the authors argue that the events from the collapse of the Bronze Age civilization to the Industrial Revolution and the economic crises of the 1970s can be grasped only in larger reproductive terms. However, how useful would this model be in explaining the financial crisis of 2008?Alan Greenspan, the former US central banker and ultimate technocrat, asks a similar question: How did econometric forecasting models fail so dramatically? In his book, Greenspan (2013) reiterates his faith in the homo economicus and statistical forecasting and prescribes public policy solutions to address and stop the problem of a declining world system (collapse). On the other hand, the conceptual model of the anthropology of global systems would highlight long-term historical processes. The authors argue that there are indeed similarities between those processes involved in today's crisis and those 544438I SS0010.