The Ethnography of Transnational Social Activism: Understanding the Global as Local Practice

Abstract

Several years ago, in the somewhat cramped quarters of New York University's anthropology department, I took my first graduate course in the history of anthropological theory. Within the first week, we came upon 19th-century evolutionism-a potentially dry topic made interesting by the creative efforts of our teacher, Professor May Ebihara. At one point in the class, just as we became rather bewildered by evolutionism's profound hold on the imaginations of Victorian anthropologists, Professor Ebihara reminded us of how intellectuals can be subsumed within a kind of "atmospheric hegemony" in which certain ideas manage insidiously to dominate the scholarly imagination. She underscored that the popularity and pervasiveness of 19th-century evolutionism, as a paradigm of thought, was almost literally "in the air" for these anthropologists-that they could not help but breathe it into their intellectual consciousness.This phrase, in the air, has stuck with me over the years as I have endeavored to remain at least aware of what theoretical influences are out there for the inhaling. But at no time has this phrase seemed more fitting or more complex than it does today, as globalization captures the intellectual imagination. Globalization is indeed in the air, perhaps in ways far more befuddling for us than evolutionism was for anthropologists of the previous century. Not only has it become an important component of anthropological study and teaching, but it pervades the world of the everyday in peculiar, often contradictory ways. Globalization manifests itself in advertizements for long distance telephone services, computer software, airline companies, and dozens of other commodities, services, and activities. Globalization discourse is found in the vocabularies not only of academics, but also politicians, corporate managers, advertisers, environmental activists, and human rights advocates. It is used by conservative CEOs to promote free-market economic agendas (such as those embodied in the GATT/WTO or NAFTA) as well as by indigenous activists struggling to preserve the rain forests from rapacious development. Nike, American Express, Coke, Visa, McDonald's, and other transnational companies have attempted to constitute themselves as symbols of the new global order, as have advocacy groups such as Greenpeace, Oxfam, and Amnesty International. It is perhaps a unique feature of our Through a study of two contemporary U.S. religio-political movements, I analyze globalization as a process in which social actors appropriate distinctive kinds of global imagery and rhetoric to create new forms of activism. I document and contrast the development of transnational identities among two groups of political activists and examine the unique but shifting historical conditions underlying these differences. Rather than begin with "globalization" as a structural given, I explore the "global" as itself a constructed context of political identity and practice. I include a discussion of my own discovery that my anthropological terms of analysi...

N30 + 10: global civil society, a decade after the battle of Seattle

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Global Anxieties

“…The language of the political right and left converges and diverges, exploiting images, brands and associations, and mixing them with political agendas that can seem frustratingly similar. Hilary Cunningham's study of the Sanctuary Movement in the United States, a church-based activist group concerned with illegal immigrants and US government policy on Central America in the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrates how an interest group defined itself as transnational (Cunningham, 2000). She shows how members of the group deployed the Christian imagery of brotherhood to redefine their senses of self, and their relations to family, Church, State and citizenship.…”