The Rumor of Globalization: Globalism, Counterworks and the Location of Commodity

Abstract

Abstract. This article seeks to document the vernacular perceptions of 'globalization' in rural Bengal (India) and, in that connection, seeks to rethink some long-held western notions concerning commodity, consumption, representation, the nature of sociality and the politics of democratic empowerment in the third-world. In the subaltern imaginary, images seem to play a crucial role conductive to empowerment. Also, far from resisting globalization and consumption, the rural poor seems to have assimilated these into their vernacular cosmology.

Transnationality, Hope and ‘Recombinant Locality’: Knowledge as Capital and Resource

“…The gathering experience at the site provokes the people attending into following their cultural values of devotion (bhakti) and also provides them a new perspective of South Asian connection. The wider research discoveries in the new light of 'Resource Anthropology' (see note 1) told us that production of locality is production of globality and opposing trends at the same time (Mukhopadhyay, 2005). Those discoveries become an engine for reproduction because they work for reinforcing their attachment to the gathering and its network (Liechty, 2005).…”