A Global Anthropology? Richard Wilk Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington IN 47405, U.S.A. Cultural Identity and Global Process. By Jonathan Friedman. London: Sage Publications, 1994. 270 pp. The twelve essays that compose this book were published in various journals and collections between 1980 and 1995. Given that they were written over a considerable period of time for different audiences, they are remarkable coherent and consistent in their approach, outlook, and style. They provide one of very few recent anthropological approaches to global cultural phenomenon, seeking a grand historical synthesis of how all the disparate localities studied by anthropologists fit together. Ethnographic examples are drawn from Friedman's and Ekholm-Friedman's fieldwork in Congo, Friedman's work in Hawaii, and a variety of historical cases from Greece to China. Friedman establishes a theoretical home-base using a refined form of cultural neo-Marxism, within the umbrella of world-systems-theory. Friedman's historical analysis of the relationship between global economic and cultural cycles underpins every chapter of the book. His driving force is the cyclic rise and fall of economic empire. At their peaks, these empires exercise real cultural hegemony and project a unified cultural model founded on a coherent vision of progress. As empires dissipate and collapse, they become culturally fragmented and their hegemony is increasingly questioned. New centers grow on the old periphery. It happened to the Hellenes, says Friedman, and it is happening to us. As a result of this modern "crisis of capitalism," of economic fragmentation, deindustrialization, and capital flight to the periphery, the West is in rapid decline. New nationalisms, ethnicities, and identities arise, each incorporating fragments of Western consumer culture, but each negotiating different sorts of relationships to Western cultural forms. Postmodernism and anthropological struggles over representation and authority are simply the scholarly reflections of the new era of disorder, downward mobility, and fragmentation. Friedman devotes several chapters to exploring a cyclic model of rise, hegemony, and fragmentation. His most stimulating and original sections juxtapose modernism, primitivism, and postmodernism as positions taken within an "identity space" of late capitalism, as local cultures and groups struggle with a declining West for authenticity and identity. His global typology of movements highlights the key roles of history and consumer goods in these articulations. The strong critique of current anthropology aims directly at the roles and functions served by our field in a declining political economy, a role which he thinks will inevitably bring us into conflict with our subjects. The last three chapters of the book are concerned with identity and modernity, and include a sustained attack on cultural essentialism and theories of creolization and cosmopolitanism. Here he introduces an important concept with his distinction between "strong" forms of globalization that extend Western cultural dominance, and "weak" globalization which extends the form but not the substance, allowing for local appropriation of Western ideas, practices, and goods. Chapter seven "Globalization and Localization," is my choice for the best single essay. He develops a contrast between urban Congolese and rural Hawaiians, identifying their different
strategies of creating identity at the margins of powerful systems. He persuasively argues for the importance of consumption in the crafting identities with different relationships to the West. Friedman is definitely a pessimist, almost a catastrophist who sees the West in the terminal phases of collapse; he foresees a "lumpenized" violent West awash with fractious immigrants and sub-nationals who float around the deindustrialized husk of the old capitalist core. Science and empiricism are headed to the junk-pile along with modernism. It is dangerous to depict the rise of new forms of nationalism, ethnic identification, and aspirations for local cultural autonomy as symptoms of decline and disorder. While Friedman is neutral about these changes, seeing them as symptoms of an inevitable global development of capitalism, his conclusions are uncomfortably close to the ideas of reactionary cultural purists who blame minorities and immigrants for the destruction of Western society. Global synthesis is difficult territory for anthropologists. We tend to know a few places very well through our own ethnography, but must depend on reading a very inconsistent and uneven literature to learn about the rest of the planet. We are always in danger of casting the globe in terms of the few places where we have worked, seeing global processes through a very small lens. There is constant tension between the 'big pictures' we want to paint in terms of general, and usually highly abstract processes, and the tiny fragments of evidence that we control. Other fields use aggregate statistics, indices, surveys, and other measures to try to understand global processes, but Friedman, along with other recent anthropological synthesizers like Ulf Hannerz and Arjun Appadurai, shun such crude devices. Instead they tend to rely on historical narratives and ethnographic illustrations, which are usually truncated into sketches or anecdotes. In global anthropology richness and creativity of ideas and diversity of theoretical connections are not complemented by much empirical evidence. In Friedman's book (as in others of the genre), the author's veracity rests on clever argument, dazzling and sophisticated references and connections, and striking examples which appeal to our own experience, all of which Friedman provides in abundance. But the theoretical richness begs the question of what kinds of comparative, historical, or ethnographic evidence a truly global anthropology will need to call upon if alternate propositions are to be evaluated. I found this book a stimulating read, full of original ideas that point the way towards the next generation of global anthropology. Friedman's argument about the political economy of anthropology make a lot of sense out of many recent trends in the discipline. The scholarly exuberance and eclecticism of the writing is often stimulating, but some sections are also sloppy and repetitious, and the author sometimes stretches a point or analogy far past the breaking point. More seriously, I am not convinced by the main thesis, that hegemony is over and the West is in a terminal decline. I am not convinced that Western hegemony was ever quite so thorough or all-encompassing, preferring Bruno Latour's formulation that "we have never been modern." I suppose that only time will tell if the resurgence of local identity and ethnicity is indeed the death knell of the West, or merely one of the more visible features of the latest phase of capitalist expansion and consolidation.
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