The rumor of globalization: Globalism, counterworks and the location of commodity

Dialectical Anthropology

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 35-60

  Mukhopadhyay, Bhaskar ^a  

^a JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY   (India)

Author keywords

'Commodity fetishism'; 'Subaltern Studies'; Community; Consumption; Democracy; Gift; Globalization; Governance; Local global; Personhood; Simulacrum; Spectacle

Indexed keywords

EID: 32044435134     PISSN: 03044092     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2005.06.004     Document Type: Article

References (86)

1. The Strait Times 19 June, 2002,
2. Singapore cited in The Statesman 20 June, 2002, Calcutta.
3. 'Bimbofication': to turn somebody or a body of people into passive bimbo(s); according to most Marxist commentators, this is what late-capitalism does to people at large. See, Robert D'Amico, "Desire and the Commodity Form," Telos 35 (Spring 1978), pp. 88-122.
4. The 'semioticity' of something means its symbolic or social meaning. Things are not just what they do for us, they are also signs which mean something. For example, a refrigerator cools but to the extent it is a sign (everything is a sign), it also signifies: it signifies the social status of the owner, his/her aesthetic inclination, economic status etc. And of course, there are many things whose semioticity is zero (e.g., chemical salts kept in a laboratory). See, Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. pp. 3-63.
5. Michel Serres, Genesis (tr.) G. James and J. Nielson, 1998, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p. 91.
6. See also, Bruno Latour, "On Interobjectivity" (tr.) G. Bowker, Mind, Culture and Activity, 3:4 (1996), pp. 228-245.
7. Bruno Latour, "One More Turn after the Social Turn: easing science studies into the non-modern world," in E. McMullin (ed.), The Social Dimensions of Science, 1992, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, p. 277.
8. John Frow, "A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole," Critical Inquiry 2% (2001), p. 271
9. Stephen Gaukroger, "Romanticism and Decommodification: Marx's Conception of Socialism," Economy and Society, 15:3 (1986), pp. 287-333.
10. William Pietz, "Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx," in E Apter and W. Pietz (eds.), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, 1993, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 119-151.
11. Cyborgs are sci-fi characters: half-human, half-machine. Following Donna Haraway, I use this term here to designate a certain constitutive hibridity of worldly things we encounter in our everyday lives. These are not just bare matter, but also discourse. See, Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 1991, New York: Routledge.
12. Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?, (trs.) WB Barton, Jr. and Vera Deutsch, 1967, Washington DC: University Press of America.
13. Karl Marx, Theorien uberden Mehwert, Vol. III, 1910, p. 355 cited in I .
14. I. Rubin, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, (trs.) M.Samardzija and F. Perlman, Detroit: Black and Red, 1972, p. 28, footnote 7.
15. An interesting reading of Marxist value theory can be found in, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivac, "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" in G.C. Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 1987, New York: Methuen, pp. 154-175.
16. The inscription of the thing with the finality of human 'use' is a cornerstone of productivist metaphysics. In holistic societies, things qua sacra are forever in a state of flux, their material boundaries are indeterminate, like the human and super-human beings with whom they are enchained through endless cycles of prestations, (cf. Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, (tr.) Mark Poster, 1975, St. Louis: Telos Press).
17. Historical evidence as well as ethnography shows that symbolic exchange and not use is the prime-mover in holistic societies. See, for example, Cecil Barraud, Danniel de Coppet, et al., Of Relations and the Dead: Four Societies Viewed from the Point of View of Exchange, (tr.) S. J. Suffern, 1994, Oxford: Berg.
18. And, Natalie Zemon Devis, The Gift in Sixteenth Century France, 2000, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
19. Alain Desrosières, "How to make things which hold together: social science, statistics and the state," in P. Wagner, B, Wittcocq et al (eds.), Discourses on Society, 1990, Dordrecht: Kluwer, p. 195.
20. For a recent exploration of Marxist use-value, see Peter Stallybrass, "Marx's Coat", in Patricia Spyer (ed.), Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, 1997, New York: Routledge, pp. 183-207.
21. Howard Caygill, The Art of Judgement, 1989, Oxford: Blackwell.
22. Desrosières, op. cit., p. 199.
23. Also, Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, (tr.) Oscar Burge, 1997, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 67-76.
24. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, (tr.) D. Nicholson-Smith, 1995, New York: Zone Books, p. 33.
25. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 2000, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
26. Keith Hart, "On commoditization," in Esther N. Goody (ed.), From Craft to Industry, 1982, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 38-49.
27. John Frow, Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity, 1997, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 8.
28. Anandabazar Patrika, "Saster China Jinis Bikrir Gujab, Hujuge Bhir Indoor", Calcutta, 26 May, 2001.
29. Anandabazar Patrika, "Saster Gujabe Thaw China Panya Bikeretarao", Calcutta, 27 May 2001.
30. The Telegraph, "Big Draw: The China fair that never was", Calcutta, 26 May 2001.
31. India Today "Taste of China" [Cover story], New Delhi: December 11(2000).
32. Anandabazar, 27 May, 2000, op. cit.
33. Denis Vidai, "When the Gods Drank Milk: Empiricism and Belief in Contemporary Hinduism," South Asia Research, 18:2, (1998), pp. 149-171.
34. L.K. Advani's (Deputy Prime Minister of the erstwhile BJP government) Rathayatra prepared the ground for the demolition of the Babri mosque in December 1991 which sparked off communal riots all over the country. It is remembered as a watershed when Indian politics, after about half a century of state-backed 'secularism', entered a 'communal' phase.
35. Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India, 2001, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 72-150.
36. Arjun Appadurai, "The Production of Locality" in Modernity at Large, 1995, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 178-200.
37. Arjun Appadurai, "Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination", Public Culture, 12:1 (2000), pp. 1-19.
38. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson "Sptializing States: Toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality, American Ethnologist, 29:4 (2002), pp. 981-1002.
39. Nussbaum makes the case for inculcating the responsibilities of global citizenship through distinctive educational programs. There is, thus, a distinctive pedagogy of the global: it is an ethical project See: Martha Nussbaum and her respondents, For Love of County: Debating the limits of patriotism, 1996, Boston: Beacon Press.
40. Also, Martha Nussbaum, "Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism," Journal of Political Philosophy, 5 (1997), pp. 1-25.
41. For a trenchant critique of globality as ground, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivac, "Cultural Talks in the Hot Peace: Revisiting the "Global Village," in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds.), Cosmopolites: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, pp. 329-348.
42. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, (tr.) W.S. Pluhar, 1987, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, p. 111.
43. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, "Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity and the Politics of Diflference," in J. X. Inda and R Rosaldo (eds.), The Anthropology of Globalization, 2002, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 73.
44. Ibid., p. 74, emphasis mine.
45. Sabang is near Keshpur in West Midnapore where massive political violence took place on the eve of the assembly elections, killing at least a dozen people who belonged to the opposition party. Its cadres are still terrorized and cannot enter their own villages. My respondents were mostly sympathizers of the opposition party and before talking to me they made me promise that I would not disclose their names or the name of their village.
46. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, (tr.) lan Cunnison, 1967, New York: Norton.
47. Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, 1983, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
48. Paul Brass, "National Power and Local Politics in India: A Twenty-year Perspective", Modem Asian Studies, 18:1 (1984), pp. 89-118.
49. As opposed to 'associative', 'ascriptive' community means a community constituted around some so-called 'primordial loyalty' like caste, kinship, religion etc.
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51. Haricharan Bandyopadhyay, Bangiya Sabdokosa, 1967 (BS. 1340), Sahitya Akademy, New Delhi, pp. 2137.
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53. Nagendranath Vasu, Viswakosa, Vol. XXI, 1988 (1886-1911), Delhi: BR Publishing, p. 239.
54. Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, 1988, Berkley: University of California Press, p. 9.
55. Mary Poovey, "The liberal civil subject and the social in eighteenth-century British moral philosophy," in Patrick Joyce (ed.), The Social in Question, 2000, London: Routledge, pp. 44-61.
56. Eric R. Wolf, "Inventing Society," American Ethnologist, 15:4 (November 1988), pp. 752-761.
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58. Rabindranath Tagore, "Swadeshi Samaj" (BS 1311), Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol. XII, 1961, Calcutta: Govt. of W.B (centenary edition), pp. 683-702.
59. In this connection, see my "The Nation and its Memories: Constructing a Bengali Past 1875-1950," paper presented at the conference on Imagined Pasts in South Asia at Maison des Sciences de I'Homme, Paris, December 2003 (forthcoming).
60. My idea of samaj has been shaped by Nagendranath Vasu's Banger Jatiya Itihas, XI Vols., 1899-1913, Calcutta: Viswakosh Karyaloy.
61. Rabindranath Tagore, "'Swadeshi Samaj' Prabandher Parishista" (BS 1311), op. cit., p. 706.
62. Rabindranath Tagore, "Shoksabha" (BS 1301), Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol. X, 1989, Calcutta: Govt. of W.B., p. 293.
63. Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and its Fragments, 1994, Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 197.
64. Chatterjee, Ibid., p. 232.
65. Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1796), (tr.) J. A. Bias, 1966, New York: F. Ungar.
66. Thomas L. Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility," I and II, American Historical Review, 90 (1985), pp. 339-361 and pp. 547-566.
67. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, (tr.) G. Collins, 1997, London: Verso.
68. John Pocock has reminded us that "property was a juridical term before it was an economic one, it meant that which was properly one's own, that on which one properly had a claim..." (emphasis mine) See JGA Pocock, "Authority and Property: The Question of Liberal Origins" in JGA Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 56.
69. Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism (1919), (tr.) Guy Oakes, 1986, Cambridge: MIT Press.
70. McKim Marriott, "Hindu Transactions: Diversity Without Dualism", in B. Kapferer (ed.), Transactions and Meaning, 1976, Philadelphia: ISHI Publications, p. 111.
71. Ibid., p. 109.
72. Partha Chatterjee, "Democracy and the violence of the state: a political negotiation of death", Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2:1 (2001), p. 17.
73. Mauss, "Democracy and the violence of the state: a political negotiation of death", Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2:1 (2001), op. cit., p. 52.
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76. Chatterjee, Nation, op. cit, p. 197.
77. Chatterjee, Nation, Ibid., p. 195, emphasis mine.
78. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, (tr.) Paul Foss, Paul Pattern et al., 1983, New York: Semiotext[e], p. 10.
79. Debord, Simulations, 1983, op. cit., p. 17.
80. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, (tr.) Paul Patton, 1994, London: Athlone, p. 127.
81. William Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, I," Res, 9 (1985), pp. 5-17.
82. William Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, II", Res, 13 (1987), pp. 23-45.
83. William Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa", Res, 16 (1988), pp. 105-123.
84. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of Image before the Era of Art, 1994, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
85. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, 2003, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
86. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modem Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, 2001, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 118.