Abstract
This chapter outlines the basic arguments for a global systemic anthropology as it has developed since the late 1970s. These include the fundamental notions that social process can best be understood in terms of the larger context of reproduction within which they occur, that world history does not consist of an evolution from primitive to civilized to modern, nor from more local to more global orders. The development of the first so-called civilizations is very much about the emergence of large-scale imperial systems in which accumulation of wealth has been a central dynamic. The dynamics of such systems, which can be called “global systems” has been more or less stable throughout the past three thousand years. The cultural correlates of such systems include the formation and disintegration of cultural hierarchies and evolutionary representations, assimilation of minorities in periods of expansion, and an inverse process of cultural and political separation and autonomization in periods of decline.
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Notes
- 1.
The work on the new global division of labor and global shift documented the decentralization of capital accumulation and the movement of investment to new geographical areas. It is quite unlike the anthropological literature on globalization and closer to a global systemic perspective.
- 2.
Attributing the capacity for action to culture is a serious error of misplaced concreteness and misplaced intentionality in which culture is understood as a subject, an actor that organizes behavior, that transforms itself over time. This is common in cultural deterministic schemes that have prevailed in anthropology for decades. The power of culture is always and everywhere the power of actors that possess culture. This, in the most elementary terms, is what socialization is all about.
- 3.
Geertz insisted on the notion of “reading” culture as a text and each text was quite specific and different from all others.
- 4.
In Europe, from the late 1970s, the Breton movement and the Occitanists, in France, the so-called “breakup” of Britain (Nairn 1977) with regionalist movements in Scotland, Wales, and even Cornwall, the rise to power of the Sami movement in Norway and Sweden, and proliferation of ethnic immigrant movements, all followed by the emergence of nationalist movements in many parts of Europe. In the United States, Black power is followed by Red power and the mobilization of American indigenous groups, the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, just to name a few.
- 5.
The liberalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries is just as “neo-liberal” as that of the 21st, and it occurs with or without salient tendencies to flexibilization, which was of course prominent before the success of the union movements.
- 6.
It is important to note here that the existence of hegemonic cycles is not contradicted by the long-term trend to competition-induced increases in technological productivity which generally raise levels of consumption in the world as shown in Fig. 1. Hegemony is about relative relations of political economic power and not about the general levels of consumption or even technological growth. The enormous growth of “wealth” in East Asia goes hand-in-hand with the decline of manufacturing in the USA and much of Western Europe.
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Friedman, J. (2020). Global Systemic Anthropology and the Analysis of Globalization . In: Rossi, I. (eds) Challenges of Globalization and Prospects for an Inter-civilizational World Order. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44058-9_3
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