The Local in the Global: Understanding, Explanation, and System

The Conceptual Context

This series of ten essays edited by Stephen Feuchtwang, well known for his long years of research on Chinese politics and religion, is difficult to categorize in standard disciplinary terms. It could perhaps most appropriately be described as sitting somewhere between human geography and cultural anthropology. Each of the contributions looks at some specific locality in China and explores its particularities, as a living culture and as a place of hermeneutic significance for different individuals, groups, and ethnicities. The focus is on given space as a place of meaning. As Feuchtwang notes in chapter 9, a place is both a "geo-story and geo-graphy" (p. 163). The purpose of this focus is to provide a counterpoint to globalization discourses that all too easily render a sense of place irrelevant. The collective sense of the contributors is that this is a charge that can be leveled at modernistic discourses that articulate an abstract homogenizing economic market and at postmodern discourses that critique the ideology of modernism as a necessarily positive development. The former requires little comment. In terms of the latter, postmodern discourses can also often empty place of meaning. Postmodernists, whatever the genuine merit of some of their insights, often make the point that information technologies condense social time and space and extend this to the insight that locations are dislocated or radically historically discontinuous. This tends to be rooted in a certain way of theorizing language:

The most common misleading conception of language is that it represents an absent, to be recalled, object. Instead, language is primarily constitutive rather than representational. The character of the object and expression arise together. . . . Saussure is most often given credit for the insight that language is primarily a system of distinctions rather than representational. This was accomplished in two arguments. First, signifiers (words or signs) and the signified (the potential constituted object to be referenced) are separate and arbitrarily related. This severed any assumption of natural, a historical or universal connections between specific words and constituted objects. Any particular language or set of distinctions is a historical product developed in social relations and subject to change. And secondly, the meaning of signs is neither intrinsic nor derived from the signified but derived from their difference from other signs in the language chain. Each word can reference only on the basis of its relations and contrasts with other words, a contrast which is reproduced in objects. . . . Because it is a system of distinction, every linguistic system puts into place certain kinds of social relations and values—that is certain things that are worthy of being distinguished from other things. . . . Both the choice of things and the choice of attributes is arbitrary. It is chosen in choosing the signifying system.¹

Making Place is an attempt to move beyond approaches that collapse the significance of location. As Feuchtwang states:

We can accept many of the contentions of philosophers, geographers, political scientists and anthropologists about the way place-making is affected by globalization without conceding that the local is merely an instance of the global. Instead we can specify the global as accelerated capitalist commodification mediated through states. This mediation is dense.

(p. 27)

Feuctwang's excellent introduction explores this mediation by providing a number of conceptual points intended to place the essays that follow in a theoretical context. The key points are:

1. 1. Making places is not an impersonal or an abstract process: places are personal, physical, and psychological—they are experienced and constituted through actions and repetition that are "centred" or directed at a location (p. 4).

2. 2. The making of place is not singular but multiple, both in terms of the intersubjective meaning of place, the practices there, and the sources and levels of interaction that seek to impose meanings and significance. One important source is the state, which is "not just an image constructed in local strategies for dominance. It is also the centralisation of actual apparatus...