Montage in Spatial Ethnography: Crystalline Narration and Cultural Studies of Globalization

If cultural studies is to make a significant contribution to the current scholarship across disciplines on globalization, then it might address itself to a perplexing representational problem facing the study of global flows. This dilemma may be evoked in the following preliminary way: much of the current theoretical literature on globalization in sociology, political economy and social geography, unable to shake long-standing disciplinary habits, poses questions about global change as if there were an omniscient point of view within its reach where we could find empirical answers to debates on points of theory. One could then assemble a list of the antinomies of globalization research: debates continue on whether globalization is a homogenizing process or whether it produces differences; whether its deeper logic is better characterized as “time-space compression” or “space-time distanciation”; whether the distinctive feature of the global is to be grasped as a breakthough in speed or the emergence of an unprecendented hyperspace; whether the nation-state is weakening or rather strengthening; whether everyday life is increasingly standardized or hybridized; indeed whether globalization is a contemporary event or a historical process already several centuries in the making, and so on.

The usual response that globalization is a dialectical process and each alternative is to be affirmed together does not seem very convincing without reference to any thick ethnographic description of changes on the ground. For example, the state may be extending its reach in the ordering of everyday life in one geo-political location only to be retreating in another or, within the same nation-state, privatizing and deregulating some of its social capital while building up its interest in other institutions. Nor has the blithe evasion of feminist, postcolonial and other situated critiques of onto-theological knowledge production by the social science of globalization been able to escape criticism. David Harvey’s call for a meta-theoretical engagement with globalization in The Condition of Postmodernity, for example, has been criticized by Meaghan Morris and Rosalyn Deutche precisely for generating the “illusion that [the meta-theorist] stands outside, not in, the world” (Morris 1992, 275). The subject of metatheoretical discourse and its object, here the condition of postmodernity, the space-time compression of globalization, etc. are constructed in relation to each other in Harvey’s text, according to Deutsche and Morris, so as to constitute a specular circuit of mistaken identity. Feminism and psychoanalytic theory have long argued, they remind us, that such specular circuits sustain themselves in a fantasy that denies the partial, conflictually situated and relational character of the subject of knowledge. Fredric Jameson, therefore, has contended that there can be no general answers to such meta-theoretical questions, and that only geopolitically local assessments can be made regarding them (1998, 54–77). Among the reservations of postcolonial critique, furthermore, would be incredulity toward the assumption that the truth of our global condition could be pronounced unequivocally in standard scholarly English. Many therefore see ethnography’s intense immersion in the dialects and perspectives of a situated location as the proper antidote for breathlessly sweeping accounts of globalization narrated from somewhere above the clouds.

Yet over the past two decades, ethnography itself has come under criticism for its textual fabrication of an a-historical ethnographic present and its lack of reflexivity regarding its rhetorical performance of ethnographic authority. In response to this critique, contemporary ethnographies seek to emphasize change, accommodation, resistance and agency. They endeavor to establish the creative novelty of a local culture’s response to global flows against discredited narratives of cultural death and assimilation. However, such descriptive strategies inevitably raise questions about our understanding of what social change and cultural creativity is, at least at the local site of study, if not more generally across articulated institutions such as states and markets. Questions about the being of becoming, about what makes the difference between an emergent and a residual cultural formation (to invoke Williams’s distinction) are inescapably theoretical in kind since they involve at least shifts in meaning, if not the “creative destruction” of whole institutions of value.

Taken together, the critiques of...