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Chapter 10 The Contemporary Intellectual Context of the China Inside Out Project GEORGE E. MARCUS Introduction The conception of the China Inside Out project is shaped by an effort at a “take,” a set of observations, on the contemporary history of theory and intellectual fashion as it unfolds in certain interdisciplinary and reformed disciplinary arenas concerned with issues of culture, ideas, ideology, and the classic themes of qualitative social science. We are especially interested in the substantive effects of these tendencies on the practices of anthropologists, historians, and sociologists, among others—not only on research practices (particularly on the signature fieldwork-ethnography paradigm of anthropology), but also on the imaginaries (the current ideas, evoked images, moral stances) that inspire the shaping of research projects as well as on the rhetorics that justify the writings that are the product of research. We have therefore followed with considerable interest the recent pleas to reconceptualize area studies according to new influences defined largely by interdisciplinary critiques and initiatives from the 1980s (for which, for example, Writing Culture [Clifford and Marcus 1986] remains a strongly symbolic and evocative text). China Inside Out is an effort to enact a transformation of area studies in pedagogical textmaking . It is an opportunity to examine how successfully a set of intellectual inspirations to see the world differently, so to speak, can change the older conventions of area studies—in this case, of China, a powerfully and essentially constructed object of Western social science (Shambaugh 1997). Here we offer some preliminary comments about the way that this project is framed and the way that it manages some of its key concepts and intellectual tendencies. Since about 1990, globalization has become the most generic macrosociological term and image for the present era, in a sense replacing the earlier, but more controversial currency of the concept of postmodernity fashionable (at least in the United States and in academic circles) during the 1970s and through the 1980s. Globalization is a much more widely distributed and sustained term of reference for our contemporary condition. It signals many things in social thought and has stimulated more or less elaborate and theoretically substantive discussions across a variety of fields. In some circles the interest in globalization is whether it is an irresistible homogenization through Americanization Breidenbach and Zukrigl on the dynamics of cultural globalization see pp. 9–15 Chine össze 6 2005.05.31 11:49 Page 293 or not. In others, it is in what form it takes and how these spread and take shape locally through privatization, democratic politics, humanitarianism, wars, patron– client relationships, and information technology (see Berger and Huntington 2002; Kalb et al. 2000; Featherstone 1996 for some discussions of globalization). In others again, the interest is in defining the prime movers of globalization—is it, for example, the international financial system, or marketing science that is most constitutive of globalization ?—and in still others, the stakes are in the politics and ambitions of knowledge industries—whether globalization requires adjustments in the older metanarratives like Marxism, or whether it requires a break with past hegemonic theories in favor of sustained “bricolage” (the survival of the postmodernist ethos). The first wave of area studies critique In academia, certainly, the first wave of theory about globalization suggested radical changes in the conventional framings of area studies based on new realities such as qualitatively different and intensified transnational processes (e.g., the renovation of long established thinking about migration brought about by new theorizations of diaspora ). These coincided with the end of the Cold War (with immense implications for preexisting habits of thought and writing among left/liberal scholars). They also arrived both with, as noted, a clear sense of the exhaustion concerning politically ambiguous discussions about postmodernity, and with excitement about postcolonial theory now at the center of critical inquiry into culture. Also, there was the specter of millennial technological change in the arrival of the Internet (recall the discussions of “Y2K,” the possible social implications of a technological failure if computers could not have managed the date change to year 2000!), evoking seamless connection, network, and global reach. All of these events contributed to the particular milieu of early expressions of the conceptual imaginary that defined the alternative to conventional area studies. The key issue on which this early expression of transformed area studies focused was the fate of the nation-state in the emergence of new (transnational, globalizing) conditions. This is indeed the central conceptual issue to which the China Inside...

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