JONATHAN FRIEDMAN

Ecole des Haute E tudes en Sciences Sociales and University of California, San Diego
KAJSA EKHOLM FRIEDMAN
Lund University

Globalization as a discourse of
hegemonic crisis:
A global systemic analysis
A B S T R A C T
Globalization discourse is deeply flawed in its very
conception, expressing a gratuitous assumption of
the emergence of a new era that is discontinuous
with the past and whose conflicts are primarily the
product of those who resist this development:
nationalists, racists, localists. This discourse is itself
an ideological product of a cosmopolitan elite
identity that has emerged (again) in recent years
and which can be accounted for, in turn, by another
approach. A global systemic perspective situates
cosmopolitan discourses in periods of hegemonic
decline, which are also periods of economic, social,
and cultural fragmentation in the hegemonic zones
as well as of vertical polarization that creates a new
rootedness at the bottom and a
cosmopolitanization at the top. While these
processes are underway today in the West,
something quite the opposite is occurring in the
emergent new hegemonic centers to the East. A
global systemic approach also offers a model of
todays crisis that is absent in globalization
discourse. [globalization, global system, class,
culturalism, neoliberalism, cosmopolitanism]

ollowing an American Ethnological SocietyCanadian Anthropological Society panel in which people so kindly discussed and
critiqued our then-recent publication The Anthropology of Global
Systems (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a, 2008b) and after
we decided to publish those proceedings, colleagues suggested
that we put more emphasis on the need to create a new understanding of
the contemporary world, especially in this era of crisis. We first embarked
on the project of charting a global systemic anthropology more than three
decades ago, more than ten years before the global became popular.
Our engagement was not with what became the keyword assumptions of
globalization discourse but with the more general argument that social
orders are reproduced within larger complexes of relations on which
their very form and existence are dependent. This was an argument for
a global framework of analysis, a general proposition about the nature of
social reproduction. While globalization is indeed a real phenomenon,
our contention has been that it is not some world-historical stage at
which we have finally arrived but a phase phenomenon within the life
cycles of global systems.1 In this approach, globalization as an empirical
phenomenon is an aspect of more-encompassing processes, which also
include de-globalization. Thus, globalization, as we argue below, is not an
evolutionary stage, not any more than modernization or what we, again,
after 50 years, call modernityterms that globalization discourse inherited uncritically and that it has included in the replication of what appears
as the old developmentalist framework. This evolution toward the global
was already present in Julian Stewards work on the contemporary world,
as a level of socio-cultural integration. In the work of Karl Marx and some
Marxists, the global was also understood as a limit case of capitalist accumulation, not so much in world-historical terms but as a tendency within
capitalist development itself.2 Imperialism was also a fundamental concept in 20th-century Marxist analysis, a notion that, since the fifties, has

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 244257, ISSN 0094-0496, online
C 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1548-1425. 
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12017

Globalization as a discourse of hegemonic crisis

developed beyond dependency theory toward a theory of

the world market and geographical shifts of capital accumulation. But the takeoff of globalization thinking appeared
in the wake of the decline of Marxism, along with the entire
modernist paradigm, with the rise or return to dominance
of culturalism and (neo)liberal thought.
Globalization is certainly a keyword in political jargon
as well as in academic discourse. As a term, it refers to something that many people experience as immediately obvious.
It seems as if the whole world is now (finally) connected.
In communication terms, this is clearly very much the case
and can be documented. But whether the world is globalized in other senses is much less clear. However much such
interconnection is assumed, it is worth considering what it
is that is globalized and how much globalization there actually is, not least in contrast to previous historical periods.
We have argued that the concept leapt into the consciousness of academics during the 1980s, when something very
new seemed to be happening (Friedman 2007a). But where
was it happening, and what was it that spurred the explosive entry onto the scholarly scene of the G-word, which has
since been embellished through its pairing with terms such
as neoliberalism, millennium, and even Giorgio Agambens
(2005; Schmitt) exception?
Its introduction in business economics in the eighties by Keniche Ohmae (1989) was related to the real
process of economic deregulation and a desire for its
furtherance to the point of relegating the nation-state to obsolescence. Capitalists were already out there doing their
business in the wider world, so the nation-state must have
outlived its usefulness. Of course, this is more than a mere
epochal experience, since capitalists have always been out
there, sometimes even more so than today. Fernand Braudel
(1977) had argued, in contrast, that globalization and the
weakening of state power were historical phenomena related to the decline of hegemonic centers and their financing of new centers by the export of capital. Braudel also argued that capitalism, as opposed to a mere market regime,
is an alliance (a bloody one at that) between the state
and capital, one he referred to as contre-marche (antimarket; 1979:197) and that led to the brutal expansion of
flag and trade that has created modern empires and, as
we have argued, most of the historical empires and imperial orders of the past (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman
1979, 2008a; Friedman 2000). Without the benefit of historical perspective, the new globalization appeared as something quite unprecedented. It resonated among and within
a number of disciplinesgeography, political science, cultural sociologyand it rooted itself in the foundation of
cultural studies. To be sure, some disciplines maintained
a critical and distanced understanding of the new term and
its application. This is certainly the case for the work of
David Harvey (2005) and Neil Smith (2005) in geography as
well as of others. Harveys take on globalization, for example, is congruent with our own approach: a shift from one

American Ethnologist

global system (hierarchically organized and largely controlled politically by the United States) to another system
that was more decentralized and coordinated through the
market, making the financial conditions of capitalism far
more volatile and far more unstable (2005:8). This is certainly not an argument for evolution.
Cultural sociology ran something similar to a global diffusionist argument in relation to the cultural imperialism
approach of the 1970s (Ritzer 1996; Robertson 1992). With
the work of Manuel Castells (2000), we witnessed a generalized theoretical approach to globalization linking technological change to a new social order. There is also the related
and important work of Saskia Sassen (1994, 1996) on global
cities, but her analysis encompasses much more than globalization even if she does pay heed to the concept. We have
argued that the concept ought to be an object rather than a
framework of analysis (Friedman 2007b). The common assumption in the above approaches is the evolutionary notion that new forms of technology, not least those related to
the Internet but also the increase in the speed of transport
in general, have led to a compression of global space. This
is, of course, a notion invoked by Braudel, as expressed in
Harveys timespace compression, but technological acceleration has occurred quite a few times in the past, so it is
difficult to gauge its differential significance today.
Globalization in anthropology, as in cultural studies,
which also partakes of the evolutionary bias, is quite different in content from the above approaches. We argue below that it is less a question of the analysis of an empirical process and more a normative discourse requiring a reconfiguration of the field of understanding, a moral more
than an intellectual critique of what are understood as traditional and culturally imperial categories and an attempt
to establish (intellectually) a new globalized and hybridized
world. An adequate understanding of the emergence of
cultural globalization discourse, unlike that of the geographers, sociologists, and political scientists, is, as we argue
below, related to the emergence of a new cosmopolitanization. The allure of the cosmopolitan and the reidentification
of elites and wannabe elites is about the formation of an
ideological vortex rather than a theoretical matrix. We have
suggested in several publications that the contents of globalization discourse replicate the content of cosmopolitan
identity in Western societies, in which national boundaries are treated with scorn by self-identified citizens of the
world, who explain in interviews that they feel at home
everywhere largely because they have property in many
places. Work on Freemasonry discusses this aspect of a
particular identity that combines a liberal anti-nation-state
ideology with an ideology of humanism, that sees the world
as one, under its aegis. Recent work by Michel Pincon
and Monique Pincon-Charlot (1996, 2001) and by AnneCatherine Wagner (1998, 2007) has developed these arguments empirically. Globalization ideology is, in social
terms, a variety of this discourse and can be found among

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media elites, members of international diplomatic circles,

UNESCO in Paris (which represents itself as the beacon of
cultural cosmopolitan, boundaryless humanism but whose
headquarters sports a high-security entrance and some of
whose functionaries inhabit gated communities where living room walls are decorated with global ethnographic
art). This is also true among academics and, sometimes,
artists who maintain the same model even if not always the
same income. And, of course, we are not essentializing here
but merely pointing to a particular tendency that we ourselves and others have documented. While there is no room
here to develop this argument, it implies, if accepted, that
the analysis of such discourses has two components. One
that is our primary focus here concerns intellectual content.
Another, which is quite crucial, is a focus on what is, indeed,
ideology, whose source of production lies in the social order,
more specifically, in the emergence of self-identified cosmopolitan elites. The cosmopolitan perspective is one that
is positioned above the fragmented world below and encompasses its differences within its own identification with
that world. Thus, while real globalization is a phenomenon
typical of decline, the cosmopolitan discourse that it triggers is more of an invariant in the ideology or even cosmology of state systems, one that can become dominant in
periods when real globalization resonates with increasingly
mobile elites. This is, of course, an area for further research
(Friedman 1997, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2002, 2007a, 2012).

Globalization discourse and its pitfalls

The founding premises of globalization discourse appear to
include the following propositions:
1. The world used to be divided into smaller political
cultural units that were more or less self-sufficient
and rather closed, so that culture, society, and
economy formed a unity available for study. This
was the ideal object of traditional ethnography.
2. This is no longer the case, because globalization has begun to move everything around at
ever-quicker pacescommodities, money, people, technology, and so ona phenomenon captured by Arjun Appadurais (1990) divergent scapes.
And, of course, culture has now liberated itself
from place and is spilling over and flowing freely
throughout the world. In its current form (i.e.,
Hannerz 1992, 1999), in particular, but also as described in the earlier work of Roland Robertson
(1992), globalization of culture is more or less identical to what anthropologists used to call diffusion, which is apparently worthy of resurrection
despite its theoretical and empirical weaknesses.3
3. If anthropology was formerly based on the assumption of the fusion of society, culture, and
economy, then we need to reformulate the basic

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conceptual apparatus of the discipline to adapt it

to the modern situation, one in which divergence
and nonsynchrony are conceived as rampant and
even paradigmatically so (Appadurai 1990).4 This
is presented as a true description and not merely
a hypothetical proposition. The social world is or
has become messy and incoherent. There is no way
in which it can be understood by using anything
like holistic models. It is not only globalization discourse in anthropology that has eschewed systematicity. This is a more general tendency in the social
sciences, in which structure is being replaced by assemblages (of course, this is an ambivalent change,
as can be seen in Manuel de Landas [2006] take
on assemblages, which is reminiscent of systems
theory, whereas in anthropology the term refers,
rather, to the lack of system and more to the mere
fact of juxtaposition).
The world is defined as new, not as part of a complex
trajectory of historical processes but as a general evolutionary stage. This impending epoch was first celebrated
as a coming together of all humanity in new hybrid forms
(of culture). Now, after a brutal prise de conscience, it appears that globalization is not so nice after all and not really a coming together in social terms. This may explain why
the term globalization has been prefixed or suffixed with
or even replaced by terms such as neoliberal and millennial capitalism. The epochal nature of the present is still
dominant, but it is no longer just fun and games; rather, it
is something a bit more sinister. These changes have been
provoked very much by the media, which have been so instrumental in the forging of the image of globalization. The
spiral of violent conflicts and now-rolling crises that began
in the United States and have spread to Europe has made it
difficult to maintain globalized optimism. For advocates of
globalization discourse, all of this is something of a tragedy.
It is not that we have been forced to change our minds,
or the ways we work, but the gap between the time of
this books conception and its context of publication is
large. The reassertion of borders and the closing down
of multiple perspectives in the current political climate
has undone the progressive potential of the terms with
which we were to engage. We began this work in 2000,
when, given the cultural promises of diaspora and
hybridity, it was still possible to discern the beginnings
of a transformation in the cultural certainties of the
homogeneous, autochthonous nation. A hesitant but
real expectation heralded the advent of hybrid forms
of culture, working at the point of cultural translation,
which many believed were going to disturb the settled
formations of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy
(to borrow from bell hooks). We have agreed to show
traces of this optimism, which may still be found
in parts of this book, but on the whole, our gauche
enthusiasm has been dashed in the face of the global
war on terror, the inauguration of new fear-driven

Globalization as a discourse of hegemonic crisis

security clampdowns, extra-legal detentions and

incarcerations, bombing raids and imperial occupations. [Kalra et al. 2005:1]
We read the above quote as a recognition of a
certain failure of perspective. But perspectives do not just
disappear when they fail. They can be modified. The interpretative scheme is still based on the premise of globalization as an evolutionary process. The understanding of
increasing conflicts, violence, enclavization, and segregation in this view is reduced to a reaction to or against globalization itself. This can be referred to as the Jihad vs. McWorld perspective (Barber 1995). It was an early way of
dealing with phenomena such as Islamic revolution but has
been extended and generalized. Thus, the explosive development of sorcery in parts of Africa (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Geschiere 1997) is seen as a reaction to the
globalization regimes in those areas, a disjunction of offer
and effective demand, of so many commodities to buy and
no money with which to buy them, which, in turn, encourages magic as a coping mechanism and sorcery as a discourse of resistance or contention. And, if not the proliferation of commodities, the movement of people is creating
fear of physical intrusion. For Peter Geschiere (2009), indigenizing movements in Africa as well as extreme nationalist movements in Europe are precisely evidence of a Jihad
vs. McWorld fear of the other, which translates a fear of
globalization.

Globalization discourse and the dark side

of evolution
In Fear of Small Numbers, Appadurai (2006) tries to come
to terms with the conflicts and contradictions that seem
glaringly obvious since the late eighties and nineties, when
the more celebratory version of globalization discourse appeared. He refers primarily to the increasing violence in the
world as well as to the more recent massive proliferation
of economic and political crises. Appadurai interprets these
trends in terms of a conjuncture of two processes. First, the
national economy is all but disintegrating under the forces
of globalization, leaving only the ethnic component and
the compensatory focus on purity, boundaries, and borders. Second, the unfettered force of global capitalism, especially financial capitalism, which is linked to the United
States, its main driver and ideologue, has led to increasing
polarization.5
It is doubtless this apparent link between imploding
national economies, runaway financial capital and the
role of the United States as the main driver of the ideologies of business, market and profit that has created
a new sort of emotional Cold War between those who
identify with the losers in the new game and those who
identify with the small group of winners, notably the

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United States. The widely remarked sense that some sort

of justice has been visited upon the United States even
among those who abhorred the brutality of 9/11 is no
doubt anchored in moral outrage driven by the logic of
economic exclusion. [Appadurai 2006:2324, emphasis
added]
The new state of affairs is accounted for in terms of
a major change in the world, the emergence of cellular
alongside what Appadurai calls vertebrate organization,
a kind of metaphoric extension of the earlier Deleuzian
metaphor of arborial and rhizomic structures, or of vertical corporate organization and horizontal network organization. The two are opposed to one another but are also
complementary, existing in a state of tension. The cellular refers to a whole range of transnational organizations
from capitalist to diasporic to terrorist, which threaten the
integrity of vertebrate organizations like the nation-state. In
this new world, leaky financial frontiers, mobile identities,
and fast-moving technologies of communication and transaction, together produce debates, both within and across
national boundaries, that hold new potentials for violence
(Appadurai 2006:37).
This situation in its turn inspires fear among those who
are still incarcerated within the nation-state, the fear of
small numbers, of minorities, which refers here to immigrant minorities. Thus, globalization is not all good insofar as it does produce inequalities between regions, primarily driven by the United States for its own benefit, but also
within societies, that is, between classes, something quite
new in the rhetoric of globalization. This is why Appadurai
understands much of terrorism as the expression of a struggle between the haves and have-nots of the world, which
hardly corresponds to what we know of the class position of
leading terrorists or even their goals. Nor does it matter that
the mass displacement of people is summarized by the term
mobile identities, which simply assumes, in a strange essentialism, that the identities of migrants are maintained in
their very movement via the substantialization of the time
space trajectory (i.e., diasporization). There is, after all, conflict in conditions in which competing identities occupy the
same space, something that can only happen in the absence
of integration or assimilation.6 But the latter phenomenon
is not part of globalization discourses, in which the movement of population is assumed to be identical with the indelible movement of culture or identity. In the end, we are
still faced with the model outlined above, in which contemporary violence is a product of resistances to globalization,
and the primary problem is the majorities of nation-states
themselves and their fear of minorities, which inspires the
rampages against transnational minorities.
All of this is still seen as a general evolutionary phenomenon, although Appadurai finds it necessary to justify his position, one that was unquestioned some years

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ago. In view of frameworks such as our own, in which the

contemporary is continuous with the past, it is necessary to argue for the historical discontinuity of globalization. So what is new? Financialization (at high speeds),
the information revolution, and new kinds of migration (Appadurai 2006:37). But these are precisely the
kinds of phenomena that characterized the period from
1880 to 1920, so one might ask just how unprecedented
they are (Friedman 1998, 1999a, 1999b).7 This is an issue that we addressed almost two decades ago (Ekholm
Friedman 2008b; Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008a;
Friedman 1992, 1994, 1995) but that has never been seriously discussed in the globalization framework, since the
newness of globalization appears to be sacred ground, part
of what is implied in the prophetic posture of the discourse. To maintain the predictive or, perhaps, oracular
content of the globalization paradigm, all of the dark side,
which in fact reflects the failures of the perspective, is
now blamed on specific actors who have done everything
in their power to halt the progress of globalization itself.
For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), it is the local fascists,8 who are the not-strange bedfellows of liberal
globalizationthat is, indigenous peoples, local communities, white male supremacists, even those struggling against
terrorism9 who are all to blame for the failure of globalization to generate a new world. It is interesting and somewhat shocking that no heed is given here to the rest of the
story: that there is increasing violence, not just by the state,
or racist groups, or majorities.

Another perspective
We (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 1980, 2008a, 2008b;
Friedman 2007b) have gone to some lengths in contextualizing the differences between globalization discourse and
our own global systemic approach. The latter is concerned
with the historical dynamics of expansion and contraction
of imperialhegemonic centers, the shift of such centers,
and the articulation between such processes and social, political, and cultural orders in both centers and peripheries.
Our work developed in parallel with that of authors such
as Eric Wolf (1982) and, especially, Jane and Peter Schneider (see Schneider 1977; Schneider and Schneider 1976),
although our perspective developed somewhat differently,
since we extended our research to ancient world systems
and arrived at somewhat different interpretations, especially of historical capitalism, if closer to the Schneiders
than to either Wolf or Immanuel Wallerstein. We have argued on the basis of a number of empirical investigations
that globalizations occur in specific historical conjunctures
and that they are neither permanent nor evolutionary phenomena (Ekholm Friedman 2008b; Friedman 1994, 1995).
They have occurred previously, and the inverse process,
deglobalization, is equally well documented, for example,

248

from the 1920s to the 1950s. It is also possible to document

the shifts of accumulative power that have characterized the
historical process of global systems and that we are witnessing today. The phenomena that we have linked to the current phase of globalization are as follows:
1. Massive capital export, decentralization of capital
accumulation, and the rise of new competitive centers, large and small, in a period in which the older
hegemony no longer reigns supreme. In economic
terms, capital moves along the vectors of the gradient of profit in the world arena, from lowest to potentially highest.
A. The export of productive capital is linked to the
increasing shift of nonexported capital into financial sectors that replace industrial production as the main dynamic and rapidly become
a speculative apparatus whose extreme expression is the derivative (which Robert Shiller
called a naturally occurring Ponzi process
[2001:78]).
B. Capital accumulation moves from Fordist, verticalized processes to a division between financial hubs and proliferating flexible (postFordist) subcontracting and outsourcing units,
a process that increasingly saturates all sectors
of the social order, not least the state itself.
2. An increase of both horizontal and vertical polarization. Ethnicization and new culturalpolitical
movements occur at the same time as increasing
polarization between the wealthy and the poor and
between elites and masses.
A. Horizontal polarization is expressed in increasing conflict generated by sharper cultural
identification. Its most common form is ethnic, but it can be regional, religious, and even
gender based.
B. Vertical polarization is the product of increasing class differentiation between the top and
the bottom of the social hierarchy, expressed
in the classical Gini indexes, which has increased markedly in the Western world. Included in this trend is a process of downward
mobility among large portions of the middle classes and an upward mobility among
a smaller segment of the same classes. It
is accompanied by shifting identification:
cosmopolitanization at the top and indigenization at the bottom.
3. An increase in emigration from areas of rampant
political and military instability. But the recipient
countries for the new immigrants are in economic
decline, leading to newcomers marginalization as
well as conflicts on the ground among immigrants
(including second- and third-generation descendants) and between immigrants and downwardly
mobile nationals.

Globalization as a discourse of hegemonic crisis

Globalization is a historical phenomenon that is reversible rather than a stage in a unilinear development.
In the systemic approach, globalization is part of a larger
transformation in the global arena. The globalization
approach, which has today assimilated assumptions of
neoliberalism, cannot account for the simple fact that
while post-Fordism and flexibilization associated with neoliberalism are rampant in the West, China seems to
be dominated by an old-fashioned Fordist configuration
(Appelbaum 2006). So the concomitants of globalization
are not across-the-board phenomena, and the regional differentiation linked to the decline of the West and the rise
of the East cannot be accounted for in this framework.
Whereas quite a few African states have declined into ethnic violence and been transmuted into gangs or privatized states (Bayart et al. 1999; Ekholm Friedman 2008a), in
China and most of East Asia, states have become stronger in
terms of centralized governance. China, an absolutist state
capitalism (see, e.g., Arrighi 2007), succeeded in introducing liberalized markets (not neoliberalism) and foreign investment coupled to rapid growth rather than flight capital, to massive overexploitation of workers and productive
expansion, all as a product of what is called the era of
globalization. But the recipe is extraordinarily similar (except for the direct intervention of the state) to the transformation England underwent in the 18th and 19th centuries from rural impoverishment and migration to Dickensian urban poverty coupled to industrialization and empire
building.
Similarly, the set of phenomena including ethnicization (autochthonization in the sense used by Geschiere
[2009]), the proliferation of sorcery accusations (Comaroff
and Comaroff 1999), and the emergence of religious fundamentalisms and smaller-scale religious cults in large parts
of the world is not a reaction to globalization but related
to the articulation of global process and local social orders, their cosmological and ontological schemes. Ethnicization is very much related to the decline in the assimilative or ordering power of central hegemonic states in
economic decline, just as neoliberalism is nothing more
than an adaptation to a decentralization of the organization of capitalist accumulation in chronic crisis. Sorcery accusations, in Central Africa, at least, are related to the collapse of incomes, the disintegration of public sectors as
well as kin groups, and the increasing competition for the
breadcrumbs left behind by rentier state-classes (Ekholm
Friedman 1994, 2008a). But this occurs in terms of local social logics that are not deducible from the global, just as antiwitchcraft cults and magic emerge to fend off the sorcery
itself. The conditions in which these phenomena develop
are related to the increasing precariousness of human existence and quite variable cultures of fear that are elaborated
in such conditions. The rise of neonationalist parties in Europe is also directly related to economic downturn, to the

American Ethnologist

decline of the state-based public sector and of the assimilation machine that was dominant in the previous period of
expansion, associated with the golden age of the welfare
state. But the local logics in Europe are quite different from
those in Central Africa.10 The reconfiguration of cultural
identification specific to such a period is one in which alternative identities emerge, in which the loss of the modernist
future ignites a scramble after roots that seem more enduring in a world in which the modernist agenda has evaporated. Re-identification in cultural terms is rehabilitating
for those so engaged, but it also implies the multiplication
of new borders and potential conflicts among groups who
have taken up the new or renewed identities. It is not merely
an ethnic issue but a more general phenomenon that pervades the entire field of potential collective identity formation. An account that interprets such phenomena as reactions to globalization itself is very different from one that
situates the phenomena within systemically altered conditions of existence of people and their culturally specific
strategies of survival. No glossing as alternative modernity
can erase this crucial difference. Ordinary lives do not confront the global as such. They face more immediate issues.

The current crisis and the transformation of the

state
The current crisis, which can be traced back to the early
1980s, is also comprehensible in this framework. It is in
the eighties that we witness a catastrophic decline of profitability that led to massive export of capital; to increasing
unemployment, declining real wages, and the beginnings
of a wholesale shift to neoliberal solutions; and to postFordist flexibilization in employment, production, and accumulation. These developments led to critical reactions
among union leaders and some economists to the move toward the dismantling of the Western industrial economy,
which began long before the end of Fordism (Bluestone and
Harrison 1982; Kotz et al. 1994; Vernon 1971). There were
moral reactions to the massive export of capital, and some
even saw it as imperialistic (i.e., the violent capitalization
of the globe), whereas others bemoaned the loss of growth
to other parts of the world. But this criticism soon vanished
among the discourses of globalization, which stressed the
unification of the world rather than the decline of certain
regions to the profit of others. The era of globalization, as
it is called, was something more specific: the decline of Europe, the United States, and Japan and the rise of new zones
of accumulationChina, India, and the new industrial supply zones in Southeast Asia as well as certain other countries such as Brazil. This process has continued unabated
since the eighties despite financial bubbles and has led to
the current hegemonic crisis that has become glaringly evident since 200708 in the collapse of Western financial markets (Dumenil and Levy 2011).

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Hegemonic decline ignites a proliferation of disintegrative processes with respect to the state and the rampant growth of networks of violence, to trafficking in people, arms, and terror. And this, in a geopolitical shift away
from the centrality of the West, feeds internally and externally orchestrated occidentalisms in which progressives
are filled with self-loathing and even praise for brutal ideologies as long as they are directed against the beast-is-us.
Some Islamists look forward in both East and West to an
imagined new caliphate that includes Europe and to the
establishment of global sharia. At the same time, morepowerful states farther to the east are growing ever more
rapidly into the future workshops of the world and engaging
(especially China) in a new colonization of former Western
peripheries. And, in interviews, we have encountered statements of the type, I dont care how bad they are, let them
rule us because we are even worse and deserve it.11 The
content of these developments can hardly be understood as
globalization.
Issues of culture in globalization discourse are concerned with flows and mixture, with border crossing and
the critique of boundedness, pace CNN.12 This has become
one of its central themes in relation to the debates concerning the nation, the core of essentialism. Globalization in relation to migration is not an opening up of borders to allow people to move more freely. It is the result of the disintegration of political regimes in the Third World, to increasing conflict and violence and a resultant emigration
of peoples from zones of violence and collapsed conditions
of existence to the declining yet still wealthier zones of the
West. And even this is also only a very partial truth, since
most of this movement is confined to the local regions involved. In any case, to characterize it as the advent of an
epoch of nomadism that has replaced a more static past is
an immense and cynical misrepresentation of underlying
realities.
It is difficult to reconcile the tragedy of this movement
with the liberating discourse of what can only be understood as a new-fashioned liberalism celebrating the joys
and virtues of migration. This discourse entails a shocking disinterest in the reasons for mass migration and in
a politics that might serve to ameliorate peoples conditions of existence in such a way as to ultimately curb such
migration.13 Can such discourse be characterized as progressive? In any case, it includes a predisposition to rubbish any conception of cultural or political unity in that
ghastly phenomenon the nation-state, which is, as indicated above, redefined here as an essentialization machine
responsible for most of the woes of the contemporary
world.
Here we should recall that what is homogenized in the
nation-state is the public sphere, not individual subjects.
Cultural difference is not eliminated at all but relegated to
the private lives of its inhabitants. This situation does imply

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that the cultural character of the public sphere might well

be Christian or occidental, and this is surely a product of
particular histories and the majorities that have been generated in those histories. We might argue, then, that the public
sphere is essentialized in respect of its values and institutions. How could it be otherwise unless a self-defined we,
a royal we, decided to do ceremonies of state in mosques
or Buddhist temples, accepting sharia law for some groups,
Buddhist doctrine for others, and Christian for yet others?
This would be a gesture in the direction of pluralism but
nothing new, since it characterized most empires of the past
as well as more recent colonial regimes (Furnivall 1948). Todays identity politics certainly heads in the direction of ethnicization of the public sphere. It is interesting to note here
that Tariq Ramadan, who is a hero to many for his alleged
attempt to adapt Islam to Europe in what is called EuroIslam, apparently says quite different things in Arabic than
he does in English or French, suggesting that Europe should
become part of Islam rather than the converse.14 Is this
all a mere question of the evolution of globalization or a
strong tendency toward fragmentation of the national public sphere?
What is, then, the proper image of the current global
situation? Can it be adequately understood in terms of the
vocabulary of globalization, that is, as the transgressing of
boundaries, the concomitant breakdown of the nation-state
and its essentialist assumptions, the increase of mixing and
hybridity as differences are thrown together in global meeting places such as Davos, in which the world is becoming
an upscale cosmopolitan canopy (Anderson 2011)? Or is
something else happening in which all of the above are part
of an elite-based imaginary rather than an emergent reality?
We suggest that the latter is very much the case.
1. Nation-states are indeed coming undone but not
as a result of the penetration of the forces of globalization. Rather, they are, by and large, in a state of
bankruptcy in which the former machinery of integration no longer works, not only in relation to the
new immigration but also even in relation to the
older order of the nation-state itself. This is demonstrated by the revival of ethnic identities that were
previously integrated into larger national spheres.
In this process, the state has emerged strong and
unscathed, but the nation has suffered a great deal.
Bereft of state support, it has become reduced to
ethnic status, whose reinforcement has lent it a
clear nationalist profile but in a period in which
everyone else is celebrating their particular ethnic
identities.
2. The cultural mixture is primarily found in discourse, especially elite discourses. On the streets,
there is enclavization and segregation as well as
the violence of turf wars. And, of course, Elijah Andersons (2011) message is that the cosmopolitan

Globalization as a discourse of hegemonic crisis

canopy is a momentary respite in a larger context of

generalized segregation, just as the famed bazar
is in the plural society of John Sydenham Furnivall.
A. In addition to cosmopolitan canopies, there
are also middle-class professional communities in which multiculturalism might seem to
work, but this is often the result of another
encompassing identity related to the professions themselves, for example, being part of
Silicon Valley (English-Lueck 2011). Here we
can surely speak of identity testing and hybridity, as well as of situations of peace between separate communities, where there are
also limits to tolerance and even more so to sociality, but they can become ideological instruments among those who participate in such
networks. This is, however, a particular classbased phenomenon in a larger world marked
by less amicable relations. It parallels the cosmopolitanism of elites although it does not
generate an ideology.
3. We have argued that the above phenomena are accompanied by a complex of systemically related
processes, including:
A. The ethnicization of all of the social categories of the nation-state: regional minorities,
transnational populations (diasporization), indigenous populations, and national populations themselves.
B. The vertical polarization of class relations and
cultural relations between elites and masses.
The elites have become increasingly cosmopolitan, identifying out of the nation-state,
and the masses have become increasingly indigenized, seeking roots either defined by the
nation-state (and its territories) or by other
subnational (regional, indigenous, migrant)
categories.
C. The unification of fragments in networks
of transnational exchange, sometimes organized in ethnic or in strictly organizational
economic terms. These include the networks
that organize three major global trades: in
arms, drugs, and people. Network society in
this framework is a product of the decline of
vertical organization of both political and economic entities.
D. Neoliberalism in all of this is not, as we say
above, an epochal invention, the final victory
of Friedrich Hayek and that other Friedman.
It is simply a reflection of the unfettered market in centers of accumulation, the normal
state previous to and following the short Keynesian interlude. More important is that the
liberalization is primarily a shift to a financially
based regime of accumulation in which production has moved substantially to East and
South Asia and a few other regions, in which

American Ethnologist

Western hegemony has declined and financial

accumulation has gotten out of control for perfectly logical reasons. While it is more complex and savage, this shift represents a second
wave (in the past century, there were similar
waves) of what Rudolf Hilferding (1981) a century ago called finance capitalism. Of course,
speedup due to technological advances has
made the process more pronounced, complex,
vicious, and even insane, but the basic logic
has not changed.

Cultural process
What happens to culture in this framework? Many are critical of an approach like ours that is occupied by politicaleconomic processes, as if such a concern were a kind of betrayal of the field. Our argument here, however, is that it is
precisely the cultural orders within which capitalism develops that promote the political economy to a dominant position. We have proposed that there are two major aspects
of the cultural. The first refers to the mere distinctiveness of
social processes and is not a representation of those processes or a scheme that organizes them. It is, rather, the
properties of the processes themselves, that is, particular
ways of producing, dominating, accumulating, and so on.
The second is culture as representation, code, or scheme,
as structures of meaning produced on the basis of social
experience in historical conditions that articulate preexisting historical configurations with particular existential
situations. Thus culture is never ex nihilo but appears always as a historical transformation. Its significance within a
population is related to the fact that it makes sense in particular circumstances as it connects to historically constituted shared social experiences. Cultural production involves objectification, and in this process it can become determinant in the sense that it can be used to socialize subjects or organize social situations. As the locus of meaning
production, it is dependent on the existential conditions
from which meaning originates, but it can take on a life of its
own in the sense attributed to it by Marshall Sahlins (1976),
as a scheme of meaningful organization.15
Particular schemes in this view must always be understood in their larger context, and it is this larger context that
conditions such schemes in the long run. In such terms,
capitalism, for example, is a cultural phenomenon in the
trivial sense that all social phenomena are simultaneously
cultural, simply because they are specific in form. But the
discourses of capitalism, whether Keynesian, neoliberal, or
socialist, are produced out of the differential experiential
conditions of life within capitalist processes. The forms of
the capitalist state are historically variable transformations
of earlier state forms in articulation with capitalist processes. The categories that we discuss herecosmopolitan,

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Volume 40 Number 2 May 2013

indigenous, ethnic, class, diaspora, migrantare all generated within processes of constitution of states and governance, and this extends to NGOs, the United Nations, the
World Bank, and other similar global forms. All of these categories have a historical existence and display properties
that are part of a longue duree of the global systems that we
have discussed.
As we have also suggested, globalization as reality and
as discourse is also a derivative set of forms in relation to
the reproductive logics of global systems. This does not imply that culture is a global product in the sense that globalization theorists might have it. On the contrary, since
the global is itself derivative of local interactions, it is always embedded in social fields that are local in experiential and practical terms. The life of the most high-end
global populations is encapsulated within forms of sociality that, even if they cross national borders, are quite
local as social fields. These populations are characterized
by endosocialityshared forums, clubs, hotels, vacation
spots, schoolsand often display a pronounced degree of
endogamy. This form of globalism does not require the existence of modern individuals in the usual sense of the word
since what is shared need not be the specific distancing that
is characteristic of the individualized self. However, it might
be suggested that cosmopolitanization does tend to lift persons out of whatever social networks they were formerly
embedded in.
If cosmopolitan culture or cultures are local, then all
the other cultures must be local as well. A diaspora is local in social terms. As such, it generates an identifiable set
of repertoires that its members can practice. And indigenous populations who are accused of being inauthentic are
just as authentic as any other populations, no matter how
much they might deviate from some anthropologically established norm. Culture is about the structures of existence
and the imaginaries and representations that weave themselves around such structures. This is why a global systemic
approach does not eliminate the local or place it on a lower
level where it is generated by the global, which is assumed
to be a different, higher, sphere. The global is not a separate
sphere or the abode of prophets of the future. It is nothing
more than the structural properties of the field of interaction of local social actors. But the fact that these properties are structural implies that they harbor logics that are
not reducible to those of the actors themselves. On the contrary, they refer precisely to the nonintentional properties
of systemic processes of social reproduction that escape individual intentionality. They constitute, instead, the field of
possible interactions and their outcomes.

Rethinking the global

We argue that the discourse of globalization is inadequate
to an understanding of the contemporary world because

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it participates actively in and is partly constitutive of that

world, a perspective that has taken on the character of a
moral imperative. Thus, despite what is referred to as the
backside of globalization, understood as the resistance of
nationalists, sovereigntists, and other such dangerous people, globalization appears as a fulfillment of a positive evolution of humanity if we can only get rid of the drawbacks of
the social stratification that is its neoliberal component.16
Instead, as repeatedly set out in our writings (Ekholm
Friedman and Friedman 2008a, 2008b), we stress the necessity of a broader perspective that begins by locating the
discourse itself within a larger global historical arena. The
illusion of global unification is produced among elites of
the declining center itself, but it is accompanied by a number of other reconfigurations: the decentralization of accumulation expressed in the reintegration of smaller units
into larger networks of capital flow, the rise of financial
capital and speculation, the criminalization and privatization of states, the increase of intrastate violence in the
West simultaneous with the (sometimes violent) consolidation of states and regions in the East, the class polarization that produces globalizing elites, the rise of occidentalism in the wake of declining orientalism, and the breakup
of former hegemonic political-economic power, leading to
cultural and social segmentation and competition. These
phenomena cannot, as we have said, be understood in
terms of globalization or reactions to globalization. First,
they represent quite opposite tendencies in different parts
of the world, decline in one area and simultaneous ascension in another. Second, the rise of new identifications
indigenous, regional, ethnic, religious, nationalare expressions of decline in the West (and Japan) and its
peripheries and the simultaneous emergence of new alliances such as the BRIC17 pervaded by new nationalisms
and regional consolidations that are quite opposite tendencies. Similarly, the emergence of global Islamism and the
general occidentalism referred to above are expressions of
a set of logically related processes but clearly not reducible
to globalization. Third, globalization discourse itself is understood as the product of a particular elite positioning in
the West, one that is a subset of a cosmopolitan identity and
that is logically complementary to the inverse indigenization that occurs among declining middle and lower classes.

Conclusion
Globalization is a historical phase within a global system
and not a stage of world-historical development. The connectivity of the world may have increased in the long term,
but it is not clear to what extent this is qualitative change or
mere speedup or timespace compression. No one, in any
case, has made a concerted effort to produce an argument
for qualitative change, one that requires more than simple
correlations and labels.

Globalization as a discourse of hegemonic crisis

The critique of the closed model of society was the basis of the global systemic approach, but it was a general critique. It did not claim that now that the world has become
globalized, the older single-society models no longer work.
On the contrary, it claimed that such models have never
worked because all societies are constituted and reproduced within larger complexes of relations and processes.18
Thus, the entire critique of local bias, as presented, for instance, in the work of Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson
(1997), is already present in the global systemic critique of
the 1980s, in which the nation-state in formation is seen
as the locus of production of closed social models of function, dynamics, and transformation (Ekholm Friedman and
Friedman 1980; Friedman 1997).
Similarly, the issue of borders, which has been
broached in recent literature, needs to be inverted, since
the production of borders has to be accounted for to begin to understand their transgression. We note again that
this approach never reduced the local to the global. The local was always understood as simply the social fields within
which historical processes work themselves out. The historical processes are simply, or, rather, complexly, the articulation between global and local processes, but the local is
the locus of transformational history, no matter how large it
might be, whether a village or a continent. It is the processes
that count and not the locality as such. Thus, the global is
not a higher level even if it refers to a specific set (thus, localized in theoretical space) of properties. The latter are aspects of interlocal relations rather than a higher spatial order of reality. Their character as such is what enables ethnographic research on global processes. The World Bank and
the World Economic Forum are just as local as the village
pub, but the properties of their activities are quite different
in terms of their scope.
Our insistence on such a framework is not new, but it
is baffling to us that there have been no related discussions
or debates. Thus, when Appadurai stresses (above) the newness of globalization as the dominance of financial capital,
the rapidity of transaction speed, and the massive movement of people, he cannot be unaware that these are precisely the phenomena that are used to mark the period from
1880 to 1920 in Europe and the United States. Maybe there is
more financialization today, maybe the transactions are infinitely more rapid, and maybe migration is greater in percentage terms (hardly the case). But are these quantitative
changes enough to define a new world? Is there any concerted effort to make this point? Or is such a conclusion,
as Bertrand Russell put it, intuitively obvious to the most
casual observer? It would seem that there is no such effort because there is no field of debate, and the new ideas
in academe are not, as previously defined, hypotheses to
be falsified but truths to be sanctified. This new doxa is
what we have sought to challenge in our work by suggesting a more encompassing account. This doxa is the direct

American Ethnologist

expression of an emergent dominant ideology of the global,

and, as we have argued, it needs to be understood critically
in terms of its internal propositions as well as in terms of the
locus of its production among rising global elites of declining hegemonic centers.

Postscript: Response to Don Kalb and Don Nonini

First, we must express our gratitude for having been subjected to such thoughtful engagement, for the critical comments and suggestions in what we see as a longer-term
elaboration of a common set of research issues.
Don Kalb (this issue) raises very important critical arguments in relation to our approach. It is true that Max
Weber looms large in our discussions, but this is for Marxist reasons. The Marx of volume 3 of Capital is concerned
with the autonomous dynamic of fictitious capital in relation to real accumulation, and this volume is, for us, the
major theoretical component in his work, one that leaves
the idea of the labor theory of value behind and, instead,
understands that the accumulation of abstract wealth contains the core contradiction of capitalist reproduction. This
logic can be extended backward in time in the following
sense: Capitalism is about turning money into more money.
It becomes modern industrial capitalism in specific historical circumstances, but the accumulation of abstract wealth
remains a structure of the longue duree. After all, why produce when you can just make money? Financial capitalism
is thus not merely a phase of capitalist accumulation but its
logical framework. Exploitation and appropriation of value
in the form of other peoples labor is, of course, crucial as
is the linkage to the real economy, but it is not in such
relations that we can find the source of the capitalist dynamic (only its contradictions). This argument is opposed
to what Kalb calls the class approach, in which the logic
of capital is somehow reducible to the labor theory of value
presented in volume 1 of Capital and popularized by a certain Marxist perspective in which money is mere ideology
rather than the real abstraction that is the dominant operator of capitalist process. That Weber understands capital
as autonomous in relation to labor is, in our view, a mere
extension of Capital volume 3. Money capital is not a mere
representation of what people like to call the real economy. Nor are classes, however important as the principal
structure of exploitation in industrial capitalism, directly
causal in historical terms, except insofar as class struggle
changes conditions of existence and thus of the costs of
capitalist reproduction.
Modern industrial capitalism is, of course, a historically
specific phenomenon, but it has existed tendentially in the
past. It is not an essence waiting to be realized in the phenomenal world but a historical complex that has been relatively short lived and quite partial. The specificity of industrial capitalism is the systemic dependence that emerges

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Volume 40 Number 2 May 2013

between fictitious and real accumulation, one that is the

foundational contradiction of modern capitalism. Thus, we
would agree on the specificity of industrial capitalism, but
we would see it as one in a family of historical capitalisms
whose logics are related even if there are clear differences.
As for the role of the state, the argument that true capitalism
is an unholy alliance between commercial capitalism and
state power is the view stressed by Braudel, who clearly differentiated market economies from capitalism. Here, however, a case can be made that this alliance is not specific to
modern capitalism but is quite typical of ancient forms as
well. The Dutch state was a military machine, and its empire was based on mass appropriation of wealth via a variety of forms of exploitation. Just as Athenian slaves reproduced themselves via wages or sales of their products, so
the worlds precapitalist capitalisms were based on massive
dislocations, enslavements of populations of dependents in
the forced service of their goals of wealth accumulation.
And in all of this, it is not, we argue, the logic of capital
accumulation that accounts for the new spaces but the
political logics and strategies of states. The logic of capital
accumulation can never explain the nature of the imperial
orders within which it is encapsulated.
Our use of Weber, who cannot be said to have ignored
class relations, is limited to his notion of capital as abstract
wealth and his analysis of accumulation in ancient China,
in which he saw a major contradiction between state classes
and capitalists, with the former dominating and, thus, limiting capitalist development. Our stress on reproduction
rather than production, then, is derived from Marx rather
than Weber. Classes are not autonomous actors in this approach. Rather, they are deeply embedded in a Kafkaesque
drama in which control of the actual dynamic is less than
complete and often mystified. Classes, in this approach, are
generated by the logics of accumulation itself.19 Here, there
is the same difference in perspective with Kalb, who takes
a more classical position that classes in capitalism are collective and autonomously defined actors locked in struggle.
We stress that classes themselves are generated in the accumulation process, which can exploit slaves, freeholders,
and peasants without the mediation of the capitallabor relation understood as a wage relation. The relation between
capital accumulation and other institutions and processes
of the social world is not of a Hegelian or essential nature. It
is this misunderstanding that is at issue in the erroneous assumption that capitalism emerged out of feudalism or that
it began with industrial capitalism at the end of the 18th
century. We argue that the latter was a particular historical
process within an already-existent global system based on
mercantile accumulation, and it occupied only a portion of
the total space of wealth accumulation.
Don Nonini (this issue) provides an entirely new analysis of the local-food and food-security movements in relation to what might be declining hegemony, and he explores

254

the contradictory aspects of the cosmopolitan, localist,

national, and antiglobalist positions that have developed
in these movements. I have recently become acquainted
with an interestingly similar development in northern Italy,
where elements of the classic slow-food movement, clearly
an elite phenomenon, and the local-food movement, which
is based on a reorientation to self-sufficiency but stresses
the issue of quality, have formed at least a temporary
coalition that displays some of the same kinds of tendencies discussed in Noninis comment. The complexity of
the movement, which is transected by class, is the kind of
phenomenon that we have not dealt with ourselves but
that expresses the commonalities of Noninis and our approaches. We would probably be more self-critical in this
case since the cosmopolitanlocal identities implicit in
these movements are not dealt with clearly in our own
material, an issue whose analysis would certainly benefit
greatly from developing a more dialectical understanding of
the crosscutting relations between class and cultural identification. In terms of global transformations of social conditions, it is possible to discern a number of differentiations
and even oppositions that stretch from national to local and
that are configured by an articulation between the elite consumption of upscale local quality and the more politicized
anticosmopolitan goal of self-sufficiency. In European
countries, the latter has expressed itself in policies aiming
at national self-sufficiency within a green agenda, as in Norway (Flaten and Hisano 2007).
We thank our friends who have critically contributed
to what we see as a collective project to continually rethink anthropology in the broadest sense, one that refuses
to eschew the materialities of capitalism or of imperial
realities and their logics any more than it does the culturally specific and the existential. Such an endeavor works to
support and develop a general anthropology for our times.

Notes
1. We are not referring to the mere existence of either connections or diffusion, which have no specific structural properties.
Such properties are crucial for this approach, since they account
for the differences between colonization, diffusion, and globalization, even if these processes all result, superficially, in some similar
outcomes.
2. The evolutionism in Marx was not about the ultimate unification of the world but the progression of forms of production and
reproduction.
3. Diffusionism, whatever its defects and in whatever guise, has
at least the virtue of allowing everyone the possibility of exposure
to a world larger than their current locale (Appadurai 1988:39). See
also Hannerz 1992:218.
4. For example, Appadurai notes, The global relationship
among ethnoscapes, technoscapes, and financescapes is deeply
disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable (1996:35). Or as Josiah
Heyman and Howard Campbell put it, He [Appadurai] believes that focusing on disjuncture provides a powerful criticism
of Marxist models that give ordered causal priority to capital

Globalization as a discourse of hegemonic crisis

accumulation and class relations because they are inadequately

quirky (2009:133).
5. This second process is interesting in terms of our subsequent
argument in this article that the United States is itself in steep economic decline. It also resonates with statements that the colossus
has become so weak that it no longer deserves its former respect.
6. One might argue that integration of culturally distinct minorities is not a contradiction, which is, of course, true, but the conditions it implies include a higher-order state identity and not a mere
negotiated tolerance or even fusion.
7. In the late 19th century, as in the late 20th century trade was
booming, driven upwards by falling transport costs and by a flood
of overseas investment. There was also migration on a vast scale
from the Old World to the New (Economist 1997).
8. For Hardt and Negri, todays celebrations of the local can be
regressive and even fascistic when they oppose circulations and
mixture, and thus reinforce the walls of nation, ethnicity, race, people and the like (2000:362).
9. The war against terrorism is an ambivalent case here, since
Appadurai claims that there is a serious question of moral indignation, cited earlier in this discussion, by the have-nots but then
ignores the strongly fundamentalist ideology of Islamism, which is
not particularly positive to globalization.
10. The assertion of differing local logics is not, of course, to essentialize place but simply to recognize that differential historical processes produce different social forms over time, which has
nothing to do with the greatly feared essentialism of the globalizers.
11. We conducted these interviews in conjunction with two
projects on the transformation of the nation-state during the period 200310. They were made with politically active youth and
with numerous middle-class (in the European sense) professionals
and academics.
12. CNN has taken to advertising itself as truly boundary busting
with proliferating exclamations of going beyond borders.
13. Or must we assume that people all want to move and that
they have been somehow hindered throughout world history until
the epoch of globalization?
14. See, for example, Fourest 2004. There is a larger literature on
this issue.
15. But such schemes are always secondary elaborations in this
approach.
16. In this sense, elite representatives have taken to distinguishing between good and bad globalization.
17. BRIC refers to Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
18. This argument was based on the concept of social reproduction and implied that if a society reproduced itself entirely on the
basis of local resources, then one could deal with it as a single autonomous entity. However, this is only very rarely the case, often a
product of collapse, evasion, or isolation.
19. We find it difficult to understand how Kalb can assert that
we are engaged in anthropologizing and universalizing Max Weber on Protestantism and individualism. On the contrary, we simply suggest that in periods of strong capitalization in the past, for
example, classical Athens or Rome, there were also tendencies toward the emergence of strong forms of individualism, a model that
is quite the opposite of that of the Protestant Ethic. We certainly
appreciate debating points, but this is really quite exaggerated.

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Jonathan Friedman
Directeur detudes
EHESS (IRIS)
96 boulevard Raspail
75006 Paris, France
Jonathan.friedman@ehess.fr
Dist. Professor
Department of Anthropology
UCSD, 9500 Gilman Dr.
La Jolla, CA 92093
jafriedman@ucsd.edu
Kajsa Ekholm Friedman
Professor Emerita
Lund University
Lilla Fiskaregatan 8A
222 22 Lund, Sweden
Kajsa.ekholm-friedman@soc.lu.se

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