SOC 596ZG
GLOBAL ETHNOGRAPHIES
Spring 2012
Instructor:
Zsuzsa Gille
56 CAB
333-1316
gille@illinois.edu
Class meeting times:
Mondays 3:30-5:50pm
430 Armory
Office hours:
Thursdays 3-5pm or by appointment
56 CAB
Course objectives and themes:
The purpose of this course is to help graduate students develop an analytical and methodological
toolkit with which to embark on their research projects.
We will address the following questions.
 How can we give an account of people’s diverse experiences of globalization?
 How can ethnography, traditionally understood as the study of the here and now, be
relevant for the study of communities and cultures whose boundaries are seen as
increasingly porous?
 How do we study issues, people, places without ignoring connections and links among
multiple sites but without fetishizing the global?
 How do we choose the appropriate level of analysis when social relations stretch beyond
national boundaries?
 What implications does the conceptualization of globalization carry for methodology and
political conclusions?
 What is the role of historical analysis in studying globalization ethnographically?
 What changes are necessary in qualitative research for a critical analysis of social
processes associated with globalization?
 What are the theoretical implications of recent conceptualizations of neoliberal
globalization for interpreting our data?
We will start with a brief overview of ethnography as method and as epistemology and we will
discuss the politics of methodology. Then we will compare and evaluate different
conceptualizations of globalization in social theory and research. From the middle of the
semester on we will focus on how various scholars have conceptualized the social and the
spatial—whether implicitly or explicitly. We will explore the political and methodological
implications of each of these approaches.
Global ethnography, and the study of globalization from below and from a cultural perspective,
constitute a relatively new field that emerged in the early 1990s, yet some texts became instant
classics. We will include both those classical references students will keep bumping into and the
more recent theories and empirical works, especially applications of Foucauldian
governmentality approaches. Readings in most sections include both theoretical and empirical
pieces, so students can immediately see the application of various theoretical approaches.
However we will read two ethnographic monographs in their entirety which students may use as
models for their dissertation theses.
Since the emphasis of this course is on the critical application of new concepts and ideas
discussed in this course, participants will be encouraged to try out these approaches in their ongoing studies or research projects and discuss these efforts in and outside of class. The final
paper will preferably reflect that effort. To facilitate this work process, students will be asked to
turn in statements and outlines before starting writing the actual final paper. (For dates see
schedule below.) Precise instructions on the format, content and length of these assignments will
be provided in time.
Format:
For each topic, or as the content of the readings requires, I will provide a context-setting short
lecture. In addition, for each class, students will take turn preparing with a set of questions that
should reflect the major ideas of the readings and students’ discussion or summary of questions
shared on Compass (see below under Students’ Responsibilities). These questions will serve as
the springboard for our discussions in class.
Students’ responsibilities:
1. Reading all assigned texts.
2. Weekly commentary on readings that reflects one’s familiarity with the assigned readings
(one page-300 words max) to be submitted before class—by 9pm every Sunday--to the
“Discussions” of the course’s webpage in the text of your message, not in an attachment.
Throughout the semester you may miss one such commentary. These commentaries will
be graded.
3. Completing in-class writing assignments and occasional smaller projects
4. Thoughtful, focused, and respectful contributions to discussion in class
5. Turning in project statement (one-page narrative)
6. Turning in paper outline (five pages, outline format)
7. A cumulative final exam (essay of 20 pages)
8. Approaching instructor with questions before problems accumulate
9. Visiting instructor at least once during office hours
10. Watch movies assigned to class content (unless marked as optional)
Grades will be based on these essays and students’ written and oral contributions to in-class
learning. The course qualifies both as a transnational studies area of concentration core course
and as a graduate sociology methods course.
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Books:
1. Roy, Ananya. 2010. Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development.
Routledge.
2. Carolyn Nordstrom. 2007. Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the
Contemporary World. University of California Press.
3. Lemke, Thomas. 2011. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. New York University
Press.
4. Calhoun, Craig and Georgi Derluguian. 2011. Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global
Financial Meltdown. New York University Press.
5. Michael Burawoy et al. 2000. Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and
Imaginations in a Postmodern World. University of California Press.
6. Walters, W.P. and Larner, W. (eds) (2004) Global Governmentality: Governing
International Spaces. London: Routledge.
7. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press.
8. Michael Goldman. 2005. Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social
Justice in the Age of Globalization. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
SCHEDULE
January 23
Introduction. No reading.
WHAT IS ETHNOGRAPHY?
Ethnography as method, ethnography as epistemology
January 30
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture.” The
Interpretation of Cultures. New York. Harper’s. 3-30.
_____. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic
Books. 55-70.
James C. Scott. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1-52.
Haraway, Donna, J. 1991. “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the
privilege of partial perspective.” In: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature. New York: Routledge. 183-202.
Burawoy, Michael. “Introduction.” “Reconstructing Social Theories.” “The Extended Case
Method.” In: Michael Burawoy et al. Ethnography Unbound. Berkeley: University of
California Press. 1-28, 271-290.
Marcus, George E. 1998. “Introduction: Anthropology on the move,” “Imagining the whole:
Ethnography’s contemporary efforts to situate itself.” In: Ethnography through Thick and
Thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 3-29, and 33-55.
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Comaroff J, Comaroff J. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder: Westview
Press. 181-213.
Watch video: Second nature (On reserve at UGL)
Optional background on ethnography:
Harry F. Wolcott. 1999. Ethnography as a Way of Seeing. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. 65-100
(on e-reserve), 131-168 (on Compass)
Chiseri-Strater, Elizabeth and Bonnie Stone Sunstein. 2006. Fieldworking: Reading and Writing
Research. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Comaroff J, Comaroff J. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder: Westview
Press. 3-48.
Conceptualizing and practicing relationality
February 6
Emirbayer, Mustafa. 1997. “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology.” American Journal of
Sociology. 103(2): 281-317.
Carolyn Nordstrom. 2007. Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary
World. University of California Press.
Debate between Burawoy and Sztompka: four short pieces on Compass
SOCIAL THEORIES OF GLOBALIZATION
What capitalism? What modernity?
February 13
Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change. Oxford: Blackwell. 121-197, 284-307.
McMichael, Philip. 1996. “Globalization: Myths and realities.” Rural Sociology. 61(1):25-55.
Ferguson, James. 2006 (1994). “The Anti-Politics Machine.” In Sharma and Gupta (Eds.) The
Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Blackwell Publishing. 270-285.
_____. 2002. “Global Disconnect: Abjection and the Aftermath of Modernism.” In Inda,
Jonathan Xavier and Renato Rosaldo (Eds.) The Anthropology of Globalization. 136-153.
Michael Goldman. 2005. Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in
the Age of Globalization. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Watch videos: Money Lenders (UGL) and/or Other People’s Money (I have a VHS copy).
Approaches to finance capital and the global financial crisis
February 20
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. 2000. “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second
Coming.” Public Culture. 12(2):291-343.
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Tsing, Anna. 2005. “The Economy of Appearances.” In Tsing: Friction: An Ethnography of
Global Connection. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 55-80
Calhoun, Craig and Georgi Derluguian. 2011. Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global
Financial Meltdown. New York University Press. Chs TBA
February 27 (reschedule this class)
Roy, Ananya. 2010. Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. Routledge.
What liberalism? What State?
March 5
Sassen, Saskia. 1995. “The state and the global city: Notes towards a conception of placecentered governance.” Competition and Change. 1:31-50.
Rose, Nikolas. 1996. “Governing ‘advanced’ liberal democracies.” Pp. 37-64 in Foucault and
Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government edited by
Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Clarke, John. 2004. “Dissolving the public realm? The logics and limits of new-liberalism.”
Journal of Social Policy. 33:1. 27-48.
Fraser, Nancy. 2003. “From Discipline to Flexibilization?—Reading Foucault in the Shadow of
Globalization.” Constellations. 10(2):160-171.
Walters, W.P. and Larner, W. (eds) (2004) Global Governmentality: Governing International
Spaces. London: Routledge. Chs TBA.
Optional background:
Jin-Ho Jang. 2006. Neoliberalism. On Compass.
Optional:
Brown, Wendy. 2003. “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory and Event
7:1.
Neoliberal governmentality and biopolitics
March 12
Lemke, Thomas. 2011. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. New York University Press.
Ong, Aihwa. 2006. “Introduction: Neoliberalism as Exception, Exception to Neoliberalism.” In
Ong. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Duke
University Press. 1-30.
Ong, Aihwa. 2006. “Graduated Sovereignty.”Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in
Citizenship and Sovereignty. Duke University Press. 75-96.
SPRING BREAK
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Difference and subjectivity in globalization
March 26
Hall, Stuart. 1991a. “The local and the global: Globalization and ethnicity.” In: Anthony D. King
(ed.) Culture, Globalization and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the
Representation of Identity. Binghamton: SUNY at Binghamton. 19-40.
_____. 1991b. “Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities.” In: Culture, Globalization and
the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. 41-68.
Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. 1994. “Introduction: Transnational feminist practices and
questions of postmodernity.” In: Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational
Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press. 1-33.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2000 (1993). “Goodbye to Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of
Modern World History.” In Culture in Practice: Selected Essays, by Marshall Sahlins. New
York: Zone Books. 471-500.
Wilk, Richard. 1995. “Learning to be local in Belize: global systems of common difference.” In:
Worlds Apart: Modernity Through the Prism of the Local. 110-133.
Tsing, Anna. 2009. “Supply Chains and the Human Condition.” Rethinking Marxism. 21(2):148176.
THE VIEW OF THE SOCIAL IN THEORIES OF GLOBALIZATION
The Social as Flows or Networks
April 2
Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. “Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy.” Public
Culture. 2(2):1-24.
Castells, Manuel. 1989. “Conclusion: The reconstruction of social meaning in the space of
flows.” In: The Informational City. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 348-353.
_____. 1996. “The net and the self: Working notes for a critical theory of the informational
society.” Critique of Anthropology. 16(1):9-38.
John Urry. 2000. Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. New
York: Routledge. 1-76.
Sassen S. 2000. Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization. Public
Culture. 12(1): 215-32
DUE IN CLASS: Project statement
The Social as Transnational. The Social as a Borderzone
April 9
Schiller, Basch and Szanton Blanc. 1995. “From immigrant to transmigrant: Theorizing
transnational migration.” Anthropological Quarterly. 68(1):48-63.
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Portes, Alejandro, Guarnizo, Luis, E. and Landolt, Patricia. 1999. Introduction: Pitfalls and
promise of an emergent research field. Ethnic and Racial Studies. 22(2):217-237
Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo and Smith Michael Peter. 1998. “The Locations of Transnationalism.”
In Transnationalism from Below, edited by Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo.
New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. 3-34.
Kearney, Michael. 1998. “Transnationalism in California and Mexico at the end of empire.” In
Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, ed. TM Wilson, H Donnan,
117-141. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lugo A. 2000. “Theorizing Border Inspections.” Cultural Dynamics 12(3):353-73
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. 2002. “Globalization as Reworking Borders: Hierarchical integration
and new border theory.” Paper presented at ISA, March, 2002.
Optional:
Mahler, Sarah J. 1998. “Theoretical and Empirical Contributions Toward a Research Agenda for
Transnationalism.” In Transnationalism from Below, edited by Michael Peter Smith and Luis
Eduardo Guarnizo. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. 64-102.
Bhabha, Homi K. “Introduction: narrating the nation.” In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi
K. Bhabha. New York: Routledge. 1-7, 3-22.
HANDED BACK: Project Statements
TOWARDS A NEW CONCEPT OF THE SOCIAL
The Global Sense of Place
April 16
Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press.
Where is the local, where is the site? The production of place and community.
April 23
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. 1997. “Discipline and Practice: The Field as Site, Method,
and Location in Anthropology.” In Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a
Field Science, edited by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson. Berkeley: University of California
Press. 1-46.
Marcus, George E. 1998. “Requirements for ethnographies of late twentieth-century modernity
worldwide,” “Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited
ethnography.” In: Ethnography through Thick and Thin. 57-104.
Brenner N. 1999. “Beyond state-centrism? Space, territoriality, and geographical scale in
globalization studies.” Theory and Society 28:39-78.
Tsing A. 2000. “The Global Situation.” Cultural Anthropology. 15(3): 327-60.
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Gupta A, Ferguson J. 1992. “Beyond ‘culture’: Space, identity, and the politics of difference.”
Cultural Anthropology. 6-23.
Appadurai A. 1995. “The production of locality.” In Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of
Knowledge, ed. R. Fardon, 204-25. London/New York: Routledge.
DUE IN CLASS: Outline
GLOBAL ETHNOGRAPHIES
April 30
Michael Burawoy et al. 2000. Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections and Imaginations in a
Postmodern World. University of California Press.
HANDED BACK: Outlines
May 10
FINAL PAPERS ARE DUE
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