Dialectical Anthropology 27: 118, 2003. 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Local Enclosures of Globalization. The Power of Locality

RUEDIGER KORFF
Josef G. Knoll Professor for Development Studies, Hohenheim University, 70593 Stuttgart (Phone: +49-711-4594116/4117; Fax: +49-711-4594248; E-mail: rkorff@unit-hohenheime.de) Abstract. In the discussion of globalization and localization, the main perspectives are either to unveil how global issues are localized, or to analyze local modications resulting form global integration. In contrast, a perspective from the local to the global is proposed to be able to point at local contents of globalization. Such a perspective requires an analysis of how locality is constructed locally. In much of the current discussion local stands for places, indigenous people, villages, cities, quarters within cities, factories, regions, nations or places. Following older research on ethnicity and recent studies of migrant cultures, locality is described as a social construction, which connects space, local knowledge and social organization. Locality is connected to support among those belonging to the locality, interests and the control of resources. Thus competition and potential conict is linked to locality. Therefore, speaking of locality implies speaking of power-differentials. Whether a locality can assume a dominant position vis--vis other localities and dene its discourses as dominant or even as universal depends on its organizational and integrative capacity for the mobilization and application of resources. Though control of resources required by others, the respective local knowledge becomes a necessity for gaining access to these resources. Consequently, global discourses can and often do have a local background. Accordingly, globalization in quite often global dominance from particular local context. Keywords: ethnicity, globalization, locality, local knowledge

Globalization is on the political, economic and social science agenda. However, globalization can not be separated from localization. It has been maintained, that at the core of the globalization debate is a polarity between global and local. The global reality, it would seem, is somehow at odds with a different social reality that is local; and yet we are not dealing with a simple replacement of the former by the latter.1 In a similar vein is has been indicated: The local is encompassed and constituted within the global, which is not to say that it is a mere product of external forces. On the contrary, we have insisted on the articulation between the local and global as central to the generation of specic social realities.2 Quite often the global local distinction resembles other differentiations like modernity tradition, rst world third world, universal particular etc. What all these distinctions have in common is that they only make sense in their reference to each other and thus imply each other. In this regard, globalization carries with it the ambi-

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valences of modernization as well as implicit valuations (developed versus under-developed etc.) and questions related to domination and the validity of knowledge in a different local context. Compared to the older discussion of the modern world system, the globalization debate is much more multi-faceted. While world-system analysis is based on a quite clearly stated theoretical framework,3 there never has been one accepted denition of what actually is globalization and the popularity of the term has even increased its vagueness.4 It is quite common to start with process and ows that transcend national borders. As these processes do not only work on an abstract and virtual level, but also become real through their linkage to specic infrastructures and demands for resources, globalization is linked to space and thus localized in an interaction with other localities.5 The most global discourse on globalization is certainly the economic perspective identifying globalization with the working of free world markets, demanding the opening up of national economies, de-regulation and in general a reduction of state control over national economic resources and international capital ows. This global integration is regarded as the major means to achieve development and modernization. Several studies have shown how modernization implies anxieties of those affected by rapid changes. There is a reason for such an anxiety. In his critique of colonial rule in Burma J.S. Furnivall shows that the opening of Burma to free enterprise without any limitations and regulations led to the disintegration and collapse of society6 that we can still observe today. The protest against economic globalization reects such a fear and makes for surprising bedfellows like politicians, who are afraid to loose their position,7 people who feel negatively affected in their everyday life (unemployment, wage reductions, pollution etc.), intellectuals expressing dire warnings of cultural pollution, alienation and loss of identity as well as religious leaders. In this political realm the linkage between global and local are obvious in terms of power and resistance. This political critique can itself be interpreted as globalization: the defense or promotion of the local is a global phenomenon8 and one can not deny the globality of locality, as locality in this sense is reproduced on a global scale. As an alternative to the global local perspective that is common in most discussions of globalization, a perspective from the local to the global can be developed from anthropology. Such a perspective implies looking at globalization from a local point of view and analyzing how global aspects are put into local frames, but beyond this rather common view, it is possible to indicate how local contents are globalized, on how to nd

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locality within globalization. Furthermore, one can draw attention to those aspects of cultures and people regarded as not having any global relevance and which are simply being ignored.9 As D. Miller points out: Within the social sciences it has become almost anthropology alone that challenges the idea that there is only one model of knowledge that gives authority and legitimizes power.10 A perspective from the local to the global is direly needed at least as an addition to the common perspectives starting with the global and looking at local accommodations to globalization. Although it is repeated like a mantra that globalization is not Americanization, Westernization, or standardization, in competitive processes the winners tend to have a specic local background, or are linked to such a background. Taking the Asia-crisis of the late nineties as example, it fuelled the belief that either it was an attempt by Western big business to regain dominance on East-Asian markets, or that it was used as a welcome opportunity to go on a shopping spree and get Asian enterprises for sell out prices. The global media are another example. Knowledge and information from developing countries are presented as either exotic, or primitive and savage with generally only local relevance.11 Under these conditions, there is some empirical evidence to look at globalization as a new stage of imperialism that concerns anthropological knowledge as well. What has been apparent is that anthropologists have not addressed or responded to the increasing alienation between East and West, North and South, . . . , or how representative are these images of the developing world which are created through the globalization of knowledge and how distinctly different these are from the images that the developing world conceives of knowledge produced from Europe and the United states.12

What is local? Anthropology is less equipped to deal with macro-processes on a world scale, and therefore can hardly challenge the authorized knowledge of economics. Its strength is the analysis of local and spatially bounded patterns of direct interaction. The legacy from the classical monographic studies is to focus on the internal relations within a social and cultural unit. Even more, as G. Schlee claims, some of the established patterns of social anthropology seem to generate units and sub-units thereby neglecting at least partially inter-relations between groups.13 Furthermore, the classical studies were not concerned with how cultures and societies construct boundaries and differences to others or how they create themselves as demarcated units. In the studies of islands, tribes and villages, a territorial boundedness and isolation of cultures and societies was assumed. A village formed a social and

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territorial unit, because it was spatially demarcated and institutions existed, dening the village socially. The village as a social unit was linked and integrated into a wider society through kinship, joint ritual, or language etc. Contacts only took place at the edges and change hardly happened. The borders of cultures indicated by language usage, kinship systems, ritual, dress and other practices coincided with spatial borders.14 During the fties already, this view was strongly criticized as ignoring the role of inter-tribal and interethnic contact for the interpretation of the own culture, as well as of not taking social change into consideration.15 It seems as if, as a legacy from the classical period, it is assumed that everybody knows what local is and thus there is no need for further elaboration.16 This can be taken as one reason why the current literature dealing with local, is not at all explicit about what is meant by it.17 Implicitly local is linked to spaces socially and culturally integrated in specic ways. Local is then the space structured by an organization where a specic (local) knowledge has relevance. In this regard local can stand for places, indigenous people, villages, cities, quarters within cities, factories, regions, nations or places. The problem is that a vague concept of local (basically interaction within a space) is linked to a vague concept of global. The idea of local bears an obvious spatial connotation. Form this angle, global denotes an abstraction from space in terms of ows, ideas, virtual realities and images, while local in contrast refers to real spaces. Without spelling out the understanding of the local, the question of how to link space and society is by-passed or avoided which is, as I will indicate, of relevance.

Local and space From an anthropological point of view, space does not have a dynamic of itself in structuring social relations. It is not space that gives rise to specic cultures, but the other way round: cultures and social relations give meaning to space and construct landscapes. This does not deny, though, that space can, and in fact is, applied as a powerful means of control. Space is produced and created, transformed and experienced within and through social relations.18 One specic form of social space is territoriality. Territories are delimited from each other through attempts to affect, inuence or control people, resources, phenomena and relationships by asserting control over a geographic area.19 Hence control over space allows for control over what this space incorporates and the competition over access to space is a conict over who can shape space and execute control. I regard this as a basic aspect of the discussion of local versus expert knowledge in development projects. Thus,

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one has to turn to the forms of construction of social entities, which occupy a local space. Knowledge plays an important role in the transformation of space. Especially large scale projects like building skyscrapers, airports, highways, cities etc. require specialized expert knowledge and skills that can usually not be substituted with locally available knowledge and skills. Thereby local space is structured and transformed through global knowledge, which is one reason why the large cities look ever more similar: Their skyline is the concretization of global discourses of architects. It is an important question what the impact of these spatial structures is with regard to determining possible local social relations. Space produced through global knowledge often alienates local cultures and communities, who cannot use this space in their everyday life. B. Latour gives an interesting example. There are certainly global networks, but access to them depends on having the required means (material as well as intellectual) to link locally into these networks. Without access to and the knowledge of how to use a computer, a modem and a working telephone plug, one can not make use of the World Wide Web.20

Local and ethnicity As little as space gives rise to cultures, social entities do not emerge from an inner essential dynamic, but out of interactions in which differences and alliances are dened. The local as a social reality is born out of wider processes and interactions between different groups and agents, as indicated for example by research on ethnicity in mainland Southeast Asia. For E. Leach, the Kachin of highland Burma included people who spoke a variety of mutually unintelligible languages and displayed marked contrast in culture. He concluded that the Kachin, like other ethnic groups in the area should be conceived of as social and not as cultural entities. They dene themselves and are dened by others through a structural opposition with regard to access to political power.21 The differences to other groups in the vicinity are part of the denition of the own group. Consequently, the own culture only makes sense as being different from other locally known cultures. The main political power in highland Burma were the Shan and those Kachin dominated by them interpreted their culture in line with Shan political organization as hierarchical and stratied, while the interpretation of those Kachin living further away was egalitarian and in opposition to the Shan political structure. For F. Barth ethnic groups are societal entities that result from a structural differentiation between interacting groups. Group membership is not only a function of a shared common culture, but of ascription by others and identication of the actor himself.22 C. Keyes synthesizes

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these arguments: members of an ethnic group share a common interest in their competition for scarce resources with other groups, and a common cultural identity. What complicates matters is that some ethnic groups allow for people to have multiple ethnic identities. These are used to gain access to resources depending on circumstances. Ethnic identity and belonging to a certain group is a dynamic process depending on the guration of ethnic and other social groups and their interactions.23 When these studies were conducted, the impact of globalization in the area can be taken as minimal, as well as the impact of state governments. The situation was different in those regions formally under colonial control or where the state had a stronger grip on the area. Not only through a policy of divide et impera, but through census categories, the British designed ethnic groups in Malaya. The idea that Chinese are Chinese, Indians are Indian and Malay are Malay was applied in the census. This idea, however, was quite removed from reality. The Baba or Nonja Chinese living in Malacca for centuries, or the Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien or Teichio Chinese did not see themselves as one ethnic group or belonging together.24 In fact, the rich Babas did not at all identify themselves with the migrant in rags coming to Malaya. However, they nally became an ethnic group when rights were attached to those ethnic categories applied in the census, as the colonial administration assumed that the ethnic groups followed different cultures. For the aborigines in Australia B. Kapferer describes a similar process of how ideas and discourses of one group turn into social reality of others. The discourses over identity in Australia as elsewhere challenge and subvert previous conceptions and, most importantly, are vital in the construction and constitution of identify itself. Discourses surrounding identity in Australia concretize what they construct. They create communities in fact whose social and political reality is forged through the imagination and style of the discourse itself.25 If the construction of an ethnic and/or local identity is resulting out of numerous inuences and interactions, globalization can be integrated as one of such inuences, and what we nd are not indigenous authenticities but innumerable shifting local Creoles.26 Research on localities in Southeast Asian cities indicated that urban localities neither resemble administrative districts nor closely knit communities. Locality emerges as a basis for social empowerment to protect local interests. Multiple local relations and interdependencies dened as locality, provide a basis for self-organization and thereby collective action. What makes a locality are local organizations that have the capacity to dene and maintain spatial boundaries. Even more, the denition and protection of these boundaries is a requirement for the reproduction of the organization. Thereby the organization can claim to speak for all people living within these bound-

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aries. Forms of self-organization are, following these ndings, at the core of processes integrating local social entities, maintaining them, and dening spatial borders.27 The old idea of the local as isolated island, village or tribe is certainly out of date. The local, is a point of articulation of diverse cultural, social, economic and political impacts reaching from neighbors via the state to the global level. Combined with forms of self-organization these inuences are applied, accommodated, rejected, redened and used as material in the construction of the local as specic.28 Part of this process is the appropriation and transformation of space as a habitat continuously formed and transformed. Space can be and quite often is a scarce resource and thus an object for competition. Following Keyes argument that members of an ethnic group share a common cultural identity and common interest in their competition for scarce resources with other groups, the territorialization of space through markers indicating to whom it belongs is directly linked to the construction of a local culture. Consequently, the local is limited and bounded in spatial terms as well as in terms of the reach of local knowledge, local organizations and local cultures.

Localized global networks A. Appadurai notes that ethnic groups, sectarian movements, and political formations increasingly operate in ways that transcend territorial borders and identities.29 These movements take place on a world scale, but as well on national and especially regional levels. Migrant labor is not only heading towards the Middle East, North-America and Western Europe, but to Malaysia (migrants from Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Myanmar, Bosnia), Thailand (migrants from Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia), Korea and other places. The modern means of communication and media allow for maintenance of ties to the home place. Thus we nd local identities in which the locality is removed from the current place of living. During the time spent abroad, the far away home changes, as does the memory of it. Increasingly, imagination replaces reality. Accordingly, we nd the strange situation of a virtual local identity, where the local is an image of the mind.30 I do not agree with Appadurai who speaks in this context of de-territorialization. Instead, one has to look at different and may be novel forms of arranging spaces. In the studies dealing with migrant cultures, one hardly ever nds research on migrants from Western Europe or North America moving to Africa or Asia. Some studies exist dealing with itinerant experts, managers and scientists, and even works on tourists.31 One reason is that these groups of people,

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with the exception of the tourist, are usually included in the discussion of cosmopolitan styles, and/or as the agents of globalization and thus seem not to t into the category of migrants. There appears to be a tacit thought style32 that classies migrants from Asia and Africa into categories different from those from Western Europe or North America. Dont these migrants create their own respective images of locality and keep ties to a local, or is their identity in fact cosmopolitan without any need for spatial references and the selection of particular spaces as local? My own research in Malaysia points in a different direction. Those who can afford it, travel home, that is to their families, houses etc. regularly and denitely try to keep the linkages to their friends, colleagues etc. in their hometown. One reason is that after their assignment abroad they have to go back to work and it is crucial to keep up integration into a local social network at the home place.33 Those who settle abroad as small scale entrepreneurs running bars, restaurants, guesthouses, factories etc. tend to create their own localities at the current living place quite similarly to other migrants in similar economic positions.34 Migrant cultures challenge the perspective of local as a real territory. Real space is substituted by images and virtual realities. But nevertheless, migrants create own local cultures abroad too. References to a home culture are integrated into these local cultures, just as references to a past and nostalgia are elements of any local culture. The myth of a far away home culture receives a status similar to founding myths and acts as a stabilizing factor as well as a means for selection of who belongs where. Research on migrant adjustment indicates that new migrants initially contact those localities to which contacts are established already because family members, friends or people from the home place live there. Instead of de-territorialization one can interpret these processes as integration of diverse spaces separated by geographic distance into a socially integrated locality. Among nomads one nds a similar structuring of space through a local culture. Nomad space is not unied, but consists of holy places linked with each other through lines directing movement. Any kind of social life or culture depends one way or another on access to space, simply because people have to live somewhere. The conceptualization and usage of space can provide insights into the social organization and culture of local entities. Social distinctions and life styles are not only concerned with what to eat, how to live and how to spend leisure time, but as well with where to live, where to work etc. The address was not only of high importance in so-called polite society during Victorian times, but is still today an indicator of social and symbolic capital. Just as people can have multiple ethnic identities, multiple local identities are possible. These can be arranged in a manner resembling a Russian doll (Babushka), starting

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with the living place, proceeding to the village or quarter and nally the nation. Another possibility which is, I would expect, more widespread, is the combination of different geographically unconnected spaces, like feeling at home in New York as well as Bangkok, Hong Kong or a village in India, so as to re-territorialize or de-territorialize migrant local cultures.

Construction localities According to P. Dickens, locality means linking the ways in which people interact with one another, with the physical environment and how they articulate their experiences.35 Localities are characterized by social relations and interdependencies among those using a particular space, and having a common understanding of it. They are socially dened and thereby created socio-spatial entities differentiated from other spaces by symbolic markers. Following former research on localities in Southeast Asia, organizations are at the core of localities. They are required for integrating locality socially, for dening boundaries and for maintaining integration as well as boundaries and regulating the crossing of these boundaries. During a life-time, many choices with regard to the living place have to be made: Does one stay in the village or move to the city or even further away to work abroad, move into a new house or hut, the place of the wife or the husband after marriage, what quarter of a city to life in etc. Social relations and of course economic capacity restrain many of these decisions. According to Mary Douglas these decisions are linked to thought styles, what she denes as a communicative genre for a social unit speaking for itself about itself, and so constituting itself.36 Choice implies afrmation and rejection and is thus not free from the constraints of allegiance, loyalties and alignments. The selection of one address is rejection of others and thereby refers to classications of address or places as appropriate or not. Following Douglas, institutions do the classifying and model social interaction.37 In this regard, economic, social and symbolic constrains of choice are similar.38 With the decision the person indicates his/her own position within a social context. It leads to concentration of people with similar tastes and thought styles in specic areas. From this angle, people do not live where they live just by chance, but to express social belonging. This argument can be extended to incorporate further choices linked to places like restaurants, shopping centers, where to send the kids to school, where to spend the holidays etc.39 There are not only clothes we do not want to be seen in, but as well places. Institutionalized thought styles cluster and classify places and link these to communities.

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To be able to live within a community one has to share the common classication. These make a world that is reliably intelligible and predictable enough to live in.40 It requires that a structured local knowledge is appropriated and applied to be able to make the decisions that t. The local knowledge in turn constitutes practices, interpretations and understandings that constitute a local culture, which shapes experiences. Much anthropological work has been conducted to analyze and document local knowledge.41 One nding was that local knowledge is basically practice and that the search for generalization and synthesis of explanation remains limited. This has drawn some critique. Anthropologists have always been happy to see local people as producers of local knowledge, . . . but there was very little question of such knowledge being valorized outside the local domain. . . . In other words, local people produce local theories and such theories are, almost by denition, not comparative ones. The implicit assumption was therefore that the theories of non-Western peoples have no scope outside their context.42 Douglas argument about forgotten thought provides some explanation. When a new private thought comes into being, it may have a chance to escape being embedded in a social institution. It will then likely pay for its originality in being forgotten.43 We cannot, or only hardly understand ideas from other and foreign thought styles and thus, nd it difcult to see into what context they t. Because one neither understands it nor nds any use for it, it is simply ignored. Local knowledge, so far, has received valorization in the context of local development projects, thereby strengthening exactly the point Moore takes for her critique. Based on the above discussion, three dimensions form locality: Space, thought styles (or local knowledge) and organization. All three are intricately interwoven and refer to each other. Organizations form a core able to dene space as belonging to a certain community. This classication is connected to thought styles and institutions. Thought styles and institutions concern the pattern and forms of organization, as well as the valorization of knowledge. Organization and knowledge are applied to create, produce and transform space into social space, appropriated by a community, incorporating specic symbolism related to a thought style. Organization and knowledge become local through dening and creating space as particular and delimited. Turning to localities following this perspective, locality is not homogenous but different forms and sizes are possible. They can be strictly demarcated or more open. The more a locality is demarcated, the more exclusive it tends to be. An example is luxurious housing estates where special passports are required for entry or those parts of a city where nobody dares to go. Mostly, the regulation of access works through subtle means of control and identication. A person can belong to several localities. Multiple local identities in this

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sense can indicate that either a person feels at home at different places within different communities, or that the respective identities are compatible with each other. With regard to ethnic identities of north-eastern Thai peasants, Keyes shows that depending on the circumstances the villagers can identify with Lao, Thai or Isan. In contrast, the Karen do not have such a choice. If they dene themselves as Thai they cease to be Karen. Local identity differs from ethnic identity because a specic locality can be integrated into a locality on a larger scale.44 Using the Northeastern Thai peasant as example, he probably identies with a specic village or region. Isan, in fact is the whole northeastern region of Thailand and Thai refers of course to the whole country. Localities do not have to be fully integrated territories. Especially in larger localities spaces exist that do not belong to and form part of the locality. Areas with mixed ethnic groups like North Eastern Africa, Northern Thailand and Highland Burma can be cited as example. The Thai and Shan are usually dominant and dene the whole area as belonging to them. However, they usually live in the fertile lowland valley regions, while Karen, Kachin, Lisu, Lue, Hmong etc. occupy the mountain slopes and hills. Finally, locality does not have to be a unied space but can consist of different places connected by lines of communication through which information, and people are owing. I regard integrated migrant communities as well as trader communities living in different places as examples.45 Localities might overlap and co-exist within the same space. Within inner city areas one often nds often a co-existence between high paid managers and professionals and low paid maids, servants, saleswomen etc. The better off prefer living in the inner city because cheap services are available, and the inner city is a fashionable address. The low paid, often migrant workers, live there because they want to stay close to their places of work. Both groups are interdependent: The attraction of the inner city derives for one group from the availability of cheap labor and, for the other from the availability of employment. A special case are nation-states. They are organized and denitely occupy a clearly demarcated territory. Even more, access to this territory is highly regulated. Finally, they have an afnity to community, in the sense of the nation as imagined community.46 M.A. Bamyeh shows that the strength of the nation-state depends on its ability to organize itself culturally, thus linking culture to a territory under control of the state. The lesson from Europe, which the rest of the world began to digest fully with the colonial period, was that one of the essential prerequisites for prevailing over the other was neither richness nor formal governance by themselves, but superior cultural organization capacity, whereby everything within the domain of a country

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is made serviceable to the designs of the state thorough its appropriation as national endowment.47 Everybody identies or is identied with a locality.48 At the least, most have an identity card stating membership of a territorial state. To be identied and identify with locality does not require romantic dreams about home mother- or fatherland. Social interaction is always spatially bound. Selections and classications of interaction space linkages are constantly made and places perceived as favorite, less favored and avoided. These classications are internalized through routine and taken for granted. In other words, an accommodation takes place. Localities in this broad sense are neither homogenous nor egalitarian or harmonious communities.49 Just like any other social entity they are stratied, hierarchical and conictual. Although the internal social integration provides support in terms of access to resources,50 this access is not at all equally distributed among those belonging to a locality. Those who are closest to and involved in organization tend to exert dominance, valorize and control local knowledge. The locality is not an independent and even less an autonomous unit, but at a crossroad of diverse cultural, social, economic and political interventions. These are interpreted and internalized as self-descriptions and play an often crucial but ambivalent role in conicts within the locality by providing access to strategic resources. A person selected by the administration as slum leader or village head can use the resulting links to the administration for improving his position. This might allow for an improved internal control and organizational capacity. It might, however, be detrimental for organizing.51

Locality and control of resources Applying Keyes argument that ethnic identity is linked to the competition over scarce resources to locality, the relations between localities and a surrounding are potentially conictual. Due to the spatial dimension of locality, conicts are unavoidable when land is scarce, or access to a certain space is required as pre-condition for having access to other resources. Looking at some of these locational/local conicts like the building of hydrodams, mines, transmigration projects in Indonesia, slum eviction etc. the outcome is not at all pre-dened. Sometimes the affected local groups are able to set up a resistance and succeed even against powerful multi-national enterprises or states. Two main variables inuence the outcome of the conict: 1. the ability and efciency to organize on a local scale, and 2. the ability to globalize the local issue. For success, the multi-national enterprise has to set up a local organization, dealing with those that organize resistance. On

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this local level, local groups can have an advantage. Thus locational conicts require that global actors localize, because there it is decided who wins and who loses, and can appropriate the space. To globalize the issue is an important strategy for a local group to receive support. The multi-national enterprise, to follow this example, has advantages on the global scale, but might be faced with other global actors like NGO, who depend on such issue for their self-description and for recognition from others. Locational conicts like ooding a valley, dening regions as natural reserve, park or forest reserve etc. tend to be strongest and the outcome most open, because the existence of locality depends on it. The newly dened land use transforms space in a specic, often irreversible way, allowing no other usage, especially not living on it. Most challenges of locality are less visible and nal. Contagious with the dimensions of locality, the impact of political, economic and social processes on a local, national and global level concern the denition and control over space, organizational capacity for integration, and thought styles through he validity/valorization of knowledge. How far does locality play a role for the cosmopolitan? I would argue that the itinerant manager, development expert, professional etc. develops and uses locality in the form of a cluster of separated but similar places. International hotel chains provide a good picture of such clusters of places. Although in their architecture attempts for localization are made, the interior design of the rooms is standardized. The guests of these hotels are as standardized as the rooms. Adding the usual high-class restaurants and bars as well as ofces in skyscrapers built by trans-national architects to the list, we have a surprisingly homogeneous locality. The organization of space for the long-term expatriate is quite similar with apartments, condominium or a house located in a usually expensive high-class area, where most of the other expatriates reside. To this list one can add the international club, international school, etc. regardless in which city one lives. All these create places in different spaces, but with surprisingly similar forms and patterns of social interaction that form a globally connected locality. As everybody is identied and identies with locality, and because the integration into locality implies forms of support for following interests, those who can draw on well organized, powerful localities have advantages in the competition with others.52 Especially if the locality executes control over resources desired and, even more so, needed by others, it is possible to require others to follow the classication used within that locality. In fact, access to these resources considerably depends on the ability to adapt like speaking the same language, using the cultural codes, accepting the power structure and accepting the local knowledge of that locality.53 As long as a locality controls resources and can maintain its grip over them, this can be applied

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for executing dominance in the sense of valorizing and validating knowledge alongside classications established within the locality. Thereby local knowledge spreads far beyond the realm of the locality where it emerged. Although considerable resources can be monopolized by one locality, especially on a global scale, several different localities have relevance beyond their respective spaces. Global knowledge could, following the above perspective, then reect a global creolization of different local knowledge. This perspective would be more in line with the interpretation of globalization as diversity of discourses. However, it should be claried empirically, from which locality different aspects of global knowledge derive from, and what are the mechanisms of its globalization. Certainly, the spread of modern science for example, is linked to colonialism.

Globalizing local knowledge In the current debate on globalization, one problem is the juxtaposition of a vague concept of global to an open concept of local. Global appears as allencompassing, abstract, general, virtual, modern, de-territorialized etc., while local is the concrete, the realm of direct interaction, tradition etc. Synthetic terms like Glocalization are of little help in clarifying what is local and what global. Global as well as local have obvious spatial connotations. As space has no meaning outside of its social denition and construction, local implies a relationship between space and social relations, local cultures and local knowledge. The question is how is local space bounded? Where are the borders, and how far stretches the reach of a local culture and local knowledge? This question is, I think, of high importance, because it concerns relations between different local cultures and the question whether global actually does have a local background. With the concept of locality an attempt is made to clarify some aspects of the local. If locality is not taken per se as linked to a unied space, but can have the form of clusters of places, several aspects often perceived as belonging to the global, like migrant communities, cosmopolitan life styles, etc. could be re-constructed as basically local. The difference to other localities is only that they consist of different, but nevertheless linked places spread over the globe. This raises the question in how far expert-knowledge, discourses of universality (even if these refer to relativism!) etc. can be re-constructed as local knowledge? Localities are not isolated from each other. If there is one feature of the global age that can denitely not be doubted, it is the global networks of communication and media. Thus, between localities which used to be far apart, now regular interactions take place. Because locality is connected

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to support, interests and control of resources, we have a competition and potential conict. Whether a locality can assume a dominant position and dene dominant discourses depends on its organizational and integrative capacity for the mobilization and application of resources. Through control of resources required by others the respective local knowledge becomes a necessity for gaining access to these resources. Consequently, global discourses can have a local background, and globalization can be interpreted accordingly as global dominance from particular local contexts. Although regularly denied, the view of globalization as Westernization and even more so Americanization is wide spread, and in fact, empirical evidence can easily be found. If the discussion of globalization is to avoid such a perception, much more attention has to be drawn to the analysis of what is global and what is a generalization of local specics based on power differentials on an international scale. As much as it is important to see how globalization affects the local, and how much of what is perceived as local is actually global, the other perspective, what is local in the global, is as crucial.

Notes
The article is inuenced by discussions at the National University of Malaysia (UKM) and

is connected to the current work of the research group Social Networks and Development in the Uplands Program, funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG). 1 P. Beyer, Globalizing Systems, Global Cultural Models and Religion(s), International Sociology 13(1) (1998): 7994, 81. 2 K. Ekkholm-Friedmann and J. Friedmann, Global Complexity and the Simplicity of Everyday Life, in: Daniel Miller (ed.), Worlds Apart. Modernity through the Prism of the Local (London/New York: Routledge, 1995), 134168, 134. 3 For current developments of world system theory see T.D. Hall (ed.), A WorldSystems Reader. New Perspectives on Gender, Urbanism, Indigenous Peoples, and Ecology (Lanham/Boulder/New York/Oxford: Rowman, Littleeld, 2000). 4 In a polemic way one might say that globalization is an amalgam of mass-consumer- and cultural industries, the internet, nancial ows and capital markets, migration, tourism, multipolarity in international politics etc., to cite just some titles and studies. 5 See: S. Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); S. Sassen, Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Pine Forge Press, 1994); and M. Castells and P. Hall, Technopoles of the World. The Making of the 21. Century Industrial Complexes (London/New York: Routledge, 1994). 6 J.S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice. A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (Cambridge, 1948). 7 R.L.M. Lee, Modernization, Postmodernism and the Third World, Current Sociology 42 (2). 8 R. Robertson, Habib Haquekhondker, Discourses of Globalization, in: International Sociology 13(1) (1995): 2540, 30. 9 Many local processes only receive temporary and often biased global attention, if somehow local issues are touched upon like when German tourists are kidnapped in the Zulu Sea, or the

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Al Quaida network has been sighted somewhere. For the time the tourists are kept, or terrorists are seen, the region becomes a relevant place in the global medial or a globalized locality. It will disappear in oblivion though afterwards. 10 D. Miller, Introduction: Anthropology, Modernity and Consumption, in: Daniel Miller (ed.), Worlds Apart, 122, 20. 11 Were it not that real people are involved, much of the global news resembles the pattern of soap operas. Asia tends to satisfy the demand for exotic places, while Africa is taken to indicate the superiority in terms of culture and civilization of the developed world. Islam has a specic position as a dangerous threat. 12 Wazir Jahan Karim, Anthropology without Tears: How a Local sees the Local and the Global, in: Henrietta L. Moore (ed.), The Future of Anthropological Knowledge (London/New York: Routledge, 1996), 135. 13 G. Schlee, Identities on the Move. Clanship and Pastoralism in Northern Kenya (New York: Manchester University Press, 1989), 1. 14 This assumption is at the base for drawing atlases of The Cultures of the World. 15 See: E. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma. A Study of Kachin Social Structure (Boston: Beacon, 1964); A. Kuper, Anthropology, Anthropologists. The Modern British School (London, New York: Routledge, 1996); J. Urry, Before Social Anthropology. Essays on the History of British Anthropology (Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993). 16 N. Long for example, uses localization to emphasize the local embeddedness of agrarian development. That is, we aim to examine the complex ways in which local forms of knowledge and organization are constantly being reworked in interaction with changing circumstances. N. Long, Globalization and Localization: New Challenges to Rural Research, in: Henrietta L. Moore (ed.), The Future of Anthropological Knowledge, ibid.: 50. The question is, though, how far is the spatial reach of the local knowledge? The development expert certainly takes for granted that his knowledge has a universal validity. Local knowledge certainly is limited, but so what? Is it valid only for the eld, the village, the cluster of villages etc.? 17 In the general denition of local by the Collins dictionary, local is the characteristic of a particular area and/or concerned with or relating to a particular point or place in space. 18 See: M. Foucault, Questions on Geography, in: C. Gordon (ed.), Power, Knowledge: Selected Interviews on Other Writings 19721977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980); M. Foucault, Of Other Spaces, Diacrytics 16(2) (1986): 227; E.W. Sonja, Postmodern Geographies. The Reassertation of Space in Critical Social Theory (London/New York: Verso, 1989), and the classical work of H. Lefebvre, La production de lespace (Paris Editions Gallimard, 1974). 19 R.D. Sack, Human Territoriality. Its Theory and History (Cambridge/London/New York/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 20 B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press, 1993). 21 E. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma. See in this context as well the study of G. Condominas, From Lawa to Mon, from Saa to Thai. Historical and Anthropological Aspects of Southeast Asian Social Spaces (Occasional Paper of the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacic Studies, Australian National University, 1990) on the relationship between the Dai and other groups in upland Northern Vietnam and Laos. 22 F. Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969). 23 C. Keyes, Isan: Regionalism in Northeastern Thailand (Southeast Asia Program, Ithaca: Cornell University, 1967). 24 S. Seagrave, Lords of the Rim (London: Corgi, 1997). 25 B. Kapferer, Bureaucratic erasure: Identity, Resistance and Violence Aborigines and a Discourse of Autonomy in a North Queensland Town, in: Daniel Miller (ed.), Worlds Apart, ibid.: 6990; M.A. Muqtedar Khan, Constructing Identity in Glocal Politics, in:

LOCAL ENCLOSURES OF GLOBALIZATION

17

The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 15(3) (1988) points at similar processes with regard to Islam and globalization. 26 U. Hannerz, Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures, in: A.D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World System (London: Macmillan, 1991). 27 E. Berner and R. Korff, Globalization and Local Resistance: The Creation of Localities in Manila and Bangkok, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 19(2); R. Korff, Global and Local Spheres. The Diversity of Southeast Asian Urbanism, Sojourn 11(2) (1996). 28 K. Ekkholm-Friedman and J. Friedman, Global Complexity (ibid.: 134) provide an interesting example: The Natives . . . are not what they used to be, and there is a tendency to think of them as Baudrillardian simulacra, hybrids, modern, toying with the ideas of their identities. But this is indeed the self-identity of the cosmopolitan culture critique, and not those whom he observes. Finding native African clothes with made in Holland printed on some label is not the globalization of culture, because the global circulation of products is not equivalent to the globalization of meaning. 29 A. Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, Theory, Culture and Society 7 (1990): 295310; A. Appadrai, The Production of Locality, in: R. Fardon (ed.), Counterworks. Managing the Diversity of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1995), 204225. 30 Chua Beng Huat, Imaginierte R aume und Kampung-Nostalgie, in: M. Kieserling (ed.), Singapur. Metropole im Wandel (Franfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000) provides an example that the creation of local as an image of the mind can as well arise out of nostalgia in his discussion of Kampung in Singapore. Images of locality emerge when the local is removed from the present time and/or space. 31 See: J. Urry, The Tourist Gaze. Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990) and D. MacCannel, The Tourist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 32 M. Douglas, Thought Styles (London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage, 1996). 33 H. Stengel, Expatriates in Singapur, in: M. Kieserling (ed.), Singapur, Metropole im Wandel, ibid.: 3065. 34 An excellent example of creating a locality in an alien context is provided by Orwell in his book Burmese Days. The center of the colonial British locality in the far away place of northern Burma was the club and the accompanying tennis court and lawn. 35 P. Dickens, Urban Sociology: Society, Locality and Human Nature (New York, London/Toronto/Singapore: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 3. 36 M. Douglas, Thought Styles, ibid.: xii. 37 M. Douglas, How Institutions Think? (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986). 38 This might sound strange in an environment where access to housing is expensive and regulated mainly through the market. However, it is as impossible for a poor person to live in a penthouse of a condominium, as it would be for a married Manaus women to live in the village of her parents. A Kuala Lumpur Chinese or Indian would not move into the suburb of Bangi, even though decent, cheap and convenient accommodation is available there, because of rather strict Islamic Malay living in this place. 39 The decision where to spend the holidays or which restaurant to visit is concerned on one hand whom one expects to see and on the other hand where one wants to be seen. Furthermore, it is used to impress others. Of course these decisions are not only constrained by alliances, loyalties and interests but to a considerable degree by the purchasing power. 40 M. Douglas, Thought Styles, ibid.: 58. 41 M. Hobart (ed.), An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance (London/New York: Routledge, 1993).

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42 H.L. Moore, The Changing Nature of Anthropological Knowledge: An Introduction, in:

Henrietta L. Moore (ed.), The Future of Anthropological Knowledge, ibid.: 12.

43 M. Douglas, Thought Styles, ibid.: xiv. 44 C. Keyes, Ethnic Identity and Loyalty of Villagers in Northeastern Thailand, in: Asian

Survey 6(7) (1966): 362369.

45 In this context integration does not only relate to the integration of a locality at one place,

but to the integration of different localities by the migrant community.

46 B.R.O Andersen, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nation-

alism (London: Verso, 1985). 47 Mohamad, A. Bamyeh, Transnationalism, in: Current Sociology 41(3) (1993), 14. 48 In Malaysia I am identied as German, European and mostly as Westerner. With these identications it is presupposed that I do not have a local knowledge, and accordingly, I am asked to participate in talks on Germany and Europe. 49 D. Clark, The Concept of Community: A Re-examination, in: Sociological Review 21 (1973): 397216; S. Duncan and M. Savage, Space, Scale and Locality, in: Antipode 21 (1989): 179206. 50 Here welfare states can be taken as example. They provide their citizen with support in case of need like social welfare, protection and even facilitate trans-national movements through the embassies. 51 L. Jellinek, The Wheel of Fortune: The History of a Poor Community in Jakarta (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991). 52 The Teichio Chinese trade/smuggling networks are an example. They form a wellintegrated locality in form of clustered places spreading over much of Southeast Asia and support each other in case of need. This facilitates transactions crossing long distances tremendously. 53 In some regards anthropological eld work ts that situation. The anthropologist depends on resources (data) from the locality she is studying. To gain access to these data and even more so, to understand them, it is required to speak the language and adapt at least to some customs. To challenge the power and authority structure, to criticize cultural practices etc. is usually not part of the eld work.