Steve Dawe and Romera M. Doval:

Compare the way "context" is used in three of the texts on the course reading list. Explore the similarities and differences between the three perspectives, and suggest ways in which they might complement and/or constrain each other. You may write the paper in any form you like, but you should take as you point of departure an empirical event (anything from a chance encounter on the street to a major political event).

The chosen texts, used in this essay, all share a context of globalization although they approach it from the differing angles of locality, knowledge and culture. When attempting to find an appropriate empirical event that could be considered truly global, we decided to indulge on a common fantasy and take a hypothetical final between England and Spain in this summer's FIFA World Cup 2002 in Japan and Korea as our point of departure. An accumulated audience of about 42 billion people are expected to watch some of the 2002 FIFA World Cup on television and some 400,000 international visitors are expected to go to Korea alone. There is no bigger sporting, social, political, cultural and economic event. As such it seems appropriate to use it as our example of globalization.

This essay will first examine Appadurai's ideas relating to locality, neighbourhood and context. We will show how the expansion of contexts outside of a locality can lead to a trans-local context, a process that can continue indefinitely to the point that there is only the largest possible context, the context of globalization. We will then look at his idea of the global production of locality and explore the similarities between this and the universalization of knowledge that Vitebsky questions. We will proceed to examine the globalization of culture suggested in Sahlins' questioning of the acquisition of tradition and question the ability of a culture to resist its colonization. We hope to relate these texts back to our chosen example of the World Cup final where we feel it may offer us a good example of the processes in question.

For Appadurai "locality [is] primarily relational and contextual rather than scalar or spatial." He contrasts this with his use of "neighbourhood to refer to the actually existing social forms in which locality, as a dimension or value, is variably realized." (Appadurai 1995:204) He sees the production of 'neighbourhood' as contextual as it is always created in opposition to the 'other'. However neighbourhoods themselves "both are contexts and at the same time require and produce contexts." (Appadurai 1995:209) This means that the sight of a neighbourhood contains an increasingly complex network of contextualization. However when a context goes outside of the boundaries of a neighbourhood and is shared with another neighbourhood it becomes 'trans-local'. As this process continues it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the contexts of different neighbourhoods until it becomes possible to view everything from the largest possible context, that of globalization.

This means that the "task of producing locality (as a structure of feeling, a property of social life and an ideology of situated community) is increasingly a struggle." (Appadurai 1995:213) One of the reasons that this has become a struggle is because of the ever-increasing power of larger power authorities such as nation-states. These authorities have bigger and much more powerful contexts that impose their contextualization upon these local contexts.

Another reason for the increasing difficulty in the construction of locality is that of human movement. "It is now widely conceded that human motion is definitive of social life more often than it is exceptional in our contemporary world." (Appadurai 1995:214) This motion can take many forms be it in "the lure of economic opportunity, … permanently mobile groups of specialized workers, … movement away from drought and famine, … movement provided by leisure industries, …[and state sponsored] forced migration." (Appadurai 1995:216) This last category is both the darkest and the most confused "conditions of uncertainty, poverty, displacement and despair under which locality can be produced." (Appadurai 1995:217)

The other major factor affecting the production of locality today is the increasingly dominant area of mass electronic media, whether in the form of television, e-mail or Internet. Again the latter of these is perhaps the most important as we are now faced with a situation where a virtual neighbourhood can exist without the need for a definitive space in which it exists.

Appadurai gives us a good example of the changing contextual relationships as a result of impact of globalization on the production of locality. We can use his ideas of the changing contextualization in our example of the 2002 World Cup. Appadurai would perhaps suggest that although the true roots of football are in the support of a local team, in the global context of a World Cup people put aside their locality (in the form of support for their local team) in order to think globally. Also in the past a team from a certain place (e.g. Madrid or Manchester) would be supported by and all its players would be from that place, allowing the people a very definite sense of locality. However, with globalization of football and the introduction of mass media into the game we have seen both players and fans from all over the world, construct a new global locality for a team from a specific location.

We now turn our attention to Vitebsky's discussion of death in order to see how this can affect our understanding of knowledge. He shares a similar idea of context to Appadurai especially with his views on the globalization of knowledge. Vitebsky examines how people react to death within contexts of different knowledges. He chooses this slightly morbid subject, as it is a question to which "it is perhaps hardest of all to feel absolute certainty." (Vitebsky 1993:100)

Vitebsky compares two approaches to death that are very different in their ideology, but share certain functional aspects. These are the Freudian psychoanalytical approach and the Sora's communication with the dead through a shaman spirit medium. He uses these approaches to death in order to examine the global interpretation of knowledge and ignorance.

He defines knowledge as "a collective term for thoughts about the world that gives to their thinkers the conviction of commanding that area of experience to which those thoughts refer." (Vitebsky 1993:104) However he suggests that knowledge is not a static phenomena but is one that is capable of assimilating contradictions to it.

"If we choose to interpret these as alternative systems of knowledge, then despite their relative strengths, none of these knowledges is seen to render the others ignorant. Each 'is appropriate to' its own knowers and users. It is profoundly local" The Sora system of knowledge does not attempt to impose itself on other knowers, but instead "local knowledge is often total by the very fact that it is local." (Vitebsky 1993:106) That is to say that for the Sora their knowledge explains their universe without trying to explain the universe of those outside of it. However when "a knowledge is exported beyond the limits of this area, it can survive and be sustained only by some sort of claim to universality." (Vitebsky 1993:100)

Where Vitebsky's idea of globalization appears similar to Appadurai's is in western knowledge's claim of universality. In this way of thinking knowledges other than those that conform to a certain way of thinking, are dismissed as 'ignorance'. However he also suggests that "universalist knowledge is seen to be alienated precisely because it applies to everywhere and nowhere, everybody and nobody […] A knowledge which is timeless and spaceless is also useless." (Vitebsky 1993:109)

"If one is concerned more with technique than with context, then the highly contextualized, technically local methods of shamanism (or subsistence cultivation) may seem ignorant; if one respects context then the de-contextualized technical universal methods seem effective, but crass and thus just as ignorant in their own way. There is no growth of ignorance, only the possible appearance of ignorance from certain viewpoints looking over the others, all of them constantly shifting their positions in the encounters of history and society." (Vitebsky 1993:113)

If we again relate this to our World Cup example then Vitebsky might suggest that people would emulate the strategies of the victorious team in the World Cup. However this does not mean that this is the only, or indeed correct way to play football, but merely a successful system of knowledge about the game. Although there are many different strategies to play football, they all have to play within the basic rules. In a similar way there are many different strategies of dealing with death, but all of them relate to the same basic question, "what happens to people when they die?" (Vitebsky 1993:101)

Although Sahlins is also writing about globalization, he takes a different approach to the two previously mentioned authors. For Sahlins "the very ways societies change have their own authenticity, so that global modernity is often reproduced as local diversity." (Sahlins 1994:377) In other words, globalization may provide us with a universal context but this will in turn be contextualized by each culture in a unique way.

In relation to context, Appadurai is suggesting that we can no longer view locality in its own context but we must view in within the largest possible context, that of globalization. However Sahlins is suggesting that to properly examine globalization we have to view it in the context of locality. "To put it in Volosinov's semantics, the capitalist forms in these alien contexts acquire novel local accents." (Sahlins 1994:385)

To provide an example of what Sahlins means within our World Cup example we would suggest that football, as we know it, was invented by the English and exported to Latin America by the Spanish. The football tradition that exists today in Latin America may have begun in this way but each country has adopted it as theirs and given its own style and place within society. Although it is a far cry from the World Cup 2002, a group of children kicking a can in the streets of Rio de Janeiro still constitutes a game of football.

"If all of this makes any sense, if the world is becoming a Culture of cultures, then what needs to be studied ethnographically is the indigenization of modernity-through time and in all its dialectical ups and downs, from the earliest develop-man to the latest invention of tradition. Western capitalism is planetary in its scope, but it is not a universal logic of cultural change. In any event, we have been ourselves too dominated, histiographically and ethnographically, by its imperial claims. The agenda now is how it is working out in other cultural manifolds." (Sahlins 1994:390)

It is difficult to draw conclusions from a starting point such as this. What is clear, though, is that the context of globalization does in fact not lie at either Appadurai's idea of a universal locality or in Sahlins' indigenization of modernity but somewhere within the transition between these two polarities.

Bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun (1995): "The production of locality", in Richard Fardon (ed.): Counterworks, Managing the diversity of Knowledge, p.204-223, London & New York: Routledge.

Sahlins, Marshall (1994): "Goodbye to Tristes Tropes: ethnography in the Context of Modern World History", inn Robert Borowsky (ed.): Assessing Cultural Anthropology, p.377-395, New York: McGraw hill.

Vitebsky, Piers (1993): "Is Death the same everywhere? Contexts of Knowing and Doubting", in Mark Hobart(ed.): An Anthropological Critique of Development. The Growth of Ignorance, p.100-114, London: Routledge.