The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith

We met in 1995 as graduate students and quickly fell in love. Philip had just returned from fieldwork in Mexico and was fascinated with the ways that the arrival of large multinational corporations in small rural communities was dramatically changing the lives of the people in those communities. Eve was finishing up her doctoral thesis on the building of the Channel Tunnel and the transnational impact of the European Union on people living in southern England. We could not clearly articulate it at the time, but both of us were doing field research that engaged with the issues and impacts of globalization. Many different global forces were manifesting within nations and across geopolitical regions, and we were both interested in how new political, economic, cultural, and social processes were changing concepts of nationalism, identity, and people’s sense of belonging. We were both beginning to think as interdisciplinary global scholars even though at the time no university had a department of “global studies” and only a few scholars were even talking about globalization.

This book reflects twenty years of conversations between the two of us about what it means to study global processes and how to go about doing such research. Over the decades each of us has been involved in a variety of research projects, many of them not obviously concerned with the “global.” But always our work has circled back to the big questions of how to reconceptualize intellectual work so as to better accommodate new forces and processes not contained within the conceptual frame of the nation-state nor easily managed by national governments and state institutions. In what ways do the emerging impacts of globalization push us to develop new theoretical approaches that transcend disciplinary boundaries, and call for the development of new modes of inquiry, analytical tools, research designs, methodological approaches, and forms of data collection?

Driving many of the discussions between us was an earlier discussion Eve had had with Marshall Sahlins, one of the most eminent anthropologists in the United States. Eve was standing in the foyer of Haskell Hall, the home of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She had just finished her doctoral defense and was leaning against the wall in limp relief. They were discussing the challenges for anthropological research in the coming decades and what it meant to do ethnographic research in an increasingly complex global age. “But, but …” Eve sputtered in protest. “You are making unreasonable demands on students. You are suggesting that in addition to being an anthropologist, we have to be historians and be well versed in law, literature, politics, economics, cultural studies, and so on. You are saying that to study current global issues the researcher has to do it all!” Sahlins looked up at her and smiling in his impish yet commanding way and said, “That’s right and you had better get cracking!”

This book is an attempt to help students in new global studies departments, as well as scholars within established disciplines, to think about what it means to do global research. We believe that engaging with global processes need not be a daunting venture. Hence, in this book we are not suggesting that to do global research one has to be deeply versed in multiple disciplines, each with its own literary canons and theories. Even if that were possible, amassing huge bodies of knowledge is not the same thing as innovatively deploying particular knowledge to develop new kinds of research questions and new modes of inquiry. Moreover, we are very much aware that everyone doing global research will have particular challenges relating to their own project. We don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all approach to research design and methods. We are suggesting, however, that by engaging in the conversations, insights, ideas, and examples laid out in this book, the reader will come away feeling motivated to think creatively, ask new questions, embrace new knowledge, grapple with new methodological approaches, and write new kinds of research relevant for understanding our increasingly complex world.

While writing global studies research may appear daunting at first, it also presents an enormously exciting challenge. Across the humanities and social sciences, scholars are confronting a range of problems and ideas that could not even be articulated thirty years ago—for example, climate change, postnational identities, social media, electronic surveillance, drones, unending civil wars, and new forms of terrorism and violence. Every one of us is being pushed to reexamine our taken-for-granted assumptions about how the world is organized and functions, and reflect upon new forms of global interdependence and interconnection that bring peoples around the world together but also create new moments of conflict and crisis. The early decades of the twenty-first century present a unique moment and need to rethink mainstream scholarship in order to better engage with and understand a wide range of global issues affecting us all in our everyday lives. We see this as an incredibly exciting time within the academy, offering a range of opportunities to embrace new kinds of research and include new perspectives in the production of more inclusive modes of knowledge. Appreciating the global dimensions in even the most locally based research is vital if scholarship in the Euro-American academy is to maintain its relevance to global contexts in the coming decades. Conventional scholars who are comfortable in their established ways of thinking may balk, but innovative scholars who recognize the urgent need to rethink and retool will rise to the occasion and “get cracking.”

Eve Darian-Smith and Philip McCarty, Santa Barbara, California

Acknowledgments

Thanks to our colleagues in the Global Studies Department, University of California Santa Barbara. Special thanks to authors Mark Juergensmeyer, Bishnupriya Ghosh, and Paul Amar whose books feature in Chapter 7. Also special thanks to Sabine Frühstück, Wesley Pue, Todd Sanders, Florence Seow, Katja Siepmann, John Soboslai, Matthew Sparke, and Tim Wedig for reading early drafts of this book. Thanks to Nicholas Buchanan, Ilana Gershon, Isabella Lohr, Matthias Middell, and Margrit Seckelmann for their general support. Eve thanks John Comaroff, Greg Dening, Peter Fitzpatrick, Donna Merwick, and Sally Falk Moore for their mentorship over the years. Philip thanks William Bielby, Denise Bielby, Jon Cruz, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, and John Mohr. Finally, thanks to our editor at UC Press, Reed Malcom; to anonymous reviewers; and to Athena Tan for her excellent editing.

Several parts of this book are based on articles that the authors have published in various journals over the last few years. Most notably, these include “Globalizing Legal History,” in Rechtsgeschichte—Legal History 22 (McCarty 2014b); “Communicating Global Perspectives,” in Global Europe—Basel Papers on Europe in a Global Perspective 105 (McCarty 2014c); “Mismeasuring Humanity: Examining Indicators through a Critical Global Studies Perspective,” in New Global Studies 10 (1) (Darian-Smith 2016); and “Beyond Interdisciplinarity: Developing a Global Transdisciplinary Framework,” in Transcience: A Journal of Global Studies 7 (2) (Darian-Smith

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