Thursday, January 21, 2010

Critique to flows

Something I 'm deleating, from a papaer i'm finding very hard to rewrite.

When studies of transnationalism and globalization emerged, the initial and necessary critique was over the perspective that regarded cultures as confined within clear spatial limits. New studies on diasporas (Clifford 1997), urban ethnoscapes (Appadurai 1996), strategic uses of citizenship (Ong 1999), creative expatriates as “neo nomads” (D’Andrea 2006), appear as examples that have celebrated movement and deterritorialization. The studies show how movement generates the possibility for new encounters and allows cultural productions beyond locality
If other authors have also stressed the role of locality as a counterforce to transnational capitalism (Turner 1991), a critique to this position argues that local social movements are effective in controlling places, but relatively powerless in regards to challenging capitalist control over global spaces (Harvey 1996).
In the anthropology of migration it has been argued that a deep transformation of the nation state’s power is taking place: nationality is being challenged by the simultaneous participation of some people in multiple nation-states, national territories tend to be only temporary emplacements, and state control is always being exceeded by the diversity and heterogeneity of people moving in and out of their boundaries (Inda and Rosaldo 2002).
These lines of study offer important insight to new phenomena, call for an incorporation of movement to our studies, and prove that culture, group and place are not undetachable. Evelyn Peters proposes to study urban indigeneities as a type of transnational identity, since these people change their social context, government jurisdictions, and social interactions as much as transnational migrants (Peters 2003).However, a common critique made to studies of transnationalism and globalization has been that state power, class divisions, gender inequalities are not easily erased by the accelerating flows of late capitalism.To this, I would add the tendency of such studies to abstract the trips in themselves and consider as objects of analysis only the dynamics of the points of departure and arrival. Some works support this critique. Massey (1995) has argued that the acceleration and connectivity of some actors is in direct relation to the slowing down and spatial isolation of other actors. Urry (2005) has called to focus on the material infrastructure that makes those apparently unplaced movements happen.
I agree Gidwani’s and Sivarakrishanan’s (2003)idea that restricting the analysis of mobility only to transnational or continental flows creates a one-dimensional perspective that blinds us to how multiple social subjects transform their conception, inhabitation and perception of spaces by the act of moving.

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