Fragmented Globality
This is a comment page for “A Fragmented Globality” (47-78) in Trouillot’s Global Transformations, read together with Welsch & Vivanco, chapter 5, “Globalization and Culture” (80-100) for the Hartwick Cultural Anthropology 2016 course.
We pondered a few things:
- Tried to use these readings, together with the film Advertising Missionaries to address the question of “What, if anything, is truly new about our times?” (Trouillot 2003:47).
- To think about the “truly new,” reviewed what Trouillot has said is not new about our times, the global flows that began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
- Compared Welsch & Vivanco p.82 & p.88 to Welsch & Vivanco:3-4. It’s particularly interesting that although they clearly know about and draw upon Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History, it does not seem to adjust their treatment of the origins of anthropology.
- “Prompted by global media, more human beings than ever before share similar lists of the products they need to consume and the objects they need to possess in order to achieve individual satisfaction. In that sense we are truly witnessing for the first time, especially among the youth, a global production of desire” (Trouillot:60).
- How does Advertising Missionaries shape the list of products? What’s on your list? Is it then true that we are witnessing a global production of desire?
I’ve posted previously about these issues as Advertising Missionaries, Fragmented Globality: Irony, Paradox, Uncertainty.