Workshop at the Biannual Conference of the German Association of Social Anthropologists

The global economy frames the circulation of goods, values and norms. Social anthropology has a wide and diverse array of notions of the global to offer. Debates on theoretical as well as empirical approaches revolve around “the global” as both a unit of analysis and as a category relevant to actors. With this panel, we invite speakers to refer to some of the key concepts within recent debates on economic globalisation: dispossession, accumulation, and the social distress these practices cause.

Approaches to globalisation within economic anthropology may be grouped into those focussing on the worldwide organisation of production or on the worldwide spread of consumption. The former identify the global division of labour (e.g. flexible accumulation, post-fordism) and its local repercussions in regimes of production (Nash 1979, Ong 1987, etc.) as the unit of analysis. The second highlights mass consumption’s global spread and local ways of appropriation by making sense of commodities in cultural terms (Miller 1994, Douglas 1996, etc.). Thus, the latter strand of research envisages the need for research on active appropriation in consumption, whereas the other envisages reactive ways of dealing with change in production.
“Neoliberalism” is prominent in recent anthropological theory building.

According to David Harvey (1989, 2005), “accumulation by dispossession” marks the end of fordism and the beginning of neoliberalism and is grounded in flexible accumulation, privatisation and the financialisation of markets. By arguing from a more global perspective, anthropology has the potential to show that it is difficult to speak of a post-fordist or post-developmental era (Nash 1995). 
We encourage paper givers to engage the above outlined arenas of production and consumption and the unequal distribution and differing notions of power within the global economy from ethnographic as well as theoretical perspectives. Questions may be:

How do we analyse the different developmental agendas of global institutions, regional blocks, nation-states or local governments and the experiences they bring about within the respective units of analysis (local or global)?

And how particularly do these developments shape everyday experiences? How do farmers, factory or service sector workers form an understanding of the sometimes very rapid changes to which their economic strategies are subjected?

How do concepts like neo-liberalism, post-fordism but also an even more blurry term like globalisation travel across different locations and what shapes do they take in periods of rapid economic change (be they for the good or the bad)?

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http://tagung2009.dgv-net.de/home.html