Noer Fauzi Rachman
A book review submitted to Prof. Kate O'Neill in a course ESPM 259 "International Environmental Politics and Movements", Spring 2006, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM), University of California at Berkeley. The author thanks Prof. Kate O’Neill for giving feedback on the draft version of this paper. The author also thanks Ann Hawkins for criticism on global ethnography and consulting on the English language of the final version of the paper.
- Published by : Princeton University Press
Friction, noun.
1 [U, plural] disagreement or angry feelings between people:
• Pay is a continuing source of friction with the workers.
• Creative differences led to friction within the band.
2 [U] the rubbing of one surface against another:
• Check your rope frequently, as friction against the rock can wear it down.
3 [U] TECHNICAL; the natural force that prevents one surface from sliding easily over another surface:
• Heat can be produced by chemical reactions or friction
Introduction
Ethnography is that field of anthropological research based on direct observation of and reporting on a people’s way of life. It is the basic methodology employed by cultural and social anthropologists and consists of two stages: field work and reportage. Field work is a term used for the process of observing and recording data; and reportage is the production of written description and analysis of the subject under study.
Historically, ethnography concerned itself principally with recording of the lives and habits of people from societies not of the observer’s own. In an entry on “Ethnography” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences,” M. H. Agar (2001:4857) writes that:
“(a)s one learned the community’s way of living, one said (that) one was ‘doing ethnography.’ Ethnography, then, named the process of learning what for the anthropologist was a new and different way of talking, thinking, and acting. When the work was done, a monograph was usually written—a report of this exploration into the community’s way of life. One could point to that book and say it was an ‘ethnography’ as well. Further, one could also say that the book was a description of the group’s culture. Traditionally, then, ethnography named both a research process characteristic of anthropology and a research product, often a book-length description, but at any rate a representation of the culture of the community in which the research had been done.”
Ethnography is predicated upon attention to the everyday, an intimate knowledge of face-to-face communities and groups. To take globalization as an object of study, ethnography has modified its mode of practice. This paper will review a newest example of how that modification has found its success, in Anna Tsing’s 2005 book, Friction:, An Ethnography of Global Connection. Before this paper presents an assessment on the original contributions of the book, I will summarize two ways to change conventional ethnography in order to take globalization seriously into account, i.e. through multi-sited ethnography and through global ethnography. The main part of this review will comprise my arguments as to why this book is so important to the emergent global ethnography, and to pose my appreciation to Tsing’s work, especially from NGO activists who have experienced her pieces, as well as to pose questions to global ethnography.
Globalization and the multi-sited ethnography
One of the main recent topics of ethnography is globalization. Despite its precise meaning still remaining contested, globalization “has been variously conceived as action at a distance (whereby the actions of social agents in one locale can come to have significant consequences for ‘distant others’); time-space compression (referring to the way in which instantaneous electronic communication erodes the constraints of distance and time on social organization and interaction); accelerating interdependence (understood as the intensification of enmeshment among national economies and societies such that events in one country impact directly on others); a shrinking world (the erosion of borders and geographical barriers to socio-economic activity); and, among other concepts, global integration, the reordering of inter-regional power relations, consciousness of the global condition, and the intensification of interregional interconnectedness.” (Held and McGrew, 2000:3). Globalization tests what Marcus termed as “the limits of ethnography” (1995):
“Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as “local” and the “global”, the “everyday live world” and the “system”” (Marcus, 1995:95).
“Although multi-sited ethnography is an exercise in mapping terrain; its goal is not holistic representation, an ethnographic portrayal of the world system as a totality. Rather, it claims that any ethnography of a cultural formation in the world system is also an ethnography of the system, and therefore cannot be understood only in terms of the conventional single-site mise-en-scene of ethnographic research, assuming indeed it is the cultural formation, produced in several different locales, rather than the conditions of a particular set of subjects that is the object of study. For ethnography, then, there is no global in the local-global contrast now so frequently evoked. The global is an emergent dimension of arguing about the connection among sites in a multi-sited ethnography. Thus, the multi-sited ethnography is content to stipulate some sort of total world system as long as the terms of any particular macro-construct of that system are not allowed to stand for the context of ethnographic work that becomes opportunistically constituted by the path or trajectory it takes in its design of sites." (Marcus, 199:99)
“Multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography. Indeed, such multi-sited ethnography is a revival of a sophisticated practice of constructivism. ” (Marcus, 1995:105)
In his 1998 volume, Ethnography through Thick and Thin, he details techniques (outlined in Marcus, 1995) to define various fields of multi-sited ethnography study: follow the people, follow the thing, follow the metaphor, follow the plot, story, or allegory, follow the life or biography, and follow the conflict.
Global ethnography and its criticism to multi-sited ethnography
The extension of ethnography to multiple sites is a seemingly excellent way to meet the challenges posed by globalization. But, Marcus’ proposal has been criticized by proponents of so-called global ethnography which has come from the sociology discipline. They pose two criticisms over Marcus’ multi-cited ethnography (Gille, 2001; Gille and Riain, 2002). First, Marcus had taken the sites for granted. “In Marcus’s (1998) multi-sited ethnography, what constitutes a site needs no revision. … (I)n multi-sited ethnography, history remains an afterthought, if even that, rather than a factor that has implications for what can be seen as a site. Second, multi-sited ethnography does not allow us a sufficient amount of critical attention to political efforts to naturalize the local community and to brand extra-local ties as inherently negative, because it provides no space from which to notice that such construction occurs. It takes places for granted and leaves no room for accounting for the production and transformation of sites.” (Gille, 2001:326). More than that, the proponents of global ethnography argue that
“This interweaving of ethnographic sites across a range of spatial scales, and therefore units of analysis, poses serious challenges to established ethnographic practice—challenges that have barely been raised within sociology as a whole let alone among ethnographers. While we do not deny the place of constructionism in research, sociologists are likely to find Marcus’ definition of a multi-sited research imaginary to be wanting primarily because social relations among sites can never be reduced to the connections forged by the ethnographer’s imagination and logic of association. Conceiving of ethnographic sites as internally heterogenous and connected to other places by a myriad of social relations requires that the extension of fieldwork to several sites be dictated not by the logic of the ethnographer but by the character of these social relations themselves, both within and between sites. “ (Gille and ´O Riain, 2002, 286-287)
Referring to these criticisms, the project of global ethnography focuses “on dynamic social relations rather than static sites, and sees localities as politically and historically constructed.” Then, “global ethnography requires the historicization of the locality and of local and extra-local social relations.” (Gille and ´O Riain, 2002: 288). Proponents of global ethnography believe that by locating themselves firmly within time and space of social actors “living the global”, ethnographers can reveal what Albrow (1997) called “socioscapes” that people collectively construct and are constructed by global processes, thus demonstrating how globalization is grounded in the local (Burawoy et all, 2000). The term of “socioscapes” is used by Albrow (1997) to refer to “fluid imaginations of spatial belonging and of the social formations created by and making possible the reach of social relations beyond the locality” (quoted by Gille and ´O Riain, 2002:278). Using concepts of place, space, and scale, the global ethnographer will deal with special hierarchy and have to make intertwined multiple levels of analysis through interrogating social relations and social structures from particular places. They propose that:
“Instead of a comprehensive account of a self-contained set of social relations, the ethnographer now uses her location to interrogate a variety of intersecting place-making projects as they are manifested in a particular spatial location. Reflecting changes in the world itself, location in place is crucial for understanding the social relations that extend beyond it. The ethnographer is less a chronicler of self-evident places than an interrogator of a variety of place-making projects. How the ethnographer analyzes the intersection of scales depends in part on her position in a particular set of place-making projects. Such a concept of global ethnography enables us to make sense of the variety of ethnographies dealing with global processes and to classify them according to how they identify their subjects’ relations to certain place-making projects” (Gille and ´O Riain, 2002:278)
Burawoy (2001: 157-158) summarize some main steps of doing global ethnography:
“The first step made by global ethnography is to restore history and agency to the reception and contestation of the global in the ‘local’, to give life to the local. The second step is to regard the global as produced in the local, which can be the supranational agency, branches of the transnational corporation, the state apparatus, the urban community, or the family. Here globalization is the production of (dis)connections that link and of discourses that travel. The ‘local’ no longer opposes but constitutes the global. The third step is to recognize that in every process of production there is a politics of production. Up and down as well as beyond the global chain there are interconnected political struggles. These, then, are the agendas of global ethnography – to replace abstract globalization with a grounded globalization that tries to understand not only the experience of globalization but also how that experience is produced in specific localities and how that productive process is a contested and thus a political accomplishment.”
Friction as an example of global ethnography
According to Gille and ´O Riain (2002:271), “global ethnographers must begin their analysis by seeking out “place-making projects” that seek to define new kinds of places, with new definitions of social relations and their boundaries. … The extension of the site in time and space poses practical and conceptual problems for ethnographers, but also political ones. Nonetheless, by locating themselves firmly within the time and space of social actors “living the global,” ethnographers can reveal how global processes are collectively and politically constructed, demonstrating the variety of ways in which globalization is grounded in the local. Global ethnography focuses on experiences of globalization (Burawoy et al., 2000), and more than that, ‘not only the experiences of globalization but also the very production of globalization can properly be the subject of ethnography’ (Burawoy 2001: 150; emphasis in original). By doing so, a global ethnographer refuses the binary dichotomy between local and global.
These are precisely what Tsing does. She makes a crystal-clear statement as to how she situates herself (Tsing 2000:119-120):
“Social scientists have been thrilled to discover the excitement about the global that has taken corporate planners, bureaucrats, and political activists by storm over the last decade. Anthropologists have hoped that by attaching ourselves to this excitement we might propel our discipline beyond a heritage of studying obscure villages to reposition it in the middle of all kinds of world-making projects, big and small.
Yet our tools for thinking about the big picture are still rudimentary. Holding on, as I think we should, to a disciplinary heritage of attention to up-close detail, we find ourselves with data about how a few people somewhere react, resist, translate, and consume. From here it is an easy step to invoke distinctions between local reactions and global forces, local consumption and global circulation, local resistance and global structures of capitalism, local translation and the global imagination. I find myself doing it. Yet we know that these dichotomies are unhelpful. They draw us into an imagery in which the global is homogeneous precisely because we oppose it to the heterogeneity we identify as locality. By letting the global appear homogeneous, we open the door to its predictability and evolutionary status as the latest stage in macronarratives. We know the dichotomy between the global blob and local detail isn’t helping us. We long to find cultural specificity and contingency within the blob, but we can’t figure out how to find it without, once again, picking out locality.
… (I) suggest further that we pay attention to the making of scale. Scale is the spatial dimensionality necessary for a particular kind of view, whether up close or from a distance, microscopic or planetary. I argue that scale is not just a neutral frame for viewing the world; scale must be brought into being: proposed, practiced, and evaded, as well as taken for granted. Scales are claimed and contested in cultural and political projects. A “globalism” is a commitment to the global, and there are multiple, overlapping, and somewhat contradictory globalisms; a “regionalism” is a commitment to the region, and so on. Not all claims and commitments about scale are particularly effective. Links among varied scale-making projects can bring each project vitality and power. The specificity of these articulations and collaborations also limits the spread and play of scale-making projects, promising them only a tentative moment in a particular history.” (see similar paragraph in Tsing 2005: 58).
The subtitle of Tsing’s Friction is “an ethnography of global connection”. Global Connections is one of three slices of globalization that have been studied by global ethnographers. The other two related themes are global forces and global imaginations. Studies of global connections show how certain social actors are able to take advantage of the destabilization of socio-spatial hierarchies centered on the nation-state to build new trans-local and transnational connections. The social actors who construct global imaginations—a less easily classified group than those in the other two slices—are most explicitly engaged in place-making, contesting definitions of local, national, and global scales, and of the relations among them. Citing Smith’s work Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (2001), Gille and ´O Riain, stated that “(w)riters on global connections have typically focused on the agency of social actors – in fact … (w)riters on transnational connections explicitly position themselves against the overtly determinist analyses of globalization theorist”. (2002:281) They continue that “(t)he starting point of analyses of connections is typically a type of strategic action or a group that exhibits, or is even defined by, strategic behavior… (which) are explicitly tied to the making of new places but largely through the strategic action of individuals or networks, rather than the collective politicization of global imaginations. … Although often responding to global forces, the agency of social actors in their responses is typically seen in terms of global connections. This is clearest in the literature on transnational social movements.” (2002:281-282).
Friction’s original contributions
Friction represents an interesting approach in global ethnography, and this is the first of Tsing’s original contributions in this book, because Tsing combines it with post-colonial theory. One of the main concerns of post-colonial theory has to do with power and domination in relation to knowledge. This is necessarily associated with arguments that assert that human life can be known only through specific and therefore limited representations which inevitably reflect the power relations between those who represent and those who are represented. Post-colonial ethnography is sensitive about the ways in which the historical and cultural context created by colonialism and colonial heritages influences the researcher’s own conceptions and preconceptions (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1998:85-89). In the second paragraph of the introduction of this book, Tsing (2005:1) explicitly colors her position with a seductive character of post-colonial language:
“Post-colonial theory challenges scholars to position our work between traps of the universal and culturally specific. Both conceits have been ploys of colonial knowledge, that is, knowledge that legitimates the superiority of the West as defined against its Others. Yet in studying colonial discourse, social scientists and historians have limited themselves to the cultural specificity side of the equation. There has been much less attention to the history of the universal, as it, too, has been produced in the colonial encounter. Here a specific valence for the universal has been produced; the universal is what, as Gayatri Spivak has put it, we cannot not want, even as it so often excludes us. The universal offers us the chance to participate in the global stream of humanity. We can’t turn it down. Yes we also can’t replicate previous versions without inserting our own genealogy of commitments and claims. Whether we place ourselves inside or outside the West, we are stuck with universals created in cultural dialogue. It is this kind of post- and neocolonial universal that has enlivened liberal politics as well as economic neoliberalism as they have spread around the worlds with such animation since the end of the Cold War. Nor is scholarly knowledge exempt; every truth forms in negotiation, however messy, without aspirations to the universal.”
The second original contribution of Friction for global ethnography has to do with friction as a door to enter into global connection. Friction tells the story of how prosperity, knowledge, and freedom work out in particular times and places, through friction. Tsing assumes that this started with the assumption that Universalism is implicated in both imperial schemes to control the world, and liberatory mobilizations for justice and empowerment. Universalism inspires expansion – for both the powerful and the powerless. Indeed, when those excluded from universal rights protest their rights to be included, this protest itself has a twofold effect: it extends the reach of the forms of power they protest, even as it gives voice to their anger and hopes. Tsing uses Balibar’s concept of “normalization” and “insurrection” to understand both phenomena as inspired by universals. She believes that: “Friction gives purchase to universals, allowing them to spread as frameworks for the practice of power. But engaged universals are never fully successful in being everywhere the same because of this same friction.” (Tsing 2005:10). She uses a beautiful metaphor to convince the reader on the importance of friction:
“Speaking of fiction is a reminder of the importance of interaction in defining movement, cultural form, and agency. Friction is not just about slowing thing down. Friction is required to keep global power in motion. It shows us … where the rubber meets the road. Roads are a good image for conceptualizing how friction works: Roads create pathways that make motion easier and more efficient, but in doing so they limit where we go. The ease of travel they facilitate is also a structure of confinement. Friction inflects historical trajectories, enabling, excluding, and particularizing.
…
Friction makes global connection powerful and effective. Meanwhile, without even trying, friction gets in the way of the smooth operation of global power. Difference can disrupt, causing everyday malfunctions as well as unexpected cataclysm. Friction refuses the lie that global power operates as a well-oiled machine. Furthermore, difference sometimes inspires insurrection. Friction can be the fly in the elephant’s nose.
Attention to friction opens the possibility of an ethnographic account of global interconnection. Abstract claims about the globe can be studied as they operate in the world. We might thus ask about universals not as truths or lies but as sticky engagements” (Tsing (2005:6)
The third original contribution of Friction is how global connections can be understood through fragments. Diverging from academic works exposing the unifying patterns of globalization, Tsing has used ethnographic fragments to interrupt stories of a unified, monolithic and successful regime of global self-management. Tsing’s fragment approach is an accurate example of what Gille and O Riain mean when they say that: “(s)tudies of global connections show how certain social actors are able to take advantage of the destabilization of socio-spatial hierarchies centered on the nation-state to build new trans-local and transnational connections. The social actors who construct global imaginations—a less easily classified group than those in the other two slices—are most explicitly engaged in place-making, contesting definitions of local, national, and global scales, and of the relations among them” (Gille and ´O Riain, 2002: 279). Tsing’s approach reveals many details and makes claims, including about globalization as an arena of contention. We are convinced, using her words that “Globalization is not delivered whole and round like a pizza, to be munched and dismantled by the hungry margins.” (Tsing, 2005:271). She believes that “Global connections are made in fragments – although some fragments are more powerful than others (p. 271). Her telling of global connections highlights rural Kalimantan, where the fragmentary nature of global processes is especially evident. Through the fragments, readers are invited to look at the whole. She also believes that “fragments need not reduce analysis to simply noticing idiosyncrasy and happenstance” (p. 271).
The forth original contribution in this book is how Tsing employs a series of methods to enable more nuanced understandings of global connections with the Kalimantan forest. Instead of positing a triumphant global regime, her method guides readers from one space into another, with realistic and concrete narratives. She starts with a historical sketch of the Indonesia forest tragedy at the end of 1960s, starting with Japanese general trading companies, the Sogo Shosha which hooked up with the New Order regime of President Soeharto, who had come to power in the blood of a great massacre in the 1965-1967. The connections made Indonesia the largest tropical timber exporter in 1973. The Sogo Shosha strategy to monopolize timber trading was mimicked by Soeharto’s cronies, APKINDO (Indonesian Wood Panel Association) which began in 1980. Tsing makes a big claim that “(a)s the identity of nation became entangled with forest destruction; logging concessions became a clear sign of regime connections” (p.16). Every student of the political ecology of Indonesia’s forests knows that it was a first period of state-sponsored forest degradation and was directly handled by logging companies. On average, about 1 million hectares of tropical forest per year were cleared in the 1980s, rising to about 1.7 million hectares per year in the first part of the 1990s. Since 1996, deforestation appears to have increased to an average of 2 million hectares per year (FWI/GFW, 2002). It was also a period of primitive accumulation for capitalist development, which is dispossession of small forest-dependent people and the creation of a new mode of extraction over forest resources. Because the “forest” had been simplified as uninhabited terrain, a tabula rasa assumption, local and indigenous peoples living in and around forests became victims of these developments. The 1998 fall of the New Order Regime did not improve these situations. Post-Soeharto governments dealt with more complicated problems: Illegal resource extraction rocketed out of control. Using Tsing’s words, “Ties between illegal and legal enterprise have been close. Most importantly, their collaboration undermines pre-existing property rights and access conventions, making everything free. Either official or unofficial alone could be challenged, but together they overwhelm local residents, who generally have been unable to defend their land and resources against this combination of legal and illegal, big and small. Together, they transform the countryside into a “free-for-all frontier” (p. 17). During reading her narratives, it is hard not to conclude that prosperity, greed, and ambition ripped up the forest landscape and dispossessed its human inhabitants in order to offer quick profits to a privileged or tricky few.
After describing the backdrop, the book presents three different but related fragments: (i) social links and cultural practices that made dispossession and deforestation a destructive “business as usual”. This first section of the book (p.18 – 54) presents many narratives of friction on how aspirations for prosperity and progress produced contradictory results for the environment and local communities of Kalimantan, Indonesia, in the 1990s; (ii) a wider interplay of transnational forms of knowledge about forest. This second section (p.55 – 112) considers how friction morphs both knowledge of the globe and globally-traveling knowledge; and (iii) very dynamic environmental movements who tried to offer an alternative to forest destruction and the erosion of local and indigenous rights. This third section (p. 113 – 268) considers the accumulation of meanings and genealogies of environmental movements that has placed forest protection at the forefront of causes for making a living world.
Appreciations and Questions
As one of the pioneers of Global Ethnography, Burawoy poses questions (2000:1) that challenge ethnographers: “How can ethnography be global? How can ethnography be anything but micro and a-historical? How can the study of everyday life grasp lofty processes that transcend national boundaries?” Now, we have not only answers, but some answers with a seductive example. I fully agree with Goldman appreciation that “The beauty of the book is not just in the stories, but also in the way stories are told” (Goldman, 2005:649). I believe that Friction becomes more valuable beyond the academic sphere, because of her style of writing. I believe that if social scientists, journalists, novelists, and NGO activists read this book, they will feel they have been provoked by this book to rethink the character of their reporting. What differences are there between a scientific explanation, a journalistic essay, a historical novel, and an activist field report? One of the answers is that the scientific explanation presents theoretical and tested knowledge; the journalistic essay emphasizes news content; the historical novel demonstrates romance; and the activist report contains an evaluative assessment. But, we cannot apply these stereotypical answers to Tsing’s book: Friction, Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Her anthropological work challenges boundaries of these categories. Since emerging onto the academic stage, she has been a provocative person who pushes journalist, novelist, social scientist, environmental activist, and the reader to rethink the nature of some of these writing borders.
I fully support Celia Lowe’s judgment, written as promotional text on the backside of the hard cover edition of Friction: “One of the many enjoyable aspects of Friction is its continuation of the story Tsing introduced in her previous book, of the original and creative program of scholarship she is famously known for. This will be a much-discussed contribution to the anthropology of cosmopolitanism and transnational interconnection" (Tsing, 2005). I feel Lowe’s blurb is not just advertising words. It is also true. We can not fully understand Tsing’s contribution in ethnographic methods of inquiry and writing, without reading her first book, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).[1] This work appeared twelve years ago, and has won warm, critical praise as provocative and pathbreaking work. Her first book was “guided especially by feminist critiques and revisions of ethnography” (p. 33). The book brought together a set of detailed description, reflections, and commentaries on the problem of marginality in light of the author’s engagement with Meratus Dayak communities of South Kalimantan, Indonesia. I read the book in 1998 in a translated version. This book was translated into Bahasa Indonesia and published in 1988 as Di Bawah Bayang-Bayang Ratu Intan: Proses Marjinalisasi Pada Masyarakat Terasing in Jakarta by YayasanObor Indonesia. I was impressed with her style of critical writing that seemed to me held a good lesson for NGO activists, notably on how the activist has to develop empathy and understand how local people feel and perceive dominant power. I re-read the book in 1999, when I was looking for a piece of ethnographic reporting that could be used as a reference for my class on how to make a field report. I cut and pasted her work on how Indonesian government officials interact with local communities, and packaged in several pages as example. Some of the young NGO activists in my class were impressed at how she successfully uncovered the hidden dimensions of power in class, political and gendered power relations, not by explaining theories but by posing narratives.
Looking back at that experience brings me to question the relations between the ethnographer, their narratives, and their political practices. Critics of ethnography argue that ethnographic activities (watching, listening, asking, collecting and reporting) are never neutral, value-free acts as (supposedly) are positivist assumptions. The fundamental positivist beliefs are detachment and objectivity. The positivists believe that they can capture reality as such in the specific historical and geographical context of the study. Unlike them, the critical approach of ethnography assumes that the ethnographer is embedded in representation processes. This approach begins with assumptions that society is structured by class and status, as well as by race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, in order to maintain the oppression of a marginalized group or groups. Interestingly, in this approach, the researcher, besides collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data is also expected to function as an intellectual advocate and activist, to use the tools of research to discover inequalities and to find ways through research, dialogs, intervention, and so forth, to bring about a change in unequal distributions of power.
Various examples from anthropology tell us about changing roles of researchers from “ivory-tower” academics into advocacy activist (for general review, see: Sponsel, 2001; for detail example see: Wright, 1988, Kirsch, 2002). They are involved in advocacy because these researchers are sincerely concerned with applying knowledge on behalf of the communities who are indispensable for their research, as an expression of genuine reciprocity, and to avoid dehumanizing their hosts and themselves. They also try to practically answer some moral questions, as posed by Kirsch (2002:175):
What is the value of anthropological knowledge for the communities with whom we work? What are the responsibilities of anthropologists to these communities? Should anthropologists adopt a position of advocacy in relation to local political struggles? What are the consequences of maintaining a neutral stance in such contexts? These questions are not simply rhetorical, for they are increasingly raised by the claims made by the people with whom anthropologists work.
Dealing with these questions seriously, some researchers go beyond the research activities and become involved in various positions for advocacy works. Advocacy encompasses a broad agenda for social and political activism -- promoting cultural survival and identity, empowerment, self-determination, human rights, economy, and the quality of life of communities. Advocates reject the supposed neutrality of science and adopt a stance on some problem or issue to improve the situation of a community, ideally in close collaboration with it. Thus, as an advocate, the researcher anthropologist is no longer just observer, recorder, and interpreter (basic research), nor consultant to an external agency (applied), but facilitator, interventionist, lobbyist, or activist for a community (Sponsel, 2001:204).
Then, how does a global ethnographer perceive and then make a claim about relations between their narratives and their political practices? Burawoy (2001) writes that global ethnography’s focus is
“… not only the experience of globalization but also the very production of globalization can be properly the subject of ethnography. What we understand to be ‘global’ is itself constituted within the local; it emanates from very specific agencies, institutions and organizations whose processes can be observed first-hand. As social scientists are drawn into legitimating these global agencies, especially as they face growing contestation, so increasingly social scientists have access to their inner workings. In demystifying the supranational agency, they also begin to recognize its limitations. These are not all powerful behemoths that carve up the vulnerable as they will. Their policies do not result from a seamless conspiracy of global elites. Their programs are hotly contested within the agencies themselves, and national, regional and local groups appropriate their effects for their own interests. Indeed, globalization is produced as much in the communities of the weak as in the organizations of the powerful.
From the vantage point of its production, globalization appears more contingent and less inexorable than it does from the standpoint of its experience or reception. From the perspective of their production, global ‘forces’ are the manufacture of powerful connections or, as we shall see, disconnections. Money, technology, goods, services and people do not flow on a level plain, but are propagated through inequalities of power between transmitter and receiver. There is a hierarchical chain, but like all social chains it can be disrupted and diverted. At the same time, globalization cannot be reduced to the links of a chain. Just as important as the links within the chain are the ruptures and local violence’s produced beyond the chain. The marginalization of people denied access to the chain is as important as the appropriation of resources along the chain. Structural irrelevance can be as devastating as structural dependence. …
In line with Burawoy, in her Coda of Friction, Tsing (2005:271) poses some indicative statements exposing the power and the limitation of her narratives:
“… my project stretches and changes the practice of ethnography. As I reach to describe global connections, my ethnography necessarily diverges from the holism of more familiar models, in which each anecdote or custom forms a scrap in a larger, unified pattern. Instead, following the example of subaltern studies historians who retrieve forgotten pasts plowed over by national histories, I endorse the fragments ... In this project I have used ethnographic fragments to interrupt stories of a unified and successful regime of global-self management.”
I have no hesitancy that her narrative will be able to convince English-speaking academic communities, especially the social sciences communities, regarding the usefulness of her global ethnography. The book called Friction is seductive and Tsing has the leverage for it. The next problem will be: how can the subaltern groups and their supporters gain access or at least get benefit from her narrative, this Friction? I pose this question, not only based on my personal wish to imagine translation of the book of Friction into Bahasa Indonesia. But I am also motivated by my question to challenge global ethnographers to think more about political practices of their narratives. If conventional ethnography was able to produce the practice of anthropological advocacy, what is it that the global ethnographer will be able to do, pushing further beyond the anthropological advocacy results, using their global ethnographic methodologies in their narratives of friction and global connection? ***)
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[1] Unfortunately, the book had been translated without Tsing’s permission (personal communication with Nancy Peluso, 2003)
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