Global Shadows- Chapter 1 & 2 Questions
Chapter 1: (Instructor and Class)
1.) Why has there been a deficiency of attention to Africa in discourses on globalization?
Discourses on Africa are generally ignored, but function around the idea of Africa being one static place, which has had an unfortunate run with the perceptions of the continent from outsiders. Africa doesn’t fit the ideal picture of globalization, as its hardships aren’t a problem of being overrun by consumer goods and factories, but are a result of the difficulty the country has faced in begging for foreign investment, and being unable to provide a significant market for the consumer goods that are available.
- “Africa’s inconvenience is not surprising if we consider that most of the dominant theories of globalization have been theories about worldwide convergence of one sort or another.” (27)
2.) What have anthropologists failed to do?
Anthropologists have failed to notice the African modernity that is creating itself, and instead they have understood modernity in terms of the broader global perspectives which overlooks “the socioeconomic inequalities and questions of global rank that loom so large in African understandings of the modern.” (33)
3.) How does Ferguson use the constructs of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ in his analysis?
4.) What is the orientation toward globalization that Ferguson advocates?
Chapter 2: (Population Group)
1.) What happened in Lesotho?
Lesotho is a landlocked country surrounded by South Africa that was formerly a British-colony, but gained internationally recognized independence in 1966. Lesotho became one of the “front-line states” in the battle against apartheid and was considered separate from the “Bantustans” which were “bogus ethnic” states who weren’t recognized as actually being independent. Although Lesotho had apparent independence, it was clear that the country was dependent largely on South Africa. The leading form of employment in Lesotho was migrant labor to South Africa, who also controlled the local banking, manufacture and market. Lesotho was considered independent, but in reality there wasn’t much separating the Bantustan from Lesotho, other than its internationally recognized independence. Some residents and informants from Lesotho claimed that they’d almost prefer to be Bantustan’s because the taxes are lower and government services were better. Nevertheless, Lesotho’s independence was never questioned by the international community, but the country was simply viewed as a “former British colonial territory acceding to independence.”
- “Indeed, it seems clear that Lesotho’s sovereign status was accepted by the international community more as a response to its status as a British ex-colony than as an endorsement of any internal capabilities to function economically or politically” (55)
- “Unlike the case of Transkei, Lesotho’s accession to statehood was received as a routine decolonization, not as part of a cynical ploy to strip black South Africans of their citizenship. It was this political context, rather than any objective features of the territories involved, that made Lesotho but not Transkei, a “real country”.” (55)
2.) How has poverty been politicized?
Poverty in Lesotho and Transkei is strikingly similar, but due to Lesotho’s position as an independent country they are treated and viewed differently by the larger community. Poverty in both areas were results of South African state policy, enforced low wages, influx control, and apartheid, but these things were never discussed to be the cause for poverty in Lesotho specifically. Instead, the poverty was blamed on Lesotho’s poor national economy which was a result of their unfortunate geography and lack of resources. “Poverty in the independent nation-state of Lesotho has long been formulated in insistently national terms, as “Lesotho’s poverty – and, thus, implicitly, Lesotho’s problem.” (60) In contrast, the poverty in Transkei was perceived as a result of wider economic order. The only difference between the two forms of poverty is Lesotho’s independence as a nation-state, and the idea that the economic issue in the Bantustan’s is their subjection to a higher power (South Africa).
- “Precisely because the legitimacy of Lesotho as a sovereign, independent nation-state was not in question, economic structures were insistently conceived in national terms (“Lesotho’s Economy”), and questions of poverty, growth, wages, and so on were treated as matters of national policy (“Lesotho’s development problems”). In the case of Transkei, by contrast, the formidable political challenges to the very existence of the Bantustans created a very different discursive landscape in which questions of poverty, economic policy, and “development” could be posed in a way that made questions of wider regional economic and political structures more visible.” (63-64)
3.) What does Ferguson mean by ‘anthropological apartheid’?
Ferguson mentions that to understand societies or cultures, we must view them based on their relations and interconnections with the wider economy; like in the case of Lesotho, there is no separation of the national economy from South Africa. Ferguson relates this to the anthropologist’s notion of “the field”, and how they term being in the field and leaving the field which creates an “anthropological weakness for seeing cultures as the property of separate “societies” or “communities” rather than as phenomena of hierarchical relation and interconnection.” (67) The difference between in and out of the field allows us to contrast the culture we’re studying with our own culture from which we come from. “Placing central analytic focus on the connections and relations that constitute national economies as national, or local cultures as local, can combat the dehistoricization and depoliticization that both developmentalists analyses of economies and anthropological analyses of cultures, in their different ways, promote.” (68)