“The term local peoples— now increasingly used by ethnographers instead of the older primitive, tribal, simple, preliterate, and so on—can be misleading in an interesting way and calls for some unpacking. In a literal sense, of course, all people most of the time are “local” in the sense of being locatable. Since anthropologists now generally claim that their distinctiveness rests on a method (fieldwork) rather than an object (non-European cultures), this sense recommends itself to them: fieldwork defines privileged access to the local. Yet not everyone who is local in this sense has the same opportunity for movement, or the same practical reach: national politicians in the Sudanese capital and nomads and peasants in the provinces; corporation directors in an Australian metropolis and mineworkers in the New Guinean Highlands; generals in the Pentagon and front-line soldiers in the gulf, and so on. They are all locatable, but not equally so by each other.
To say of people that they are local is to imply that they are attached to a place, rooted, circumscribed, limited. People who are not local are thought of either as displaced, uprooted, disoriented—or more positively as unlimited, cosmopolitan, universal, belonging to the whole world (and the world belonging to them). Thus, Saudi theologians who invoke the authority of medieval Islamic texts are taken to be local; Western writers who invoke the authority of modern secular literature claim they are universal. Yet both are located in universes that have rules of inclusion and exclusion. Immigrants who arrive from South Asia to settle in Britain are described as uprooted; English officials who lived in British India were not. An obvious difference between them is power: the former become subjects of the Crown, the latter its representatives. What are the discursive definitions of authorized space? Everyone can relate themselves (or is allocated) to a multiplicity of spaces—phenomenal and conceptual—whose extensions are variously defined, and whose limits are variously imposed, transgressed, and reset. Modern capitalist enterprises and modernizing nation-states are the two most important powers that organize spaces today, defining, among other things, what is local and “what is not. Being locatable, local peoples are those who can be observed, reached, and manipulated as and when required. Knowledge about local peoples is not itself local knowledge, as some anthropologists have thought (Geertz 1983). Nor is it therefore simply universal in the sense of being accessible to everyone.”
