Ethnography and the Problem of Place in Global Modernity
A key human outcome of modernity has been disengagement- from community,
from place, from resources, from control over the means of production,
from the supernatural- in order to be 're-rooted' in the operation of
market economies and liberal democratic institutions (Bauman, 2001). The
twinned process uprooting /re-rooting is even more evidently the shift
created by modernity as capitalist economic practices re-tool to
function as a 'global economy'. But how complete is this uprooting? How
thoroughly are people re-rooted in their identities as modernized
citizens? This proposal calls for contributions that consider the
persistent use of 'place' to ground 'meaning', 'identity', 'culture' and
'autonomy' even as such links are disrupted by the operation of global
modernity and global scale capitalism. Are place-based politics
anachronistic? Are localizing projects legitimate only as they can
achieve global influence? Are place-based community-making projects
defenses against global scale capitalism, or is every place productive
of a new expression of global modernity? Are the tools of ethnography
especially relevant to exploring these issues?
Please submit proposals to Wendy Russell wrussell@huron.uwo.ca
<mailto:wrussell@huron.uwo.ca> by March 5, 2008.
