Abstract
In recent years, significant epistemic and methodological interest has focused on understandings of global inequality. This interest is marked by a shift from comparative measures of national poverty and its elision of the strategic role of the global South, to a focus on supra- and transnational processes of production and reproduction centered in a critique of methodological nationalism. In her thoughtful and historically grounded volume, Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism, Manuela Boatcă explores precisely these latter processes and relations by drawing on the legacies of classical sociological debates and feminist and postcolonial theory. Her argument is particularly attentive to the contributions of German and Latin American scholars, respectively.
The volume is organized around two broad debates on inequality that characterizes the sociological enterprise: one offered by Marx and political economy and a second by Weber and his attention to historical comparison. In unpacking the longue durée of these debates and their embeddedness in theories of modernity and capitalism, Boatcă showcases the important shifts in their complex histories and, significantly, how feminist and postcolonial understandings of gender, race, and ethnicity unsettle class and status as the cornerstones of perspectives on inequality. In so doing, she contests the centrality of processes of proletarianization and mobility that undergird most sociological discussions of inequality. Crucially, as well, Boatcă argues against understanding identities as merely an additional concern able to nuance analyses of inequality. Instead, she explores identity as a central dimension of social relations and constitutive of processes of global inequality.
To reveal the limits of proletarianization as the central feature of analyses of capitalist accumulation, Boatcă engages the contributions of the Bielefeld feminist subsistence perspective of Claudia von Werlhof and Maria Mies who challenge the separation of production and reproduction and identify housewifisation as central to relations of inequality. Her argument thus reintroduces North American scholars to the significance of the Bielefeld perspective for contemporary imaginings of capitalist accumulation (and feminist understandings of gender inequalities), she also challenges those who engage the domestic labor debate and dual systems theory that maintain the production–reproduction distinction and thereby fail to engage relations of patriarchy and capitalism as co-constitutive.
To demonstrate the constitutive character of gender, race, ethnicity, and the limits of a modernist framing of political economy, Boatcă revisits the contributions of Sidney Mintz on plantation slavery and Immanuel Wallerstein, Etienne Balibar, and Anibal Quijano on world systems theory to advocate for a reconsideration of classical understandings of labor and methodological nationalism. She argues not only for altering the unit of analysis in understanding global processes, which has been a major contribution of world systems theory, but also for building a relational analytic that goes beyond simply calling for understanding history from below, the voices of the often unheard, or colonial difference. Although limited in scope, she grounds this part of her argument in critiques of the Subaltern Studies Collective and, in its place, elaborates the contributions of Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, and Anibal Quijano on coloniality, to oppose modernity’s elision of the global south in the constitution of global inequality.
The volume also thoughtfully engages the Weberian project’s theory of western exceptionalism that has gained increased currency in late 20th century sociological analysis. Reading the concepts of social closure and citizenship against the grain, Boatcă exposes the limits of Weber’s argument for Western uniqueness, relations of equality, and the rationalism that sustains these modernist impulses. Viewed as displacing solidarities of ethnic and religious difference characteristic of relations in the global South, Boatcă makes explicit how, instead, universal norms of citizenship invoke a politics of exclusion that maintain colonial difference. This discussion is both noteworthy and timely in offering a window on the differentiated experiences of rich migrants who are able to buy their citizenship – a commodification of citizenship and belonging – and poor ones who risk life and limb as refugees seeking safety and economic and political security in times of war and genocide.
Boatcă’s contribution is important not only for reimagining inequality as a global relation by contesting efforts to simply pluralize models of stratification, but, also, for offering an alternative to methodological nationalism in her call for methodological cosmopolitanism. Methodological cosmopolitanism destabilizes Eurocentric assumptions of evolutionism, causal relations, and abstract universalism in which colonial relations continue to be ‘a blind spot’ and, building her case on critical scholarship from Latin America, grounds her argument in an elaboration of a decoloniality approach to global inequality. In what is the book’s most important contribution – a relational analysis grounded in the history, experience, and centrality of non-White and non-European populations, that displaces Orientalist and Occidentalist constructions – Boatcă lays the foundation for a global, rather than universal, sociology of inequality.
Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism thus offers an ideal contribution for graduate seminars in sociology, political theory, development theory, and courses focused on inequality, including those that critically engage race, gender, and economic relations. The strengths of this volume are many, as few studies so provocatively move between epistemic and empirical analyses. If there is a criticism of the text, it is that it could have been better edited, removing some of its repetition and grammatical and typographical errors. But, perhaps, repetition in such a rich text can benefit students new to the broad range of literature that Boatcă shares.