Abstract
This book is a piece of research on the question of the global and the development of the global systems approach (alternatively global systemic approach or global systemic anthropology). The book is written in a clear and concise style and the arguments are made in a comprehensible form. It is an edited collection of articles originally written and published in the 1970s and shows the intellectual journey of Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman. The book is well structured in general terms although there are two problems: the lack of a general conclusion and the logic among the chapters is hard to discern without the connecting function of general and sectional introductions.
The authors’ main concern has been to understand the structures of long-term historical processes. They propose a conceptual framework that consists of two structures (social reproduction and centre/periphery relations) and a notion of society that criticizes the limitations of a single-society-based understanding characteristic of traditional anthropology. It also consists of a notion of ‘long-term continuity’ (the collapse of civilization) and a notion of ‘articulation’ (that explains the links between the local and the global). Starting from this conceptual model, the authors argue that the events from the collapse of the Bronze Age civilization to the Industrial Revolution and the economic crises of the 1970s can be grasped only in larger reproductive terms. However, how useful would this model be in explaining the financial crisis of 2008?
Alan Greenspan, the former US central banker and ultimate technocrat, asks a similar question: How did econometric forecasting models fail so dramatically? In his book, Greenspan (2013) reiterates his faith in the homo economicus and statistical forecasting and prescribes public policy solutions to address and stop the problem of a declining world system (collapse). On the other hand, the conceptual model of the anthropology of global systems would highlight long-term historical processes. The authors argue that there are indeed similarities between those processes involved in today’s crisis and those that brought about the decline of previous civilizations. They disavow forecasting (‘futurology’) because it consists of projecting current trends into the future ‘without providing any analysis of the mechanisms that might generate them’; they also argue that forecasting fails to understand ‘the fluid and shifting nature of world accumulation over time’ (p. 84). Finally, they argue that ‘[t]here is no empirical basis for futurology other than in the understanding of the past and the present’ (p. 62). For these anthropologists, the explanatory emphasis lies in the long-term historical processes that are, they claim, characterized by continuities and repetitions.
The authors’ conceptual model consists of five notions. Social reproduction, the first concept, is taken from structuralist Marxism; it refers to a process of constitution and reconstitution of social forms (of production, distribution, consumption) over time. They argue that there is no ‘general evolution of world society’, but rather a gradual diversification and differentiation (‘Epigenetic model of the evolution of civilization’). The authors reviewed archaeological and textual evidence from Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, China, Peru and Greece.
A centre/periphery structure is the second notion. Kajsa Ekholm Friedman argues that civilization coincides with the emergence of these structures (p. 64) and that they are a historical constant –although they have never been geographically stable. She looks at some features of the general pattern of economic regression based on an examination of processes of growth and decline, considering elements such as deindustrialization, technological regression, ecological crisis, demographic crisis, social relations, science and ideology. She also examines the shifts in the emergence and decline of the centres of development. In this way, she assesses the extent of the similarities between processes involved in the current global crisis and those that led to the decline of previous civilizations. She concludes that the decentralization of production in the larger system is the equivalent to the decline of the centre.
Third, a notion of society is the point of departure for a framework aimed at the understanding of the global system. According to the authors, global reality is an indication that society is not a closed entity that can be studied and understood in its own right. Therefore, a single-society-based understanding that is common among anthropologists (p. 29) is not an adequate unit of analysis because society is reproduced within a larger regional system (structures). Ethnographic work carried out in Madagascar in 1973 persuaded the authors that ‘a circumscribed population’ (i.e. the rural village), as assumed by anthropology, cannot be understood if it is only seen as a unit separated from a wider system. In this way, the notion of society results from the confrontation between assumed anthropological notions of society and the global/local reality.
Fourth, the ‘long-term continuity argument’ helps us understand the collapse of both ancient and present-day civilizations. For instance, Greenspan would argue that too much government intervention in the economy will lead to the collapse of the United States as a global leader; to arrest this collapse, he would prescribe public policy solutions (e.g. no market regulation and no progressive taxation). On the other hand, Kajsa Ekholm Friedman, referring to archaeological and textual evidence of the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East in 1200
Fifth, the notion of local–global articulation refers to the multiple logics that are linked to one another in larger processes of social reproduction. The notion of local–global articulations is based on historical and ethnographic material (Congo, Oceania and Polynesia); it establishes the way the latter are implicated within the former. This notion, the outcome of a confrontation between anthropology and structuralist Marxism, suggests that (1) local social forms are the product of larger historical-geographical processes and that (2) such forms are only reproduced within larger processes.
Thus, the book’s model, aimed at the understanding of the long-term historical processes, rests on these five conceptual notions. The authors rely on structuralist Marxism and on ethnographic fieldwork observation. In defining their approach, the authors engage in debates with some currents of different theories. These discussions reveal another problem with this book: it lacks a review of literature published in the 21st century. For instance, there is a critique of dependency theory – which is still seen around the world as the dogma of the poor, especially in Latin America – on the grounds that the centre/periphery ‘structure of the world system today is similar to that of previous periods’ (‘The study of risk in social systems’, p. 72). They also examine the concept of the global as understood by the globalization approach and the anthropology of a global systems approach. The authors argue that globalization is an approach that fails to explain the structures of long-term processes, unlike the anthropology of global systems. The latter argues that the global is a historical phenomenon, but that it is not a place; instead, the global is ‘the arena of interaction among localities’ (p. 4). ‘The global is always about inter-local relations, not about a supra-local organism. In the global systemic approach, the global is not an empirical unit or space.’ Likewise, KEF and JF engage in a disciplinary debate about statistical forecasting and economics (‘Crisis in theory and transformations of the world economy’). They also question anthropology’s emphasis on culture and institutions as well as its limited understanding of structures, processes and long-term change (‘Notes toward an epigenetic model of the evolution of “civilization” ’).
Finally, the book is a recapitulation of the work that these anthropologists carried out on the question of the global in the 1970s; the conceptual model of the anthropology of global systems is their contribution to the understanding of long-term historical change or ‘the global’. This conceptual model needs some more systematic empirical testing as a way to give the reader an understanding of the model’s explanatory strength.