Abstract
Truth be told, I only agreed to review this book because of a pressing sense of obligation. I knew two of the editors very well. If I didn’t review it, who would? I also teach a very large first-year undergraduate course on globalization, and I felt obliged to read any germane work by geographers that crossed the transom. However, that sense of obligation vanished as soon as I read the book’s first sentence: ‘Think of the ship or the stirrup or barbed wire’ (p. 1). I was instantly hooked. I compulsively continued to turn pages and appropriately enough as I practiced my own form of globalization traveling from airports in Oulu, Northern Finland, to Helsinki, to London, and finally to Vancouver. By the time I woozily left the plane 23 hours later, I was done with Globalization in Practice, and I was also done in by practicing globalization.
The volume consists of an excellent introductory essay and 51 short entries from two to six pages in length about ‘the not-so-“little” things that keep the “large” forces of globalization ticking over’ (p. 14). One of those not-so-little things of course are airports, the subject of the very first entry in the book by Peter Adey. ‘Airports are . . . obligatory points of passage’, he writes (p. 19). Didn’t I know it? It is followed in rapid succession by some beautifully crafted and illustrated mini essays on other not-so-little things such as mobile phones (Eric Laurier), passports (John Torpey), pipelines (Andrew Barry), LIBOR (Donald MacKenzie), global brands (Celia Lury), bananas (Mimi Sheller), the AK-47 (Tom Osborne), and ISO 9000 (Wendy Larner). I learned an enormous amount about the mundane materiality and practices that constructed and maintained our present moment of globalization. The day after I arrived back in Vancouver, I made three of the entries compulsory reading for my first-year course: Sue Robert’s riveting four pages on ‘Containers’, Steve Graham’s electrifying ‘Automated repairs and backup systems’ (don’t be put off by the title), and Caitlin Zaloom’s illuminating ‘Of pits and screens’.
There was an enormous amount of factual information sardined into each entry, but unlike Oscar Wilde I didn’t find any facts disappointing. And if I did, I had always the interesting theoretical question to ponder of how humdrum smallness can produce something as large, as complex, and as rousing as globalization. This goes to that opening sentence. Thinking of the ship, the stirrup, and barbed wire gets you in no time at all to Empire, just as containers, automated repairs and backup systems, and pits and screens gets you in no time at all to globalization. For the editors, such a connection between the little and the large and the ordinary and extraordinary can now be made because of ‘analytical scepticism’, (p. 1), a notion first devised and deployed in Science and Technology Studies. It is the idea that seemingly transcendental, gigantean, and synthetic movements are in fact made possible and preserved by mundane, everyday, ordinary objects, and actions. Intellectual pretence is consequently disarmed and deflated. We are back to the world that everyone knows.