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News Feeds General Books Current Affairs Globalisation and New Identities
| Globalisation and New Identities | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Globalisation & New Identities: A view from the middle brings together 12 ethnographic studies of post-apartheid South Africa, which focus on the emergence of new South African identities with both strong local characteristics and powerful global influences. It shows how, in different ways, through adoption, adaptation, avoidance and resistance -- South Africans are responding to the forces and connections of globalisation. These ethnographies refuse to make of South Africa a special case, a case apart from the rest of the world, but instead locate it within the rest of the world. In adapting northern approaches to globalisation to their own purposes, the originality of the authors’ engagement with South Africa’s social fabric becomes clear in historical perspective. All these studies show how globalisation constitutes and is constituted by the spreading of localised interests and identities – quite a tranformation from the intense national politicization associated with the anti-apartheid struggle. The editors are all academics at the University of Johannesburg. Peter Alexander is Professor of Sociology and the Director, Centre for Sociological Research, Marcelle C. Dawson is a lecturer in Sociology and Meera Inchharam is a Research Associate at the Centre for Sociological Research. “What overall picture of South Africa emerges from this collection of ethnographies? It is one of proliferating identities, organisations, movements, forming a national mosaic with strong local flavours. Post-apartheid South Africa has opened itself up to a kaleidoscope of global forces resulting in social chaos – an image so different from the 1970s Marxist account of repressive state regulation of capitalism … Now the political project is lost in a cacophony of voices, shaped in unpredictable ways on the terrain forged between globalisation and localism. Gone is the South African exceptionalism. And instead we encounter a country buffeted by global storms – the perfect place from which to study globalisation.” – Michael Burawoy, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. |
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