Global Assemblages

Provides an exciting approach to some of the most contentious issues in discussions around globalization - bioscientific research, neoliberalism, governance - from the perspective of the 'anthropological' problems they pose; in other words, in terms of their implications for how individual and collective life is subject to technological, political, and ethical reflection and intervention. It offers a ground-breaking approach to central debates about globalization with chapters written by leading scholars from across the social sciences.It examines a range of phenomena that articulate broad structural transformations: technoscience, circuits of exchange, systems of governance, and regimes of ethics or values. It investigates these phenomena from the perspective of the 'anthropological' problems they pose. It covers a broad range of geographical areas: Africa, the Middle East, East and South Asia, North America, South America, and Europe. It grapples with a number of empirical problems of popular and academic interest - from the organ trade, to accountancy, to pharmaceutical research, to neoliberal reform.

"This compelling book demonstrates how a very sophisticated anthropological perspective can transform 'globalization' into a useful tool for investigating emerging social forms and ways of ruling and living. Certainly this non-structural approach is needed-one that attends to the specificity of combinations, interactions, sites, and effects associated with the spread of technology and risk." Ulrich Beck, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen "Global Assemblages provides excellent and rich insight into a developing anthropology of the contemporary world. The intertwining of violence, capital flows, political fragmentation, and regimes of social and moral control are investigated here in what must be recognized as a major contribution to anthropological scholarship." Jonathan Friedman, L' Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris and Lund University, Sweden "This volume will give assemblages of many types a good name-the authors are astute, varied, and at the top of their game; the geographies do justice to the notion of global; and the book has a core intellectual inquiry about reflexive practices that holds together its wide-ranging essays. From transplanted kidneys to research audit protocols, the uneasy interrelationships of global assemblages emerge in the fleshy details of a knotted world." Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz

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