Local Knowledge, Capital, and Social Change in the Age of Globalization

All social knowledge is local. Even the most universalist claims are of a time and place. If a claim applies to more than one context-- traveling well or badly as the case might be--- that does not cease to deprive it of its local character.

Globalization does not change this fundamental fact about social knowledge. But with globalization, local actors and agents do not have a monopoly over local knowledge anymore. Theoretically anyone anywhere can now possess knowledge about any location.

An example, admittedly simplified, will clarify the point.

If I want to see the attractions of a particular city, say, Jaipur, my best bet might be to hire a car manned by a local guide who doubles up as a driver. This person would know the roads, the rhythms of traffic, the best restaurants, the forts and palaces, the best areas for shopping, and so on. If I want to relocate permanently to a city, it would, likewise, make sense to consult a reliable local source. The same principle applies to any number of activities.

With globalization, I can access all this information without relying on any local individual. Google's range of offerings, whether maps or information, equipment and clothing suited to any clime, guidebooks and audiotapes providing detailed historical information, websites empowering consumers to make choices about everything from real estate to purchasing a car--- all of these options mean that there is no real premium or advantage to being of a place in a globalizing world. The US is, and has been, a deeply 'internally globalized' society in this sense, with its do-it-yourself culture of rental cars, U-hauls, its massive webs of retail chains, its highly developed communication networks, and its amazingly mobile society.

This outline is an ideal-type sketch. The question of language remains at once an obstacle to, and safeguard against, a world where the local becomes completely redundant. Most parts of the world are not multiply systematized and mapped on to multiple classificatory grids like the US. (Almost all contractual transactions that one undertakes in the US are, variously, recorded, mapped, and traceable, for the purposes of capital, security, the official record, data gathering, and so on.) In the US, as in other places, local identity matters profoundly. Identity cannot be reduced to a side-effect of 'rational' transactions. And it is worth remembering that the most local of places have always, of course, been connected to other places. No place, if I may misquote a well-known line from a well-known poem, is an island. Not even an island.

All of the above is true. Yet, what changes with globalization is the fact that local actors are no longer the only ones who can convert local knowledge to capital. Far from possessing a monopoly in this regard, local actors and agents may, in fact, lose any opportunity for cashing in on their local knowledge. Whether it is the business of selling vegetables or tourism, the local agent does not, by definition, possess anything that cannot be brought from outside, from somewhere in the globe.

And yet most parts of the world remain overwhelmingly local, in the sense of not being mapped and systematized into global flows of capital, even if the world comes to them. I witnessed an example of this first-hand when I visited the Taj Mahal in Agra a couple of years ago with some colleagues. Dozens of young men, approved as tourist guides by the relevant state or central tourist authority, accosted us as we got out of our car in the parking lot. They were insistent, even pushy, that we hire them as guides to the monument, drivers of horse-drawn carriages or rickshaws, or as providers of assorted services. A more obvious example, familiar to all travelers to India, is the crowd of touts who mill around the entrance of any Indian airport, trying to hustle a few rupees from harassed travelers through one strategy or another.

This situation cannot be blamed on globalization: it is the result of massive social and economic failures, stemming from the policies of the Indian state. But unless the local actors-- some of whom, ironically, may not be local at all-- can somehow convert their local knowledge or local existence into capital, it is likely to get worse.

Local actors and agents, when confronted with these possibilities, will slow the world down. They will make it inefficient, will protest, or in extreme situations will resort to violence or give up. (The farmer suicides in India, which some scholars and journalists attribute to the pro-market economic reforms, are a case in point.) They will use whatever is at hand to try and make the world comprehensible, manageable, and amenable to capital on their terms. The Economic Right typically misreads this as backwardness, inherent antipathy to capitalist initiative, socialist-driven sloth, and so on. The Left also misreads this as political resistance.

In the face of such changes, local actors are also likely, out of a sense of anxiety and insecurity, to assert greater authority over their spheres of influence, whether the family, community, ethnic group, or nation. In different disciplines and contexts, many scholars have commented on and analyzed these reactions to globalization. That obduracy means the weakest and most vulnerable members of the community are likely to become the indirect victims of globalization. (I am not, however, imputing a simple or exhaustive causality between globalization and social-political injustice or conservatism)

Globalization, however, can also help these very weaker members of social groups. It can do so precisely because globalization empowers individuals qua individuals through economic (but also cultural, social, and political) opportunities. In other words, it empowers individuals by simultaneously breaking up the collectives in which those individuals are nested. This is not some simple dissolution of an idealized community, but a reframing of social logic thanks to which the very raison d'etre for the collective no longer holds. A thinker like Pierre Bourdieu sees the systematic destruction of collectives as the hallmark of neo liberalism. Certainly, inasmuch as these collectives are voluntary and civic associations, fragile communities, and non-hegemonic groups, there are costs and losses that stem from their fragmentation under globalization. Ashis Nandy would perhaps view this phenomenon as consonant with a logic of colonialism in that an external force results in a rearrangement of local priorities (although those priorities, arguably, are already the result of a postcolonial cultural economy in which the local has been anyways been dislodged and thoroughly worked over)

But it is worth considering whether the destruction of collectives, or at least a challenge to them, is entirely a bad thing, if collectives refer to ethnic groups, religious communities, caste groups, and so on. In the Indian context (and other similar contexts), the romanticization of the collective has been an enormously dangerous idea, a source of violence, and a socially, culturally, and politically legitimated basis for hegemony. If rigid structures in these collectives are somewhat dislodged through globalization, might that not serve the cause of social justice. (I should acknowledge, here, a debt to Salil Tripathi, whose writings over the years have led me to rethink some of my assumptions about globalization, social change, and justice. See, for instance, Salil's article on Jagdish Bhagwati)

I should point out that I am NOT advocating the fetishization of the individual, nor dismissing the value of all kinds of solidarity or collectivity. I also believe that a simplistic opposition between the individual and the community represents a philosophical and methodological fallacy. I simply want to point out that it seems to me that there is no such thing as a win-win situation, with globalization or its absence, with socialism or its other.