Global Assemblages

Offers an approach to central debates about globalization with chapters written by scholars from across the social sciences. This work examines a range of phenomena that articulate broad structural transformations: technoscience, circuits of exchange, systems of governance, and regimes of ethics or values. Global Assemblages presents a unique perspective on the current globalization debates. Rather than examining globalization as a marker for a new epoch or as a broad structural transformation, this volume examines specific technologies, ethical regimes, and administrative systems that articulate contemporary transformations. The chapters combine a sophisticated theoretical approach to these "global" phenomena with detailed study of the assemblages in which they become significant for individual and collective life. The contributors to the volume are leading scholars from sociology, anthropology, and geography whose research spans Africa, the Middle East, East and South Asia, North America, South America, and Europe. Their work examines the conflicts and controversies at the heart of contemporary debates, in areas such as neoliberal reform, the pharmaceutical industry, financial practices, illegal trafficking, and information technology. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems 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. Offers a ground-breaking approach to central debates about globalization with chapters written by leading scholars from across the social sciences. Examines a range of phenomena that articulate broad structural transformations: technoscience, circuits of exchange, systems of governance, and regimes of ethics or values. Investigates these phenomena from the perspective of the "anthropological" problems they pose. Covers a broad range of geographical areas: Africa, the Middle East, East and South Asia, North America, South America, and Europe. Grapples with a number of empirical problems of popular and academic interest — from the organ trade, to accountancy, to pharmaceutical research, to neoliberal reform.