The Cultural Life of Things: Anthropological Approaches to Law and Society in Conditions of Globalization

Abstract

This chapter helps to understand the economic and social forces that produce "global cities" characterized by socioeconomic polarization. This creates economic concentration in a limited number of cities that account for most of the international transactions, transactions in which lawyers, concentrated in ever bigger firms play central roles in negotiation, documentation, and implementation. The informal economy is increasingly recognized to be structurally related to flexible regimes of global capital accumulation and not simply an arena of immigrant activity, migrants without documentation and few sources of economic livelihood are disproportionately represented there. The chapter focuses on to add cultural specificity to studies of globalization by attending to the multiplicity of contexts in which processes of capital restructuring are given human dimension-a mode of inquiry that requires an ethnographic sensibility. An ethnographic approach calls upon us to "ground subjective, culturally configured action in society and history".

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