What are the implications for the anthropological strategy of fieldwork when the local becomes globalized and the global becomes localized? It was in October 2000 when Egyptian students of Cairo University fervently expressed their solidarity with the second Palestinian Intifada in a demonstration that lasted for a few days and was the site of tear gas and hundreds of obtuse state security officers. The nearby McDonalds, the symbol of ‘Western imperialism’, was attacked with sticks and stones, an act that led this branch to close down. Sentiments of anti-globalization soared as the average Egyptian citizen, and the prominent Egyptian intellectual condemned globalization as the project of Western domination. The scene was completely different in another societal pocket. Hundreds of youth danced uninhibitedly to the tunes of Latin Salsa and American and British pop in the trendiest night spots in Cairo.  People exhibited their foreign language skills in hybridized conversations of Arabic, English, and French. Meanwhile the nearest traditional coffee shop, where middle class men congregated to play backgammon, proudly offered ‘USA Coffee’ on its drinks menu. Such schizophrenic images challenge the notion of the culturally homogeneous and economically distinct society and fascinate the anthropologist who knows that studying locales as if they head neatly drawn boundaries will no longer do. Being the self-reflecting, self-challenging discipline that it is, anthropology has realized a while ago that any society is part of a wider world, and so criticisms were heralded at structural-functionalist anthropologists who reduced the wider world to a set of ‘external’ factors and even then considered these factors effectively benign.  If the discourse on globalization had been widespread during the structural-functionalist era, perhaps ‘globalization’ would have become one of these ‘external factors’. ‘Discourse’ is important here, because anthropology’s relationship with discourse is rather fickle. It both contributes to it and is shaped by it. One wonders whether anthropology recognized that anthropology itself was part of the wider world of discourse, or whether the societies it studies were part of the wider world in a material sense. In other words, was anthropology’s revelation of the wider world spurred by the pervasive discourse on globalization, or based on new theories coming from the field? It hence becomes important, in disentangling the question of this essay, to distinguish between globalization as discourse, and globalization as changes and phenomena that signal a global world. This essay will address the implications for anthropological fieldwork from these two dimensions of globalization, looking specifically at context, temporality, and ethnography. It is important to highlight that the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ do not only refer to space defined terms, as in the local village and the global world. They also work as adjectives, as qualities that characterize the nature of phenomena. Globalization as Discourse Globalization in the widest sense of the term is not new.  For example, Islam historically had a globalizing thrust, but had that potential form of globalization prevailed, we would have now needed to comprehend contemporary globalization differently (Robertson:1992:28). The Comaroffs question the novelty of globalization “it has existed in one or another manifestation, for centuries; not least as a condition of the very possibility of modernity, of colonialism, of the Age of Empire” (Comaroff & Comaroff:1999:13). The specific form of globalization referred to in current discourse pertains to the last 20-30 years and refers to the trans-national movement of capital, ideas, culture, and people leading to compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole (Robertson:1992:7, Tsing). In virtually all writings on globalization it is depicted as an inevitable and pervasive capitalist force with social, cultural, and economic transformative ability, despite differences in theories over the direction, magnitude, and transformative ability of the force.  I will briefly summarize the development of the discourse. Although coming from outside anthropology, modernization and dependency theories of the sixties raised consciousness about the interdependence of the world. While modernization theory presented a unilinear path for countries to emulate the ultimate modernization and development of the first world, dependency theorists emphasized that the backwardness of the third world was a direct product of capitalism and that there are divergent paths towards development (Roseberry:1989:110)  and Robertson:1992:10). Wallerstein’s World System theory grew in the 70’s out of dissatisfaction with the comparative consideration of societies, with western societies as the major reference points, as opposed to seeing them as parts of a systematic pattern of relations among societies (Robertson:1992:13).  This theory urged social scientists to study ‘social wholes’ and since in the modern world there is only one effective social whole, the ‘world system’ should be the relevant unit of analysis (Roseberry:1989:110). Eric Wolf also resented the ‘grand narrative’ approach of the modernization theory which endowed societies with the qualities of internally homogenous and externally distinctive and bounded objects. Such a depiction leads to the creation of a ‘model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and rounded billiard balls’ (Robertson:1992:30). Modernization discourse, paved the way neatly for globalization discourse, although the concepts differ theoretically. Both carry baggage of Western liberal ideology in the broadest terms of enlightenment, since in an increasingly globalized world there is heightening of civilizational, societal, ethnic, regional and individual self consciousness in (Robertson:1992:27). Much of the globalization discourse does not differ much from the modernization discourse, in that its effects are seen as totalizing and homogenizing. According to some authors on modernization, the global flow of cultural meanings takes place along a unidirectional path from the core countries to the peripheral ones. Mlinar speaks of ‘Cocacolization’, Appadurai of ‘commoditization’ and Hannerz of a global ‘takeover by giant cultural commodity merhcants’ (Schuerkens:2003: 214). The Comarroffs speak of how the global rise of neoliberal capitalism is eroding the nation-state and is leading to the ‘erasure of national economy’ (Comaroff & Comaroff:1999:15). Implications for Anthropology and Fieldwork Anthropology’s forte against sociology has been claimed to be that sociology is about grand theories, a positivist science in which the scholar goes out and tests a preconceived hypothesis, whereas anthropology discerns the theory (which is often particularistic to the study in question) from mounds of data. However it would be a naivety to assume that anthropologists have no predispositions before entering the field, that they are freed from the current discourse. Knowledge production is what Mary Douglas refers to as being emotionally charged: “However much they try to insulate their work, scientists are never completely free of their own contemporary society’s pressures, which are necessary for creative effort…[The scientists] make a determined effort to specialize and refine [theory’s] concepts so as to make them fit for use in a discourse that differs from, though it is contained within, the entrenched ideas of the larger encompassing social group…The scientific formulae that emerge always carry the marks of their social origins”  (Douglas:1986:56) The point here is that globalization discourse, while prompting anthropologists to see the wider world in their analysis, also blinds them from seeing outside the discourse. An example about hunter-gatherers will clarify the impact of globalization discourse on anthropological fieldwork and interpretation.  Edwin Willmsen and Elizabeth Garland both argued that hunter-gatherers have long been engaged in the economic, political, and cultural dynamics of the region. Their articles demonstrate how in two different situations, globalization discourse fashioned the image of the Kalahari bushmen and led to fieldwork that reinforced such images. They are examples of how the (global) discourse became localized, of how the hunter-gatherers were seen through the eyes of the discourse, and fashioned by it. Willmsen describes how the discourse prevalent during Lee’s work on the Harvard Kalahari project was of modernization and its sweeping effects on the ‘primitive’ way of life. The ‘authentic’ life of the Kalahari Bushmen was on the verge of extinction since the tenet of the neoevolutionist-modernization paradigm is that prior systems must disappear before more evolved forms can appear. Lee and the Harvard project thus set out to “show that the Bushmen exhibit an elementary form of economic life and to trace the origin and evolution of human energy relations”.  A ‘return to authenticity’ had emerged during the sixties, and hence the Bushmen were the ultimate exemplars that a ‘truly communal life’ actually existed.  But the Harvard project had to capture the Busmen and their pure life (the predecessor to our own) before they disappeared in the face of modernization. Howell, a member of the project, was dissonant that what the field brought home was a confirmation of the then- current discourse: “…nowhere but the Kalahari allows a glimpse of the “hunting and gathering” way of life…and although we remind each other once in a while not to be romantic, we consciously and unconsciously neglect and avoid the !Kung who don’t conform to our expectations” (Willmsen:1989). While the discourse described by Willmsen had to do with modernization, that referred to by Garland had to do with the recent ‘globalization’, and particularly the ‘global civil society’ aspect of it. Garland argues that beneath much liberal discourse there is an implicit fantasy about the ‘pre-political, pre- economic’ world which holds the Bushmen captive to a caricature of the ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ life. That’s why fashioning the Bushmen as vulnerably being ‘on the brink of extinction’ as a result of disposition and colonization is both shocking and appealing to the ‘global civil society’. The discourse on the global civil society is based on the humanist assumption of universality, that ‘we’ all belong to a single global village which enables us to discuss global matters of civility. The term ‘we’ is misleading here, since the same discourse interpellates some people as aid givers and others (the Bushmen) as aid receivers. Garland tells the story of how the discourses on global civil society and the Bushmen conveniently intersected at a point that necessitated the creation of a development project for the Bushmen. Pre-project research only confirmed the Bushmen’s vulnerable state and their need for help. Garland also discusses how anthropologists retain ‘civil society’ as a universal analytic concept even when they are committed to proving the cultural and historical specificity of it in different contexts (Garland:1999). Both the Garland and the Willmsen case show how anthropologists are vulnerable to reaffirming the discourse through their fieldwork. One of the challenges then for the anthropologist is to make sense of the discourse on globalization, when he or she is at the same time one of its interlocutors. Anthropological Contribution to the Discourse It would be unfair to look at the influence of discourse on anthropological fieldwork without examining the reverse, for anthropology has also added to the discourse. Anthropology’s mark can be felt when societies are depicted as active agents in the change process, not merely passive victims of the sweeping, homogenizing change hurled upon them by globalization. In this way, knowledge emerging from various local settings served to nuance and refine the global, by engaging with the discourse. Anthropologists have by no means denied the real effects of globalization in the past two to three decades, but they have addressed the topic in a nuanced way, showing how the global- local encounter yields an assortment of assemblages. One example presented by Nurit Bird-David is of the case of the hunter- gatherer Naikens of South India and their interaction with a plantation opened in their locality. Bird-David examined how external change was internalized by the Naikens by looking at changes in the Naikens’ production, consumption, and distribution patterns attributable to their employment at the plantation, and comparing such patterns with those of the other Naikens who did not work for the plantation. Naiken males preferred to work as casual labourers resembling their attitude towards hunting and gathering in the forest, while the women tended to work as permanent workers to be, as in the past, more responsible for the supply of the staple food. Cash became important for the Naikens, not for its use as a medium of exchange, nor for its ability to accumulate wealth, but rather to obtain credit at the new food and tea shops. Purchase by credit was analogous to the collection of food resources in the forest. Relations between people were also not perturbed by the cash economy. Bird_David concludes that the Naikens have retained their traditional ‘pre-existing’ pattern, by ‘gathering wage’ from the plantation, and ‘collecting’ foods from the ‘environment’ which was extended to include shops. In this way, rather than absorbing the fundamental change predicated by the cash economy, the Naikens usurped the new system to fit with their pre-existing pattern (Bird-David:1983). This example challenges the totalizing effects of globalization presented by the discourse, and so do others. Anna Tsing makes the sensible point that “if globalization could be predicted in advance, there is nothing to learn from research except how the details support the plan”. Tsing conjures the metaphors of motion and friction to show us that the motion of globalization (the flow of goods, ideas, money, and people) is not frictionless. Just as ‘a wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road’, globalization comes into friction with each encounter, reminding us that ‘heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power’ (Tsing: 2005:1-15). Schuerkens stresses that the ‘global’ would not exist without the ‘local’. He quotes Long: “Globalization itself can only be meaningful by reference to existing experiences and cultural understanding” (Schuerkens: 2003: 216). All these writers allude to the heterogeneous, erratic, and capricious features of globalization and its encounter with the local. Globalization as Real Phenomena Discourse on the heterogeneity of the global-local encounter was achieved through, what I believe, is a ‘globalized’ approach to anthropological fieldwork. Regardless of whether globalization is new or old, is benign or domineering, real and tangible effects are exerted upon societies by the transnational flow of capital, people, and culture. Those who argue that such flows have existed since the beginning of time leave no excuse for anthropology’s previously narrow aperture. Those who attribute such flows to the recently fashioned ‘globalization’ are more lenient on anthropologists. Notwithstanding this debate, it is crucial for anthropologists to ‘globalize’ their fieldwork, in terms of both methodological approaches and areas of study, whether this be a response to ‘globalization’ or a drive for methodological and intellectual rigour. One thing that ‘globalization’ does, even if only at the conceptual level, is explode the concept of boundaries. Niklas Luhman’s discussion on systems of meaning is illuminating since it echoes the way anthropologists go about designing their fieldwork so that why they study can in fact be ‘study-able’.   Luhman is critical of the application of boundaries on meaning systems, since the notion of boundary has its origin in the realm of physical and organic systems. Boundaries separate a system from the environment which has “a higher complexity than the system, and ultimately the indeterminate complexity of the world itself” (Luhman:1990:51). From inside the system, what is beyond remains unspecified, yet system boundaries are open since they let through information concerning the environment. “[Boundaries] require us to consider ‘what next?’ and to look around for the next means of orienting ourselves” (Luhman:1990:52). Conventionally, anthropologists studied particular locales, perhaps because structural-functionalist anthropology found comfort in conceiving of societies as organic systems with neat boundaries. Yet what happens when the boundaries get blurred, when the local becomes globalized and the global becomes localized? Diasporas and migration are reflections of social networks that span boundaries, whether or not these are caused by the capitalist spread of globalization is a separate issue. The Comaroffs write about the erosion of nation states through the deconstruction of currency and customs boundaries, the dispersion of production and circulation of value, and the transationalizing of the division of labour (Comaroff & Comaroff:1999:15). When boundaries shift, or all together disappear, both conceptually and in real life, what happens to anthropological fieldwork? Implications for Fieldwork The previous sections aimed to highlight that globalization has plural facets, two of which are globalization as discourse, and globalization as real phenomena. One may argue however, in a Foucauldian sense that nothing exists outside of discourse and that there is nothing real about globalization. Proponents of this view may see that anthropology is a child of its time, that societal dynamism and complexity and global connectedness are inflated because of the pervasiveness of the globalization discourse. However, as discussed above, discourse does not develop in a vacuum; the discourse may taint anthropological interpretations, but anthropology has also left its mark. And yet, if it turns out that globalization did nothing but prompt anthropologists to take on a more ‘globalized’ approach, it is no less real. Context, Scale, and Space ‘Merography’ has had a long tradition in the sciences. Marilyn Strathern has argued how merography has been a Euro-American modality of sense making which envisions and describes things as part of something else. The more ‘contexts’ are considered in describing a thing, the better, and the more the knowledge. This is especially true for ethnography, and is the reason why enthnography was borrowed by other disciplines in attempts to garner ever more knowledge (Schlecker and Hirsch:2001:75). The convention of merography seems to make a lot of sense then in an increasingly globalized world. The village is not a bounded entity, but part of a country which is part of a region which is part of the world. Not only that, but where the village stops, and the region begins is no longer clear against the backdrop of globalization. What would then demarcate the field in fieldwork? Are anthropologists to create even ‘thicker’ descriptions than those discussed by Geertz, taking into account all the possible contexts that the village may lie within? Moving to a regional strategy could be an alternative, but it also has its drawbacks according to Roseberry. This “tends to move anthropologists from the intimate daily interactions, yet it does not necessarily give them a bird’s eye view; they may still have a worm’s eye view in that many of the forces and relations that affect a region are located elsewhere” (Roseberry:1989:119). Smallness of scale is not really the problem. It is the assumption of the autonomous self reproduction of societies (Tsing:2005:122). Having a spatial model in mind enables the anthropologist to study in communities and consider the effect of wider phenomena. It enables anthropologists to ask what within the locale is to be understood in terms of ‘local’ factors, and what is to be understood in terms of larger forces. Geertz reminds us that anthropologists “don’t study villages, they study in villages”. The locus of the study and the object of study do not necessarily, and often do not coincide (Geertz:1973:22). An alternative would be to eschew the spatial definition of the anthropologist’s unit of analysis. An example is discussed by Roseberry, that of Chris Gjording’s study of a copper mining project in Panama. The study was local in that Gjording was interested in studying the impact of the project on the Guyami Indians, but was also ‘global’ in the sense that it explored the role of the project within the state plan, decision making processes at the World Bank, and the role of multinational corporations involved in the project (Roseberry:1989:121). Yet whether the spatial dimension is eschewed or not, using a spatial model as a frame of reference is a manifestation of the part-whole mentality discussed by Strathern and Hirsch and Schlecker.  These authors discussed a certain ‘crisis of context’ in the social sciences, stemming from the ambivalence of holding on to merography while being sceptical of its epistemology. Strathern pointed out that “nothing is in fact ever simply part of a whole because another view, another perspective or domain, may redescribe it as part of something else” (Schlecker and Hirsch:2001:71). It became apparent that instead of bringing the researcher closer to the subject matter, ethnography opens up endless domains that constitute the subject matter. The assurance that the subject matter’s part-being in different contexts could add up to an integrated whole, was lost (Schlecker and Hirsch:2001:78). Strathern literalizes the point that in our conception of things as parts belonging to wholes, the relations between parts, and between parts and wholes become secondary (Strathern: 1990:5). Globalization is probably more about the spaces in between, the connections and relationships, than about how parts fit in the big picture. Anna Tsing’s fascinating book is an ethnography of global chains pertaining to the Indonesian timber industry and destruction of its forests. These chains are awkward and uneven, showing how universal claims do not make everything everywhere the same, but are themselves embroiled in chaotic encounters. Tsing looks at three universalist dreams- prosperity, knowledge, and freedom- and explores what they mean in the context of capital, nature, and advocacy in Indonesia (Tsing:2005:10). She engages with the universals rather than rejects them, in an attempt to see how universals travel and what happens to them at the point of confluence with the particulars. She makes it possible to look at both the local (Indonesian forest) and the global (Suharto’s regime, Japan, timber markets) and the spaces in between (flows of capital, chains of corruption, social movements).   Looking at relations becomes even more important when we realize that flows are “relations of disjuncture…They have different speeds, axes, points of origin and termination…It is the disjunctures between the various vectors characterizing this world in motion that produce fundamental problems of livelihood, equity, suffering, justice, and governance” (Appadurai:2000:6). These problems are very much real, manifesting themselves in local forms but having contexts that are anything but local. An example is the universalist promise of prosperity that benefited some in Indonesian timber industry, but deprived many more. A word on ethics is in order. To grab hold of ‘globalization’ and to make the field manageable, anthropologists resort to classifications such as local-global, internal-external, particular-universal, etc. The very wording of the question in this essay is an example. Yet there is a danger in this seemingly harmless way of classifying. An example is provided by Freguson and Gupta, which discusses how an Indian state run program for child health and maternal care espoused spatial images of the ‘local’ people fixed in place, the ‘higher up’ and more encompassing program supervision office, and the village level state workers somewhere betwixt and between (2002:985). Although this article discusses how certain state ‘supervision rituals’ contributed to this spatialization, it sheds light on how anthropologists’ conceptualization of the field can also create specific spatial images. At best, when people are placed against the backdrop of the global, they are reified as ‘locals’. At worst, when they are perceived to be passive recipients of ‘globalization’, they are depicted as ‘poor’. We have seen how the global analytical frame render the bushmen as encapsulated by globalization, marginalized by it, but still existing within it. All sorts of debate ensued on whether their way of life was original and genuine (as in Sahlins), or spurious, as in their being fixed in hunter-gatherer state because they could not be assimilated with globalization.  Anthropologists are not bad-intentioned, but one should be wary when anthropological research (as well as other types) is used to justify the establishment of development projects geared to help the ‘local people’. Temporality On a more positive note, Appadurai discusses how one role of imagination in social life is a force that encourages an emancipatory politics. This allows people “to consider migration, resist state violence, seek social redress, and design new forms of civic association and collaboration often across boundaries”; these are the beginnings of new social forms (2000:6). One such form is global civil society. To understand such forms, anthropologists must look into their emergence, to the confluence of factors that led to their appearance. Their present form would not be understood without an understanding of their past. Tracing the genealogies of globalization is very important especially for anthropologists interested in change, impact, and process. A historical perspective is also important to place a locale within a global arena. However one should not to reduce historical understanding to the simple statement that a particular locale has always been part of the wider world, be it a capitalist economy, an international labour market, or a global civil society (Roseberry:1989:116). But looking to the past is not enough; anthropologists must also study patterns of change over time, recognizing that relations that characterize one period of time continue to carry social, political, and economic weight in a subsequent period. Fieldwork interspersed over an extended period of time enables anthropologists to better assess whether their studies were indeed tainted by the dominant discourse at the time when the initial fieldwork was conducted. In another respect, it enables anthropologists to unpack and retract what has become ‘second-nature understandings’ often acquired through ‘immersion experience’ (Dresch and James: 2000:9). In yet another respect the anthropologist’s own aging process can prompt him/her to reconsider earlier assumptions, or enable him/her to see through a different lens.  Aging of the anthropologist also has another very real effect on ethnography, in terms of how the anthropologist is perceived by the subjects of the study. David Parkin discusses his fieldwork experience in Kenya, where he worked for an intermittent twenty years among the Giriama and Swahili Muslims. Among the Giriama, he is perceived as having come up the ranks of generation and so deserving of seniority. Among the Swahili Muslims, in contrast, Parkin was not conferred social wisdom since to acquire it he would have needed to come from an Islamic college in the Middle East, know Arabic, and be well versed in Islamic teaching (Parkin:2000:98). This is significant because it means that a society collaborates in the production of ethnography and may even shape it depending on its perception of the anthropologist (Parkin:2000:266). In an increasingly globalized world, these aspects of time become more pertinent. Wendy James characterizes her fieldwork experience in Sudan as “trying to capture shifting scenery from a series of moving escalators”. Two sources of change are interacting here: the anthropologists own situation, interests and perceptions, and that of the history of the people being studied (Parkin:2000:263). A word on ethics is in order here too. Obviously for pragmatic reasons an anthropologist can not go backwards or forwards in time indefinitely. Yet selecting a specific time horizon to study has serious implications. To go back to the bushmen example, Garland discusses how a selective historicity was at play, which chose to discuss the Bushmen’s victimization at the hands of the ‘white people’. In this representation, the bushmen appeared in Western discourse as “fully historical, modern subjects, ushered into history and modernity by virtue of their collective experiences of dispossession and colonization” (Garland:1999: 79). This representation coincided with the bushmen’s portrayal as victims ‘on the brink of extinction’.  Both portrayals legitimized the existence of the development NGO set to rescue the bushmen from their miserable fate. Ethnography When the global becomes localized and the local becomes globalized, a pressing question is: what do anthropologists write ethnographies about? The terms ‘local’ and ‘global’ themselves are shifting from denoting geographical spaces to signifying the particular and the universal, the subjugated and the hegemonic, the peculiar and the conventional.  Anthropologists will still study locales, such as villages, neighbourhoods and cities. However expanding the definitions of the global and the local explodes the potential of ethnography. As mentioned above, Tsing does an ethnography of global connection, examining global chains of capitalism, advocacy, and knowledge production, and asking how universals are embroiled, and how all this impinges on the Indonesian rainforests. The study of diasporas, or migration, is another example in which anthropologists do a kind of detective work, tracing links and following where they might lead. Globalization poses challenges for, but also invigorates certain dimensions of ethnography, such as consumption. Jonathan Friedman discusses three cases in which people’s reaction to foreign goods and global circumstances resulted in different local-global encounters. Among les Sapeurs, a Congolese youth group who rise in status through consumption of French haute couture, elegant dress is not representative but constitutive of social identity. The Ainu, an ethnic minority in Japan, reject the engulfment of their identity by the Japanese. Unlike les Sapeurs who consume the global, the Ainu resist Japanese hegemony (the global) by producing their culture in a commodity form in a large tourist project. By orienting themselves towards the tourist market (a global form), the Ainu are affirming their identity as distinct from the Japanese. The Hawaiians, by contrast, are adamantly anti-tourist in their cultural movement. Although like the Ainu the Hawaiians want to affirm their identity, they respond differently since their culture has already been commodified by the Americans, a process raising great worries among the Hawaiians about the de-authentication of their culture. Friedman argues that such different reactions must be understood in light of their historical emergence (Friedman:1994:102-115). Rather than looking at the local/global encounter and whether the local resists, appropriates, or usurps the global, Collier and Ong examine a range of phenomena that articulate the shifts associated with globalization, such as technoscience, systems of governance, and regimes of ethics. When such phenomena interact with other elements they form assemblages which are products “of multiple determinations that are not reducible to a single logic”. Such global assemblages suggest inherent tensions “global implies broadly encompassing, seamless, and mobile; assemblage implies heterogeneous, contingent, unstable, partial and situated” (Collier and Ong:2005:12). The authors thus look at global forms, such as ISO standards, that have a capacity for decontextualization and recontextualization and move across different social and cultural situations (2005:11). Douglas Holmes and George Marcus call for the extension of ethnography to the world of experts, such as bankers and bureaucrats, not by studying their lives, but their frames of reference in an attempt to bridge gaps across disciplines. Their study of the United States Federal Reserve-the Fed, is an example of the creative application of ethnography to a ‘contemporary system of technocratic expertise, which conceives and produces the idea of the global as daily practice’. The Fed has played a direct role in creating and mediating global capitalism. The authors claim that there is a para- ethnographic feature in every domain of expertise, which is a ‘self conscious critical faculty’. At the Fed, where policy decision making can not rely solely on hard, statistically obtained data, the experts including Greenspan resort to personalistic factors such as ‘hunches’, ‘intuitions’, ‘anecdotes’, ‘gut feelings’, which are complementary to but also oppositional to the reigning statistical mode of analysis.  In producing the Beige Book, a report published eight times a year to debrief the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s research division rely on human interlocutors who oversee daily transactions within strategic spheres of the economy. These interlocutors are not employees but informants – bankers, real estate agents, retailers- who are constantly in conversations with clients and colleagues, to elicit “profound and elusive cultural forces guiding the economy: expectations and sentiments” (Douglas & Holmes:2005:236-251). By doing an ethnography of the para-ethnographic, Douglas and Holmes have envisioned a different form of ethnography from the traditional localized model of a place/people bounded research. This kind of ethnography of the frame of reference of another discipline, leads to an understanding of knowledge production, a global form which constitutes and propels the ‘global’ in globalization. Conclusion This essay has attempted to examine what happens to anthropological fieldwork when the global becomes local and the local becomes global. The ‘global’ and the ‘local’ here were considered as constituents of the globalization discourse, as physical locales, and as descriptions of forms and phenomena. This enabled the imagining of globalization both conceptually and materially. On the conceptual level, globalization can be thought of as discourse. In this case, the ‘global’ is the discourse, and the ‘local’ is anthropological fieldwork. They enter into a dialectical relationship where the discourse can subjugate fieldwork to develop insights that reinforce the discourse, while fieldwork can also contribute to or even revolutionize the discourse. This was seen in how anthropology, through fieldwork, was able to nuance the globalization discourse from depicting people’s actions as mere forms of either resistance against or assimilation into the global, to relaying forms of engagement with the global through messy encounters that resulted in whole new forms. When imagined physically or materially, the global and the local take on different meanings. Globalization is then seen as having real and felt effects, as in causing deforestation or increased poverty, and producing new social phenomena such as international standards, or social networks that span the globe. For fieldwork to grasp such effects, it must envision the local as belonging to a wider world, if the subject of study is ensconced within a particular locale or among a particular group of people. Fieldwork can also extend to studying relationships, forms, and frames of reference. But for it to study either it must itself become ‘globalized’ through expansion of the context, space, and scale, through widened notions of temporality, and through creative application of ethnography. The blurry boundaries should not threaten anthropological fieldwork, but rather create an opportunity whereby fieldwork can remake itself by both ‘anthropologizing’ globalization and ‘globalizing’ anthropology. Works Cited Appadurai, A. (2001) Globalization, London: Duke University Press Bird-David, N (1983) ‘Wage Gathering: Socio-economic Change and the Case of the Naiken of South India’ in Robb, P (ed.) 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