Customer Reviews

Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World

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This is a terrific collection of writings that push forward a new way of understanding globalization: through ethnography. I have found this to be a terrific tool for the classroom. Undergraduates want to understand what globalization is and what it means. Most writings on globalization are abstract, theoretical, and from 30,000 feet. The case studies in global ethnography give students a window onto what globalization means up close and personal for real people on the ground. Just terrific!

Having only read a few excerpts from this book about unemployment, homelessness and mental illness I have attempted to compare my own observations with those of some of the contributors. Much of the homelessness I see in my own Ontario city is due to the embrace of community mental health by the provincial government in the early seventies as a cost-saving mearsure in response to the unionization of attendants in these hospitals and resulting higher labor costs. The government felt these could be reduced by sending patients to various cities which were ill-equipped to deal with them. Soon the revolving door of hospital, rest home, street, hospital began. These patients form the core of the homeless population in my community. Displaced auto workers,even those from non-union companies, are much less likely to be homeless since they usually have family resources. Worse case scenarios do exist where years, even decades of alcohol and/or drug abuse have frayed family ties to the breaking point, resulting in a precarious 'couch-crashing' existence without rent money with which to afford even the lowest cost housing.
The author-editor's analysis of the effects of globalization on skilled and unskilled workers in various locations is strained through a Marxist utensil. He spoke at my alma mater today as a guest of the Social Justice League but I was unable to attend due to a working with the homeless schedule conflict. Had I been able to attend with a Romanian friend who's experience with communist societies is extensive, we would likely have heckled him as a dewey-eyed Berkeley Marxist unwilling to admit the past ecological disasters of Soviet Europe.