Nils Bubandt :
'After Globalisation? - Anthropological Reflections on a Fetish'

The paper attempts to sketch an outline of the emerging critique within anthropology of current theories of globalisation. Distinguishing between critical perspectives inspired by world systems theory on the one hand and by historical anthropology on the other, the paper asserts the need for both historical depth and ethnographic thickness when approaching the subject of 'globalisation'. The article suggests seeing the two types of critique as complementary rather than antithetical, since both insist on the need for a self-reflexive, historically sensitive approach. Such an approach is necessary to culturally and historically deconstruct the current tendency, both academic and political, to fetishise globalisation. Entailed by this critique of the academic and political infatuation with globalisation is also a reconsideration of doxic oppositions such as those between the 'global' and the 'local', the 'modern' and the 'non-modern', the 'rational' and the 'magical' as well as the dichotomy between the 'cultural' and the 'technological'. Assembling support for its argument from within contemporary critical anthropology, the paper also makes use of fieldwork material from Maluku in Eastern Indonesia to illustrate its points.