Why is it important to talk about faces and actual bodies?

While there are many ways of delineating different forms of globalization – the classic delineation being by domain: economic, ecological, political and cultural – different forms of globalization can usefully be distinguished for our purposes through an emphasis on levels of integration/differentiation: from embodied globalization through to agencyextended globalization, object-extended globalization and most abstractly to disembodied globalization. Embodied globalization, meaning simply the movement of bodies across world-space, was a dominant characteristic of traditional extensions globally. Since the time of the early empires and population upheavals, people carried their stories, sensibilities and practices of community over vast distances. This intersected with other forms of globalization. Agency-extended globalization refers to the way in which agents of polities, corporations, religious sodalities and other organizations became central carriers of processes of global extension. Object extension refers to the way in which objects such as commodities, traded goods, museum artefacts and icons moved across the world also carrying social relations. Finally, disembodied extension refers to processes of interchange where the actual bodies of persons become irrelevant to the dominant mode of integration/differentiation, at least at one level. This approach allows us to understand what is happening to the borders of nation-states. Contra all those arguments about a borderless world, global flows and a flat earth, the global movement of people is differentiated and complex (Bude and Durrschmidt 2010).