ABSTRACT
Despite voluminous research on globalisation, there is growing acknowledgement that insufficient attention has been paid to ‘globalisation from below’. Specifically, there is growing recognition of globalisation as a dynamic, contingent and contested process that impinges on and is in turn impinged upon by individual actors and social groups beyond the huge, imposing and over-powering structures of economy (Giddens 1996). In this chapter, I wish to emphasise the contingent nature of globalisation, that is, that it is not an ‘out there’ phenomenon, but ‘an “in here” phenomenon’ which involves ‘transformations in the very texture of everyday life…, affecting even intimacies of personal identity’ ( Giddens 1996:367–8). While much of the literature has focused its attention on globalisation in large metropolises, functioning as command and control centres, economic motors and knowledge-bases (Amin 1997), there is equally well a need to understand the experiences of individuals who people these metropolises that are constantly undergoing changes associated with globalisation. My particular aim here is to illustrate, through my empirical work on Singaporean transmigrants negotiating their sense of ethnic (Chinese) identity, the dynamic, contingent and contested nature of ethnic identity as it is constructed and reconstructed in a global context. I wish therefore to draw the literature on globalisation away from the study of formal, macroscale and quantifiable transnational processes to focus on the informal, microscale and qualitative experiences of everyday people (Boden 1994).
