ABSTRACT
The topic of globalization in anthropology can be approached in different ways. Perhaps appropriately, the idea of globalization was imported into anthropology from outside the discipline. It was a concept that had acquired its meaning in part as a reflection of a number of approaches that were circulating among various sets of people who shared a broad orientation toward political economy. These included dependency theory, imperialism theory, the new world division of labor, world-system theory, and various related debates that took place primarily among Marxist economists. In anthropology, a discourse on globalization emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, associated especially with the work of Arjun Appadurai and U. Hannerz, and with the journal Public Culture. It is important to understand the emergence of discourses of globalization in terms of their social context, especially where they take the form “globalism,” the embrace and advocacy of globalization and its fruits.
