Module 'Intimate relations in a globalised political economy'

Oct 31, Nov 1, 2012

Prof. Holly Wardlow (Toronto)

As modern anthropology has shown so often, the apparently global consolidation of Western modes of political economy is compatible with the generation and reproduction of multiple local forms.  Global forces become more fine-grained at the local level both as a consequence of their entering into more subtle interaction with articulate forms in place through diasporic connections or communications, and as they become the subject of discussion in alternative universal discourses, such as Christianity or neo-liberalism.  Anthropologists have repeatedly shown how the locally distinctive lifeways produced by these delicately imbricated syntheses entail novel flows of cultural forms and the transformation of regional and international relations; in this module, we wish to focus on the way the form and tenor of intimate relations are implicated in these processes.

It is clear already that contemporary globalization can produce many subtle effects on the relations that are fundamental to social forms, their reproduction, and the subject’s experience of them.  Here, as elsewhere, though, we see anything but uniformity at the ethnographic level.

In this module we will consider contemporary sexualities, gender relations, household structure, intra- and interfamilial dynamics and their mode of reproduction as these vary at different points in transnational social space. We are particularly interested in the affective aspects of intimate relations as these are experienced and as they represented in the competing discourses that valorise or stigmatise different forms.

Questions to be addressed include: How do local configurations of the global influence gender relations: can they empower women or do they tend to make their subordination worse? How do local forms of social reproduction respond to discourses of love and idealised family life? Are kinship norms and practices always assimilated to newer conceptions of an appropriate life? What is the fate of different heteronormative conceptions of the family when transformed modes of sustaining intra-familial relations entail separation for long periods? How are the effects of the commodification of intimate relations in sex tourism, child trafficking, prostitution and international marriage markets to be investigated and characterised? How do the cross-currents produced by the sexualisation of international work relations and specific gender programs of WHO, churches and NGOs work themselves out in specific contexts, and what challenges do these present to ethnographic analysis?

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