Bulgaria to a situation in which one demolishes one’s old house before finishing construction on the new one, thus leaving one figuratively, if not literally, homeless.
Indeed, the pictures in the Romanian slideshow in particular demonstrate not so much fuzziness or old pictures showing through, but friction, lack of movement, and dysfunction resulting from incongruity. The same is true for my three cases. The balconies cannot be fully used because of the lamppost poking through their floors (which also creates a safety issue); the newly paved sidewalk cannot be walked on; and the slide ending in the dumpster is not useable as play equipment nor can it fit in the dumpster fully, preventing its functioning both as value and waste.
My use of the metaphor of friction adapts Anna Tsing’s (2005) image to a new context. She uses “friction” to show that, far from being a smooth movement of people, money, knowledge, and goods, globalization—like any movement, according to physics—requires a certain resistance of the surfaces and entities brought into contact. Such interactions are productive, not just in the sense that they provide traction for things on the move, but also in the sense that it is from such awkward encounters that culture is generated. Friction is also unpredictable: in one case it may end up providing the much-necessary traction, a surface for something slippery to hold onto; at other times, as Tsing says, it can inspire insurrection, so that the physical concept of resistance manifests in actual social resistance.
Tsing faithfully references the physics of friction, and her research does attend to nature and materiality. Yet her examples of friction are drawn mostly from the realm of culture, knowledge, and identity, and less often from the realm of objects. It is in the spirit of inspiration that I want to adopt and direct this concept back to its original milieu: the material. The case studies in this book demonstrate that the EU is a sociomaterial assemblage, and that when a new member country enters this assemblage, its existing materiality and practices rub against those of the western European countries, whose practices have shaped and constitute the EU. Physics tells us that two further things happen as a result of friction in addition to generating movement—the effect that Tsing pays attention to. In some cases there is a triboelectric effect: an explosion. An example is striking a match. In other cases, over a longer time period, there can be a polishing effect; just think of sanding a piece of wood. Rubbing wood with a piece of sandpaper will ultimately wear down both surfaces—though to a different degree—so that traction and grittiness decrease. This is the opposite of explosion. It is a certain kind of stabilization.
The literature on EU legal harmonization has tended to assume the second effect: stabilization and normalization, a slow, steady, relatively uneventful polishing effect. The paprika panic, the foie gras boycott, and the red mud spill, however, are of the former kind. In them the friction becomes too much, there is an explosion and things come to a halt. In the crater the detonation leaves behind, the pieces may be picked up again, but they will never be reassembled in quite the same way.
When we look at globalization, the postsocialist transition, or EU integration through the lenses of triboelectric effects rather than movement or polishing, different connections will become visible. How to study these cases is what I turn to next.
GLOBAL ETHNOGRAPHY
When we are interested in the question of how something we accept as a universal phenomenon or trend “spreads”—that is, moves across space and transforms places—we are in fact not studying imposition, or painting over, as the tabula rasa metaphor suggests, nor are we studying the abstract becoming particular the minute it touches the local. We are studying friction: the process by which things—democracy, animal rights—gain traction on seemingly alien, inferior, or inhospitable surfaces. This friction, however, is always concrete and particular, because the grittiness of the surface is dependent on the actual, local context. So the resulting “contact” itself is concrete, unique, exotic, or idiosyncratic. What we are studying is not the local particular but the global particular. Going back to the second set of binaries above, we no longer assume that the concrete can only be studied at the local or micro levels, nor that the abstract is only evident in studies of the macro or the global. That is, referencing Doreen Massey (1994), we no longer conflate level of abstraction with social or geographic scale. Massey’s critique is directed at David Harvey and others wedded to classical Marxist epistemology, who tend to look down on locality studies as inferior in their theory-generating capacity and in their capacity to support progressive—read universal and general—political solutions. Let’s take the market as an example. Most Marxists and many social scientists consider it an abstract and macro-level institution. Massey suggests, however, that if by concrete we mean the product of many determinations, as most usually do, then the market is not less concrete than certain economic and material practices at the level of the individual, the household, or the village. Therefore, it is possible to think of the market as concrete and particular, even as we recognize that it operates at the macro or even global scales. Economists and sociologists can certainly distill abstract laws or logics of the market, but that does not mean (a) that that logic acts alone or is the single cause of a range of phenomena or (b) that those “abstract” laws do not change in certain circumstances, under the pressure of concrete actors, human or nonhuman. Consequently, the market too can be the product of many determinations.
Disentangling the level of abstraction from social and geographical scale will yield the epistemological matrix seen in table 0.1.
Studying globalization as frictions therefore requires that I locate myself in the rubric of the global concrete. To understand what this means methodologically, let’s fill in table 0.2 following Michael Burawoy’s (1991) comparison of different social science methodologies. While he never explicitly identified the methodological perspective he and nine students, including me, elaborated, which we called global ethnography, it is easy to see why I have placed it in the upper right-hand cell. But first let me summarize what that perspective is in the collaborators’ own terms.
Table 0.1. Disentangling level of abstraction from social scale
Table 0.2. The relationship between geographical scales and levels of abstraction in different methodological traditions
In the 2000 book Global Ethnography, my colleagues and I, under the guidance of Burawoy, demonstrate how and why globalization and its associated processes and institutions should be studied at the local scale. We argue that people in different parts of the world and differently positioned in their respective societies experience globalization in radically different ways (Burawoy et al. 2000). We group these experiences into what we call the three “slices” of globalization: global forces, global connections, and global imaginations. In the first instance, people experience globalization as an external force impinging on the locality and changing their lives in ways over which they have no control, restricting their choices to defensive reactions or adaptations. These changes in general are negative, such as factories closing or welfare being cut as a result of pressures by supranational agencies committed to a neoliberal economic agenda.
People in other positions, however, may find that globalization and transnationalization, or the deterritorialization of the nation-state, also offer opportunities. For them, whether they are migrants finding employment in countries that are better off or political activists maintaining transnational contacts with movements abroad, globalization opens up a space in which they can build connections to improve their lives and better represent their interests. They actively participate in building these links, which in turn sustain them economically, socially, and culturally and which allow them to maneuver around the global forces that otherwise might be more constraining than enabling.
