Sherry Darling
New Yorker
Shoot, this may even speak to the War on Christmas. (I hope I don't regret bringing that up LOL).
Anyway, a wonderful articel I came across on globalization, economic uncertainity, identity and violence.
Here's a taste:
But what is the special status of such scapegoats in the era of globalization? After all, strangers, sick people, nomads, religious dissidents and similar ‘minor’ social groups have always been targets of prejudice and xenophobia. Here I suggest a single and simple hypothesis. Given the systemic compromise of national economic sovereignty that is built into the logic of globalization, and given the increasing strain this puts on states to behave as trustees of the interests of a territorially defined and confined ‘people’, minorities are the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few mega states, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties. Minorities, in a word, are metaphors of the betrayal of the classical national project. And it is this betrayal – actually rooted in the failure of the nation state to preserve its promise to be the guarantor of national sovereignty – that underwrites the worldwide impulse to extrude or to eliminate minorities. It also explains why state military forces are often involved in intra-state ethnocide.
http://www.india-seminar.com/2001/503/503 arjun apadurai.htm
Anyway, a wonderful articel I came across on globalization, economic uncertainity, identity and violence.
Here's a taste:
But what is the special status of such scapegoats in the era of globalization? After all, strangers, sick people, nomads, religious dissidents and similar ‘minor’ social groups have always been targets of prejudice and xenophobia. Here I suggest a single and simple hypothesis. Given the systemic compromise of national economic sovereignty that is built into the logic of globalization, and given the increasing strain this puts on states to behave as trustees of the interests of a territorially defined and confined ‘people’, minorities are the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few mega states, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties. Minorities, in a word, are metaphors of the betrayal of the classical national project. And it is this betrayal – actually rooted in the failure of the nation state to preserve its promise to be the guarantor of national sovereignty – that underwrites the worldwide impulse to extrude or to eliminate minorities. It also explains why state military forces are often involved in intra-state ethnocide.
http://www.india-seminar.com/2001/503/503 arjun apadurai.htm