anecdote, the father of Singapore politics, Lee Kuan Yew, called the air- ... politics'. Climate control, as George entitled Part I of his book, was ultimately about.
The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2009) 20, 369–378
doi:10.1111/j.1757-6547.2009.00042.x
BOOK REVIEW ESSAY
On the politics of culture, or the state of the state, in Singapore Allen Chun Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
George, Cherian, 2000, Singapore, The Air-Conditioned Nation: Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, Singapore: Landmark Books, 223 pp., ISBN: 981-3065-46-X. Yao, Souchou, 2007, Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess, London: Routledge, 209 pp., ISBN: 0-415-41712-0. Wee, C. J. W.-L., 2008, The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 210 pp., ISBN: 978-962-209-859-6. Welcome to the desert of the unreal (Baudrillard 1994: 1)1
This essay examines three recent books on Singapore, written by authors from quite different disciplines who, despite offering distinct analytical perspectives, put forth remarkably similar or compatible caricatures of Singapore culture, society and politics. All three books point to the peculiarities (or distinctive features) of Singapore society, which are seen in the context of historical practice and epitomised by representative figures or forces. These aspects of Singapore society drive events and underlying institutions. More importantly, these books challenge prevailing notions of modernity, nation-state and ethnic identity inherent, if not central, to anthropological or social scientific studies of contemporary society, especially in Asia. There are many reasons why Singapore, in light of its distinctive (if not paradigmatic) features, deserves more serious attention by socio-cultural observers of all persuasions. At the same time there is a sense in which the peculiarities (or excesses) of Singapore’s experiences frustrate our best efforts to understand and rationalise them. The constant shift in emphasis between the paradigmatic and transcendent nature of Singapore in a constantly mutating multiethnic, transnational and market environment is a persistent tension evident in all three books. All three authors are either natives of Singapore or write on the basis of long experience as local residents with deep familiarity of everyday life, behaviours, values and attitudes. Cherian George is a journalist turned academic, and his book is a collection of feature essays that initially appeared in The Straits Times during the 1990s. His book is, of the three works, the most tangibly rooted in everyday events in its discussion of Singapore culture and society. Yao Souchou is a Malaysian Chinese who spent several years working as Research Fellow at the ª 2009 Australian Anthropological Society
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National University of Singapore before becoming Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at The University of Sydney. His book is a critical commentary from afar, but it is based on intensive research conducted during his stay in Singapore. Wee Wan-ling is an Associate Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University. His book is a revision of separate journal essays into a larger, integrated view of culture, modernity and ethnicity in Singapore. George’s caricature of Singapore as the ‘air-conditioned nation’ was intended not just as a metaphor of the modern imperative that underscored Singapore’s experiences of, and attitude towards, development in the last half of the twentieth century, especially after gaining independence. It was also a clear allusion to the Singaporean government’s policy of regulating or managing society. In an oft-cited anecdote, the father of Singapore politics, Lee Kuan Yew, called the air-conditioner the most influential invention of the twentieth century, as it enabled those in tropical zones to transcend the disadvantages of working in hot, humid conditions and to compete effectively against more advanced civilisations. As George (p. 15) put it, ‘there are few metaphors that more evocatively crystallise the essence of Singapore politics’. Climate control, as George entitled Part I of his book, was ultimately about the mastery of nature, not only of the environment but also of humankind, which was in turn predicated on the unilineal desirability of progress—what theorists in a classical era termed the ‘happiness thesis’. Comfort and control thus went hand in hand; one was the means to an end, and the substance of the book, in its ruminations on politics, is less about theory than an analysis of the underlying mindsets that guided practices. In this regard, George begins with everyday events, but he is ultimately interested in unpacking the behind the scenes operation of institutions that drive them. This is what journalists are good at, but it is also important to note that he writes from a distance, not entirely privy, as an insider, to the minds of his subjects and not personally inclined to their own point of view. This is not dissimilar from the empathetic yet detached positionality of the ethnographic participant observer. His book can be read as an ethnography of Singapore society through the interpretation of representative actors and institutions that presumably play a determining role in defining and charting its course. Insofar as the book is a revision of newspaper essays written in 1990–2000, its content deals strictly with the era of Goh Chok Tong, Lee Kuan Yew’s chosen successor as the second Prime Minister of Singapore. In many regards, Goh’s overall policy and political vision was a continuation of the People’s Action Party (PAP) designs, which were laid out and put into practice most forcefully by Lee, but it was an era where one could see systematic institutionalisation of a distinctive cultural lifestyle, mode of political regulation and tight interplay between state, economy and society that epitomised Singapore’s approach to development and the polity. Although George notes that the two dozen essays that comprise the book can be read in any order, thematically they are divided into four parts. The first is a set of essays dwelling on the nature of governmentality during the Goh regime but reflective generally of the PAP’s evolution in the decades that followed Singapore’s 370
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independence from Malaysia in 1965. The second concentrates on the macromindsets and micro-practices that guided its relationship with the political opposition and intellectual critics on all fronts. The third deals with its handling of the emergence of civil society in the form of freedom of expression, internet democracy, environmentalism, artistic resistance and community activism. The fourth explores debates over ethnic and national identity and the challenges of Westernism and cosmopolitan influences. Most of these themes are staple issues that have generated intense discussion in the daily media and influenced the course of everyday life in Singapore, not just as a conscious discourse on domestic politics but as one framed in an unconscious relationship with its regional neighbours and distinctive differences with the world at large. These subjects garnish the stereotypical images of Singapore already familiar to most laymen, namely a cosmopolitan, multiethnic city-state managed by a strong technocratic central government, a Switzerland of the East in terms of its clockwork efficiency and ethos of utilitarian achievement through collective discipline. Its systematic obsession with selecting and adapting what it perceives to be the best of the (capitalist) West and the (moralistic) East has become the discursive ground for its search for national identity, among other things. The domination of the State in controlling the course of those societal developments has been, for most part, the single handed achievement of the PAP. The PAP’s ‘success’ can be seen as the result of its effective articulation of a political ideology that best mirrored the ideals of its mass constituency and its ruthless ability, through legal and institutional manipulation, to both eradicate and assuage critical opposition to its position of power. In other words, governmentality has relied on more than just domination and hegemony; it has also relied on the PAP’s assumption that it actually advocates for the populace and its singleminded confidence that it can realise such political goals more effectively than all other competing parties or voices. This same combination of tactics has driven its determination to deflect and suppress emanations from below, however civil, that challenge its authority and, ultimately, its competence to govern. If the oft-quoted ethos of ‘minimal government’ defines American populism, then the Singapore government, as dominated by the PAP, represents the other extreme in its determination to promote a rationally planned society. Buttressed by the ideals of Western progress and Eastern collectivism, it not only claims to possess the best qualities of sage government but has also been able to effectively stifle competition from various dissident parties and alternative voices to its authority. In these respects, it is easy to recognise the distinctive features of Singapore culture and society, but how positively one can view these features is a matter of interpretation or value judgment. Taken at face value, journalistic commentaries on daily politics may represent narrow views on society if they are fixated disproportionately on the actions of people and institutions in power, but in this case George’s account can be used to highlight more salient aspects of culture and society, seen through the framework of discourse and practice, that are basic or crucial to the operation of the modern ª 2009 Australian Anthropological Society
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nation-state. In this regard, George’s deeper reflections on the subjectivity of the State share a common object of interest with those of Yao and Wee. Yao Souchou’s book is an overtly symbolic analysis of Singapore society that begins by acknowledging the influence of Marshall Sahlins. However, his polemic style more closely resembles Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1993) in its effort to isolate epitomising spectacles of everyday mindset and lifestyle and then, through demystifying and destabilising tactics of writing, to unmask various fictions of culture routinely promoted by the State as norms. Singapore may be epitomised, in fact, by its culture of excess, but Yao’s critical fac¸ades, which shift often between discursive deconstruction, psychoanalytic interpretation, Orientalist decolonisation and literary catharsis, are also modes of exaggeration that deliberately create spectacles of excess by exhaustively over-determining such banalities of culture. Yao’s object of criticism is primarily the State, insofar as its authority is forcefully stamped everywhere in the spaces of everyday culture. The culture of excess is thus the sum product of its omnipresence in these spectacles of everyday life. Disciplinary control and smooth society in George’s depiction of Singapore are replaced in Yao’s by accounts of naked violence and hegemonic terror subjectively driven by psychological anxieties. He assumes the reader’s familiarity with the stereotypes of Singapore’s progressive economy, rationally regulated society, pragmatic ethos and moral government, then proceeds directly to unveil the masks and primal convulsions that drive such antiseptic modernising obsessions. Psychoanalysis as a genre of cultural critique is, of course, not new to anthropology. Claude Levi-Strauss famously opened his critique of Totemism (1963) by arguing that the vogue of hysteria and that of totemism were contemporary, arising from the same cultural conditions; a product of the same scientific rational worldview that Yao finds equally suspect and inherently flawed in the case of Singapore. Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic can be read in a literal sense as Calvinism’s fatalist worldview transformed into economic action as the ethos of rational calculation. That same religion can also be read in a strong sense as the product of psychological tensions, marked by a compulsive obsessive disorder that belies its Puritanical fac¸ade. Yao’s ethnography is thus a psychoanalysis, literally speaking, which is at the same time a strong reading or critique of culture. It may not convince the patient of his illness, but Yao is not interested in dialoguing with his patient as much as with other scholarly observers of Singapore. By invoking theory of all kinds in his explicit critique of culture, he stands both distanced and detached. In Chapter One, he takes direct aim at the State, as the pathological source of this culture of excess. In both George’s and Yao’s accounts, one might ask to what extent Lee Kuan Yew can be regarded as personifying the State. For George, even though Lee is not the primary object of scrutiny, it is clear that his policies and legacy live on in the institutional practices of the PAP and State. His influence is still materially and spiritually present. For Yao, Lee personifies the State in a sense that is no less unconscious or abstract. The mesmerising image of what Yao calls ‘the sick father’ at the dawn of independence (the result of Lee’s failure to prevent 372
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Singapore’s expulsion from Malaysia) represents an act of self-sacrifice for the nation that galvanises Lee’s heroic stature. This is Yao’s real point of departure, which exposes the mask and magic of the State that is at the apex of this mythmaking apparatus. Lee is a larger than life figure who resonates with the spectre of the State in Yao’s account but, unlike George’s focus on the pragmatic micropractices of the institutional machinery that epitomise the staying power of the system, moralism in its various guises seems to epitomise for Yao the essence of the Singaporean State. Given the figure of the national father as sacrificial martyr hero, moral regulation from Durkheim to Abrams2 becomes the paradigm on which supply-side and market socialism is institutionalised and seeks legitimation in the form of shared values and Asian communitarianism of various flavours. I personally find it difficult to reconcile the pathological sick father with the moralism of the Singapore State in Yao’s terms (Abrams’ use of moral regulation more directly invokes Foucault), especially when his intent is to depict Singapore as a Nazi Leviathan. In chapter two, Yao continues to expand on this excess of power, where self-preservation of the State in its paranoid extreme is seen as an extension of this imperative of legitimation. Fears of chaos and intolerance of dissent also make necessary legal measures to defend the government’s political integrity from attacks of libel and other perceived threats. Yao’s focus in Chapter Three on what can be regarded as Culture Wars (yellow culture, white peril) attempts to show the underside of Singapore’s parallel embrace of capitalist progress, but without the decadent vices, spiritual pollution and crass materialism. The violence of excess is treated differently in Yao’s account of the caning of American Michael Fay (Chapter Four), an event that sparked outcry in the international media, including calls for leniency. While the reception of this incident on both sides can be seen as a debate between East and West on the merits of corporal punishment, Yao reads a Lacanian fulfilment desire that compensates for its own lack or inherent sense of inferiority into this larger confrontation between the Singapore government and its external critics. The caning of Michael Fay is, in essence, ‘a drama of the State’s imaginary movement from ‘‘insufficiency (of a postcolonial state) to anticipation (as First World nation)’’, from the singularity of its dependence (on the West) to the fantasy (that extends from a fragmented bodyimage) of its wholeness’, as Yao (p. 95) puts it. In layman’s terms, it is akin to the local bully flexing his muscles against the taunts of alien intruders, with the inferiority complex thrown in as a psychological motive. In Yao’s terms, this incident exuded excess and over-compensation, but it was also a media spectacle blown out of proportion. The lengths to which the puritanical Singapore government has gone to suppress forms of unnatural sex (oral, including homosexual), and to control unproductive or hedonistic behaviour (to which one might add artistic expressions of resistance that satirise the squeaky clean images and intentions of government policy), are offered as further examples of excess. Similar puritanical trends can be seen in the rise of Islamic anti-Westernism and George W. Bush’s America, but in the context ª 2009 Australian Anthropological Society
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of Singapore these trends point to the extremity of the State, in particular. In the last two chapters, Yao offers final thoughts on the future of Singapore at the end of history, at which point he returns to the legacy of the sick father, Lee Kwan Yew, as though to suggest that one can expect to see little change in the order of things until the passing of Lee. At the end, one should not be surprised that Yao calls all this ‘useless pragmatism’. Having subjected his patient (and the reader) to heavy psychoanalytic shock treatment, the fact that pragmatism is useless is an understatement, to say the least. As political ideology, it ‘conceals and mystifies’, and in the final analysis it ‘also blinds the State to its moral defects’ (Yao 2007: 186). Magic then becomes tragic. It is somewhat ironic that George’s journalism reads more like an ethnography (if that is what anthropologists ‘typically’ write) and that the anthropologist Yao’s ethnography is written as an unabashed political critique that relies primarily on theoretical artillery as a weapon. Moreover, it is probably not fair to compare the two books, even at face value. It is not surprising to discover that George is, at best, mildly critical of Singapore’s orthodoxy. Even if he took a more critical view of its politics, the various legal constraints that actually limit what can be written in the media would have deterred him from saying anything more in print. Yao writes as an academic (and is thus not legally constrained in the way journalistic media is) who also happens to reside abroad, immune from threats of libel, despite the vicious tone of his psychoanalytic critique. Whether or not one agrees with the full extent of his critique, its uninhibited quality is nonetheless a constructive contribution. By contrast, I doubt if the government would care at all. Being theoretical, it is just ‘useless’ criticism. One can find in C. J. Wee Wan-ling’s ruminations on ‘the Asian modern’ a deep play on the same stereotypes of Singapore culture and society that resonate in the books by George and Yao. Despite his thematic attention to Asia, the book is less about Asia per se than its recognition that Singapore’s experiences are inextricably entangled with discourses on Asia or comparative developments therein. He attempts to confront the broader issue of modernity, as understood in the complex interplay between culture, economy and politics. In his introductory chapter, it is apparent that the thematic frame of reference is, in large part, the discourse on modernity in the context of Asia as a whole. This has a long history in the modern East Asian literature, beginning with Japan, the rise of other Asian tigers that invoked explicit influence of neo-Confucianism, then (by extension) experiences elsewhere in South and Southeast Asia. Similar concerns resonate in the theoretical literature on alternative and postcolonial modernities. Modernity in both discursive contexts is the point of departure for his book, which is divided into two parts: deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. By territorialisation, he refers not to geographical space but rather to the abstract displacement of culture in this process of modernity. For Wee, culture is, in essence, a space that comprises ethnicities, identities, representations, social values, political ideologies and imaginations of all genres, which constitute the substantive logic that drives the quest for modernity. 374
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In historical terms, deterritorialisation corresponds roughly to the early phase of Singapore’s development in the postwar era, especially after its independence from Malaysia. In this era, culture took a back seat to the imperative of economic modernisation, which was characterised by a blunt emphasis on economic takeoff, utilitarian survival and the ethos of rugged individualism. Much of this history has been written in standard textbooks, but Wee’s focus is on the ideological visions that drove these policies in various dimensions of economic development and social planning. This vision is personified, in part, by the influence of important figures leading the PAP, such as S. Rajaratnam and Goh Keng Swee, as well as the work of urban planners, most importantly the Housing and Development Board, who systematically transformed the city-state into what Rem Koolhaas termed a ‘Potemkin metropolis’. This early stage of Singapore’s development contrasted with culture’s reterritorialisation in late capitalism. In its reterritorialisation, culture becomes an active object of discourse and appropriation within a changing capitalism. As Wee (p. 105) puts it, ‘capitalism must homogenise—it must deterritorialise—while also producing difference—it must reterritorialise—and become a ‘multicultural’ capitalism’, thereby explicitly echoing similar arguments put forth by Zˇizˇek on the cultural logic of multinational capitalism. In this regard, many kinds of reterritorialisation seem to overlap and interact. In particular, Wee discusses the advent of Asian values as a cultural discourse of modernity, the government’s management of race or multiethnicity in a multinational capitalism, the imagination of national culturalism within the capitalist order and the use of Asian religions to foster neo-traditional links to modernity. Wee then complements the discussion of reterritorialisation with re-imaginings of Asia in Singaporean theatre that represent counter discourses to hegemonic state projects. In this regard, the Singaporean eunuch and Asian Lear in plays by Kuo Pao Kun and Ong Keng Sen are hybrid reconfigurations that challenge the caste-like multiracialism and the underlying East-West dualism promoted by the PAP regime, which constitutes an obstacle to the formation of a new trans-Asian imagination and cosmopolitan culture. Such hybrid reconfigurations of place and culture in the global capitalist system are necessary to counter the clashes of civilisation that emerged after ‘the end of history’ and became intrinsic to neo-liberal globalisation. Wee’s book is, in short, an ambitious attempt to rethink the crises of global capitalism or modernity in a Singapore context. Ironically, his is the most anthropological of the three, in the sense that it seriously confronts theoretical discussions on this subject by the Comaroffs, Fernando Coronil, Arjun Appadurai and Partha Chatterjee (a political scientist by training now in the anthropology department at Columbia), whose works Wee cites often. The fact that modernity and capitalism have become mainstream issues to which anthropologists have contributed can also be seen as a sign of anthropology’s maturity as a serious discipline. Wee’s training in the history of religions and literature undoubtedly makes his contribution even more noteworthy. However, there are many loose ends in his thesis. One might ask, are the reterritorialisations in this ongoing evolution of global capitalism really ª 2009 Australian Anthropological Society
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the same as those being mapped out in a Singapore context? There are, to be sure, discursive crises of culture in a Singapore context, but how do we know whether they are endemic to capitalism (which is by definition a social, political or economic system in itself), nationalism, or the State, all of which can be viewed as analytically distinct entities, albeit overlapping in practice? There is also a difference between the rise of East Asian economies and the perception of cultural crisis within it, the latter not necessarily being a relevant discursive problem in other Asian countries but rather the object of Orientalist imagination in Western social scientific discourse imposed on these debates. The debate over modernity can be seen, in effect, as an extension of crude debates over modernisation, as economic progress, where cultural factors play a crucial role, but where the meaning and crisis of modernity can be understood as distinct from those of capitalism. The plethora of writings in the humanistic fields easily attest to the idea and phenomenon of modernity as something that crosscuts Western enlightenment, the emergence of nations, the formation of disciplinary regimes, its appropriation by the state—in other words, many other things, strictly speaking, than just its embeddedness in global capitalism. Wee gives the impression that the process of deterritorialisation in an early era of Singapore’s development, followed by reterritorialisation in various domains of cultural reconfiguration, is largely a historical transformation, which I do not doubt as a matter of fact. But this transition is different from the tensions endemic to capitalism as sketched by Deleuze and Guattari, whom Wee also cites. At a more superficial level ideological tensions polarise party politics in many other countries, in which case do we really need a heavy notion of territorialisation, when the agency of culture is not necessarily the focal issue? The crisis of culture as national identity can also be understood in much simpler terms, as something endemic to the formation of the nation-state. Clifford Geertz (1963), writing in the aftermath of Third World independence movements, called it ‘the integrative revolution’, which was prompted by a need to transcend primordial sentiments of the kind characteristic of multiethnic Singapore, where the PAP made an overt attempt to invent a Singaporean identity in the absence of such a shared ‘tradition’. Ernest Gellner (1983) viewed the same set of shared values that Wee outlined in a Singapore context as necessary constructions of any national culture. Benedict Anderson’s (1993) imagined community (of culture), which was predicated on a colloquial language, popular media and literary imaginations, also invoked reterritorialisations that were not intrinsically relevant to global capitalism per se. The real question is, namely, why has Singapore been so fraught and obsessed by such cultural crises, when they are discursively lacking in many countries, even in Asia? Even when they existed, they were not perceived as being tied specifically to these crises of global capitalism. The various debates that have energised the recent literature on ‘global’ or ‘neoliberal’ capitalism have accented important issues in the contemporary world, but reterritorialisation is, in one sense, geographically literal. One might argue, contra Appadurai’s (1990) notion of transnational disjunctures, which are characterised by 376
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chaotic flows or scapes, spewed from the ashes of Lash and Urry’s (1987) disorganised capitalism, and which resemble Deleuze’s smooth society and presaged Hardt and Negri’s (2000) ‘empire’, that this transnational (multinational) capitalism constitutes a new form of imperialism. How else do we reconcile the widening gap between rich and poor nations that has fuelled anti-WTO movements everywhere? Yet how relevant is this mode of capitalism to the discourse and policy of the Singapore state? Despite Wee’s (2008: 148) contention that ‘the PAP government has acknowledged for some years that the Fordist-Taylorist machinery of disciplinary modernisation that it had so successfully used was starting to creak’, leading to greater investment in a knowledge economy, the machinery remains largely unchanged. In its enticement of foreign capital investment in exchange for tax incentives, second perhaps only to Dubai, Singapore seems to be a willing recipient of free market capitalism. Its Prime Minister earns a millionaire’s salary and is expected to run the nation like a business, which would make staunch Reaganites or Thatcherites blush. Recently, the embarrassment of national wealth has aggravated the extreme gap between rich and poor to such an extent that it has prompted the government to defend even more the sanctity of its workfare (antiwelfare) policies. Shades of classical Marxism—there still seems to be a long way to liberal, even neo-liberal, capitalism! As Singapore moves into the next stage of economic development, much can be said about its strange combination of microeconomic laissez faire, macrosocial regulation and illiberal democracy, which are seminal constituents of its unique capitalist order. But to lump all of culture together and to then recast it as a reterritorialisation of modernity is to overgeneralise the nature of the problem, which centres on making sense of the distinctive features of Singapore. As a theoretical problem, I think the experiences of Singapore have been overlooked in the literature. Despite Durkheim’s conception of the socialised individual, and Foucault’s genealogy of the disciplinary society, both of which have become paradigms of Western modernity, few scholars mention Singapore, where disciplinary regulation, as a project of the State, has been fine tuned to a degree of efficiency unseen elsewhere. Gellner’s argument that nationalism creates nations where they do not exist finds a perfect example in Singapore, where an ongoing search for identity has prompted unending reconfigurations of culture in materialist and abstract senses. Singapore has, in many cases, worn out established theoretical paradigms of all kinds, while spinning life into higher states of unreality. Yet few scholarly observers seem to notice or care. While I appreciate Wee’s ambitious attempt to conceptualise the broader ramifications of Singapore’s experiences, I think he has misleadingly situated the heart of the problem in a crisis of global capitalism, which I regard, following Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000), as a problem of a ‘local’ West extending outward. Singapore, like other nations, is conscious of its ‘being in the world’, in Jonathan Friedman’s (1990) terms, but abstract understanding of socio-cultural processes should proceed from the ground up, distinctive excesses above all. ª 2009 Australian Anthropological Society
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In retrospect, all three books in my opinion offer important insights and contributions to the study of Singapore culture and society. Taken as a whole, I think they show the benefits, for anthropology, of a stereophonic perspective. The three authors do not cite each other’s work and, despite their differences in style and approach, each book adds to and reaffirms the substance of the other. I avoid calling this dialogical, because it is really not about authors conversing with their subjects or invoking subjects to unveil multiple realities. The complexity of Singapore (indeed any society) resides in the multiplicity of methods that the observer must employ to make sense of its social phenomena, whose meaning and formation are ephemeral and intertwined. Most importantly, all three authors show how one can be native yet maintain a critical positionality crucial for an ideal ethnography. NOTES 1
2
Baudrillard 1994: 1. This phrase also appeared in the movie The Matrix, which suggested that the Matrix was an elaborate virtual fac¸ade, disguising the reality of persons subjected to the total control of the State—perhaps not unlike the totalitarian nature of Singapore society. Abrams’ (1988) notion of moral regulation is rooted in the moral nature of social solidarity.
REFERENCES Abrams, P. 1988. Notes on the difficulty of studying the state Journal of Historical Sociology 1: 58–89. Anderson, B. 1993. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn. London: Verso. Appadurai, A. 1990. Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Public Culture 2: 1–24. Barthes, R. 1993 (1958). Mythologies. London: Vintage. Baudrillard, J. 1994. Simulacra et Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Friedman, J. 1990. Being in the world: globalization and localization Theory Culture & Society 7: 311–28. Geertz, C. 1963. The integrative revolution: primordial sentiments and civil politics in the new states, In C. Geertz (ed.) Old Societies and New States, pp. 105–57. Chicago: Aldine. Gellner, E. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardt, M., A. Negri 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lash, S., J. Urry 1987. The End of Organized Capitalism. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Levi-Strauss, C. 1963. Totemism. trans. R Needham, Boston: Beacon Press.
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