Abstract
Workshop/Panel chaired by Prof. Jonathan Friedman (EHESS, Paris and UCLA in San Diego) and organized as a part of 2nd biennial CASA/SASA conference Of Cosmopolitanism and Cosmologies held in Telč, Czech Republic, 2-3 September 2011.
Workshop focuses on studies of imagination as the locus of unequal power relations in times of globalization. Globalization entails macro-structural processes such as the decline of exclusive centrality of the West followed by new "softer" and mostly non-coercive forms of global Western hegemony leading to even larger social inequality and polarization of wealth among people and among countries.
We understand the World as unequally structured space where it is needed to see the global connectivity and mobility as highly stratified processes. There is a great, yet not fully extracted potential in social anthropology to reveal these worldwide processes ethnographically, or to put it in Burawoyian words, to study people in their time and space and by doing so to get an insight into the lived experience of globalization.
Nowadays, the fabrication of people's imagination and the production and incorporation of what is imaginable has become indispensable part of new hegemonic processes and techniques of domination. But at the same time, imagination remains creative, constituent and yet fully uncontrollable sphere of people's agenda where new seeds of resistance can always grow up.
Imagination in globalizing world is traceable through ethnographical methods. First, one can trace the lives of people through the effects of global processes and constellations of contemporary geopolitical and economical relations characterized as a set of possibilities for action.
Second, we think it is possible to trace global processes on the internal level, that is, in a set of dispositions and mental and corporeal schemata which reveal variable modes of hegemony, domination and resistance in the everyday lives of people.