Chapter 1 - Introduction

Summary

This book explores the multiple and combined effects of globalization on urban and rural communities, providing case studies from postsocialist Bulgaria. As globalization has been studied largely in urban contexts, the aim of this volume is to shift the attention to the countryside and analyse how transnational links are transforming the destinies of and relations between cities, towns and villages. Very few scholars have systematically studied the effects of globalization in the countryside. As one of them, Michael Woods, writes, place-based studies that show how rural localities are remade under globalization are lacking (2007, 486–7; see also 2011, 270). Theorists of globalization in anthropology such as Arjun Appadurai (1996) and Ulf Hannerz (1996) have failed to explicitly anchor their analysis in rural sites, while the widely used Anthropology of Globalization reader makes almost no reference to the countryside (Inda and Rosaldo 2008; see also Appadurai 2001). A notable exception is Anna Tsing's book Friction (2005), which combines a keen theoretical interest in globalization with an ethnography of what she calls ‘awkward, messy and unpredictable encounters’ in the rainforests of Indonesia, where foreign investors meet local communities and entrepreneurs, as well as environmental movements and other actors. The present volume attempts to make a contribution to this emerging debate, providing ethnographic accounts of global processes in specific rural places without losing sight of urban contexts.

The case studies are from postsocialist Bulgaria, providing examples of the effects globalization has had in a range of specific localities.