1) What can you tell me about the Mercato, other than it is a place where flip-flops finally end up
for sale (p. 137)?
2) Who is Des and what are some reasons he has moved from being a leather footwear maker to
an EVA-material footwear maker (pgs. 141- 142)?
3) What is the importance of the 'Made in Ethiopia' tag (p. 141, p. 143, and p. 145)?
4) Who is Addisu, how has he maintained connections to his ancestral village, and what are some
constraints he has on his flip-flop business (pgs. 147 - 150)?
5) What are some challenges of urban planning (determining what social activity will happen
where) in Addis that are not as challenging in the US (pgs. 152 - 153)?
6) What country invaded Ethiopia and caused one of the earliest reasons the League of Nations
broke up (p. 158)? What were some of the footwear changes Zema went through from the
invasion of Ethiopia to the printing of this book (pgs. 158 - 159)?
7) Other than protecting feet while walking what are some other roles of footwear in Ethiopia?
Do these roles for footwear exist in the USA (p. 160)?
8) More and more sociologists, historians, and anthropologists are paying attention the parts of
cities that serve the role mentioned on p. 173. What is Koshe? Is it easy to access (p. 174)? What
is the name of the famous book that discusses what is held in Koshe (p. 175)?
9) Who are the 'scratchers' and what are some conditions that make their work difficult (pgs. 177
- 184)?
10) When Dr. Knowles says globalization is "all local," what does she mean (p. 193)?
< -...,~ f ·
·. .· '~. ._J~·.-·
Globalisation Revisited
187
What do the stories of the flip-flop trail tell us about globalisat·10n.,
11
Globalisation Revisited
The flip-flop trail provides an empirical, ground-level account of the
landscapes and lives in which people walk along a mesh of mutating
translocal back roads. But what is its broader resonance for globalisation
theory? Globalisation theorists raise grander and more sweeping lines
of enquiry without the restrictions of empirical verification. They ask,
what is globalisation? Is it taking new forms? How might the relationship
between extended locales and nation-states be conceptualised? These
are excellent questions. At least two of them resonate with the trail, as it
probes the mutating forms and substance of translocality. The problem,
and part of the reason why globalisation analysts talk across each other's
concerns rather than to them, is that globalisation thinking is colonised by
particular conceptions of theory.
I
I
I
It is these grand, abstract conceptions of theory that I want to dislodge.
Offering instead, more modest and serviceable conceptions, suggesting
new ways of thinking about globalisation, which draw on the insights of
the trail. This shift in scale involves shifting my own thin.king too, from a
series of microcosmically small, detailed, empirical encounters, albeit with
grander resonance, onto the higher ground of overview reflections. In the
pages that remain, I want to revisit globalisation with an overview of the
trail, gathering and developing some of the reAections scattered along it,
like the pieces of brightly coloured rubbish that stand out from the heap,
catching the eyes of the scratchers. This is social theory as scratching.
Theory
The boys on the bridge suggest the benefits of oversight from the
vantage-point of higher ground, in their case, oversight of the rubbish dump
a nd its approach roads. The first direction in my tentative, operational,
definition of theory, is that theory is about reflection on multiple processes
and t he connections between them. Oversight of the entire trail, a step
up in scales of reflection, proffers a position from which to think more
deeply about its directions, its connections, its social fabrics, comp,trisons
between differe nt parts of the trail and, ultimately, the implications of this
I
I
for how we think about globalisation.
My second direction of travel is that theory, ,ts centati\'e fonns of
explanation, is always present, even in our most rudiment.try thinking.
whether we acknowledge it or not. It is imbricated in the selection,
I
I
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188
Globalisation Revisited
Flip-flop
189
arrangement. im-estigation and narration of empirical detail. It was always
geographies, the term globalisation with Chinese characters acknowledges
embedded in the trail, as I acknowledged in my introduction. Theory, like
the particularity of routes through China, they rarely focus their enquiries
photography, selects and fran1es. It can never be post-empirical; instead
on them. Instead they rework the same, limited, empirical scenarios
it provokes a dialogue between analysis and investigation, between
and territories, for deeper and ever more abstract truths. This challenge
reflection and discovery. Theory is about gathering the insights that come
to the grip of hegemonic globalisation on the imagination of global
from the unloosening, as Lemert' calls it, that close examination entails.
theorists questions, for example, Castells' most excellent conception of
Consequently, theory always comes from a particular vantage-point,
globalisation for its focus on the key landing places of network value. My
whether or not this is acknowledged. My version of globalisation is
book shows that globalisation is more than this. It is more plural and open.
articulated from the flip-flop trail. I don't claim universality for it. I suggest
It constantly reroutes trails and opens new ones. New trails, new routes,
instead that it provides an alternate vantage-point from other analyses,
new configurations and articulations of social and material fabrics, form
and one from which hitherto unacknowledged features of globalisation
the mutating substance of globalisation.
enter the frame.
My third direction of travel is that theory does not usefully encompass
globalisation is always a work in progress. Only provisional assessments,
The flip-flop trail discourages conceptual complacency. It shows that
entire paradigms. Indeed this is impossible in conceptualisingglobalisation,
pending further investigation of something so vast and diverse as
as a number of scholars have noted in unravelling some of its plurality.'
globalisation, are appropriate. Further investigation of a diverse range of
Rather than reaching for universals, the scope and ambition of theory
circumstances and vantage-points is urgently needed. In the interim, our
should be appropriately modest and serviceable. Vered Amit3 explores the
theoretical pronouncements should be provisional and the limitations of
benefits of mid-range concepts that are 'good to think with', that ope n up,
their circumstances acknowledged, moderating claims to general truths.
rather than cap, e nquiry, in place of overarching systems of thought. These
This is the first of the insights with implications for how we concepruaJise
three directio ns guide my thinking on theory in offering the journeys
globalisation, to come from the flip-flop trail.
composing the flip-flop trail as empirical-analytic vantage-points from
which to revisit our understanding of globalisation.
Logics of Travel
Beyond the Landing Places of Network Value
The second of these insights is the consequences of shifting the framework
of globalisation from objects (as commodities) to people, embarked on the
Globalisation has hitherto been viewed from a limited range of perspectives.
journeys of everyday life. The flip-flop trail pursues globalisation from inside
The fl ip-flop trail tilts the angle of conception from the commanding
the logics of travel, unusually, foregrounding its mobile human substance.
heights of globalisation, from what I have at various points along the trail
Journeys both embed the core logic of globalisation in movement and
referred to as 'mainstream globalisation' or the 'global superhighways', to
offer a way of investigating it empirically. The logics of travel foreground
less hegemonic, less sensational, qui ete r, more mundane streams of global
the everyday lives of people collaborating, in different ways. with the
traffic and translocal connection.
businesses of globalisation, with the macro as well as the micro landscapt'S
Shifting the lens from high finance, media images, fast food chains
that co-produce them. These living, moving, story-telling human fabrics
and other high-profile vectors of global inte rsection, creates a conceptual
graphically depict the substance of globalisation, and the landscapes on
space for other versions of globalisation in othe r places, to take shape.
which its multiple possibilities are enacted. Their journeys reve.1I the skills
These are not better o r mo re real than the insights of iconic-hegemonic
with which people navigate and customise the trails they we.we through
versions, but they do reveal global isation from different angles, exposing
their neighbourhoods. The benefit this brings to an undersunding 0f
its less prominent features, a nd adding to what we know about it by
globalisation will be unfolded further below.
othe r means. While globalisation theorists now admit its lesser-known
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lli,.J.;:·
•
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190
Flip-flop
~
Fragility and Precmity
The third insight on globalisation from the flip-flop trail challenges the
robust, solid, enduring and thus, perhaps, apparently unchallengeable
networked monolith presented in globalisation theory. The flip-flop trail
instead exposes globalisation's fragility as an unstable, shifting and ad hoc
tangle of translocal routes, which can, and do, as we observed on the trail,
...
-
\
Globalisation Revisited
191
As a counterpoint to the stable netw ks
.
f I .
or ' strengths and . .
ties o c ass1c globalisation theory th fl"1 fl
.
mevitabili, .
' e P- op trail reveaJ 111
· h
f
o peoples lives, another side to global' .
s, t e fabric
isatron. This side .
h"
consistent and stable. It is instead a . h
rs anyt rng but
• n rnc oate, ad hoc ma ·
. .
tnx of shrftmg.
cross-cutting trails that are difficult to f .
.
an 1c1pate, and even mor d'ffi
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I
to live. Globalisation produces fraoiJe a d
.
.
e
cu t
o· n precanous lives, even i h
. . .
who live m its more privileged locations.
or t ose
reroute in directions that cannot always be predicted. Flip-flop production
is particularly fragile on account of its mobility. Low wages and easily
learned technical skills make flip-flop production possible in thousands
Globalisation on the Back Roads
of locations. If flip-flops were people they would be experienced migrants
living in transit. Dai Wei's reverie of Middle Eastern feet in the sand cannot
be predicted from the logics of capital accumulation. The fragiliti es of life
on the flip-flop trail consist in such random motilities as well as more
systematic ones.
What is, perhaps, more surprising are the fragilities and precarities
of the hegemonic forms of globalisation, developed around oil and
petrochemicals. Viewed from the humanistic perspective of the flip-flop
trail , life in Kuwait and Korea is precarious in its own ways, as we
observed. On each of the platforms composing the trail, materials, objects
and livelihoods can move in any number of directions. This is not to
suggest that Kuwaiti, Korean, Chinese, Somali and Ethiopian fragilities are
commensurable. They are not, as we could see. Fragilities take different
forms and intensities in people's lives.
Globalisation's fragilities and instabilities weave their way through
people's lives along the trail as incommensurable, personal insecurities and
precarities. Precarity refers to the different ways in which risk is shifted
from public and commercial bodies onto the personal circumstances of
individual workers and their families. Precarities manifest themselves
in being unable to eat three times a day, circumstances which Chinese
producers and Ethiopian consumers share. They are manifested in risking
imprisonment for evading import duties, in having to drive a taxi or dig
clams in old age, and in fearing of invasion and violence. For much of
the human substance of globalisation we witness on the trail, the fragile
form s of stability available to them in a shifting, precarious world entail
remaining poor, so that jobs are not relocated to still poorer places _and
people. People's navigational skills are attuned to the shifting precarities
.
. d
•
we saw of globali•
with which they coexist. They are ski 11e navigators, as
sation's precarities.
Straying
· departmg
•
. from the .well-trodden superhighways ofgl obal'1sation,
routes,
taking
the
roads
Jess
known
tr'ki
from Its hegemomc
.
.
, s I ng out on
new geographies, following an object without knowing where it is headed
and general_ly wan~ering off the beaten track, furnishes new thinking on
what global1sat10n 1s and how it works. What follows unravels the benefits
of the back roads a bit further. The idea of back-road globalisation is
intended to convey a sense of it as an alternative set of routes. I am not
making a conceptual distinction between it and hegemonic versions of
globalisation. On the contrary, as the flip-flop trail shows, the two closely
intersect. Back roads depart from the main roads, with which they form
significant junctio ns, they cross, and run alongside other main roads,
forged by other steams of business animating other lives. Distinguishing
back and main roads is thus a matter of descriptive convenience,
signalling departure from hegemonic versions of globalisation, rather than
a fundamental distinction. Back roads do not lack significance, or large
scales of traffic as we have seen. They are back roads in carrying low-value
goods and in not marking the landing places of network value, two factors
which rule them out as vantage-points onto globalisation. Network value
aside, the flip-flop trail reveals some of globalisation's macro-contours
forming the social morphology of our time. Three revelations of the trail
in particular display the benefits of these back roads.
They revea.l significant streams of global migration. In the process they
display the rhythms, scales of movement and volition driving these
forms of human mobility. They expose the logics of rural-to-urban
migrations and difference between points on the trail. These are in full
swing across China, over in Korea, and scaled down in Ethiopi,1. They
expose female transnational migration between Ethiopia and Kuwait.
Flip-flop
Indeed, at the en d of the flip -flop trail, further trails are generated from
the rubbish dum p to the Middle East. They expose another stream of
movements too, in the traffic between Africa and China, which brings
Chinese m igrants to Africa, and Africans to China.
Secon d, these back roads reveal what is happen ing in China. As a
global production centre in transition to becoming a major economic
powerhouse, China is a twenty-first century fo rce to be reckoned with .
Accou nts of globalisation should take this into accoun t. These back
roads unpack some of its small-scale factory production and the people
whose lives it weaves. These back roads reveal China's (quasi-colonial?)
relatio nship with Africa. Th is is important in rising (competition and)
opportunity and ( u nevenly distributed) prosperity on this continent.
Third, these back roads reveal the current securitisation efforts and ,
sometimes, t he military interventions of the twenty-first century, in
borderland struggles with in surgents, jihadists, disaffected citizens and
pirates. They expose the seizures and violence undermining the security
and prosperity of the global North. In these moments local precarities
are tran sformed and passed along, creating new routes to new places,
in which they take n ew forms. Back roads t hrough Somalia, Djibouti
and Ethiopia vividly display the tensions in the ( macro) geopolitics of
the m om ent.
Journeys
The journeys composing the back road s of the trail port ray the lives ~£ an
oil geologist , a team of Korean petrochemical workers, several Chme~e
fl ip-flop productio n workers, the rise of t he bosses, an interlocutor m
accessing global markets, two Ethiopian trader s, a smuggler, an elde rly
· iourn
·
eys reveal
Eth iopian woman and three rubbish scrat c h ers. Their
. .
d c h·
· the hyper-local
striking similarities between Eth10p1ans an
m ese m
.
. h
J t'1ng to them, and Ill
geographies of their journeys, m t e purposes re a
.
h
I e everyone m t e
the skills with whic h they navigate them. Journeys P ac
• s and between
same fram e. They e n able comparisons between 1ocauon •
.
.
tours of comparative
lives in the same locatio ns. Jou rneys d isplay t h e con
. .
pie
.
d differentiating peo •
( dis )advantage. They offer a means of group m g an
. . . t ad as we
.
· ·
rov1dmg m s e •
avoiding the juggernauts of socia l categon satw n , P .
es of their
.
.
d the circurnstan c
observe d, fine-grained portra it s of lives an
. d They expose the
. h I" es are hve .
_
living. Jo urne ys r eve al the scale o n w h 1c iv
Globalisation Revisited
193
hyper-local and the long-distance traveller, along with the rhythms of
their routes. They reveal people's calculations and navigational skills, the
capacities and circumstances that make their journeys possible.
Journeys reveal places. They expose the missing urban geographies
of globalisation. They provide a series of lenses through which cities
can be apprehended and analysed. They problematise the relationship
between cities, as well as between cities and the routes composing them.
Journeys, as I ho pe I have shown, provide sophisticated urban analytics,
while placing the lives fabricating them at the centre of our concerns.
Globalisation is increasingly lived in and through cities, in one way or
another. In payin g close attention to landscape we see the environmental
impact of globalisat ion on the flip-flop trail, in the detritus on the oil and
petrochemical landscapes in Kuwait and Korea, in the way discarded
flip-flops sit in th e landfill site on the edge of Addis, picked over by
scratchers, and, p erhaps, turned into biomass electricity.
It's All Local
Finally, in among the seething inchoate mobilities composing
globalisation, its hyper-locality is declared. Globalisation is lived in houses
and in neighbourhoods. It is lived through work. And it is lived in the
social relationships of these restless groundings. What stretches these
things beyond the local, what makes them global, is a chaotic patchwork
·
of movement, on different
seales, by d 1·fferent people, by 061·ects like
flip-flops, by materials like plastics, and by substances like food .. The
flip-flop trail shows that globalisation is made in little, hyper-local sections.
all of them connected, in different ways to the next stage or platform on
the trail. At n o point, and this would seem to be crucial in thinkmg about
.
.
I
ctions of 1t, revealed. Not
globalisation is an entire trail , or even arge se
even in the a{gorithms of logistics. Trails jolt uncert,1inly across the opaque
h00d5 locales and nauon-states.
.
inte rsections betwee n neighbour _ __ ' .
s the fli -flop trail has shown,
Globalisation is not what we th111k it isb._A- . -!ys It is an unst.1ble.
k of human and o 1ect JOll t
•
.
it is a loose pate hwor
.h
k ts ofopportunitv witlun
f lh )C ery wit poc e
'
shifting, contingent mass o ac l - . ' b ' II globalisation net'ds to b,•
.
d.
. f P·ecanty. A ove a ,
.
overwhelming Ian scapes O 1
_ - . ·nsnbilitit·s nught
. . ,- for manoCUVIC l 1' l . •
re-examined fo r the opportumt1e,
"de who struggle in their own w.1ys
provide for the mass of people wo rldw1
to navigate it.
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