Globalization discourse is deeply flawed in its very conception, expressing a gratuitous assumption of the emergence of a new era that is discontinuous with the past and whose conflicts are primarily the product of those who resist this development: nationalists, racists, localists. This discourse is itself an ideological product of a cosmopolitan elite identity that has emerged (again) in recent years and which can be accounted for, in turn, by another approach. A global systemic perspective situates cosmopolitan discourses in periods of hegemonic decline, which are also periods of economic, social, and cultural fragmentation in the hegemonic zones as well as of vertical polarization that creates a new “rootedness” at the bottom and a cosmopolitanization at the top. While these processes are underway today in the West, something quite the opposite is occurring in the emergent new hegemonic centers to the East. A global systemic approach also offers a model of today's crisis that is absent in globalization discourse.

Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman's The Anthropology of Global Systems (AGS) is a robust, ambitious, and timely undertaking in macrotheoretical and macrohistorical anthropology. I show that, more than 30 years ago, its political-economic underpinnings anticipated the key mechanisms of financialization, so important for debates on the current financial crisis. By revisiting the “transition from feudalism to capitalism” debate with new insights from diplomatic history, I work out a Marxian critique of the Friedmans’ Weberian concept of capital, which is insufficiently relational and therefore not sufficiently alert to the politics of class. Attention to these relational politics adds an important measure of what I call “structured contingency,” and indeed agency, to temporal process, which in the AGS tends to become overly teleological. Building on my critique, I also draw attention to the absence of the possibility of “collective rationality” in the Friedmans’ grid of modern subject positions.

Today's wrenching worldwide social and cultural instability calls for more adequate theorization. Through an examination of the local-food movement in the United States, I consider one such theorization, Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman's anthropology of global systems. The Friedmans set out an original conceptualization of transformations in the political economy of commercial civilizations and processes of identity formation in periods of hegemonic decline. I present data on the local-food movement in North Carolina and on differences in identity orientations between “sustainable-agriculture” and “food-security” activists to evaluate this conceptualization.

Pursuing a self-described anarcho-surrealist politics in the aftermath of Iceland's banking crisis, Jón Gnarr shocked the country's political establishment by winning the mayoral election in Reykjavík in May 2010. In this article, I explore the rise of Gnarr's Best Party, especially its refusal to accept a distinction between parody and sincerity in its mode of political performance. Against the backdrop of the increasing monopolization of (neo)liberal political discourse and action, I discuss how “Gnarrism” reflects at once something old and something new in northern liberal democracy.

Pursuing a self-described anarcho-surrealist politics in the aftermath of Iceland's banking crisis, Jón Gnarr shocked the country's political establishment by winning the mayoral election in Reykjavík in May 2010. In this article, I explore the rise of Gnarr's Best Party, especially its refusal to accept a distinction between parody and sincerity in its mode of political performance.

How does humor serve political leaders widely seen as inept? How does political satire shift when a country's own prime minister is both media mogul and object of ridicule? I examine humor of and about Italy's Silvio Berlusconi and look at the country's top news parody program, especially its mascot: a big, red puppet named Gabibbo, who is praised as a “civil defender.” I argue that Berlusconi's own humor forges ties to an Italian citizenry habituated in the 1980s to political spectacle—the carefully staged and sensational exhibitionism of national politics—and, subsequently, to the media saturation of late-liberal politics. I show how political spectacle gave way to a cynicism capable of simultaneously propelling Berlusconi's peculiar popularity and transforming puppets into truth-tellers.

How does humor serve political leaders widely seen as inept? How does political satire shift when a country's own prime minister is both media mogul and object of ridicule? I examine humor of and about Italy's Silvio Berlusconi and look at the country's top news parody program, especially its mascot: a big, red puppet named Gabibbo, who is praised as a “civil defender.” I argue that Berlusconi's own humor forges ties to an Italian citizenry habituated in the 1980s to political spectacle—the carefully staged and sensational exhibitionism of national politics—and, subsequently, to the media saturation of late-liberal politics.

Parody possesses a kind of power that realist critique sometimes lacks. I explore why humor is sometimes used as a medium for addressing tragic circumstances and why parody in particular may be especially suited to communicating about dictatorship. The research presented here draws on a long-term project on Eritrean politics and on websites devoted to Eritrean politics created by Eritreans in diaspora. The core of the analysis dissects an online political parody of conditions under the regime of President Isaias Afewerki. So much of what is known and written about Eritrean history and current realities, whether by scholars, journalists, international organizations, or Eritreans online, is earnest, serious, and even heartbreaking. The uses of humor in this context seem to call for an explanation, and the analysis presented here sheds light on the mechanisms through which humor accomplishes important political work and fosters the development of new subjectivities.

Visual caricatures were important in the political, social, and cultural context of the Second Brazilian Reign (1842–89). With Pedro II as a central figure in the monarchy, most satirical artists concentrated on attacking his public image. Nevertheless, the results were always ambivalent. On the one hand, caricatures showed the monarchy becoming weaker and weaker throughout the period, and, in fact, it ended the year after the abolition of slavery in 1888. On the other hand, they transformed Pedro II into a kind of “good father” and increased his popularity. Images are central in understanding the regime: Sometimes, it is hard to say if they were consequences or causes, if they reflected, were part of, or were even the origin of the events of the day.

Visual caricatures were important in the political, social, and cultural context of the Second Brazilian Reign (1842–89). With Pedro II as a central figure in the monarchy, most satirical artists concentrated on attacking his public image. Nevertheless, the results were always ambivalent. On the one hand, caricatures showed the monarchy becoming weaker and weaker throughout the period, and, in fact, it ended the year after the abolition of slavery in 1888.

Nigérien gendarmes invest considerable creative energy in their daily paperwork. I explore how the gendarmes conceive of the writing of seemingly purely bureaucratic documents, procès-verbaux, in aesthetic terms. At the same time, I ground the aesthetic appreciation of these documents in the gendarmes’ socioprofessional environment. Writing an aesthetically satisfying procès-verbal is a means of gaining respect from colleagues and superiors and of justifying and actualizing gendarmes’ self-perception as intellectuals in uniform. Bureaucratic work, I argue, is always also aesthetic work, and bureaucratic aesthetics is where aesthetic, pragmatic, and legal reasonings become one.

In Jimma, Ethiopia, young men's friendships involve affection and reciprocal exchange of material goods, and in many cases the balance between the two creates conflicts. I examine tensions concerning exchange and friendship in relation to literature on love and transactional sex in Africa to argue for a conception of friendship that does not assume that calculation and self-interest conflict with affection. For friends in urban Ethiopia, affection and material interest are inextricable, and this often generates feelings of jealousy and mistrust. Similarities in the ways lovers and friends struggle to balance affection and exchange indicate that sex and romantic love may not be the primary sources of tension within relationships. I argue that friendship is often a particularly flexible and ambiguous relationship, and in comparison to relations between lovers, this flexibility reduces conflicts between those involved.

In Hindi-speaking northeastern India, mothers whose daughters are afflicted with a psychosomatic illness referred to locally as “the teeth have clenched” employ standard tropes pertaining to Indian femininity to negotiate their daughters’ agency against the backdrop of new aspirations. An inquiry into two cases I encountered during fieldwork in Varanasi psychiatric clinics in 2001–04 demonstrates how girls’ symptomatic bodies mediated social concerns pertaining to the challenges that women's education and work in public spaces present to non-elite middle-class domestic orders. While these illnesses may have been born of previous traumas or household conflicts, and sometimes were acknowledged as such, mothers’ and daughters’ own concerns about the illnesses focused on what they indicated about the daughters’ potential for social and academic success. In particular, mothers regarded their daughters as possessing either too much or too little “power” or “strength,” and these attributions attached to their anxieties and hopes for their daughters’ futures. In the drama of clenched teeth, disordered bodies, disruptive behavior, and possible futures were folded into the same metaphors of agency.

Azonto is a Ghanaian urban dance craze whose popularity is built through its global circulation. I trace its production and flow across studios, radio stations, dance floors, and digital platforms in Accra and among Ghanaians in London and New York. I argue that, as a technologically mediated style, Azonto is the embodiment of being Ghanaian in a mobile, digital world. This dance reveals both the potentials and the hazards of digital repetition and copying for self-recognition. Ghanaian musicians and fans creatively use the repetitive aspects of digital technologies, making this dance a style of symbolic appropriation that links Ghanaian youth both in Accra and abroad into a dispersed community of musical participation that valorizes mobility itself. The dance's sudden ubiquity, however, creates “digital fatigue,” an uncertainty among participants about belonging in an era of digital replication that threatens to unmoor signs of recognition from the cultural registers that empower them in the first place.

Azonto is a Ghanaian urban dance craze whose popularity is built through its global circulation. I trace its production and flow across studios, radio stations, dance floors, and digital platforms in Accra and among Ghanaians in London and New York. I argue that, as a technologically mediated style, Azonto is the embodiment of being Ghanaian in a mobile, digital world. This dance reveals both the potentials and the hazards of digital repetition and copying for self-recognition.

Building on the importance of “play” in traditional sociality, organized team sports such as soccer are instrumental in promoting a new moral and political order among Urarina people of Peruvian Amazonia, one grounded in notions of roles, rules, and the abstract individual. As a vehicle of nationalist sentiment, highly amenable to ritualization and bureaucratization, sport is central to the process by which the state expands its territory and influence. Like warfare, but unifying rather than fragmenting in its effects, sport harnesses the energy and vitality of youth and co-opts them for other ends.

Building on the importance of “play” in traditional sociality, organized team sports such as soccer are instrumental in promoting a new moral and political order among Urarina people of Peruvian Amazonia, one grounded in notions of roles, rules, and the abstract individual. As a vehicle of nationalist sentiment, highly amenable to ritualization and bureaucratization, sport is central to the process by which the state expands its territory and influence.