World Systems Analysis

Complexities of Collapse: Maya Obsidian as Revealed by Social Network Graphical Analysis (Mark Golitko, James Meierhoff, Gary M. Feinman, and Ryan Williams, 2012)

by Gary Feinman

Antiquity 86:507-523

Talking among Themselves? Weberian and Marxist Historical Sociologies as Dialogues without 'Others'

by Gurminder K Bhambra

Sociology’s orientation to history is based around agreement on the importance of key substantive issues concerning... more Sociology’s orientation to history is based around agreement on the importance of key substantive issues concerning the emergence of modernity and the related ‘rise of the West’, as well as agreement around a stadial idea of progressive development and the privileging of Eurocentred histories in the construction of such a framework. Within these areas of broad agreement, however, there are also key points of contestation between the strong forms of macro-sociology as embodied, in particular, by Marxist and Weberian approaches, for example, Brenner, Anderson, and Wallerstein on the one hand, and Runciman, Giddens and Mann, on the other. The sites of contestation include addressing the precise nature of the origins of capitalism, the importance of the commercial versus the agrarian mode of production in the transition to capitalism, or arguments about how later developing countries might accommodate forms of modernity already established, for example, as in the multiple modernities debates. What these debates all have in common is that they can be carried out in the context of a standard framework of comparative sociology, a framework that I will argue is unable to address the issues raised by the turn to postcolonial studies and global history.

Globophilia (Encyclopedia Entry)

by Richard Kahn

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

“World Systems Theory and Alternative Modes of Interaction in the Archaeology of Culture Contact”.

by Gil Stein

1998  (Gil Stein) “World Systems Theory and Alternative Modes of Interaction in the Archaeology of Culture Contact”. In James Cusick (ed.) Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology. pp. 220-255. Carbondale,  Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Center for Archaeological Investigations.

Households and the world economy

by Hans-Dieter Evers

The North American Fur Trade World System

by Field Notes: A Journal of Collegiate Anthropology

By Richard Wynn Edwards IV, published in Field Notes: A Journal of Collegiate Anthropology 1(1) 2009 pp. 46-64.

The fur trade played an important role in determining the nature of the European-Native American relations. It acted... more The fur trade played an important role in determining the nature of the European-Native American relations. It acted as the framework for a developing world system, in which the European powers eventually formed multiple cores where a few Native American groups formed the semi- periphery and drew many more Native American groups into peripheral positions. To fit into this world system, the Native American groups restructured their lives in a variety of ways that can be seen archaeologically and historically. This is not to say that the Native Americans lacked agency within a deterministic system. To the contrary, the changes made to compete within the world system were often adaptations or intensifications of preexisting Native American practices in ways that would benefit them, at least in the short term.

The debate is open (intro and coda to 'Language ideological debates' 1999))

by Jan Blommaert

Peripheral normativity: Literacy and the production of locality in a South African township school

by Jan Blommaert

The Limits of World Systems Theory for the Study of Prehistory.

by Randall McGuire

McGuire, Randall H.1996 The Limits of World Systems Theory for the Study of Prehistory. in Prehistoric World Systems in the Americas. ed. by P.N. Peregrine & G. Feinman, pp. 51-64,  Prehistory Press, London.

„Centre and Periphery in Icelandic Medieval Discourse“, in Á austrvega. Saga and East Scandinavia. Preprint papers of the 14th international Saga Conference. Uppsala 9th-15th August.

by Sverrir Jakobsson

"El regreso de Túpac Katari. Bolivia y los procesos de transformación global del capitalismo"

by Iñigo Errejón Galván

Tábula Rasa. Bogotá - Colombia, No. 7: 111-148, julio-diciembre 2007

Ennui Becomes Us

by Randall Schweller

Imperialism Old & New: A Thermodynamic Analysis

by Blair Fix

This paper examines historical instances of imperialism using a world systems perspective grounded in thermodynamics. This paper examines historical instances of imperialism using a world systems perspective grounded in thermodynamics.

What Kind of System Is It? The DynCoopNet Project as a Tribute to Andre Gunder Frank (1929-2005)

by J. B. (Jack) Owens

In Networks in the First Global Age, 1400-1800, edited by Rila Mukherjee. Indian Council of Historical Research in association with Primus Books, Delhi, 2011.

In this chapter, I connect some of the central concerns of the final stages of Andre Gunder Frank’s research with a... more In this chapter, I connect some of the central concerns of the final stages of Andre Gunder Frank’s research with a multinational, multidisciplinary project that I created after Frank’s death. The project has a long title, ‘Dynamic Complexity of Cooperation-Based Self-Organizing Commercial Networks in the First Global Age’, and is usually referred to by its acronym, DynCoopNet.  Without the continuous, vigorous prompting of Frank, I would not have arrived at a point in my own work where I could have conceptualized and designed such a project, and I, therefore, offer this chapter as a tribute to my late friend Gunder.

Eastern Poland in a center-periphery perspective

by Tomasz Zarycki

(Published in:) M. Stefański (ed.) Strategic issues of the developement of the Lublin region. Lublin (2011): Innovatio Press Scientific publishing house University of Economic and Innovation in Lublin. pp. 95-112.

The article presents a view on the contemporary development problems of Eastern Poland in a centre-periphery... more The article presents a view on the contemporary development problems of Eastern Poland in a centre-periphery perspective, that is one referring to the world system theory and the dependence theory. The theoretical point of reference of the paper is the distinction between the interface and external peripheries introduced by Stein Rokkan. In such context the change of the status of the Eastern Poland after Poland’s accession to the European Union and the Schengen zone is analyzed. As it is suggested by the author, the outcome of these developments is a gradual move of Eastern Poland from the status of interface to external periphery. This state of affairs is seen as negative for the region, however its reversal may be a very difficult task. This is because the current state of affairs, as it is argued, may be seen as functional from the point of view of central regions of continent but also for part of the elites of the peripheral regions.

"Antiglobalization: The Global Fight for Local Autonomy" (New Political Science)

by Jason Adams

A. Starr and J. Adams, New Political Science 25:1 (2003)

***

Excerpt:

"Unlike the New Left, contemporary autonomous movements reject the seizure of power as a strategy just as surely as they reject the elusive politics of mass struggle; instead they work towards a “revolution of everyday life.”42 As George Katsiaficas documents, these movements appeared first in an autonomous version of the traditional class struggle movement of Autonomia in the late 1970s in Italy. Then, as Autonomia began to decline in the 1980s, the far more diverse form of the Autonomen first arose in the metropoles of Germany. Similar movements have since emerged in other areas of Europe, South America, North America, Asia and other parts of the world. The best-known and most influential of these newer autonomous movements is undoubtedly the Zapatista movement, based in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The Zapatistas have staked out a unique political space that goes beyond that of the autonomous movements that preceded them, while maintaining their strongest features. Like Autonomia and the Autonomen, the Zapatistas directly challenge neoliberal capitalism and defend the autonomy of local communities. The primary tactic they have employed has been the municipo libre (autonomous municipality) in which a majority of the residents vote to declare it autonomous from the state, which is promptly denounced as illegitimate. The Zapatistas have initiated a widely flung network of 38 core municipalities which control over a third of the political territory of Chiapas.43 The tactical logic at work here is nothing new; as one Zapatista remarked, “Zapata championed and fought for Indigenous ownership of land (which at that time, as now, meant removing the mestizo capitalist owners), and autonomous local political control.”44 But in taking up this old struggle, they also go far beyond it, effectively tearing open a new social and political space which encourages local, national, regional, and global networks of autonomous local groupings—not only municipo libres, but also affinity groups, subsistence cooperatives, collectivized clinics, autonomous schools, independent media groups, and other directly democratic community structures. This is the space from which a “triangular agrarista alliance began to evolve… between a periodically active village mass, the local militants, and… anarchist urban intellectuals and workers.”45 Now, eight years after the initial uprising, the Zapatistas are but one of many such autonomous movements in Mexico. Employing the municipo libre tactics, dozens of communities have declared themselves autonomous since 1995; while communities in neighboring states of Oaxaca, Hidalgo, Morelos, Michoacan, Mexico D.F., Tabasco, and Guerrero are laying the groundwork for such activity. 46 In Zapata’s home state of Morelos, for instance, inspired women of the new United Community of Tepotzlan (CUT) near Mexico City declared their town autonomous and defended it for over three years from attempted police incursions. In Tabasco, over 100 indigenous Chontales went to prison for seizing government buildings and declaring their region autonomous from both the state and the clutches of PEMEX Oil. In the state of Mexico, D.F., the 800,000 strong suburb of Nezahualcoyotl declared itself autonomous in 1998, as did the smaller community of San Nicolas Ecatepec. And in early 2002 the city of San Salvador Atenco was declared autonomous and defended in pitched battles following a victory against the building of a new international airport that would have appropriated 5000 hectares of farmland and displaced 4375 families."

Historical Sociology, Modernity, and Postcolonial Critique

by Gurminder K Bhambra

Standard historical-sociological accounts of modernity are predicated on notions of rupture and difference: a temporal... more Standard historical-sociological accounts of modernity are predicated on notions of rupture and difference: a temporal rupture between an agrarian, pre-modern past and an industrial, modern present, and a cultural difference between the ‘West’ and the ‘Rest’. While sociology’s long-standing linear accounts of modernization, based on notions of societal convergence, have been tempered by a recent emphasis on ‘multiple modernities’, the wider postcolonial critique has not been sufficiently answered. One of the most significant charges of this critique has been that the universality ascribed to sociological concepts such as modernity has been based on a parochial reading of the histories of Europe and the US as internally homogenous and qualitatively distinct from histories elsewhere. In other words, the world historical character of such concepts rests on a partial understanding of what happened in the West with little consideration of events in other places – more specifically, of the necessarily global conditions of these events. In this article, I assess the contributions of four developments in sociology and history which seek to take into account the world beyond the West in our understandings of modernity: namely, third wave cultural historical sociology, multiple modernities, micro-histories and global history. These different endeavours provide promising avenues of redress to earlier Eurocentred narratives, but to be effective they must not only provide us with ‘new data’ but also participate in the dialogue of how these new considerations may prompt us to think differently about the concepts in question.

Fuzzy Set Theory (or Fuzzy Logic) to Represent the Messy Data of Complex Human (and other) Systems

by J. B. (Jack) Owens

Co-authored with Emery A. Coppola, Jr.

Historians and Human Geographers deal with human systems or subsystems of considerable complexity. This situation... more Historians and Human Geographers deal with human systems or subsystems of considerable complexity. This situation presents a dilemma to those who use computational technologies, which demand a high level of precision to organize, analyze, and visualize information: the more complex the system is, the greater the imprecision of the available data. Historians and geographers often feel that their imprecise, ambiguous, contradictory, messy, largely qualitative information does not “fit” well in the available software categories, and they have trouble discussing the results produced when they work within computational environments because category assignment seems so arbitrary. This dilemma appears dramatically with the use of Geographically-Integrated History (GIH) as a research strategy. In this paper, we introduce fuzzy set theory (or fuzzy logic) as a proven solution for dealing with imprecision in complex systems.

Immanuel Wallerstein: Sosyal Bilimlere Yeniden Bakmak

by Uluslararası İlişkiler

Elçin Aktoprak, "Immanuel Wallerstein: Sosyal Bilimlere Yeniden Bakmak", Uluslararası İlişkiler, Cilt 1, Sayı 4 (Kış), 2004.

Immanuel Wallerstein, dünya-sistem analizi temelinde geliştirdiği tezleriyle dünyayı alışılagelmiş anlama ve algılama... more Immanuel Wallerstein, dünya-sistem analizi temelinde geliştirdiği tezleriyle dünyayı alışılagelmiş anlama ve algılama biçimlerimizi farklılaştıran önde gelen sosyal bilimcilerden biridir. Bu makalenin amacı, Wallerstein’ın temel tezlerinin kısaca açıklanmasından öteye gitmemektedir. Bu çerçevede ilk bölümde dünya-sistem analizi ve Wallerstein’ın sosyal bilim anlayışı ele alınmakta, ikinci bölümde modern dünya-sistemi incelenmektedir. Wallerstein’a göre modern dünya-sistemi bir kapitalist dünya-ekonomidir. Bu nedenle ikinci bölüm dahilinde Wallerstein’ın kapitalizm ve jeokültür anlayışı ile sınıf, ırk, ulusal ve etnik kimlik hakkındaki görüşlerine de değinilecektir.

Race, Language, and Culture in the Intermediate Area: Recovering Chibchan Identities from the Mid-Hemispheric "Periphery" (2001)

by John Hoopes

Working MS. of paper presented in the symposium “Archaeology on the
Edge: A Century of Research on the ‘Peripheries’ of Core Studies,” organized
by Patricia Urban and Edward Schortman, at the 100th Annual Meeting
of the American Anthropological Association, November 28 – December 2,
2001, Washington, D.C.