UC Irvine

This volume is the product of a workshop on ‘transnational flows’ held in 2001 with support from the Norwegian Research Council, and the majority of the chapters have been contributed by Scandinavian anthropologists, many based at the University of Oslo. The editor argues that recent attention to ‘globalization’ has tended uncritically to reject the traditional tools of the discipline, only to reinvent the wheel when it comes to conducting research. The view from Oslo sheds much needed light on the pretensions of such scholarship. As Eriksen puts it, ‘quests for symbolic power and professional identity sometimes tempt academics to caricature the positions taken by their predecessors, so that their own contribution may shine with an exceptionally brilliant glow of originality and sophistication’ (pp. 5–6). Eriksen wants to ‘cut globalization research down to size’ (p. 15), and to ‘reintegrate it into the methodological mainstream of anthropology’ (ibid.). These remarks may frustrate readers who wonder whether that methodological mainstream is up to the task, or even complicit with the phenomena that the anthropologist of globalization seeks to understand. Still, Eriksen valuably reminds us of the work on flows, fuzzy boundaries, and change by the Manchester School, cultural ecology, and various Marxisms that constituted much of mid-twentiethcentury anthropology.