Suchergebnisse

Surveys current research conducted from a world-systems perspective, identifying three themes: (1) how different definitions of the world system or world market imply different ways of dividing history into distinct periods, (2) how the changes initiated by patterns & cycles (eg, of economic development, state formation, population, commodification, technological development, & capital) structure the reproduction of the world system, & (3) how the global hierarchy of power & wealth reproduces itself via constraints it imposes on policy options available to most nations. Leading concepts in world-systems analysis are reviewed, & their capacity for providing insight into historical change processes on a global level is documented. 1 Table, 112 References. K. Hyatt Stewart

Surveys current research conducted from a world-systems perspective, identifying three themes: (1) how different definitions of the world system or world market imply different ways of dividing history into distinct periods, (2) how the changes initiated by patterns & cycles (eg, of economic development, state formation, population, commodification, technological development, & capital) structure the reproduction of the world system, & (3) how the global hierarchy of power & wealth reproduces itself via constraints it imposes on policy options available to most nations. Leading concepts in world-systems analysis are reviewed, & their capacity for providing insight into historical change processes on a global level is documented. 1 Table, 112 References. K. Hyatt Stewart

Demonstrates how the application of a world-systems perspective in anthropological research can offer sociologists new insights into non-Western & noncapitalist societies. Archaeologists have begun such work via redefinitions of (1) the nature of geographic differentiation within world systems & (2) the nature of economic interdependence among differentiated regions. Research in each of these areas is summarized. 42 References. K. Hyatt Stewart

Archaeology has tremendous potential for developing world‐systems approaches to non‐Western and noncapitalist societies because it has the ability to both explore non‐Western and noncapitalist societies with the sophistication of anthropology and to explore societies in existence long before the capitalist world‐system began to evolve. I suggest that sociologists stand to gain by learning about non‐Western and noncapitalist societies, particularly as they are understood by archaeologists. World‐systems theory provides a common framework within which archaeologists and sociologists can both work. This article explores recent work in world‐systems archaeology that sociologists might find particularly valuable.

This paper is a historical sociological exploration into the viability of using world-systems theory to examine premodern societies. Looking at world-system theory from the anthropological aspect of interactive networks, I argue that the most important and controversial network is the information network, although political/economic methods of studying world-systems persist among researchers of world-systems. The model for the premodern world-system is different enough from the modern model that the question arises if world-systems is even a viable framework for studying the premodern period. The main contribution I make in this paper is the discussion of four "facts" ala Durkheim's "social facts" that when considered, inform us of the effectiveness of information flows throughout premodern world-systems, absent of modern speed of transportation and communications transmissions. Information flowed effectively through the premodern world-system via the steady and constant ability of people to navigate these systems by traditions of human resiliency and social cooperation that we still see in indigenous populations today. The human element in the study of world-systems is the key to understanding premodern world-systems. A failed information network meant failed systemness, but it did not necessarily mean the failure of social organization. That continued through traditions of human resiliency. Putting the human face on the world-system may be the way to save this theory as a viable tool for the study of society.

This essay discusses conceptual issues that arise from the study of human social change. The comparative and evolutionary world-systems perspective is explained as a theoretical research program for studying long-term social change. This approach employs an anthropological framework of comparison for studying world-systems, including those of hunter-gatherers. Problems of spatially bounding whole human interaction networks are addressed, and the utility of a comparative approach to the study of hierarchical relations among human polities (core/periphery relations) is examined. The hypothesis of semiperipheral development is explained, and criteria for empirically identifying semiperipheral regions are specified. World history and global history are the most important evidential bases, along with prehistoric archaeology, for the comparative study of world-systems. Getting the grounds of comparison right by correctly conceptualizing the spatial units of analysis and paying careful attention to core/periphery relations are crucial issues in the effort to comprehend and explain the development of world-systems.

As developed by Immanuel Wallerstein and various co-thinkers, world-systems analysis is essentially an approach to economic history and historical sociology that has been largely indifferent to literary studies. This indifference is perhaps surprising given that the Annales school, which clearly influenced Wallerstein's work, produced a foundational account of the emergence of modern western literature in Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's L'apparition du livre (1958). More recently, literary scholars have attempted to apply this kind of analysis directly to their own field. The best-known instances are probably Pascale Casanova's La republique mondiale des lettres (1999), Franco Moretti's Distant Reading (2013) and the Warwick Research Collective's Combined and Uneven Development (2015). More recently still, Andrew Milner in Australia and Jerry Määttä in Sweden have sought to apply "distant reading" more specifically to the genre of science fiction. Milner's model of the "global SF field" identifies an original Anglo-French core, supplemented by more recent American and Japanese cores, longstanding Russian, German, Polish and Czech semi-peripheries, an emergent Chinese semi-periphery, and a periphery comprising the rest of the world. This essay attempts to apply that model to what Adam Trexler has termed "Anthropocene fictions" and Daniel Bloom "cli-fi", which we treat here as a significant sub-genre of contemporary science fiction.

"Geographic Perspectives on World-Systems Theory" published on by Oxford University Press.