Youth practices swarm in the deep drag below the surface of more obvious and studied forms of global movements: migratory labor, commodities, refugees, information, militaries, drugs, nannies, tourists, body parts, car parts, parts of parts, music, and capital, among others. These practices circulate in unexpected ways with unexpected surprise. When they erupt, they pop the seals on the glossy scholarship focused on valorized networks and sensational, powerful subjects sites. It is easy to append young people to the fetish engine of economics and to take measure of their global positioning in relation to the flow and wash of capitalism. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, children appear as a canary in the future complex of coalmines while laboring right alongside the rest of us, uniquely presented as cohabiting a space of transition in the present and clouding the horizon of our own imagined future with their hazy destinies mapped to global capitalist trajectories. The quality of young people’s lives (often naturalized along a fixed scale privileging Western notions of “childhood”) serves as the experimental field upon which the measure of global capitalism’s effects can be symptomatically taken. While more nuanced through the depth of fieldwork, this is basically the mode Cindi Katz uses as she attempts “to situate children’s lives in…two vastly different places [Harlem and Sudan] within the shifting configurations of global economic restructuring, both to examine the ways these shifts have transformed their everyday lives and prospects…and to make global capitalism sensible in a different register than is usually the case” (2004, xiii). Such an anthropological approach to globalization removes the tidy blinders worn in earlier work in which children and family studies suffered from ahistoricity and a sense of desynchronization with adjacent forces such as colonialism, war, trade, migrations, and environmental change and destruction.  But as stratification occurs where children occupy the lowest or prescribed micro-territories (of family, street, clinic, or classroom) and only then provisionally, they live well below mobile, deterritorialized capital seduced down temporarily into local contexts through neoliberal strategies (Harvey 1989). Between these two scales capital ricochets off of various communities and people as uneven surfaces, distorting the landscape further and drawing off profits even as social reproduction is forced to pay the price of hosting profit-making schemes.  Capital wings back into its stratosphere, wealthier than before and seemingly unaffected by its indifferent contact with locals, especially poor children in NYC or rural Sudan. Certainly the conditions of (post)modernity score new time signatures and perceptions of space and distance across all populations and communities drawn into the ever-intensifying paths and tides of global circulation, often making the differences of scale ambiguous and densely interwoven until the effects are violently universalized to entire regions in crisis.  Abstract and unplaceable (“Where have I met you before?” asks a curious corporation or advertising agency), capitalism and its international mechanisms and institutions continue to show up only dimly against children’s everyday lives in many accounts that take children as “a powerful way to understand the process and possibilities of change” (Katz 2004, 108). It is no easy task, to avoid the reduction of young people in their spaces to representative grist for larger, master narratives about globalization.

The children in Katz’s study are linked through structural conditions articulated with global capitalism and through its powerful prism the globe folds close enough to draw these disparate experiences into common analytic territory. Under the sign of globalization, children’s lives make sense and are a “sign of the times” insofar as they make legible forces operating from afar to remake the immediate and proximate. Children still seem to be chasing to catch up to social futures outpacing them in present turmoil, though they are depicted as resilient and adaptive bodies reformulating local knowledges across the noise introduced through intensive global networks coming close to ground. More often individuals are suspended within youth cultures as the catalyzing medium of globalization. Youth cultures are depicted then as a relay and amplification effect of global forces, swallowing up the identities of those counted as participants either by election or proximity. In this version of global youth the pluralized, expansive imaginary is made real by longing and acquisition, where the poorest kid struggles “to buy into an international cultural reference system: the right trainers, a T-shirt with a Western logo, a baseball cap with the right slogan” and all youth cultures “involve active importation, adoption and adaption” resulting in “organic hybridity” (Massey 1998, 122). While capitalism and the mobility of signs, bodies, and commodities are implicit in this depiction, the boundaries of the “culture” and the limiting forces and dynamic engines working to establish youth as reservoir and territory of knowledge, labor, pleasure, and desire remain murky. A focus on commodity consumption (chasing the money/getting the goods) or on subculture zones of intersection frequently reveals a weakness for articulating where the “global” actually is, especially as it pertains to mining youth practices as raw sites rich in the ore of future potentials for innovation and change. The micro-territories of youth are a the zones of counterpoint because scales collapse on themselves and vague or unmanageably vast processes can be condensed down to a readable local scale where youth dwell while exhibiting a valorized, preternatural capacity for metabolizing the currents of global cool.

Begin this path

1. Habitus and Scapes
2. Axelrod's Drift
3. Drifting Back: Uncanny Itineraries (Florida-Iwate-Tokyo)

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