Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011 557

Special Section: Keywords

“Flow”
by Stuart Alexander Rockefeller

“Flow” is a term that is frequently employed in anthropological discussions of globalization, although

little attention has been paid to the word or the presuppositions and history it carries with it. The
rise of this keyword has been surprisingly inconspicuous. In this article, I show some of the ways
“flow” is employed in anthropological and other social science writing today, tracing its development
through the works of Deleuze and Guattari and ultimately to the writings of the philosopher Henri
Bergson. I then raise two important concerns regarding the use of “flow” to talk about globalization.
First, I argue that as it is employed today, the term lends itself all too easily to a metaphysical dualism
that can only impede our understanding of the dynamic nature of locality and global interconnections.
Second, I argue that the term encodes what I call a “managerial perspective” that sees agency only
in large-scale social patterns and institutions and that is largely unable to recognize individual agency
or the significance of small-scale organization and phenomena.

In the introduction to Keywords, Raymond Williams describes but did not talk about using it; for this reason, it took me
his return to university life after several years of military ser- several years to recognize that “flow” was one of the most
vice in World War II (Williams 1985:11). He found that the important words constituting a new social scientific perspec-
conversations had changed and that people were debating tive on the relation of scale, agency, locality, and mobility on
words, many of them familiar, such as “culture,” in ways that the global scene.
suggested that their meanings and the importance attached Part of the power of the word “flow” as it is currently
to them had changed. I had a similar experience in 1994 on employed in anthropological conversations arises from its
my return from two years of fieldwork in Bolivia and Argen- sheer multiplicity: it has had a range of meanings in common
tina. I had been working with a highly mobile group of parlance for centuries, and as a result it has entered the social
Quechua speakers and had followed some of them to Buenos sciences at many junctures in many contexts. “Cash flow,”
Aires. On my return, I found that people at the University “traffic flow,” the “flow” of time, “flow” as a psychological
of Chicago were talking about international connections in a state (Csikszentmihalyi 1990), and the “flow” of conversation
way different from the one they had had when I left. People are all well-known terms in popular and academic discourse.
were using and debating such terms as “deterritorialization” But in recent years, use of the term “flow” has taken on a
as well as “transnationalism” and “globalization.” “Hybridity,” new intensity and specificity, or rather several specificities.
“place,” and “borders” had taken on a new significance and This change has been brought about by some sociologists’
urgency. “Glocal” made a mercifully brief appearance. It is and anthropologists’ efforts to develop tools to think about
significant, however, that “flow” was not a term that anyone the new extent of interconnectedness of cultures and eco-
was discussing. The word had come to be widely used in the nomic systems: in a word, globalization. This new specificity
social sciences and critical theory as part of a way of talking takes advantage of polysemy of the word “flow,” and it is
about transnational movements of money, people, images, quite difficult to discern a single meaning for the term.
commodities, and other such bearers of significance, but it One indication of the nature of the word’s recent popularity
had a way of slipping under the radar. People used the term is where it appears and where it does not. It often appears in
the titles of articles, books, and chapters; for instance, Meyer
and Geschiere (1999) subtitle their collection on globalization
Stuart Alexander Rockefeller is Lecturer at the Center for the Study
of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University (421 Hamilton Hall, Dialectics of Flow and Closure; Inda and Rosaldo use “flow”
Mail Code 2880, 1130 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, New York in the title of each section of their reader on the anthropology
10027, U.S.A. [sr2772@columbia.edu]). This paper was submitted 26 of globalization (Inda and Rosaldo 2002); Leitch’s book Post-
XI 07 and accepted 5 VI 08. modernism (1996) is subtitled Local Effects, Global Flows. Yet

䉷 2011 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2011/5204-0005$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/660912

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 558 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011

“flow” is much less often to be found in an index. The term to August 2005.1 The word “flow” occurs at least once in 28
has an aura and can appear to say a great deal, yet it can be of the 39 articles that appeared during this time.2 Twelve of
employed in a nearly unaware fashion, as if its meaning were these articles can be said to in some sense engage issues of
entirely uncomplicated and its use so innocuous as to call for globalization or transnationalism; 13 include mentions of
no special mention. The word is suggestive of something rad- “flow” whose sense broadly fits with the keyword I am dis-
ically new, yet it maintains the innocence of common English. cussing. All the other mentions of the word, including many
As I show below, “flow” is nowadays used to talk about in articles that use the keyword, represent the linguistic back-
things for which it probably would not have been used in the ground from which the keyword has arisen. For instance,
references to flowing water (Bissell 2005:235; Lowe 2004:505;
past, and it is increasingly invoked as a stand-alone noun to
Russ 2005:138) or blood (Axel 2004:47) employ only the lit-
denote a broad perspective on the world. The word has be-
erally fluid senses of the word and have no particular con-
come a feature of the social scientific landscape, particularly
nection to globalization or recent theoretically weighted uses
anthropological writing on globalization, transnationalism,
of the term. According to the Oxford English Dictionary
media, global finance, international migration, and the like.
(OED), a form of the verb “flow,” referring to the movement
There is nothing wrong with terms with complex origins of liquids, appeared in English as early as 1000 CE.3
and protean usages; they can be particularly useful for talking Sometimes the word refers to flowing cloth (Boellstorff
about the complex and protean reality we inhabit, which 2004:171; Rouse and Hoskins 2004:239) or hair (Ramamurthy
seems to be getting more complex and protean every moment 2003:534); this sense seems to rely simply on the metaphorical
(see, e.g., Geschiere 1999). But these qualities can also make association of the drape of fibers with the movement of water;
it hard to figure out what work the term is doing in specific the OED traces this usage to the early seventeenth century.
situations, and more ominously, they can facilitate the use of In other articles, the noun “flow” seems to indicate the
a term that incorporates assumptions that many of its users smooth movement of multiple items, as in the flow of “ma-
would very likely not endorse. terials” into an archive (Buckley 2004:261) or the flow of
In this article, then, I show how the term is employed to “voters and ballots” through a voting station (Coles 2004:
talk about globalization and trace some of the more important 564). The traces of such movement having occurred can also
genealogies behind the term’s current use. I begin by showing be said to flow, as in Buckley’s “stacks of boxes overflowing
the tremendous range of meanings it can have in anthro- onto the floors” (2004:262). Chesluk (2004:254) quotes some-
pological discourse, as a keyword, or just as an everyday usage. one from New York talking about trash “flowing around the
A word as common and polysemous as “flow” cannot be street.” According to the OED, something like this sense was
fairly common by the 1600s.
tracked through a single genealogy; rather, throughout the
Bissell mentions the “flow” of time (Bissell 2005:215, 221),
article I argue that several specific genealogical backgrounds
and in a usage that might be derived from the temporal as-
are mobilized by certain authors’ use of the term. A key
sociations of flow, others talk of the “flow” of events and of
moment in the rise of “flow” as a keyword came with the
verbal associations in therapy (Pazderic 2004:205, 207; this
conjunction of some writings by Arjun Appadurai, Manuel
usage dates to the sixteenth century) or use the term to denote
Castells, and Ulf Hannerz; I explicate how they adapted the causal connections (“waria [men] usually assume their desire
word into a way to approach globalization. Then I advance for men flows causally from a prior mismatching of soul and
two critiques of the way anthropologists invoke “flow” to talk body”; Boellstorff 2004:168). These kinds of deployments of
about globalization, both of them turning on the word’s cu- “flow” date to the 1600s, according to the OED. Two articles
rious tendency to give rise to dichotomies and lend itself to about China use “flow” to describe the movement of qi, or
a covert dualism. First, it is often used as an image of “pure” energy (Farquahar and Zhang 2005:322 [quoting a Chinese
movement and opposed to relatively static enclosed “places,” author]; Pazderic 2004:200). In most of the examples I have
part of an argument that places are being undermined through given so far, the term “flow” turns up in a sense that is
globalization. Second, flow as an image of agentless movement
with no starting point and no telos can elide agency, privilege 1. I should make clear that this sample is not intended as “proof” of
the large scale over the small, and in the process rhetorically any developments in anthropological terminology but rather a demon-
stration of the possibilities implicit in the term “flow” today. My choice
align the observer with the perspective of a manager. of Cultural Anthropology might appear parochial, but given that it is a
journal that makes some effort to embody multiple strands of thinking
in cultural anthropological work and consistently publishes work by
scholars from many parts of the world, I feel that it is an adequate source
Uses of “Flow” to make my point.
2. I excluded a couple of articles that contain only related words, such
as “overflow.”
In order to give the reader a feel for the wide range of senses
3. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “flow, v.” (http://www.oed.com/view/
“flow” can cover, I went over uses of the word in eight issues Entry/72001?rskeyp3qbU6G&resultp4#eid, accessed December 15,
of the journal Cultural Anthropology from November of 2003 2005).

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Rockefeller “Flow” 559

ancillary to the theme of the paper—in passing, or as part of vant and might be impossible to specify. This sort of abstract
a specific description or quote rather than as part of the and disembodied quality begins to get us close to the newer
article’s main point. uses of “flow,” which are often concerned with the “move-
Grant mentions “the flow of Caucasian bodies to Russia” ment” not of objects or liquids but of symbols, such as money.
(Grant 2005:49). As early as the fourteenth century, Wycliffe I would suggest that the current popularity of “flow” as a
also referred to people flowing, but to my knowledge the use keyword owes more to the image of cash flow than to that
of the nominal form of the word to denote large-scale move- of water flowing; more precisely, it arises from watery imagery
ments of people is much more recent; the earliest example by way of the image of money moving like water.
the OED cites is from 1832.4 This usage has a slightly sur- The association of “flow” with the words “transnational”
prising effect, because we are more accustomed to seeing the or “global” is a hallmark of the keyword; this pairing of terms
word applied to inanimate things that are clearly moved by is one of the defining features of many discussions of glob-
a force outside of themselves. By saying that people or bodies alization. For instance, Bernal (2004) argues that one of two
form a “flow,” Grant subtly highlights the fact of movement main models of transnationalism is that of Arjun Appadurai,
and downplays any sort of intentionality or agency that the who “sees transnationalism largely in terms of capital, ideas,
people who live in those bodies might have. Fassin appears and images flowing across national boundaries” (4). Bernal’s
to intentionally invoke this tendency of the term in relation account exemplifies two key dualistic tendencies of the term.
to migration when he uses it to highlight a state’s perspective She invokes a model that characterizes transnationalism by
on deciding “how to manage transnational human flows” the opposition between something flowing and the bound-
(Fassin 2005:366). aries that would (but cannot) contain those flows. She then
Another traditional use of “flow” is to talk about the move- opposes Appadurai’s model of transnationalism to that of
ment of money, as in “cash flow.” This is a handy term that Linda Basch, which focuses on people who routinely inhabit
groups a mass of extremely varied events and actions by look- multiple places in multiple countries, thus invoking an im-
ing at them strictly in terms of how they affect the “move- plicit opposition between “flow” and actors. These two du-
ment” of money into and out of some financial entity. In the alisms—flow versus static places and flow versus actors—are,
corpus I am looking at, “cash flow” as such appears only in I argue, central to both the keyword’s popularity and its weak-
Liechty’s and Ramamurthy’s articles, although Liechty men- ness.
tions it repeatedly (Liechty 2005:8, 20, 24). In spite of the Even more characteristic of the new specificity “flow” has
rarity of the term “cash flow” in our articles, “flow” is used acquired are references to “flows” of multiple kinds of things,
frequently to refer to the movement of money, and when it or of abstractions, or of multiple abstractions. For instance,
does, the usage is generally central to the articles it appears Bissell (2005:230) mentions flows of “capital, images, and
in. Bernal, for instance, calls remittances “transnational flows people,” Pazderic (2004:215) cites flows of “Taiwanese reli-
of resources from Eritreans abroad” (Bernal 2004:15) and says gious currents,” and Ramamurthy (2003:531) describes flows
that charitable donations “flowed” into Eritrea (Bernal 2004: of “imported oil, processing plants, technology, and capital.”
3). Pinto (2004:338) mentions “international flows of funds, These uses of “flow” are qualitatively different from the “flow”
ideology, and regulation through North India,” while Ra- of water, cloth, time, or words. For one thing, these usages
mamurthy (2003:528) talks of “flows” of investment. are evidently straining at the grammatical constraints whereby
The earliest English-language association of the term “flow” “flows” are “of” something or other (i.e., whereby a flow is
with “cash” that the OED records is from 1707, but it traces defined by its content).
the first use of “cash flow” to a 1954 article in a business Most historical uses of the verb “flow” were either part of
journal.5 Here again “flow” refers to smooth, apparently un- a subject-predicate pair (rivers flow, tears flow, conversation
broken movement of something, but unlike the “flow” of flows) or part of a noun phrase that tied the flow to some
archival materials or bodies, monetary flows are not neces- content through the preposition “of” or an adjective that
sarily made up of discrete items or of any sort of objects at indicates content (flow of water, cash flow, tidal flow). Or the
all so much as of monetary value (of signs, that is to say), substance that is said to constitute a flow is left implicit be-
and they need not involve any long-distance physical move- cause the context leaves it unmistakable. So the OED says
ment at all. Any mention of the “flow” of money can refer that the noun “flow,” unmodified, can refer to a volume of
to radically different scenarios, from the physical transport of menstrual blood, or of tidal water, or of fluid passing through
currency between places to the addition and subtraction of certain kinds of meters.6 A number of our texts use the noun
numbers in bank accounts whose physical location is irrele- “flow” without specifying what it is that flows, but in these
cases the substance of the flow is left unspecified rather than
4. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “flow, n.1” (http://www.oed.com/ implicit. In this usage, “flow” stands alone, accompanied at
view/Entry/71998?rskeyp3qbU6G&resultp1#eid, accessed December
15, 2005).
5. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “cash, n.1” (http://www.oed.com/ 6. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “flow, n.1” (http://www.oed.com/
view/Entry/28425?rskeypavtLKv&resultp1#eid, accessed March 10, view/Entry/71998?rskeyp3qbU6G&resultp1#eid, accessed December
2007). 15, 2005).

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 560 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011

most by an adjective, most commonly “cultural” or “trans- 1992, 1996, 2000 [1997]), but the term’s new specificity was
national.” So Bernal mentions the role of “transnational largely in place. A key moment in the development of the
flows” in constituting nations (2004:3), and Bissell says that new word came in 1984–1985, when Appadurai and Hannerz
anthropologists have recently been grappling with “transna- were both fellows at the Center for Advanced Study in the
tional flows and forces” (Bissell 2005:225). This sort of un- Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto (Appadurai 1996:x; U. Han-
specified flow is the most distinctive way that the keyword nerz, personal communication), although in keeping with the
appears. While these usages do not leave us completely in the fluid nature of the term, each author has made significantly
dark as to what it is that is flowing, they clearly put the different uses of it, apparently drawing on very different ge-
emphasis on the flow rather than on the substance that is nealogies.
flowing, on form rather than on content. Arjun Appadurai is one of the key figures in the devel-
This, then, is the basic sense of “flow” as a keyword today. opment of the language of the anthropology of globalization
From a multitude of usages—some ancient, some quite pe- because of both his role as coeditor of the journal Public
destrian, all interconnected—a new term has arisen. Apart Culture during much of the 1990s and a series of articles he
from its use to talk about movement at a transnational scale wrote in a remarkable burst of creativity from the late 1980s
and its application not just to cash but to masses of migrants, to the mid-1990s (collected in Appadurai 1996), in which he
television images, consumer goods, and many other often addressed various aspects of the problem of how to write
vaguely specified sorts of things, the distinctive thing about about culture in a way that does not localize it and that lends
the keyword is the way it tends to privilege a form (unbroken, itself to the multiscalar and fast-changing conditions under
agentless movement) over any content. which it is nowadays produced and lived. In the opening
Something like this usage has antecedents that do not ap- sentence of the “Editors’ Comments” to the first issue of
pear in the OED, although a hint of them appears in one of Public Culture, Appadurai and Breckenridge (1988:1) declared
our texts. Alonso (2004:463–464) quotes the Mexican writer that the journal is intended as “an intellectual forum for
José Vasconcelos arguing that the United States (in contrast interaction among those concerned with global cultural
to Mexico) is “open” to “the flow of civilization” (Vasconcelos flows.” Although they put considerable emphasis on “flows,”
1926:8). It seems that the association of civilization with a they treated the word as unproblematic and did nothing to
dynamic force or “flow” was a relatively commonplace idea gloss it. Two years later, Appadurai published “Disjuncture
in the early twentieth century. As Hannerz (2000 [1997]) and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” (Appadurai
points out, anthropology has never made systematic use of 1996 [1990]), in which he introduced a new vocabulary for
this sense of the term, although Kroeber employed it from talking about culture on the global scale. Prominent in his
time to time. The usage never died out entirely, and Hannerz terminology were “global cultural flows,” “deterritorializa-
cites uses of it (in which “civilization” has been replaced by tion,” and a series of terms for articulations of cultural space
“society”) in the latter part of the twentieth century (Barth through “flows”: he called these “ethnoscapes,” “media-
1969; Vincent 1977; Watson 1970). scapes,” “technoscapes,” “financescapes,” and “ideoscapes.”
A key concept of Appadurai’s is that the production of
Forging “Flow” identity and communities, as well as of cultures, are today
“deterritorialized” (Appadurai 1996 [1990]); that is, they are
“Flow” in the sense I am talking about slipped onto the scene
no longer produced in relatively contained places but rather
in the social sciences in a 2-year period from 1988 to 1990,
are made and experienced translocally, often in locales across
mainly because of the work of Arjun Appadurai (along with
the globe. Underlying deterritorialization are “flows,” which
Carol Breckenridge; see Appadurai 1996 [1990]; Appadurai
appear to be persistent, self-sustaining kinds or patterns of
and Breckenridge 1988), Ulf Hannerz (1989), and Manuel
movement of symbols, such as money, media images, and the
Castells (1989). By the end of 1990, the basic outlines of a
like. He argues that “commodity flows” have transformed
new meaning for the term had been laid out by the juxta-
consumers from actors into signs (Appadurai 1996 [1990]:
position of their separate projects. “Flow” had become a term
42). At the end of the article it becomes clear that he views
useful for talking about large-scale, even global cultural and
“flow” as a central problem for any effort to think about
economic phenomena; it was a heterogeneous word that al-
culture today. Indeed, he suggests that the concept is necessary
lowed writers to highlight formal commonalities in the move-
ment of people, ideas, money, images, goods, and more; it to introduce process into any theory of global culture:
was a way of talking about social relations and culture while In a world of disjunctive global flows, it is perhaps important
emphasizing process rather than stasis; accordingly, it was to start asking [questions of causality and contingency in
antagonistic to traditional conceptions of place. Over the next global culture] in a way that relies on images of flows and
several years, many features of the term were elaborated on uncertainty . . . rather than on older images of order, stability
as each of these authors and others published further, more and systematicness. Otherwise, we will have gone far toward
detailed work making use of the term (Appadurai 1996 a theory of global cultural systems but thrown out process
[1993], 1996 [1995]; Castells 1996a, 1996b; Hannerz 1991, in the bargain. (Appadurai 1996 [1990]:47)

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Rockefeller “Flow” 561

Here, flow is both the problem and the solution, the cause that constitutes most of our lived experiences but also people
and the means of anthropological inquiry into globalization, who are dominated by organizations that inhabit the space
the reality that challenges our understanding and the tool to of flows but are kept from participating in it themselves. Such
understand that reality. While Appadurai never defines the people resist by clinging to prenetworked “selves” and iden-
term—and in other writings he relegates it to a prominent tities (Castells 1996a). The major challenge facing us today,
role in the background of his anthropological mise-en- he argues, is resolving the growing disconnect between the
scène—it remains a key underlying concept in his analysis of space of places and the space of flows (Castells 1996b:428).
current challenges to the association of culture and locality Ulf Hannerz’s “Notes on the Global Ecumene” (Hannerz
and a key means of understanding large-scale cultural phe- 1989) appeared in the second issue of Appadurai and Breck-
nomena. In addition, he argues that the new significance of enridge’s journal Public Culture. This article is mainly an in-
“flows” marks a historical break with “place” as it has long tervention in the debate over the impact of globalization on
been seen and experienced, a break that in the term “deter- cultural variety, presenting an alternative to the view that
ritorialization” he posits as a contradiction between locality nondominant traditions would be swamped by Western cap-
traditionally conceived and the new reality of flows. italist culture. Hannerz argues that we are instead entering a
In 1989, the urban sociologist Manuel Castells published “global ecumene” in which “transnational cultural flows”
The Informational City, in which he opposed “spaces of flows,” (Hannerz 1989:68) are bridging and transforming cultures
the organizational space created by information technology that once were less intensively connected to one another. This
and characterized by global interconnection, to traditional process does not inherently mean that colonized and non-
spaces of experience, the “spaces of places” (Castells 1989). Western cultures will be wiped out. Hannerz’s starting point
Of the three authors I am discussing here, Castells makes the is the long anthropological tradition of focusing on cultural
most ambitious and historically specific claims, arguing that diffusion—what he terms “cultural flows,” following a phrase
in large part because of the rise of information technology, of Kroeber’s (Hannerz 2000 [1997]:4; Kroeber 1952:154). Part
we are witnessing the rise of new “forms of space and time” of his argument is that the world today is characterized by
(Castells 1996b:376) that constitute “a new era of the human the prevalence of cultural flows, the rapid and long-distance
experience” (Castells 1996a:34) and that not only is social transmission of ideas and influences. It is these extended and
structure changing but also what constitutes social structure intensive cultural flows that constitute the “global ecumene.”
is changing; the new material from which social structure, as A few years later, Hannerz wrote Cultural Complexity
well as selves, is made is “flows” (Castells 1996a:31). (1992), an effort to make the anthropological culture concept
In The Informational City, Castells (1989:167) argues that useful for thinking about not just traditional “small-scale”
“a new spatial logic” has emerged as a result of myriad changes scenarios but also complexly interconnected conjunctures
in the structure of productive enterprises, mostly because of such as global cities, nations, and international financial net-
the rise of information technology. The result was that “the works (Hannerz 1992). One reason he found “flow” useful
space of organizations in the information economy is in- for this project is that it could be scaled up, and in fact much
creasingly a space of flows” (Castells 1989:169; emphasis in of his book is concerned with reviving anthropology’s com-
original). The space of flows is inherently antagonistic to the mitment to studying culture at multiple scales. He laments
“space of places”: “the supersession of places by a network ethnography’s increasing concern with “miniatures” (Han-
of information flows is a fundamental goal of the restructuring nerz 1992:21), attributing it to the plethora of other social
process” (Castells 1989:349). sciences that take on large-scale structures and behavior; for
Until recently, people inhabited the “space of places” con- Hannerz, “flow” is part of a larger project to restore anthro-
stituted by bounded places whose interconnection is domi- pology’s commitment to studying complex cultures.
nated by relationships such as proximity. Or, as Castells puts He illuminates this project in a later article on “flow” as a
it, “A place is a locale whose form, function and meaning are keyword (Hannerz 2000 [1997]), in which he points out that
self-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity” Kroeber used the word in two distinct senses—both to talk
(Castells 1996b:423). Information technology, in particular about the transmission of cultural material from one people
the long-distance and global integration of economic practice, to another and to refer to the internal dynamism that gave
is creating a new kind of space characterized not by bounded any one culture its vitality—this is the “flow of civilization”
places such as neighborhoods or towns but by dynamic struc- sense that I mentioned above. Hannerz points out that he is
tured interconnections. He calls the global city “not a place, adapting both of these senses of Kroeber’s term when he writes
but a process” (Castells 1996b:386) that exists mainly through about the global ecumene—that “flow” can refer both to the
“information flows” that connect the city more closely to meanings and other values transmitted between cultures (a
other global cities than to its own hinterland. The spatial logic basically diffusionist sense, as Hannerz points out) and to the
that he initially identified within organizations has come to internal movement of ideas that constitute a culture’s dy-
colonize entire cities. He views it as the currently dominant namism (which Hannerz regards as a more processual per-
mode of spatial logic and social structure in the world, which spective). This point is quite profound and tells us something
is increasingly marginalizing not only the “space of places” important not only about the keyword but about globaliza-

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 562 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011

tion. When we can start to call culture “global,” or when it use metaphors of fluids (such as Bauman) or images of un-
becomes possible to imagine that there is an inclusive “ecu- constrained “pure” speed (such as Virilio 1997:119–145).
mene” that embraces a huge variety of cultural traditions, the Such associations between “flow” and displacement pop up
two senses of Kroeber’s “flow” cease to differ. This, I think, repeatedly in the Cultural Anthropology articles I reviewed
is where and how “flow” takes on its current status as a above. Bernal (2004) argues that Eritrea is being deterrito-
keyword: when it is used with reference to some sort of en- rialized and then reconstituted in a less place-based form
compassing global conversation or structure in relation to through global flows. Hairong (2003) says that Chinese peas-
which the outside of any single tribe, city, nation, film in- ants have been uprooted from their connection to the land
dustry, literary tradition, and so on is an inside of something and “reimplanted” in the (nongeographical) sphere of “Mar-
that contains it. The structured movements of people, money, ket and Development” (499). Bissell (2005:225) attributes
images, and so on that connect Chicago and Mumbai, Paris “dislocation” to transnational “flows and forces,” and for him
and Tokyo, Aguililla and Riverside are also the internal pro- nostalgia, the main topic of his paper, functions much like
cesses that lend any global ecumene its dynamism—they are “reterritorialization” (see below). In contrast, Favero (2003:
the “flow” of global civilization. 576), while adopting the language of flows, refuses the con-
nection with “deterritorialization,” even attributing to that
Flow and Place: Deterritorialization line of argument the dualism that I find in “flow.”
The term “deterritorialization” was apparently coined by
One point where Hannerz’s use of flow imagery is quite dif- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the 1970s at the intersection
ferent from Appadurai’s and Castells’s is that he never opposes of philosophy and psychology. For Deleuze and Guattari, “de-
“flow” to places; rather than seeing in the flows of globali- territorialization” is inextricably connected to “flow”;7 it sig-
zation a deconstruction or effacement of places, his Kroe- nifies the opening of something (a body, a polity, a sign) to
berian distinction appears to be working toward a processual flows, which allows it to integrate with and be incorporated
model of how we can think about any sort of organized entity. by (or incorporate) something else. Deleuze and Guattari sug-
In this he is following Barth (1984), who used “flow” as a gest that it is a moment of becoming not-oneself in the act
way of talking about ethnic identity in a nonessentializing and of becoming part of something else. In general, deterrito-
processual way (U. Hannerz, personal communication), and rialization is followed by “reterritorialization,” when whatever
remains consistent with the Boasian tradition of understand- had been opened or made part of something larger returns
ing spatial and cultural boundaries as inherently dynamic and to being itself (although it might not be the same self it was
constituted by circulation rather than opposing it (see Bash- before).8
kow 2004). To clarify, here let me cite the first illustration of “deter-
In contrast, for Appadurai and Castells, one of the most ritorialization” in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari
interesting and important things about flows is that they un- 1987). There is, say Deleuze and Guattari, a certain kind of
dermine the actuality or future of “place,” that is, a certain wasp that plays a crucial role in the reproductive cycle of a
kind of space that is both significantly bounded and associated
species of orchid. The wasp carries the orchid’s pollen to
with such human matters as experience (Castells) and pro-
another orchid, enabling the flower to reproduce. The wasp
duction (Appadurai). In treating flow, a kind of pure mobility,
is “deterritorialized” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:10) in this
as an antithesis to static place, Castells and Appadurai played
interaction, becoming part of the orchid’s reproductive ap-
a crucial catalytic role in the development of a now-common
paratus and in the process reterritorializing the orchid by
approach to globalization. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman,
allowing it to reproduce. Taken together, the two form a “rhi-
for instance, invokes metaphors of liquids to characterize the
zome.” When the wasp is acting as part of the orchid’s re-
corrosive effects of global capitalism on fixed features of hu-
productive apparatus, it is no longer just a wasp but a wasp
man environments (e.g., Bauman 2000, 2002, 2005; see esp.
that is being part of an orchid, or in their terms, “becoming-
the cover of Society under Siege). Gupta and Ferguson (1992)
orchid” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:10). Presumably, once
make the centerpiece of their pathbreaking article on an-
the wasp moves on and stops carrying pollen, it is reterri-
thropology and globalization the disappearance of a certain
torialized, only to be deterritorialized again when it goes back
identification of culture with locality that has long been cen-
to feeding on orchids. Deterritorialization is a universal phe-
tral to anthropology.
Most often these arguments associate the disappearance of nomenon, whereby one thing opens—or is opened—to ex-
places with a new intensity of unfettered movement, which ternal flows, becoming integrated into a foreign apparatus.
makes the association with fluids unsurprising. One of the It is interesting to note, however, that the term has taken
key terms in this complex of ideas is “deterritorialization” on a very different meaning in much social science literature.
(see, e.g., Garcı́a Canclini 1995; Tomlinson 1999), although
7. Flux, in French.
some authors, such as Augé (1995) and Bauman, talk about 8. The two phenomena are in fact “mutually enmeshed . . . like op-
the disappearance of place without using this term, and many posite faces of one and the same process” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:
of those who are concerned with the challenges to locality 258).

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Rockefeller “Flow” 563

To be brief, the sense explicated by John Tomlinson and im- longer be contained within a single “place.” This is what I
plied by Appadurai in his earlier use of the term suggests a call the “geographical” sense of the word because it specifically
fairly simple though profound historical shift in the way peo- references the geographical aspect of many dislocations that
ple relate to places. Its simplest expression comes from Garcı́a characterize the world today.
Canclini (1995), who calls deterritorialization “the loss of the But as the term spread in popularity, a series of questions
‘natural’ relation of culture to geographical and social terri- arose: Just what was the relationship between this “deterri-
tories” (229).9 In a similar vein, Morley and Robins (1995) torialization” (which often appeared in conjunction with
talk about the separation of identity from places. In discussing “flow”) and the word used by Deleuze and Guattari? Was it
deterritorialization, Tomlinson brings in Augé’s idea of “non- the same word? Was it related? The reason I infer that these
places,” spaces (such as airports and service stations) that are questions were being voiced is that a few years after the term
no longer sufficiently historical or concerned with identity to appeared in discussions of globalization, some people began
“create the organically social” in the way that real, or what making efforts to draw a clearer connection between the two
Augé calls “anthropological,” places do (Augé 1995). This uses of the term. By 1996, Appadurai was footnoting Deleuze
strictly geographical use of the term has become widely and Guattari when he used the term and connecting it to
enough accepted that recently one author, in recounting the other Deleuzian terminology. In 2002, Inda and Rosaldo, in
theft of land from indigenous communities of Chiapas, Mex- their introduction to a reader on the anthropology of glob-
ico, in the late nineteenth century, said that the communities alization, explicitly raised the connection to Deleuze and
were “deterritorialized” (Stephen 2002). This last usage really Guattari, pointing out that “deterritorialization” is accom-
owes nothing to Deleuze and Guattari, being a simple ref- panied by “reterritorialization” and that it does not necessarily
erence to the legal separation of a community from the land indicate a one-way historical transition (Inda and Rosaldo
that it had owned and that provided its members’ subsistence. 2002). In the meantime, however, the word had become quite
It is sometimes difficult to work out the actual connection popular in its “geographical” sense, as used by Garcı́a Canclini
between the word as used by anthropologists, sociologists, and others, to the point that Tomlinson, writing an extensive
and geographers and its original use by Deleuze and Guattari. discussion of the term in 1999, mentions in a footnote “for
This is in part because social scientists use the term to mark the sake of completeness” that Deleuze and Guattari use the
a historical epoch: culture is deterritorialized nowadays, but same term but that he will not discuss their usage (Tomlinson
this was not the case in the past. In addition, they use it in 1999:213, n. 1). He in effect draws a line between the geo-
a much more geographical sense than do Deleuze and Guat- graphical usage and the Deuleuzian usage. So the term has
tari. For them it is not an inherently historical concept in the divided into two tenuously or ambiguously connected senses.
sense that it does not mark a one-way transition from one Although the geographical and Deleuzian senses of deter-
condition to another; rather, it happens perennially and is a ritorialization are different in important respects, it seems to
condition of being. It is also not inherently geographical; De- me impossible to try to understand the more matter-of-fact
leuze and Guattari seem to mean by “territory” anything that version of the term (and, by extension, the sense of the term
is in some sense bounded and self-identical. “flow” that accompanies it) without reference to its apparent
Here let me present a speculative narrative of how the terms predecessor in Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari’s
“deterritorialization” and “flow” came to take on their current deployment of “deterritorialization,” “reterritorialization,”
central roles in work about globalization. In the late 1980s, and “flow,” as well as “rhizomes,” is part of their effort to
some social scientists began developing a new vocabulary to construct a nondialectical way to talk about being, change,
talk about the increasingly evident tangential relationship of and interactions. They regard dialectical analysis (in all of its
culture, identity, and locality. Everyone was to some extent many forms, apparently) as the invocation of a fake plurality,
familiar with the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and many an appearance of difference that is actually “biunivocal,”
elements of their exuberant vocabulary were in the air. Per- which is to say that it actually reduces plurality to a position
haps inspired by the Deleuzian associations of “flow,” Ap- in a totalizing scheme that encompasses and resolves all ap-
padurai began using “deterritorialization” (Appadurai 1996 parent difference. In contrast to the relentless relationality and
[1990]), and others soon followed his example. The term interconnectedness implicit in Marxian dialectics, they erect
quickly became a leading word to characterize the phenom- a difference of kind between interconnection and change on
enon whereby people participate so fully in the large-scale the one hand and being and selfhood on the other. Deter-
“flows” of information, capital, people, and goods that have ritorialization, then, is not a process whereby something be-
arisen as part of advanced capitalism that their sense of who comes itself through dynamic interaction with something else
they are (individually or collectively), not to mention the but rather one whereby something ceases to be itself while it
actual conditions under which they live and act, could no is in contact with something else because it actually becomes
part of that other thing. When it is part of something else
9. In this superficially clear definition, however, much of the murkiness and open to “flows” from without, it cannot be itself. Reter-
of “deterritorialization” has been displaced onto the quotes around “nat- ritorialization involves a withdrawal from difference into self-
ural.” hood. For Deleuze and Guattari, the virtue of this approach

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 564 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011

is that it allows us to describe and analyze dynamic inter- Bergson’s views on movement are helpful to understanding
actions while preserving a permanent difference that is never how people use the term “flow” today, particularly when they
reduced to a single encompassing logic. employ it as a noun. In English translations of Bergson, “flow”
Yet at the same time, this language posits an opposition appears mainly as a verb, but even more often we see the
between radical mobility (“flow”) and radical fixity (“terri- noun “flux.” The first word is a translation of the verb couler,
tory”), with flows taken to be ontologically more fundamental while the second is a translation of the French noun flux.
than territories. One thing to point out about the story of This is the same noun that Deleuze and Guattari’s translators
the wasp and the orchid is that by postulating an intermittent render as “flow” (see, e.g., Bergson 1998; Deleuze and Guattari
transition between being a wasp and “becoming-orchid,” De- 1972). The French flux covers a range of meanings fairly close
leuze and Guattari seem to be employing a very rigid notion to that of the English noun “flow,” particularly in that it refers
of what it is to be something—as if the wasp is just a wasp both to movement within a body of fluid, such as currents
only when it is not pollinating anything, is not making itself and eddies in an ocean, and to the unidirectional movement
part of the life apparatus of anything apart from itself. In fact, of a fluid, such as the flow of melted wax; in other words,
their conception of “territory” seems to be a fundamentally the same two senses that Hannerz distinguishes for the key-
closed space or entity with impermeable boundaries that word “flow.”10 Flux was central to Bergson’s vocabulary, often
ceases to be “territory” when it opens. Deleuze and Guattari denoting the vital principle that underlies his particular kind
have constructed a system in which selfhood and interaction, of dynamism.
being and change, territory and flow are rigidly distinguished This excursion into the work of Bergson and Deleuze and
and the transitions between them are treated as changes of Guattari is intended to demonstrate that certain usages of
kind. Both “deterritorialization” and “flow” are crucial terms “flow” carry some intellectual baggage that I doubt most peo-
in this scheme, and combined with “reterritorialization,” they ple who use it would welcome—a radical time/space dualism
indicate the basic oscillation that underlies the Deleuzian the- and incompatibility with dialectical approaches. If we accept
ory of change. the terms of the dichotomy implicit in this genealogy of
When I first read A Thousand Plateaus, the second of De-
“flow,” it becomes impossible to understand places or any-
leuze and Guattari’s pair of volumes Capitalism and Schizo-
thing as the products of movement. Rather, things and move-
phrenia, I was haunted by a sense of familiarity in the ar-
ment remain in permanent opposition as appearance versus
guments, particularly those relating to time and change.
truth. Bergsonian/Deleuzian “flow” is part of a scheme of
Eventually it occurred to me that Deleuze and Guattari’s as-
thought that appears to be processual but is in fact rigidly
sertion of a strong opposition between change and stasis and
dualistic.
their insistence on an ideal and seemingly transcendent dy-
In the social sciences, particularly in the work of Castells
namism characterized by oscillation between lively change and
and Appadurai, this dualism has made possible a rhetorical
repressive stasis bore a strong resemblance to key elements
dichotomy that locates the agency and dynamism in global
of Henri Bergson’s philosophy. As it turns out, Gillian Rose
(1984:87–108) refers to Gilles Deleuze’s work as a “new Berg- systems all at the larger scales while treating small scales, such
sonism,” and many authors note Deleuze’s debt to the phi- as the level of human experience, as essentially passive and
losopher (see, e.g., Borradori 2001; Tomlinson and Habberjam reactive. These writers imply that we must choose between
1997; Watson 1998). Deleuze even wrote a book on Bergson’s two models of the world in the globalized era. The old model
philosophy (Deleuze 1997) in which Bergson comes out is static; in it, borders divide populations and cultures, and
sounding quite a bit like Deleuze himself. things are self-identical and continuous in time. The new one
One of Bergson’s major arguments is that the intellect has is a fluid model in which places and even people are being
inherent difficulties in grasping the true nature of being and replaced by flows and in which stasis is illusion or reaction
change. Our minds, being practically oriented, tend to en- or both. For anthropologists, this is, of course, not much of
vision the world as made up of things that are in themselves a choice. Given the universally critiqued ahistoricism of struc-
static but that periodically move or change. This movement tural functionalism, the rigidities of Boasian cultural holism,
we generally conceptualize as identical with the route it covers no anthropologist presented with this choice could choose
(Bergson 1944, 1988); in other words, as a stretch of space. anything but the fluid model, with all that it implies. Part of
For Bergson, this is a serious misconception and in effect a the power of the Deleuzian language of “flows” is that it
subordination of movement (or duration) to space that arises contains within itself, in its implicit opposition to stasis, a
from imagining that there are things at all. Instead, where we critical representation of any opposing theory.11
generally perceive the world to be made of things that some-
times move or change, Bergson argues that there is nothing 10. There is no sign, however, that the similar ranges of “flow” as used
by Kroeber and “flux” as employed by Bergson are the result of any direct
but movement and that the appearance of things is simply
influence.
an imposition by our minds. He argues further that if we 11. Castells’s characterization of places in terms of the geographical
start by imagining existent things, we will never be able to containment of “form, function and meaning” (1996b:423; cited above)
grasp change or “duration,” which is real. is a clear example of such straw-man arguments; no such “places” could

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Rockefeller “Flow” 565

But of course, this dichotomy does not represent any nec- Knoeppel, an early management guru.13 As I mentioned
essary choice of cultural theories, nor does it encompass all above, “cash flow” was first mentioned in a management
of the range of approaches to globalization, transnational in- journal from 1954; in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a flo-
tegration, cultural hybridity, and the multiscalar organization rescence of “flow” terminology in the business press, partic-
of culture. In order to engage in this debate effectively, then, ularly in discussions of the organization of factory production.
we need to reject the assumptions implicit in this dichotomy. One popular term of the time was “flow production,” a way
In fact, this rhetorical stance, as well as the Deleuzian work of talking about the movement of raw materials and products
from which it draws inspiration, represents a dualist approach within the manufacturing process of a particular factory. All
that in itself should be troubling to social scientists. of these uses of “flow” correspond to the sense of dynamism
that Hannerz identifies in one of Kroeber’s uses of the word:
the form of an internal animating movement. The manage-
Flow and Agency: The Managerial ment writers differ from Kroeber and Vasconcelos in that they
Perspective are, in general, trying to map internal flows rather than just
recognizing their existence. Ho shows that these days, “flow”
For Deleuze and Guattari—who follow Bergson in treating is also used to talk about the movement of capital and goods
“flow” as something prior to being, identity, or conscious- between countries, factories, banks, and so on—in business
ness—the lexicon of “flow,” “deterritorialization,” and so on as in anthropology, the term describes both “temporal” and
are key parts of their construction of an antiphenomeno- “spatial” mobility, both dynamism and interconnection. I
logical project that allows them to dissolve subjects as much would also argue that in the business world, as in culture,
as they do wasps. All of these authors treat “flow” as a reality globalization means that external movement is internal, that
before perspective. In different ways, so do Castells, with his interconnection is the dynamism of the global economy.
talk of the creation of a new reality, and Appadurai, in as- We can be more precise, however, than to say that “flow”
serting that today we live in a world of flows.12 corresponds to the perspective or the self-presentation of
This is ironic, because “flow,” as it is used to talk about “capitalists” or “capitalism.” Ho, after all, did not do her
globalization, has long been part of the perspective of a par- ethnography with “capitalists” as such but with bankers, with
ticular sort of people. In a recent critique of anthropological people working at a very abstract level of management in the
work on globalization, Karen Ho argues that “the language financial world. They were not entrepreneurs, rentiers, clerical
of flows, decenteredness, and immateriality” (Ho 2005:69), staff, or, obviously, wage laborers. By the same token, Knoep-
as well as the assumption that capitalism is inherently nonlocal pel was not writing about business in a general sense or about
and nonhuman in its makeup, involves the importation of how to invest or start a business but specifically about how
the capitalist’s self-perception into theory. Her ethnography to manage a business. “Flow” is a term that matches most
of an investment bank is intended in part as a critical project specifically the perspective of managers, of a large segment
to highlight and protest the “conspicuous similarity between of what Pfeil (1990:97–125) calls the “managerial-professional
what investment banks say about themselves . . . and what class,” which includes not only bankers and factory managers
much critical scholarship says about capitalism” (Ho 2005: but also bureaucrats and administrators of all sorts as well as
70). In a similar vein, Graeber (2002:1224) argues that the management consultants, among others. While the term cer-
image of “flows” as used to talk about global culture is actually tainly does encapsulate the neoliberal ideology that identifies
“a classic fetishized image of capital acting of its own accord, the unfettered movement of goods, information, and capital
metaphorically treated as a natural phenomenon . . . and, with human liberation and even ecstasy, it does so from the
perspective of those charged with managing the economic
simultaneously, identified with an image of the liberation of
and social worlds we inhabit.
human creativity and desire.” There is indeed a striking sim-
In a number of the articles with which I began this essay,
ilarity between much current anthropological and other sup-
when “flow” is invoked it is to explicitly or implicitly invoke
posedly critical writing about globalization and the self-jus-
the stance of someone who is managing things. Fassin’s men-
tifying ways that businesspeople represent themselves.
tion of the French government’s concern with how to manage
The language of “flow” itself has a long history in business.
immigrant flows, mentioned above, is a case in point, as is
As I mentioned above, the term has been associated with the
Zaloom’s (2004) use of the term in describing the perspective
movement of money since the eighteenth century; in the
and activities of traders at the Chicago Board of Trade. Ngai
twentieth century, however, it began to take on a more specific implicitly invokes this stance when he describes a Chinese
set of uses. In 1920, the OED cites the earliest mention of a residence policy as having “usefulness for controlling the flow
“flow chart” in the book Graphic Production Control by C. E. of migrants into Shenzhen” (Ngai 2003:485), as does Bissell
ever have existed, and none but the most naive of social scientists could
ever have seriously argued that they did. 13. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “flow, n.1” (http://www.oed.com/
12. Hannerz is careful not to make such claims for the reality of flow, view/Entry/71998?rskeyp3qbU6G&resultp1#eid, accessed December
making it very clear that he regards the term as a useful metaphor. 15, 2005).

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 566 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011

when he says that “tourism as a development strategy depends “transnational flows” of remittances (Bernal 2004:15) that are
on intensified flows of capital, images, and people” (Bissell currently remaking Eritrea, Pinto’s passing reference to “in-
2005:230). Hairong’s (2003) entire article is fascinating in this ternational flows of funds, ideology, and regulation through
respect, focusing as it does on how the world looks to those North India” (Pinto 2004:338), or Ramamurthy’s “flow of
charged with managing migrant labor in China. investments” (2003:528). Even if the research is done at a
“Flow” does several things that are quite convenient if your small scale, in these cases the invocation of “flow” allows the
job is to oversee and manage the functioning of a complex author to momentarily soar above the actions in question and
organization or situation. As a formal term, it facilitates the make reference to the macrophenomena that “set the stage”
abstraction of many kinds of activity into a single category. for the action under consideration. Like much modeling ter-
By the same token, it enables an observer to talk about move- minology, “flow” works by elision; it enables one to glide over
ment at a large scale without saying anything in particular variety, scale, and agency in order to focus on the formal, the
about how that movement is generated at a smaller scale. large, and the systemic. “Flow” is action seen from high above.
Finally, by breaking the connection between cause and effect, Unfortunately, because of the word’s innocuous and pro-
that is, between human actors and the aggregate products of tean character, this elision has gone unremarked. Such un-
their actions, the term facilitates the cultivation of the “in- spoken elision is surely useful if you are a manager, but it
difference” that Herzfeld (1993) identifies as a key attribute hardly seems to fit with the scientific and ethical commitments
of the bureaucrat. To invoke for a moment the oldest and of anthropology as a whole. It is telling, then, that the man-
most liquid sense of “flow,” some of the distinctive qualities agement press seems to have adopted the word from physics
of flowing water are that its constituent elements have no and engineering writing of the late nineteenth century. This
agency—nor have they any telos, individually or in aggre- move corresponds to a wholesale importation of scientific
gate—and that water has no claim on an observer’s sympathy and engineering terminology into philosophy and the social
or solidarity. In Cultural Complexity, Hannerz advocated the sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
“flow” metaphor with the example of a river—from afar it (see Kern 2003; Rabinbach 1992).14 Physics, of course, has no
might look like a static line, but as you come closer, it resolves concern with particularity or agency, and the engineer is the
into ceaseless movement and change (Hannerz 1992:4). What
manager of the physical world. In this sense, then, when De-
he did not mention is that if you come even closer, if you
leuze and Guattari open Anti-Oedipus by saying that “we are
examine the river even at a molecular level, all you get is
all handymen; each with his little machines” (Deleuze and
increasingly detailed flows, molecules acted on by gravity,
Guattari 1983:1), they are continuing this mechanistic tra-
ultimately a highly complex system reducible to a set of phys-
dition and at the same time, in effect, naming us managers
ical conditions. With rivers, unlike human societies, there is
of our selves.
no scale at which you can see the actors or the practices that
Interestingly, Appadurai’s more recent writings suggest that
constitute the whole.
he might have a perspective not entirely dissonant with some
None of this should be taken to suggest that agency is a
elements of the one I have presented here, although he is
simple concept; it has some of the slipperiness of “flow” and
committed to the view that “this is a world of flows” (Ap-
has been under intense debate in the social sciences for some
padurai 2002:5). In his article “Grassroots Globalization and
time (see, e.g., Ahearn 2001; Gershon 2011). By invoking
the Research Imagination” (Appadurai 2002), he takes up the
agency and practice in opposition to the language of flow, I
question of how researchers can do something useful for those
do not intend to postulate agency as something primordial
or monolithic. Rather, my aim is to underline that while who are excluded from and/or oppressed by the global econ-
“flow” lends itself to understanding multiple scales of orga- omy, those who are not in a position to manage the world
nization and movement, it does so at the cost of making it of flows. His answer lies not with what we research but with
harder for us to understand the scales at which practice and the organization of the production of knowledge—he con-
agency are manifestly important. For those committed to top- cludes that intellectual production must become aware of the
down analysis or those who hold that agents and selves are conditions under which it occurs and that knowledge of global
nothing but moments of large systems of power or signifi- economic and cultural organization must be organized in such
cation, this may not be a problem. But for any approach that a way that it can be accessible, in a useful form, to those
holds experience, practice, and agency to represent particu- whose struggles put them in opposition to the current course
larly significant moments of social life, the tendency of “flow” of globalization. These are both noble and practical ideas, but
to elide specificities of action and personhood, not to mention here again Appadurai privileges a managerial perspective on
place, should be troubling. the world.
In the Cultural Anthropology articles, “flow” is most often
14. One part of the genealogy of “flow” that remains to be explored
invoked in its keyword sense with reference to the macro-
is that behind Kroeber’s and Vasconcelos’s use of the term. I suspect that
context in which the subject matter of the article takes place. this can be traced to the same nineteenth-century borrowing from scien-
In these cases, the flow is generally “off stage,” as in Bernal’s tific language that ultimately led to the prominence of “flow” in man-
references to the “flows” that constitute nations and the agement writings.

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Rockefeller “Flow” 567

None of this should be taken to mean that the managerial flows, he makes an illuminating point about the limits of the
perspective is without interest. (Appadurai shows convinc- term’s applicability.
ingly that it is crucial.) There are doubtless situations in which If money is transferred from Paris to Tokyo, that money
human actions, taken in aggregate, can be modeled with the does not in any meaningful sense cross the space between
example of the behavior of particles, or fluids. In other words, those cities—no money goes through Germany, Russia,
there are situations in which, in aggregate, people act as if China, or any other space. Information must leave one lo-
they had no agency or volition. Yet those situations hardly cation and arrive in another, but it hardly helps our under-
make up most of social behavior seen at any scale. Even more standing to imagine that the money itself moves smoothly or
to the point, today we are often called on to act as managers continuously.16 The mobility of media images takes place var-
of our selves—to treat our selves and social relations like iously through broadcast, through the physical transport (in
organizations.15 To that extent, managerial language like bulk and on a small-scale) of recorded media, and through
“flow” is crucial for understanding how citizens of post- the World Wide Web and the Internet. The indigenous Bo-
industrial societies experience themselves. But if the language livians I worked with never had any sense they were taking
of flow is one means by which we are being domesticated part in a “flow” of people across the border to Argentina;
into a new sort of managerial subject, anthropologists cer- rather, they were making trips based on the needs and op-
tainly should not unreflectively adopt that language as their portunities of the moment. At a certain level of resolution—
own. perceptible, perhaps, by intellectually squinting our eyes or
removing our glasses—media images and capital can be said
to travel smoothly or continuously, but they can just as well
Conclusion be said to hop about, appearing and disappearing (where is
a movie when it is not showing? where is a bank’s money
In Hannerz’s river illustration, “flow” flags something that
before it “arrives” in Tokyo?), moving in a herky-jerky fashion.
seems fixed yet is in constant movement. Language empha-
Seen in aggregate, the hundreds of thousands of trips made
sizing that things that might be seen as concrete and mo-
by Bolivians back and forth to the cities and farms of Ar-
tionless are in fact emergent is certainly the sort of thing we
gentina could be said to form a stream or a “flow,” but there
need in talking about society and culture at any scale. An-
is hardly any strong reason to adopt this particular metaphor.
thropology also needs, as Hannerz points out, a language that
The patterns of movement, or of appearance and reap-
helps us to focus on and relate different scales of action. But
pearance at a distance, that constitute “global flows” are not,
the flow metaphor transforms action into pure movement
like the water of a river, the objective result of uniform sub-
and opens itself to multiple scales precisely by eliding the
stances responding to uniform conditions. Rather, they are
smallest scale of social action. It is telling here to note that
cobbled together by actors and observers from extremely het-
in Cultural Complexity, Hannerz makes use of flow imagery
erogeneous actions, projects, and interactions that occur at
most frequently in his chapters on business and bureaucracy
many different scales. As if to prove this point, the geographer
but much less when he is discussing perspectives (“A Network
Maria Kaika wrote City of Flows, a history of the water system
of Perspectives”) or urban artists (“The Urban Swirl”).
of Athens and other cities (Kaika 2005). It is necessarily con-
The things that get called “flows”—long-distance move-
cerned with flows, not to mention management, but works
ment of money, the transmission of media images, the large-
as a marvelous defetishization of the keyword. In defiance of
scale travel of migrants and tourists, and even, for some au-
the word’s gravitational pull toward naturalizing large-scale
thors, the transmission of information between participants
patterns of movement and internalizing the perspective of
in a conversation—are all constructions. They can be seen in
managers, Kaika shows the constructed and constantly con-
many ways and as many sorts of things; indeed, they have to
tested nature even of the flow of water into cities. Far from
be seen in many ways, because in most cases there is no single
approaching action and conflict through the image of flowing
perspective that captures their entirety. But privileging them
water, she shows that the flow of water into and through cities
as “flows” has the unfortunate effect of rhetorically effacing must be approached as a historical product, the result of
their constructed nature. James Ferguson points out that on centuries of struggle, planning, and labor. Absent such con-
the one hand, “global flows” are effectively walled off from scious efforts to explore the process of construction whereby
many people by barriers such as national borders (Ferguson something can come to be called a “flow,” the imagery of
2006:155–175) and on the other, they are not continuous; flow has a strong tendency to naturalize large-scale patterns
money, for instance, “jumps” from financial center to finan- of movement. Used in the nonreflective way that I argued in
cial center without moving through the space between them
(38). Although Ferguson does not question the language of 16. Ironically, the movement of money in the global economy—it
exists in one place, then disappears into virtuality to appear in another—
15. For one particularly egregious example, see the book The Family is one of the few actual instances of the “cinematographic” motion that
CFO (Allvine and Larson 2004). Gershon (2011) elaborates eloquently Bergson denounced as a travesty of flux, the continuous “flow” that really
on this point. constitutes life and the world.

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 568 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011

the beginning of this article is one of its hallmarks, the term been constituted by mobility and how the current state of
separates putative “global flows” from the shifting interests, supermobility is reconstituting localities and being enacted
projects, and agents that are their continuing sine qua non by people in places. Also, we can focus on how things come
and rhetorically projects them into an ethereal realm in which to manifest themselves (sometimes, to some people) as flows
flows appear to transcend not only agents but also places and rather than taking flows for granted.
materiality itself. Hannerz is right that anthropologists need better ways to
Anna Tsing’s book Friction (Tsing 2005) is a magisterial talk about process and about culture as it is organized at
illumination of much of what the word “flow” effaces. By multiple scales. It is all too convenient that bureaucrats, bank-
looking at fraud, social and economic failures, and the dis- ers, and managers in general have forged a language for talking
astrous aftereffects of the intrusion of the timber industry about precisely these things. But “flow” as it is often used
into the forests of Kalimantan, Indonesia, she undermines the today is a kind of organized forgetting. Places, agency, and
harmonious overtones of “flow.” Never directly critiquing the perspective, not to mention the complex nature of large-scale
term, she persistently privileges what she calls “zones of awk- dynamic organizations, get swept up into what seems like a
ward engagement” (Tsing 2005:xi), precisely the situations in crystal-clear invocation of dynamism. The things “flow” calls
which the worldly instantiations of information, capital, and on us to forget and to remember lend themselves well to
humanity do not flow but collide, grate against one another, certain projects of power, but these are projects of which
push each other out of the way. It is these areas that are the anthropologists should be wary.
reality of globalization, she suggests, not a quasi-natural
smooth movement whose source is always elsewhere.
A few years ago, the journalist Barbara Garson wrote Money
Makes the World Go Around, in which she “followed” her
Acknowledgments
book advance, starting at the bank where she deposited it, to This article has benefited from the insightful comments of
some of the places where it was invested, and she described David Graeber, Lauren Leve, Laurie Kain Hart, Maris Gillette,
the circumstances and consequences of those investments Zolani Ngwane, Keith Hart, Jennifer Patico, and the anony-
(Garson 2002). Rather than adopting the distanced perspec- mous reviewers of Current Anthropology. Diego Cagüeñas also
tive of the financial managers who moved her money about, provided valuable help in preparing the article for publication.
she problematized their perspective by juxtaposing it to the I would also like to thank Ulf Hannerz for generously sharing
actual instantiation of their decisions, the people employed his insights and recollections about the genesis of this key-
and fired, the factories built and wetlands destroyed, the com- word.
plex and contingent dilemmas created. Her book is at once
a testament to the dramatic level of integration ruling the
global economy and a refutation of any idea that the global
economy is really as decentered and immaterial (to use Ho’s
terms) as it presents itself to be.
Comments
Rather than treating “flow” as if the word were so trans-
Arjun Appadurai
parent as to need virtually no comment, we should recognize
Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University, 20
the heavy metaphysical and ontological cargo riding on it and
Cooper Square, 5th Floor, New York, New York 10003,
redeploy it as a critical term. Any word that manages so
U.S.A. (aa133@nyu.edu). 11 X 10
elegantly to embody managerial and neoliberal perspectives
on movement is clearly of great power and worth careful Stuart Rockefeller has done an elegant job of doing what
attention. Hairong and Fassin implicitly deploy the term in anthropology does at its best and not often enough, which is
this critical fashion as they tactically adopt a managerial per- to wake up a key term from the professional slumber that
spective when talking about the world of modern or post- has made its sense common. His detailed analysis of the
modern states. weight the word “flow” has borne in the 1990s and in the
But if we must recognize that “flow” is a term that contains past decade—especially in the anthropological analysis of
precisely the perspectives that anthropological “studying up” globalization, transnationalism, and diaspora—is certainly
is supposed to criticize, how are we to talk about the many fair and evenhanded. He is right, too, to detect certain re-
issues that seem to have been so happily gathered into “flow”? cessive debts that these recent usages in anthropology owe to
How do we talk about internal dynamism and external con- such thinkers as Bergson and Deleuze, although he might
nections, about restless capital, the rapid movement of in- have gestured even deeper in time to Heraclitus and other
formation, the tremendous ease of long-distance communi- fans of riverine metaphors in Western thought. His cautionary
cation and transportation, the massive mobility of people? To notes, which constitute his main critical point in the essay,
start with, we can move beyond misleading oppositions be- are also well taken. Flow tends to elide bumps, liquids tend
tween space and time, which means asking not how mobility to trump solids, and all watery tropes tend to dissolve, erode,
is undermining locality but on what terms locality has always or submerge the all-too-solid terrain of power, limit, border,

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Rockefeller “Flow” 569

and restraint in the politics of real life. So far I am entirely vapors. Anthropology does not yet have a robust theory of
sympathetic to Rockefeller’s views. I now take up his invi- circulation, and when such a theory does emerge, it will owe
tation to a dialogue that might put some solids back into the as much to recent theories of flow as to the long-standing
aqueous terrain of flow talk and ask what his invitation might ethnographic concern with the local, the bodily, and the non-
entail (or elide). modern as elements of social life. In this sense, Rockefeller’s
Rockefeller worries about the managerial point of view, plea, which I am happy to endorse, is for a more robust
about its “large-scale” epistemology, its tendency to margin- anthropology of the ebb to balance the recent excesses of the
alize the already marginal, its apparent disinterest in small anthropology of flow.
agencies and local lives. I assume that this worry is what
informs his warm endorsement of various flow skeptics in
and around anthropology. So let me put a counterquestion
to his question.
Paolo Favero
What is the sociology of the flow skeptics, who usually
Centro em Rede de Investigação, 160 Avenida Forças
speak in the name of the small, the marginal, and the forgotten
Armadas, s/n Edificio ISCTE, Salas 2N7 e 2N9, Cacifo 237
people of the global present? Is the real problem an anthro-
0-083, Lisbon, Portugal (paolo.favero@iscte.pt). 8 II 11
pology of flow that could efface the frictions, struggles, and
stories of these little worlds? Or is it the possible loss of “Flow,” “deterritorialization,” and “rhizome” are terms that
authority of a whole generation (or two or three) of anthro- have indeed characterized a specific epoch in the development
pologists whose authority was constructed on their knowledge of social theory. Having gained popularity in a time marked
of these little worlds, on their power to report on these distant by a growing need to understand a changing world—that is,
localities and to tell us about agency, authority, voice, and globalization—a world allegedly made up of new social re-
being in these worlds? If anthropologists like myself, ostensible lations and new borders and characterized by greater and
virtuosos of managerial reason, have found new ways to speak faster interconnectedness, such words have indeed become
in terms of the large, the general, and the universal, also fundamental instruments for interpreting and addressing con-
known as the global, and have found some measure of res- temporaneity at large. Offering us, indeed, a series of new
onance among our readers and students, what threat do we epistemological insights and leading us to a critical rethinking
really pose? I doubt that we pose a real threat to the small of some of the key categories through which social sciences
marginal people of the forests, islands, and swamps of an- have enacted their understanding of contemporary societies
thropologyland. These people are being destroyed by preda- in particular (such as identity, place, and culture), these terms
tory states, rapacious corporate interests, brutal militias, and have, however, to some extent progressively become epitomes
horrifying ethnocidal movements close to their localities. Per- of our understanding of contemporary postindustrial societies
haps the real threat from those of us who were bold enough at large. Influential in the field of anthropology, in particular
to stake a place in discussions of global, transnational, dias- in the areas of research on media, finance, migration, and
poric, and translocal spaces in the name of anthropology was transnationalism, they have almost become banners of these
our threat to those who had hitherto served as the guardians, areas of research.
trustees, and ventriloquists of the local in the name of a Connected primarily to the work of Gilles Deleuze and
humbler anthropology. If the local was being unsettled by Félix Guattari (Rockefeller’s article brilliantly show us Berg-
new processes and points of view, what was really under threat son’s influence on them and in particular on Deleuze), such
in Western academia was the regnant anthropology of the words, marking the definitive incorporation of French post-
out-of-the-way. In other words, those with an interest in the modern philosophy into the anglophone world of social sci-
always local were the ones who could go out of business if ences, found their way into this world paradoxically late.
the stability of their object was to be seriously disturbed. While the first English translation of Capitalisme et schizo-
This problem of professional struggle in the belly of the phrénie by Deleuze and Guattari (published in France in 1972)
beast is not the only one we must face. Rockefeller is worried appeared in the late 1970s, this book and its authors gained
by what he calls the managerial point of view because of its popularity in the English-speaking world only in the late 1980s
tendency to take the bird’s-eye view, the view of large cor- and early 1990s. It is therefore quite ironic to acknowledge
porations, big interests, and global players. But what of some- how such terms have been capable of offering (and main-
one like Marx, from whose work both Rockefeller and I take taining across time; see below) an aura of novelty despite the
inspiration when we seek to identify with quotidian struggles, evident delay with which they were adopted. In the world of
whether they issue from India, Bolivia, or much smaller anthropology, for instance, these words (mostly the first two)
places? Marx’s biggest contribution from the point of view have in fact stood for a fairly long time as flags or markers
of the idea of flow was to put the analysis of global circulatory of a kind of “hip anthropology,” an anthropology flirting with
processes squarely on the map, and in this he belonged to a allied disciplines as if they added a surplus value of “coolness”
long tradition of thinkers concerned with the circulation of to those who used them. It was very much so 15 years ago
such substances as blood, money, and atmospheric gases and when I let myself be fascinated by such approaches at the

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 570 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011

beginning of my doctoral work, but I was also recently cultures) paradoxically reinforces our dualistic worldview of
stunned to notice (during a conference that took place just bounded things opposed to movements or events (cf. Farnell
a few weeks before this text was written) how a colleague 2000; Handler 2002). As always, we fail to escape our foun-
introduced the use of “rhizome” in a paper, justifying it as dational dualisms—mind/body, or in this case, verb/noun,
an almost experimental attempt to offer a kind of novel twist event/thing—even when we try.
to the discussion. These terms seem to have been able to Rockefeller observes that social scientists currently use
ignite a sparkle of novelty in the anthropological community “flow” as a “stand-alone noun,” one whose salience derives
for a very long time now. from “watery imagery.” Thus, a term such as “cash flow,” a
Rockefeller’s article offers us a brilliant and critical reflec- noun, is a metaphor that conjures up images such as “a river
tion on our usage of such terms while also introducing us to of dollars,” just as the term “human flows” suggests “a stream
their own, to borrow from Arjun Appadurai, “social life,” also of immigrants.” These phrases are Whorfian container for-
offering us, therefore, an explanation for their capacity to mulas in which “homogeneous continua” are depicted as con-
maintain across time this aura of novelty. Rockefeller in fact tents and container, a “formless item plus a form” (Whorf
introduces us to the multiple travels of these terms. Starting 1956 [1941]:140–141). As Rockefeller argues, taking an angle
from the original etymology of the term “flow” (referring of attack Whorf would have appreciated, to use such meta-
originally to the movement of liquids), he brings us into a phors obscures our vision of two crucial aspects of the phe-
wonderful reflection regarding the usage of “flow,” pointing nomena we are studying: first, the agents responsible for the
out the lack of problematization that has surrounded it activities (like the bankers who make decisions about where
(“flow” has been used more than it has been talked about, dollars are to be invested or the travelers who decide when
he says). Rockefeller suggests that across time, in fact, “flow” to migrate and when to return home) and second, the irreg-
has been used in such varying ways that it has ended up ularities and discontinuities in activities that are not in fact
confusing us about its meaning. The diffuse usage that has “homogeneous continua.” To use but one counterexample,
characterized its life in academia has led to the progressive one that Rockefeller also notes, James Ferguson (2006:34–38)
blurring of content of what the term seeks to address (“the points out that capital does not flow evenly into Africa, it
keyword . . . tends to privilege a form [unbroken agentless “hops” from international centers of finance across vast ex-
movement] over any content,” writes Rockefeller), leading us panses of the African continent that are not of interest to
therefore to lose sight of what we were seemingly trying to investors to resource enclaves from whence profits can be
address through it. What is actually flowing in such flows? extracted.
Rockefeller asks. Generally used “as an image of ‘pure’ move- The history of social science is littered with dead metaphors,
ment,” “flow” ends up eliding agency and small-scale process terms that, unfortunately, lull us to sleep. Rockefeller’s piece
and, in other words, dehumanizing the (human) phenomena puts us on guard against “the innocence” of a “common
it aims to describe. Emphasizing form over content, the use English” term that has become part of our theoretical jargon.
of “flow” (and I suggest that the same argument could be Sometimes social theorists create terms that gain wide accep-
valid for “deterritorialization” and “rhizome” as well) indeed tance as part of our common vocabulary (such as Freud’s
seems paradoxically to take away from us the possibility of “ego” and “id”). More often, as Durkheim (1966 [1895]:37)
enquiring further into what we were addressing. In a way, it knew, everyday language orients social scientists in their initial
is as if these terms shine out a stronger light than what they studies, and thus it is that popular terms are transmuted into
seem to be trying to illuminate. social-scientific objects and topics (“marriage and the family,”
“crime and punishment,” “magic and religion”; cf. Rose
1960). It will be interesting to see whether “flow” will become
further institutionalized (e.g., in the titles of university
courses) or whether use of the term will slow to a trickle and
Richard Handler
eventually dry up.
Program in Global Development Studies, University of Vir-
ginia, P.O. Box 400772, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-
4772, U.S.A. (rh3y@eservices.virginia.edu). 8 XI 10
How appropriate that Stuart Rockefeller should quote Ulf
Ulf Hannerz
Hannerz (2000 [1997]) referring back to Alfred Kroeber’s use
Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University,
of the term “flow,” because Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s (1952)
S-10691 Stockholm, Sweden (ulf.hannerz@socant.su.se). 3
treatise on the term “culture” is a paradigmatic example of
XI 10
the interesting project Rockefeller has undertaken. Rockefeller
suspects that usages of “flow” that apparently take up and Rockefeller covers a wide intellectual ground in his scrutiny
move forward antiessentializing critiques of cultural holism of recent varieties of flowtalk, and I believe that he basically
in fact reproduce its epistemological premises. A theory of does justice to them. I can only try to clarify certain points
culture in which flow overwhelms bounded places (locales, and voice some slight disagreements.

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Rockefeller “Flow” 571

“A key moment in the development of the new word,” in both Palo Alto and Stockholm, and in her usage, “flow”
Rockefeller suggests, came some 25 years ago when Arjun is used primarily to denote local processes of inventing and
Appadurai and I (coincidentally) found ourselves together at transmitting culture. With a small number of concretely iden-
the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences tified actors, agency and personhood are certainly not ignored
(CASBS) in Palo Alto. I doubt that we spent much of our in this study. I would claim that with the strong emphasis on
time in focused discussion of “flow,” but we were converging a concept of “perspectives” in Cultural Complexity, agency is
on interests in processual analysis and, as it would turn out, hardly played down there either. I must confess that I am
on global interconnections. Although according to Rockefeller puzzled by Rockefeller’s reference to “chapters on business
I wrote Cultural Complexity “a few years later,” this is, strictly and bureaucracy” in that book. I never thought of any chap-
speaking, inaccurate; that was my main project at CASBS, and ters in such terms.
no doubt it continuously influenced my contributions to our Finally, I offer a response to Rockefeller’s inclination, which
conversations. But revising the manuscript was somewhat de- he shares with various other commentators, to detect in the
layed, so the book appeared in 1992. My 1989 article in Public “flow” metaphor a bias toward the smooth and even. If so
Culture is basically an extract from it. At CASBS, Appadurai, many believe that there is such a tendency, there may be
I believe, was engaged primarily in editing and writing a major something to it. Nevertheless, I do not think that this is all
introduction for The Social Life of Things (Appadurai 1986), there is to flow. I have recently referred elsewhere (Hannerz
also with a processual bent, where the term “flows” makes 2010b) to the work of the political scientist James Rosenau,
an occasional appearance. It is likewise present in my article who makes “turbulence” a key concept in a theoretical edifice
“The World in Creolization” (Hannerz 1987), originally a and identifies “cascades” as a characteristic form “analogous
public lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where Ap- to a flow of white water down a rocky river bed. . . . The
padurai was then based. flow churns and shifts, sometimes moving sideways, some-
The writings of Deleuze and Guattari never had any direct times diagonally, and sometimes even careening in the reverse
influence on my own work. While I may have struggled with direction, and leaving sprays, eddies, and whirlpools in its
rhizomes in the garden of my summer house, I did not do wake” (Rosenau 1990:298–299). “Flow,” it seems, can also be
so at my desk. Apart from the year at CASBS, most of my turned into a root metaphor sensitizing us to diversity in
work in the relevant period was based at Stockholm Univer- processes in time and space.
sity. Although we hardly spent much time there arguing over
the meaning of “flow,” I note that Rockefeller points to Paolo
Favero’s criticism of the idea of deterritorialization; Favero
was part of our Stockholm milieu at the time.
As Rockefeller shows, my own use of “flow” as a theoretical Laurie Kain Hart
(or rather prototheoretical) notion draws more on earlier Department of Anthropology, Haverford College, 370 Lan-
anthropological sources, such as Kroeber. Anthropologists, I caster Avenue, Haverford, Pennsylvania 19041, U.S.A.
have recently argued (Hannerz 2010a:131–160), are now often (lhart@haverford.edu). 1 III 11
too inclined to disregard the intellectual resources of their The pleasant rhetoric of “flow” obscures the brutal dynamics
own discipline’s past. Apart from the writings cited by Rock- of contemporary north-south global political economy, with
efeller, I would mention an article by Fabian (1978) playfully its massive labor migrations and refugee exoduses. Both
proposing “a liquidation, literally speaking, of the concept of world-systems theory and globalization theory made impor-
culture” (329), by which he obviously meant making it a tant contributions to anthropology’s increasingly complex ap-
matter of flow rather than abolishing it. (The same article proach to the nature of “locality,” beginning in the 1970s.
inspired my use of the idea of creolization.) I would also Forty years later, tracking the multidirectional global circu-
emphasize that while Kroeber used “flow” in both temporal lation of apparently remote events and interests continues to
and spatial senses, my emphasis in Cultural Complexity was be among anthropology’s central concerns. If “globalization”
mostly on the temporal—“flow” as a processual metaphor— talk, however, as Rockefeller argues, turns us away from the
although as I turned to global interconnectedness, the spatial situated (if highly mobile) events, entities, bodies, and places
dimension also entered in. that make up the biographically scaled world we inhabit, and
Concerning matters of scale and agency, it is true that at if scholars mistake their own condition of mobility for a com-
the time, I was concerned with the absence of anything much mon privilege, then we are blinded by our scholarly habitus.17
in the way of a macroanthropology (Hannerz 1986). But in Rockefeller argues that anthropology’s celebration of high-
Cultural Complexity, I engaged with the scale of culture more speed global syncretisms matches up too well with current
comparatively (Hannerz 1992; see esp. 68–81), including a neoliberal ideology that equates “the unfettered movement of
conception of “microculture.” This was, furthermore, central goods, information, and capital with human liberation and
in a study by Helena Wulff, notably titled Twenty Girls: Grow-
ing Up, Ethnicity and Excitement in a South London Micro- 17. On the political salience of reterritorialization processes, see, for
culture (1988). Wulff had also been engaged in the interactions example, the careful study by Feuchtwang (2004) on China.

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 572 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011

even ecstasy.” The standard list of things in flow that Rock- life” (Agamben 1998) policing that can be carved out of so-
efeller cites from globalization theory includes “capital, images called normal national space and projected into “peripheral”
and people” and “people, ideas, money, images, goods.” It is zones. This is the poor migrant’s inverted complement to the
crucial, however, to disaggregate this list. A critique of “flow” disjunctive corporate “enclaves” of foreign extractive enter-
involves serious stakes. Human migrants are not ideas or prise and imported workers described by dependency theo-
digital transfers of money, and the implications of flow in rists in the 1970s and by James Ferguson (2006) more recently
immigration talk are different from its implications in media for neoliberal Africa. The multiple unequal statuses extended
theory. The contrast is crucial: if the dehumanized flow met- to extralegal immigrants by the U.S. Department of Home-
aphor conjures a cartographic-geological cosmic view that land Services can be understood as a regime of “bare labor”:
solicits managerial (vs., e.g., political or humanitarian) inter- arbitrary discretionary state power is codified, for example,
vention, it has effects. “Flow” naturalizes human migration. through bureaucratic instruments such as “deferred enforced
The term “goes without saying” in the mass media, and the departure permits” or revocable “temporary protected status”
hydraulic language prefigures a dehumanized, technocratic that increase the pool of inexpensive vulnerable workers.
response. Respondents are asked in opinion polls, “How im- “Flow” also masks the increasing importance of what Ribas-
portant is it to develop a plan to stem the flow of illegal Mateos designates as “transit cities,” holding pens such as
immigrants?” (O’Leary 2010). Law enforcement officials are Tangiers or Durres where the urban space is increasingly de-
directed to “mitigate the dramatic flow of illegal immigrants fined as a “waiting place for migration to Europe,” a “door
into our nation and state” (Hardy 2010). Blogs announce that to Europe,” and even, given the difficulty of the final step of
“immigrants flow in, but cap imposed by feds could limit migration, as a simulacrum of Europe (Ribas Mateos 2005).
future numbers” (Turenne 2010). But “capping” is a tech- Border megacities (such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez) as
nocratic cipher for arrest and deportation. References to the well as the personal histories of migrants, exiles, and political
reified flow of immigrants escalate periodically into the more refugees demonstrate the lack of free “flow” in human traffic
threatening millennial metaphor of “flood”: for example, the but also show us how place is indeed constituted through
anti-amnesty political action committee Americans for Legal movement. Rockefeller counsels us against the comforts of
Immigration accuses conservative “sellouts” of advocating an “organized forgetting”: the creative effects of cultural “fric-
immigration reform plan to “flood America with illegal aliens” tion” notwithstanding, we should be wary of misrecognizing
(Gheen 2010). the directionality of power inherent in the multiplication of
Most importantly, “flow” is an unfortunate term if by its borders in a landscape of increasing human inequality.
reifications and pseudocontinuity it draws our attention away
from embodied and individualized suffering of migration
(e.g., the more than 10,000 documented dead in Mediterra-
nean crossings in the last 10 years; see also Holmes 2006 on
Andrew Orta
migrant mortality at the U.S. border and Quesada, Hart, and
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Univer-
Bourgois, forthcoming). The final stages of migration passages
sity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 201 International Stud-
are increasingly a test of physical endurance that triage for
ies Building, MC-481, 901 South Fifth Street, Champaign,
productive labor. “Flow” is doubly unfortunate if it diverts
Illinois 61820, U.S.A. (aorta@illinois.edu). 13 XI 10
analysis from the complex and uneven political technologies
of securitization as revealed, for example, in Luiza Bialasie- The grip of “globalization” as a constitutive problem of con-
wicz’s insightful analysis of the “offshoring and outsourcing” temporary analysis has shifted in the past decade. This is
of the borders of Europe (Bialasiewicz 2010). The inclusion evident well beyond anthropology. In the business literature,
of new states in the European Union is no longer focused on for instance, the 1980s were marked by efforts to come to
democratization but on securitization, via legal obligations, grips with the erasure of differences across a global landscape
to serve as buffer zones or filters. The United States, Biala- shaped by intensifying circulation (e.g., Levitt 1983). By the
siewicz points out, has long been “de-bordering its borders turn of the twenty-first century, it was clear that the antici-
. . . blurring traditional distinctions between ‘external’ and pated ecumene would not come to pass; international business
‘internal’ security” in a panoply of management techniques training has come increasingly to focus on preparing business
and new technologies both within the United States and in professionals to negotiate a world where places matter, local
Mexico and Canada (Bialasiewicz 2010:2–3). Europe, in a differences count. “Bringing the Country Back In: The Im-
partnership with new and peripheral states, is following suit portance of Local Knowledge in a Global Economy” was the
with its own vast web of policing bodies and regulations that theme of the 2007 Meetings of the Academy of International
are externalized beyond “conventional” nation-state border Business; other evidence of the swing away from the flat world
control. The unevenness and arbitrariness of global political of naive globalization discourse ranges from the rise of “lo-
texture require emphasis here. Nick Vaughan-Williams (2009: cavore” cuisine to the enthusiasm for the “bottom of the
746) calls this globalized regime an “archipelago of zones of pyramid” (Bartlett, Ghoshal, and Birkinshaw 2004; Prahalad
[juridico-political] indistinction,” a no-man’s-lands of “bare- 2004; cf. Thrift 2000).

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Rockefeller “Flow” 573

Rockefeller’s critique of the keyword “flow” calls this to that when in motion make the smooth surface of the flow.
mind as he surveys a term that has done largely unexamined Yet the promise of such analysis is that the new knowledge
work in constituting the object of the anthropology of glob- can be scaled back up; the more granular data are episte-
alization. He is especially interested in “flow” as a routinized mologically continuous with the claims of flow (e.g., Baghai,
metaphor evoking the contexts and connections of globali- Smit, and Viguerie 2007; Prahalad 2004). Far from challenging
zation. Flowing is the constitutive symptom of the global the dominant framing of flow, this sort of engagement with
condition. A secondary effect is that phenomena in the locality reproduces different facets of the model all the way
world—groups of people, ideas, dollars—become themselves down.
available for analysis as tokens of a new global type: flows. A core strength of ethnography is the agility it provides
Rockefeller’s core critique is that the lens of “flow” brings researchers to respond to new questions provoked by our data.
only certain features of globalization into view. He sets himself A key challenge in the present case is for ethnography not
to the task of asking how this came to be to better show us just to be multiscalar (as the cry for an anthropology of glob-
what has been left out. alization once had it) but to be reciprocally so. Putting flow
Rockefeller’s critique illuminates two limitations of “flow,” in its places promises new questions and framings of global
each arising from dichotomies implicit in the term. One con- phenomena. The routinized rhetoric of flow has discouraged
cerns the ways the analytic identification of flow requires an some of these. Rockefeller’s critical examination of this key
original stable alter. This framing has tended to locate research word underscores the need for additional analytic orientations
on globalization in places beyond the classical loci of eth- toward the phenomena of globalization.
nographic study, seen as encompassed by but not represen-
tative of global flows. This has the ironic effect of reifying the
insular locality it seeks analytically to surpass. A related lim-
itation is a scalar dualism, because the rhetoric of flow implies
Keith Woodward
a bird’s-eye view keyed on macrolevel scales. The implication
Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin–Madi-
that the moving parts of globalization are best viewed from
son, 455 Science Hall, 550 North Park Street, Madison,
on high has a darker side; the optic of flow routinizes a low-
Wisconsin 53706, U.S.A. (kwoodward@wisc.edu). 14 II 11
resolution legibility, foregoing a critical examination of the
parts as it circulates the vantage it achieves over the whole. Rockefeller’s survey of the flow concept follows its meander-
Rockefeller’s cautions about the baggage and blind spots ings through the regime where today it is most solidly man-
of “flow” point toward a set of productive challenges for ifest: the globalized, capitalocentric logics that today project
contemporary research. One concerns seeing process and dy- hegemonic managerialist perspectives onto all aspects of so-
namism, indeed globalization, at all levels of scale and across cial, political, cultural, and economic life. The troubling epis-
all spaces of human activity. This is more than moving beyond temological consequences that come with the concept’s priv-
static or insular views of communities; at stake is research ileged spot in the social sciences, he suggests, are evident in
showing the ways that the production of local small-scale both the disappearance of “place” as a lively concept and the
communities is the work of globalization (e.g., Colloredo- concomitant decline of viewpoints that locate the individual
Mansfeld 2009; Piot 1999). as a relevant unit or “level” of agency. Elsewhere and in a
Locating globalization (at least partly) on the ground also similar vein, I, along with Marston and Jones (Jones, Wood-
entails recognizing that the rhetoric of flow naturalizes and ward, and Marston 2007; Marston, Jones, and Woodward
fetishizes as an aggregated phenomenon a set of occurrences 2005; Woodward, Jones, and Marston 2010), have criticized
that on the ground are not as smooth, continuous, or neat the “fetishistic” notions that suggest that complex social re-
as the rhetoric would imply. There are frictions, gaps, and lations are reducible to pure movements of unfettered flows.
failures of meaning. Not all of these data will be relevant to There, we challenge imaginaries that envision capital’s global
the questions we ask about global phenomena. But our un- fluidities as a model for sociopolitical liberation—or worse,
derstanding of global phenomena will always be hobbled if as its very foundation—while simultaneously ignoring the
our analytic language helps to hide such data from view. economic unevenness that smooth movement of capital both
The business trend toward the local reflects a recognition depends on and sustains. From this perspective, there is much
that such spaces are not swept away, or swept level, by flows. to agree with in Rockefeller’s account. However, where he
Yet the business shorthand for this sort of zooming-in remains suggests that flow discourse embraces the perspective of the
telling, as the aggregated “dashboard” view enabling managers managerialist capitalist at the cost of considering the partic-
to track the flows is complemented by the action of “drilling ularities of agents and places, our challenge concerns the ten-
down” into the data to look at something with greater “gran- dencies in both flow- and agent/place-based accounts to pass
ularity.” These framings suggest a freezing of the action, taking over the many concurrent constitutive sites—the cluster of
data out of the flow to interrogate it in another way. “Gran- maquiladoras along the United States/Mexico border, for ex-
ularity” suggests the subdivision of data from coarse to fine ample—where global capital flows are enabled by fixing and
categories or perhaps an isolation of the individual particles constraining the movements of people within localized ex-

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 574 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011

ploitative socioeconomic relations. This difference emerges in line with a code and a territory). Rather than driving these
part through Rockefeller’s criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari. processes, capitalism follows behind change (flux) in an on-
Specifically, I find their philosophical project in many ways going effort to capture (stabilize) and absorb it. “Agents,” far
helpful for highlighting how exploitative systems take advan- from being reduced to flows, are quite literally caught in the
tage of the cooperation of fluidity and stasis. middle of this system. By developing an account that allows
For Deleuze, flows are most closely related to processes of us to envision the combined workings of flows and stasis,
coding and—most importantly for operations of capitalism— Deleuze provides a social sciences with language for describing
decoding. If “flow” (or flux) refers to moving, dynamic, “un- the role of sociospatial difference in processes of capitalist
formed” matter (Deleuze and Guattari 19872:43–44), a code exploitation.
is something “subtracted” from flows, a bit of matter that is
stabilized by having code attached to it (Deleuze 1971, e.g.,
refers to changes in hairstyles). In this regard—contrary to
Rockefeller’s contention that Deleuze reduces individuals to
flows—subjects are the agents who interrupt flows. In a lecture Reply
on Anti-Oedipus, he explains that “Every code in relation to
flows implies that we prevent something of this flow from To begin with, I would like to express my gratitude for the
passing through, we block it, we let something pass” (Deleuze ways in which various commentators showed the productive
1971). In keeping with Foucault (who was equally critical of nature of the critique of “flow” articulated in the article by
neoliberalist managerialism; see Foucault 2007, 2008), it can adapting it to areas that I had not considered, as well as for
only be with regard to abstract populations that flows occupy the collegial, even appreciative tone adopted by the authors
center stage: “the general theory of society is a generalized whose work I critiqued. In reading the comments together, I
theory of flows” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:262). However, am struck by the level of agreement among the contributions
when turning to the particularities of social lives, Deleuze on certain fundamental points. Nearly all the authors agree
emphasizes the centrality of specific, grounded relations me- that imagery of unbounded mobility fails to help us under-
diated by pragmatic theorizations and descriptions (Deleuze stand global interconnections, and many implicitly or ex-
and Guattari 1987:139–140). The flow of power, for example, plicitly hold that what I am calling the “managerial perspec-
“is not homogeneous but can be defined only by the particular tive” holds serious snares for ethnographic projects in part
points through which it passes” (Deleuze 1988:25). These because it facilitates the elision of specificities of experience,
“points” are none other than the agents who interrupt flows, agency, and place (although not all agree that the keyword
just as in the flows of academic theories, data, site visits, and “flow” encodes that perspective). It also seems to me that we
ethnographic research, it is precisely the research subject who are all arguing for a processual approach to action, power,
interrupts the researcher’s assumptions or presuppositions. and circulation, while we may disagree about what version of
A multiplication of such codes, particularly when occurring processualism is going to help us.
as a repeated environmental process, can constitute a territory Hart’s commentary is in many ways an ideal complement
(as happens with birdsong; Deleuze and Guattari 1987). De- to the article, revealing the “organized forgetting” engendered
leuze equates deterritorialization with Melville’s use of the by the language of “flow” in a concrete manner where I do
word “outlandish” (Deleuze 2004), but if this suggests a kind so from a theoretical perspective. She highlights the traumatic
of spacelessness or placelessness, it does so only by suggesting and often violent reality of transnational migration and global
a departure from a specific constituted territory. Thus, rather labor practices and some of the ways that bureaucratic lan-
than “flow,” deterritorialization is better identified with a shift guage elides the human consequences of business and state
in an otherwise stable pattern of body-environment relations. policies. Favero focuses quite fruitfully on my point about
Consider the transformation in territorial relations that occurs the persistent novelty of the language of globalization, arguing
with the rise of factory-style production: masses of artisans, that much of the Deleuzian lexicon embodies the same par-
whose bodies are accustomed to specific styles of work with adox. Handler, in saying that I claim that uses of the keyword
specific materials, are subject to a host of new relations when “that apparently take up and move forward antiessentializing
competition and dispossession forces them into the factory. critiques of cultural holism in fact reproduce its epistemo-
Their bodies are made to work—to exert force, to bend, to logical premises,” puts one of my key points more succinctly
follow the rhythms of machines—in new and different ways than I managed to myself. I am flattered by the connections
at the same time that the value (or code) of that work is he finds between my argument and Whorf’s writings.
subject to new forms of measure (the number of commodities Woodward cleaves to a project in many ways complemen-
or the length of the working day). What is most important tary to my own rejection of managerialist fantasies of unlo-
for capitalism is that the “outlandish” or deterritorialized di- calized and unfettered flows as a useful way to think about
mension (the new form of mass labor in the new factory social reality generally and globalization specifically. But he
space) can be subject to a simultaneous reterritorialization argues that Deleuze, far from being one of the sources of the
(new practices are unprofitable if they cannot be brought into problem, offers us ways to overcome it and that my preferred

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Rockefeller “Flow” 575

approach, that is, bringing subjects and places back into any played an important role in the happy event that we come
approach to globalization, may generate blindness of its own. up with such an approach. Not only do I agree that the
I am intrigued by the fact that the language he uses as he stability of the traditional object of ethnographic concern (let
initially contrasts his position and mine (i.e., “fixing and con- us call it the “local community”) has been disturbed by large-
straining the movements of people within localized exploit- scale exercises of power, but I also hold that such communities
ative socioeconomic relations”) is remarkably similar to some were never as stable or as local as some anthropologies imag-
key concepts I use in my own ethnographic approach to power ined them to be. The rise of the language of “flow” was a key
and mobility (see Rockefeller 2010). Similarly, his claim that part of an intellectual movement of the 1980s and 1990s that
“capitalism follows behind change . . . in an ongoing effort helped us break from a preoccupation with stability and self-
to capture (stabilize) and absorb it” is reminiscent of my own containment that impeded the development of a global an-
claims in the same book that powerful social formations (such thropology. But theory making is a dialectical process, and
as nation-states) depend for their existence on the appropri- we are now in a position to internalize the processual pos-
ation and constraint of the creative capacities of their subjects. sibilities created partly by writings on “flow” while leaving
In short, his reading of Deleuze is a good deal more congenial aside their dualistic and managerial baggage.
than the Bergsonian Deleuze I have found. Here I must cede Of course Appadurai and those who follow in his footsteps
some authority to Woodward, who is far more of a Deleuze do not present any threat to “small marginal people of the
scholar than I am, and also emphasize that my article is not forests, islands, and swamps,” to Andean campesinos, to in-
intended to contain a definitive statement on Deleuze’s work digenous peoples, or to migrant workers. Rather, the language
or on its adoption in the social sciences generally but to of “flow” represents a missed opportunity. I suspect that one
critique a particular use of part of his approach. To put the of the attractions of this language is that it facilitates con-
matter in the terms Woodward offers, it is entirely possible versation with a range of relatively empowered actors (policy
that what I object to in anthropological uses of “flow” is the makers, development officials, financial managers, and the
way they have tended to privilege what he calls “abstract like) who worry about and affect some of the same things
populations” and deploy a “general theory of society” when that anthropologists have begun focusing on but who have
what is called for is an understanding of particularities. long found anthropology to be opaque in its language and
Hannerz begins his comments by pointing out a certain preoccupations and perhaps quaint in its attachment to the
lack of precision in my chronology of the genesis of the key- concrete. These cross-institutional conversations are good in
word. His clarifications are well taken, and I trust that they themselves, but if the price of achieving them is to join with
do not affect my overall argument. He also gives instances of managers in their collective forgetting rather than to point
concepts related to “flow” being used to represent difference, out that forgetting, then the resultant conversation will stand
nonuniformity, and conflict as well as small-scale interactions. in the way of our efforts to understand the global and the
Orta makes a related point in his remarks about “granularity,” local in their mutual constitution and make it harder to see
but to a different purpose, implying that even when the dis- what the managers of our increasingly managerial reality are
course of “flow” is adapted to the understanding of small- actually doing.
scale situations, it remains caught in the same dualisms as Appadurai claims that “flow” skepticism might reflect an
always. In this vein, I should point out that my argument is anxiety about the loss of the traditional local object of eth-
not that “flow” is a concept that fails to illuminate anything nographic attention. Thus, he says that “flow skeptics” often
important about the globalized world. On the contrary, I try speak in the name of the “small.” This may be the case, but
to make it clear that it can do many handy things for those it is worth noting that the authors whom I held up as offering
trying to think about multiple scales and process, but I main- us alternatives to the language of “flow” (for reasons of space
tain that the cost of making use of the concept is far greater I left out Theodore Bestor’s Tsukiji [2004], a magisterial “eth-
than one might think. A way to rephrase my overall point is nography” of the global sushi trade) are concerned with large-
to say that “flow” bears the mark of the manager, and when scale, often global actors and processes as well as with “small”
the term appears in the ways I have critiqued, we can be sure experiences and actions. In my own work (Rockefeller 2010)
that we are reading about a reality created by managerialism I strive not only to “disturb” the traditional local object of
and/or that we are seeing the managerial perspective on the ethnographic study but also to put the interaction of wildly
world enacted in text. So if we are going to talk about “flows,” varied scales of organization and power at the center of my
we ought to talk about bureaucrats, bankers, planners, con- approach to the lives of an indigenous people. Institutionally,
sultants, and managers generally and not let their perspectives anthropology has had great success incorporating translocal,
and omissions reproduce themselves uncontested. transnational, and global discourses, and I doubt that many
I follow Appadurai in beginning with our areas of agree- anthropologists these days are actually threatened by the loss
ment, which are considerable. I concur that anthropology as of what Garcı́a Canclini calls the “natural” identity of culture
a discipline lacks an adequate means to understand global and place. My own concern is that we have been more suc-
circulation. It is also indisputable that the work of those who cessful in this area institutionally than conceptually, and my
have developed the language of global flows will prove to have ethnographic work is intended to show that it is possible and

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 576 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011

desirable to grasp large-scale processes and institutions by ———. 2005. Liquid life. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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