Theorizing Impending Peripheries: Postindustrial Landscapes at the Edge of Hyper-modernity’s Collapse

Abstract

This article discusses the ways in which the predominant economic mechanisms of capitalism, characterized by a hyper-mobility of flows, affect actual places and people. The rationality informing these mechanisms is the quest for a reduction of costs and the increase of potential benefit, and this can only be achieved by jumping from locale to locale searching for a cheaper labor force, new pools of resources, or an absence of environmental regulations. Mobility becomes the fundamental framework through which to understand modernity and its new economic articulations and their associated sovereignties. Anthropology has often discussed and theorized the impact of market integration on local communities across the world. This paper, in contrast, analyzes the extraction, or the disconnection, of a community away from the market.