Ethnicity and World-Systems Analysis 51analysis: study of the consequences of changes in its components for change in the system
as a whole, and study of the consequences of changes in the system for the dynamics and
structure of its components. Study of the interplay of bottom-up and top-down processes
is vital to understanding the system.
World-system researchers have gone beyond this original agenda. They have studied the
roles of women, households, gender, race, ethnicity, and culture in the world-economy.
Case studies address these issues as well as slavery, agrarian capitalism, and the incorpo-
ration of indigenous populations into the world-economy. Many case studies focus on
how various actors have sought to limit world-systemic effects. Most germane to this col-
lection is the burgeoning world-system research on pre-capitalist world-systems. On the
one hand, archaeologists and others have used world-systems analysis to study processes
of interaction between societies. Debates focus on whether there has been one grow-
ing world-system since the origin of states some five millennia ago, or several different
kinds of world-systems. On the other hand, this extension of world-system analysis has
led to reexamination of many of its founding assumptions, derived from the study of the
modern world-system, and to refinements in its terminology.
This has generated a variety of terms for these approaches. Originally called “world-
system theory,” it first morphed to “world-system perspective” in the 1980s, and then
into “world-systems analysis” in the 1990s. The latter terms underscore that this was a
collection of sometimes competing theories, and not a single unified theory. The current
convention is that, when world-systems analysis (WSA) derives from Wallerstein’s work,
the term is hyphenated, whereas other versions omit the hyphen (see Denemark et al.
2000). The term “world” means a more-or-less self-contained system, andnotnecessarily
a “global” system. Only the contemporary world-system is planetary. There are many
other approaches to long-term social change that overlap with WSA. The most useful are
Beaujard, Berger, and Norel (2009), Bennet, Sherratt, and Wilkinson (2011), Denemark
et al. (2000), Hornborg and Crumley (2007), Hornborg, McNeill, and Martinez-Alier
(2007), Manning and Gills (2011), Parkinson and Galaty (2010), and Turchin (2003).
All these approaches are grounded in empirical evidence.
A key point from WSA is that globalization processes are actually quite old (Jen-
nings 2011), and that contemporary globalization is a culmination of older processes.
World-system studies have encouraged social scientists to embed their research in histor-
ical and inter-relational contexts. World-system studies of gender relations and house-
holds, for example, explain why development has generally led to improved status for
women in core areas, but often decreased status in peripheral areas, albeit with immense
variation between peripheral areas. There are analogous differences in labor processes,
social movements, relations with indigenous peoples, and, especially germane here, in
ethnic relations and conflicts. In short, there is no universal sociology of ethnicity, gen-
der, labor, households, social movements, or relations with indigenous peoples. All have
salient world-systemic contexts.
Placing ethnicity in such a world-systemic context means recognizing, to begin with,
that all forms of identification—ethnicity, nationality, race, sexualities, etc.—occur within
a world-systemic context, and are part and parcel of the dialectic between local social
groups in the complex relations of production and exchange within the overall system
(Hall 1998; Wallerstein 2000a [1960], 2000b [1987], Balibar and Wallerstein 2011
[1992]). Furthermore, the ways in which these forms of identification arise, persist,