Convenor
Andrew D Spiegel
University of Cape Town
Abstract
The acronym BRIC was first used by Goldman Sachs in 2001, as part of its attempt to model future global economic trends and to identify four ‘emerging market’ countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) that the bank’s planners saw as likely to have a significant global impact in the subsequent five decades. By 200X??? the acronym had been appropriated by a consortium of those countries to refer to a new formal global economic partnership between them as four ‘emerging market’ or ‘non-western economy’ countries. South Africa was included in 2010 and the acronym gained an extra final character – BRICS. A joint BRICS study, coordinated by India’s Ministry of Finance, reported in 2012 on the state of the world economy and the role BRICS countries might play in it – a role that implies direct involvement with processes of globalization through economic engagement.
The panel’s focus is on how, and to what extent, the respective emerging market engagements of the five BRICS countries, both with each other and with other countries of the global South, manifest as part of a process of globalization. It also focuses on how those engagements play out in terms of the extent to which they produce culture change that in turn affects exchange practices – both those set up through a BRICS-country initiated engagement and those that were practised prior to that engagement. Given that such engagements occur at diverse socio-political levels, and that they are inevitably also associated with power relations, the panel’s papers ought to present ethnographic data about such processes, whether from one or more of the five BRICS countries, or from one or more countries of the global South where such engagement has occurred as a result of an engagement initiated by one or more BRICS country.