This text offers a critique of current Western thinking. It does not take it for granted that "global" and "local" indicate orders of magnitude or scales of importance. Rather, it addresses the techniques by which people shift the contexts of their knowledge and thus endow phenomena with local or global significance. This book examines certain contexts in which people (including anthropologists) make different orders of knowledge for themselves as a prelude to questioning assumptions about the "size" of knowledge implied in the contrast between global and local perspectives.