..... who, I was told, said that words mean what I want them to mean.
Obviously of course, I - agf- replied, or I would not use those words
but I would use others instead that DO mean what I mean.
Notwithstanding all this, two friends have denied the 'obvious meaning' in
telling me that my note of heartfelt THANX to PEWS was somehow negative and/or
divisive, if only because I 'accuse' everybody as an 'enemy'.
NOT so, I reply and explain. I mean [like in that old movie of which i
remember only the title] FRIENDly 'enemies' , or perhaps more precisely
'disputants' but nonetheless and above all FRIENDS, as which Terry I
introduced me in the first place, for which I was and remain most
gratefull.
enough said? - in words that mean what i mean to say!
as ever
gunder
On Thu, 14 Aug 1997, Gunder Frank wrote:
> Date: Thu, 14 Aug 1997 20:34:23 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Gunder Frank <agfrank@chass.utoronto.ca>
> To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
> Subject: thanks to PEWS (fwd)
>
> for posting to WSN and/or wherever you deem appropriate
> thanks
> agf
>
>
>
> ANDRE GUNDER FRANK
> University of Toronto
>
> 96 Asquith Ave. Toronto, Ont. Canada M4W 1J8
> Tel:416-972 0616 Fax:416-972 0071
> e-mail: agfrank@chass.utoronto.ca
>
> "Thanx" was my one word response to "The Political Economy of the
> World-System Section [of the American Sociological Association]
> hereby confers the 1997 Award for a Career of Distinguished
> Scholarship to Andre Gunder Frank. Presented August 11, 1997 by
> Terry Boswell, [outgoing] PEWS Chair, on behalf of the section"
> on an engraved plaque. I now beg to use this medium to add a few
> more words of thanks for this conferral to Terry and my other
> good friends, and especially to my friendly enemies, and other
> colleagues in PEWS.
>
> To begin with, I echo my old friend Sid Mintz who put his own
> 1996 lecture to the American Anthropological Association into
> plain English by translating their "distinguished" to his own
> "extinguished." That seems all the more apt for me after our
> incoming PEWS chair and also old friend, friendly enemy and two
> time/ing co-author Giovanni Arrighi at the same ASA meetings
> first dissected Development Theory into its constituent trinity
> of Western modernization and dependence theses, world-system and
> post-modernist anti-theses, and then discarded them all in favor
> of East Asian regionalism.
>
> For my extinguished part, I am once again jumping from all of the
> above's leading edge off the edge to none of the above. I have
> been discarding one post-modern layer after another from the
> dependent modern/izing world-system onion. The first step was to
> discard the the emperor's indigestible modernization theory peel
> and replace it with dependent development of underdevelopment.
> The next layers to go were the underdevelopment of development in
> the capitalist world-system. Then I dropped Wallerstein's only
> world-like five hundred year world-system hyphen in favor of a
> real five thousand year world system. My also friendly enemy
> Chris Chase-Dunn baptized it the central world system to convey
> parentage by my world system and David Wilkinson's Central
> Civilization. At the same ASA meetings my also old friend Jose
> Bell Lara nicknamed it simply the expanding world system. That,
> my also old friend and some times co-author but now increasingly
> friendly enemy Immanuel Wallerstein says, just emasculates all of
> the old onion instead of helping give it new body as my now
> extinguished self pretends. But I contend that since the old
> world expanded beyond my friend Janet Abu-Lughod's thirteenth
> century world system and became whole/ly global with the
> incorporation of the 'new' world, it also becomes necessary to
> study and try to transform global 'development' through the
> globology of my also friend Al Bergesen, who initiated this PEWS
> round in the first place.
>
> Being more extinguishedly simple minded and therefore not so
> adept at any fancy ology, I deny that globalization is only
> recent, instead find globalism long since, and prefer just
> dealing with the global whole. And simply extinguished as I now
> am, I see Braudel's old European world-economy and Wallerstein's
> modern world-system, as well as the REnewED rise of Arrighi's
> East Asian region as constituent parts and functional
> transformational processes of global "development" if any, in
> which these 'economies,' 'systems,' and 'regions' only trade
> structural positions in an unending cyclical game of musical
> chairs. Now the sun is again appearing full circle around the
> globe to rise and shine in the East while the Western 'modern
> world-system' is developing underdevelopment even to its core. So
> to avoid also extinguishing the development theory of political
> economy of the world system [with or without hyphen] not to
> mention all of us succumbing altogether to the end of history in
> the coming anarchy of the clash of civilizations, the title of my
> forthcoming and yet probably also already extinguished book
> proposes instead to seek and promote unity in diversity in The
> Global Economy in the Asian Age: ReORIENT.
>
> Thanx again
>
> Gunder Frank
>