the local can act as a form of resistance within the global.21 It is perhaps ironic that tradition and adherence to custom should become a form of social resistance against global capital when transformation, change and the embrace of modernity through the advance of technology is often proposed as the necessary condition for progress, personal and political. Nonetheless, the particular nature of modernity as it is defined by globalisation has placed a premium on constant flux and change on many levels but has also eroded the notion of community, particularly in large, post-industrial urban centres in Western Europe and the US.22

The sociologist Richard Sennett has pointed to the negative effects of the technological revolution through computerisation of the communication industries.23 The subsequent loss of valuable skills and the emphasis on flexibility has contributed to a widespread breakdown in social networks as white-collar workers move from one employer to another resulting in the erosion of social capital. Social capital is a complex concept but for our purposes it can be understood as an investment in social relations that produces a return in the market place. It becomes an asset through membership of a group partly because it allows the circulation of information: one of its major advantages for multinational corporations. In other words its transformation into commodity capital is already pervasive. It can be found in instrumental actions that operate within heterophilious groups, for example exerting influence between individuals in different hierarchical positions in the hope of an expected return of more or better resources. They may also be homophilious, largely expressive actions between members occupying the same social and class position, defined by an equality of exchange.24

One might argue that relational rationality embedded in social capital allows outsiders to understand the ritual of Santa Rosa as an instance of connectivity and social identity that celebrates fixity, custom and tradition. The ritual is dependent on the successful movement of the machine through the town by its ‘human engine’ consisting of one hundred and fifty men who collectively must draw together their strength and mutually support each others’ endeavours to carry this monument. Thirty metres high and five tons in weight, the machine is lit with spectacular candle lighting effects and requires a careful balancing of weight and height as the terrain is negotiated through a darkened city. This is an example of a successful balance between instrumental and expressive actions as it brings together members of different social positions conferring value and influence on those who might otherwise have little access to social mobility through the accumulation of capital. It allows members of different social stations to forge solidarity through an equal exchange based in this instance on their strength and ability to work together. As a

21 Denis to provide details?

22 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s influential Marxist account of globalisation in Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000) places emphasis on the potential to own the means of production through information technology, to this end they describe our present phase of capitalism as ‘informatization’ rather than ‘industrialisation’. This allows the possibility for a decentralising of political power.

23 Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, the personal consequences of work in the new capitalism, W.W. Norton and Company, New York and London, 1998.

24 The latter in particular is an example of social exchange in which relational rationality overcomes the dominant transactional rationality with its emphasis on wealth building as central to political strategies that emerged from the nineteenth-century Anglo-American economic success through industrialisation. Cf. Nan Lin, Social Capital: a theory of social structures and action, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001, p. 160.