Anna Tsing (2004), like many other current theorists, has been writing innovative things about globalization. Her recent book problematizes "scale" in a way that questions the local/global dichotomy through the trope of "friction." Her work joins that of many others complicating anthropology's traditional focus on the local by shifting more focus to processes of globalization. Globalization study owes much to the work of Arjun Appadurai, who has emphasized how global "fows" make local reproduction "fragile," contradictory, displaced, and destabilized (1996:198). The stories considered here, however, defy reduction to the local, but they also make little sense when viewed from Appadurai's.