Chapter 5: Globalization and Culture

Culture Convergence Theories

- Ernest Gellner (1983) suggested that local traditions are gradually fading as Western ideas replace those in non-Western communities. - The "McDonaldization" model features efficiency, calculability, predictability, tight control over production, and mechanized labor over human labor—characteristics of fast food restaurants, American society, and, increasingly, the world. - "Coca-Colonization" (Westernization or Americanization): the culturally and economically powerful Western nations (especially the United States) imposing their products and beliefs on the rest of the world. (This is often referred to as cultural imperialism.)

Challenges with defining globalization

1. different academic disciplines define globalization differently because they study different things 2. Is globalization a general process or trend of growing worldwide interconnectedness?

World Systems Theory

According to this theory, the world is divided between a dominant "core" and a dependent "periphery." - Core nations develop their economies at the expense of periphery nations. - The role of the periphery is to provide labor and raw materials for the core's consumption, resulting in the periphery's poverty, underdevelopment, and dependency on the core. - Semi-periphery is in between The core (the winners) developed its economy by exploiting the periphery (the losers), whose role is to provide labor and raw materials for the core's consumption

Humans on the move

Another key feature of the changing scale of globalization is the mobility of people. - Migrants: those who leave their homes to work for a time in other regions or countries - Immigrants: those who leave their countries with no expectation of returning - Refugees: those who migrate because of political oppression or war, usually with legal permission to stay - Exiles: those who are expelled by the authorities of their home countries Today, most migrants stay within the same major region of the world in which they are born.

Rural development in Lesotho

Anthropologist James Ferguson studied the Thaba-Tseka Rural Development Project in Lesotho (1975-1984). - The project's goal was to decrease poverty and increase economic output in rural villages by building roads, providing fuel and construction materials, and improving water supply and sanitation. - Ferguson's research indicated that people in rural Lesotho are poor not because they live in a rural area but because their labor is exploited in South Africa. - The project focused on an effect (rural poverty) rather than its underlying causes (socioeconomic inequalities and subordination). - The presence of outsiders also undermined the power traditionally held by village chiefs. Ferguson pessimistically concluded that development does little to reduce poverty and only expands bureaucratic state power at the expense of local communities.

People without history?

Anthropologists contribute to world systems studies by asking: How has this world system affected the native peoples and cultural systems of the periphery? - Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without History (1984) challenged popular stereotypes of indigenous people as isolated, passive "victims of progress" (Bodley, 1999). - Wolf also challenged anthropology's traditional focus on small, local groups of people, while neglecting the world system's influence.

How can anthropologists study global interconnections?

Anthropologists most often conduct fieldwork at a single location. How can they study a local phenomenon in a community without losing sight of the international factors and forces shaping that community? - One solution is multi-sited ethnography. - Multi Sited research is fast becoming a common anthropological research strategy for investigating transnational phenomena like environmental issues, the media, international religious movements, and the spread of science and technology.

Resistance on the periphery

Anthropologists study resistance by groups on the periphery, ranging from open rebellion to subtle forms of protest and opposition. Some forms of resistance are so subtle that they might not be recognized by outsiders. - For example, females in a Malaysian factory protested working conditions via spirit possession, making them violent, loud, and disruptive. - Examples like this interest anthropologists because they show how people interpret and challenge global processes through local cultural idioms and beliefs.

Doesn't everyone want to be developed?

Colonial governments referred to their duty to bring civilization to the "uncivilized" parts of the world. - In 1949, US President Harry Truman sought to help the "underdeveloped" world. It seemed natural to Truman, and many others since that time, that everyone would want to be developed. - Contemporary international development is promoted by the United Nations, government aid agencies, lending agencies, and nongovernmental organizations. - Just as in the days of colonialism, technologically advanced capitalist countries are the model for "ideal" social and economic development.

development anthropology

Development anthropologists guide development projects in ways that are beneficial for local people, in addition to the plans of outside agencies. - For example, Gerald Murray worked to reduce deforestation in Haiti in the 1970s and 1980s. Murray bridged the gap between the goals of the planners and those of the farmers, suggesting efficient, mutually beneficial solutions. - a branch of applied anthropology

Financial Globalization

Financial globalization began in the 1870s. Though it was interrupted by two world wars, it has accelerated over the last 70 years. - Many transnational corporations have set up shop in countries with low hourly wages and/or lax environmental regulations. - And they have accumulated vast amounts of capital assets in the process. - For example, if Walmart were a nation-state, it would have the world's 24th largest economy.

Diffusionists

Frank Boas and his students developed a theory of culture that emphasized the interconnectedness of society. Early twentieth-century Boasian anthropologists who held that cultural characteristics result from either internal historical dynamism or a spread (diffusion) of cultural attributes from other societies.

Is the world really getting smaller?

Globalization illustrates how people change their cultures because of their connections with other groups. The process of globalization affects us all, especially anthropologists who seek to understand the differences and similarities between human groups and cultures.

Global communication

Innovations like cell phones, the Internet, and e-mail allow rapid and frequent communication between any two parts of the world. - While use of these technologies is taken for granted in the United States, only one in 5,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa) has computer access. - Wealth and poverty play a large role in a person's ability to participate in global communication.

Globalization

Interconnections should not imply that everyone is an equal participant in the process of globalization. Unfortunately, the word "globalization," with its emphasis on globe, exaggerates the span of financial and social interconnections. Some anthropologists avoid the term "globalization" in favor of "transnational," which refers to relationships that extend beyond nation-state boundaries without assuming they cover the whole world.

What are the outcomes of global integration?

Promoters of globalization emphasize the "winners" of this interconnectedness (unprecedented prosperity, economic growth). - Opponents emphasize the "losers" (poverty, widening gap between rich and poor). - An anthropological analysis of globalization must explore cultural nuances of global interconnections: inequality, confrontation, domination, accommodation, and resistance.

Convergence and World Culture

Shared foods, entertainment, and clothing do not necessarily mean that humans are culturally homogenous in other aspects. - As such, one major limitation of convergence theories is that they equate material goods with cultural and personal identity.

Culture and Global Change

Some anthropologists counter that there are really a variety of perspectives among developers and that development is less paternalistic and more accountable to impacted communities than it once was. Challenges that remain include the following: - There is a common perception in indigenous and rural communities that outside help isn't necessarily virtuous and undermines self-determination. - Change enforced from outside local communities can be particularly ineffective since people want to preserve traditions that give their lives meaning. - These are keys to understanding culture in the context of global change.

anthropology of development

Some anthropologists support the work of development anthropology by exploring what kinds of social conditions might help projects succeed. Others challenge that development inevitably causes harm by giving more control to outsiders, worsening social inequality, and perpetuating the ethnocentric and paternalistic attitudes of the colonial era.

Beyond "winners" and "losers"

The examples of the Warlpiri, Malay workers, and Congolese sapeurs demonstrate that people continue to define their identities locally, despite globalization. - Today, people increasingly express their local identities through interactions with transnational communications, consumption, and businesses. - People simultaneously engage in global processes and local communities but rarely on equal footing. Much depends on their placement within the sphere of the world system. - Most anthropologists would agree that dividing people into "winners" and "losers" is an overly simplistic way to view globalization.

Social, Economic, and Political interconnection

We can begin to trace the anthropological study of the spread of cultural attributes from one society to another to the early 20th-century diffusionists such as Franz Boas and his students. - In the 1950s, Marxist anthropologists like Eric Wolf suggested that non-Western societies could not be understood without reference to their place within a global capitalist system. - Until the 1980s, mainstream anthropology was locally focused on research in face-to-face village settings. - As globalization has increased pace, anthropologists now realize that too narrow a focus gives an incomplete understanding of peoples' lives and the underlying causes of cultural differences.

multi-sited ethnography

an ethnographic research strategy of following connections, associations, and putative relationships from place to place

Differences often emerge not in spite of but...

because of interconnectedness

World culture

norms and values that extend across national boundaries

Hybridization

persistent cultural mixing that has no predetermined direction or end-point While convergence theories predict a world moving toward cultural purities, hybridization emphasizes a world based on cultural mixing, border crossing, and persistent cultural diversity. - Some critics of hybridization theory argue that cultural mixing is a superficial phenomenon, with reality moving toward convergence. Others suggest that the theory ignores political power, economic power, and inequality. - Still other anthropologists assert that any of these theories needn't be mutually exclusive; convergence "fits" some contexts, while hybridization is occurring everywhere, both of which can be happening in multiple places at the same time.

Sapeurs

poor Bakongo youths in shanty towns compete with each other to acquire famous designer clothing (pg 89)

Transnational

relationships that extend beyond nations without assuming they cover the whole world they use this because transnational imagines relationships that extend beyond nations without assuming they cover the whole world

Anthropologists definition of globalization

the contemporary widening scale of cross cultural interactions owing to the rapid movement of money, people, ideas, and images within nations and across national boundaries.

Localization

the creation and assertion of highly particular, often place-based, identities and communities Its the flip-side or side effect of Globalization Localization is reflected in patterns of consumption. Many other cultures use clothing to convey messages. - For example, sapeurs, young Bakongo men from the Democratic Republic of Congo, use clothes to accumulate prestige and project self-worth to the upper classes of Congolese society.

Postcolonialism

the field that studies the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism World systems theory has been especially relevant to scholars of postcolonialism. - These are the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism, the study of which has also helped anthropologists understand the linkages between local social relations and larger regional, national, and transnational levels of political-economic activity.

cultural imperialism

the promotion of one culture over others, through formal policy or less formal means, like the spread of technology and material culture