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Chapter 4

▪ Is the world really getting smaller?

▪ Are there winners and losers in globalization?

▪ Doesn’t everyone want to be developed?

▪ If the world is not becoming homogenized, what is it becoming?

▪ What strategies can anthropologists use to study global interconnections?

▪ Globalization: the widening scale of cross-cultural interactions caused by the rapid movement of money, people, goods, images, and ideas within nations and across national boundaries

▪ 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.

▪ 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.

“Defining globalization is like eating soup with a fork”

Figure 4.1 p. 85 A Global Ecumene. The Greeks referred to an “ecumene” as the inhabited earth, as this map shows.

Much later, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (1976–1960) used the term to describe a region of persistent cultural

interaction. The term became current again in the 1980s and 1990s as anthropologists adopted it to describe

interactions across the whole globe.

Globalization is defined differently by different

disciplines.

Anthropologists define globalizations as the

widening scale of cross-cultural interactions caused

by the rapid movement of money, people, goods,

images, and ideas within nations and across

national boundaries.

BUT…

social economic, and political interactions and

mixing are nothing new for humanity.

Seven billion people, or 95% of the world’s population, now live in an area covered by a mobile network. This Connectivity, which was unimaginable even a generation ago, has had important consequences for people everywhere, including these young aboriginals of the Taroqo tribe in Taiwan.

But, access to the internet is distributed unevenly. In 2016, more than half of the worlds population (53%) did not use the internet… highlighting inequality to access.

▪ Examples:

▪ Africa = 75% of population offline

▪ Europe = 21% of population offline

During the European colonial era, Europeans were motivated to migrate out of Europe because of opportunities in the colonies (top map).

After the Second World War, decolonization saw a reversal in the flow, as non-Europeans and non-U.S. Americans began moving into Europe and the United States in search of new opportunities for themselves (middle map).

Today, most migrants stay within the same major region of the world in which they are born (bottom map).

▪ Migrants: people who leave their homes to work for a time in other regions or countries

▪ Immigrants: people who leave their countries with no expectation of returning

▪ Refugees: people who migrate because of political oppression or war, usually with legal permission to stay in a different country

▪ Exiles: people who are expelled by the authorities of their home countries

“because powerful corporate interest often influence governmental policy, some see this as a movement of

power away from nation-states”

▪ Currently, sixty-nine of the world’s one hundred largest economic entities are corporations, and the other thirty- one are countries.

▪ Example: Walmart ranks as the 10th largest economic entity in the world, just behind Canada and ahead of Spain (Global Justice Now 2016).

▪ Promoters of globalization emphasize benefits of interconnectedness

▪ Opponents emphasize negatives

▪ An anthropological analysis of globalization must explore cultural nuances of global interconnections

▪ This theory explains that capitalism have expanded on the basis of unequal exchange throughout the world, creating a global market and global division of labor, dividing th e world between the dominant core and the dependent periphery.

Anthropologists contribute to world systems theory 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.

▪ 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 (families, kin networks, communities) and larger regional, national, and transnational levels of political-economic activity

▪ 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.

▪ Factory conditions violate two basic moral principals: (1) Close physical proximity of the sexes and (2) Male management of females work

▪ Examples like this interest anthropologists because they show how people interpret and challenge global processes through local cultural idioms and beliefs.

▪ 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.

Greater global integration also creates opportunities for local cultures to express themselves more vividly,

a phenomenon known as localization. Localization is the creation and assertion of highly particular, often

place-based, identities and communities.

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.

▪ 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

▪ International development is promoted by the United Nations, government aid agencies, lending agencies, and NGOs

▪ Just as in the days of colonialism, technologically advanced capitalist countries are the model for “ideal” social and economic development

Three Big Questions:

1) A means to a particular end or

the end itself?

2) Who defines economic

success?

3) Improvement vs. forced

change, eliminating cultural

diversity with capitalism?

▪ 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.

▪ 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.

▪ 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.

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.

Anthropologists remain divided on this question, but two theories to consider are:

1. Cultural convergence

2. Hybridization

▪ The world as a “global village” a “world culture.”

▪ 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.

▪ World culture: norms and values that extend across national boundaries

▪ Shared foods, entertainment, and clothing do not necessarily mean that humans are culturally homogenous in other respects

▪ One major limitation of convergence theories is that they equate material goods with cultural and personal identity

Unique culture

Unique culture

World culture

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 argue that cultural mixing is a superficial phenomenon or that it ignores political power, economic power, and inequality.

▪ Still other anthropologists assert that the three theories needn’t be mutually exclusive; convergence “fits” some contexts, cultural conflict fits others, and hybridization is occurring everywhere, all simultaneously.

Hybridity and Warlpiri Media: Warlpiri people of northern Australia have taken to watching and producing their own films. Their

cinematic productions reflect particular social dynamics and perspectives, in the process of hybridizing Western technology and

its practices.

▪ 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.

▪ Multisited 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.

“Not everyone participates equally,

so anthropological interest lies in

the power relationships and

inequality that it creates.”