Feminization of Poverty or Consumption and Globalization

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Chapter Outline

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Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Discuss feudal and colonial peasantries.

2. Describe contemporary peasantries.

3. Discuss colonialism and neocolonialism.

4. Analyze the interrelationships among the three cultural subsystems: technology, social organization, and ideology.

5. Describe the theories that explain economic change.

6. Analyze the process of globalization.

7. Analyze the circumstances of those in poverty.

8. Explain the role of population control in developing nations.

Cultural Change, Globalization, and the Contemporary World

10

10.1 Traditional Peasant Cultures

• Feudal Peasantries • Technological Change and the Rise of

Colonialism • Neocolonialism and the Global Commodities

Market

10.2 World Population Growth and Urbanization

10.3 Globalization, Modernization, and Dependency Theory

• Economic Change • Globalization • Globalization and Capitalism • Modernity • Dependency Theory

10.4 The Future of Those in Poverty

• The Contemporary Poor • Indigenous Peoples • Refugees and Migrants • Industrialization and the Quality of Life • The Green Revolution • Population Control in Developing Nations

10.5 Costs of Globalization

10.6 Progress or Just Increasing Complexity?

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CHAPTER 10Section 10.1 Traditional Peasant Cultures

Human cultural systems do not remain stable forever. In adjusting to the world around them, to the effects of population growth, and to the influence of other groups, human beings adopt new and different ways of manipulating their envi- ronment, of organizing themselves, and of thinking and communicating. In this chapter, we will explore the process of cultural change and the forces that have influenced the rise of societies that have greater technological and social complex- ity. We will consider whether technological progress is synonymous with progress in the quality of life. We will also examine the diverse contemporary world in which hunting-and-gathering cultures that have changed little over thousands of years coexist with rapidly modernizing industrial cultures whose trappings range from superhighways, heart transplants, and cable television to polluted air and water. Between these two extremes, the majority of humanity are peasants, living from the land by hand labor or from low-paid heavy labor work in cities, with little income for luxury goods.

10.1 Traditional Peasant Cultures

Since the beginning of urbanization, the contrast between urban centers of power and wealth and less influential rural food-producing areas has been a fact of human life. As societies have grown more urbanized, the gulf between the elite decision makers and the less powerful rural subsistence workers has increased so that the majority of the human population now consists of a largely rural class of politically and economically uninfluential poor whose labor make the benefits of elite life possible. This disenfran- chised class, known as peasants, are food producers who use preindustrial techniques and are subordinate politically and socially to more powerful members of society, who control peasants’ political destinies and own the land on which peasants work. Traditional peas- ants were members of society who from the Middle Ages throughout the preindustrial era labored, as families, on farms owned by others, or who owned small farms. Peasants typi- cally consumed most of what they grew themselves. That is, they participated in the sub- sistence economy of their societies. Because peasants had to produce their own food, they did not specialize in cash crops. They might produce some crops for sale or hire out their own labor to supplement their incomes, but their cash incomes were too low to change their material conditions and, consequently, their socially subordinate status. Typically, peasants used nonindustrialized, hand-labor techniques that yielded only a minimal sub- sistence for their own families. Yet in a seeming contradiction, they needed large families to ensure that they had enough labor to produce the food they needed. They were largely rural peoples, but some peasants lived in urban areas where they could supplement their incomes from small-scale gardening with income from paid labor. Peasant food produc- tion was generally part of the larger society’s economy, but they had little influence on its operation. In most societies, peasants did not own the land that they worked and were typically required to pay tribute in the form of food and/or labor to the landowning aris- tocracy. Peasant societies still exist today in diverse parts of the world, ranging from Cen- tral America to Africa. However, their rural-based ways of life have changed over time and (since the late 20th century) have been significantly impacted by global capitalism.

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CHAPTER 10Section 10.1 Traditional Peasant Cultures

Feudal Peasantries In preindustrial times, peasants were part of political systems in which local aristocratic leaders, who claimed ownership of the land, granted the feudal peasants the privilege to use the land to grow their own food in return for rent or service. According to G. Dalton (1969), the relationship between peasant and lord in feudal times involved responsibili- ties and obligations on the part of the landowner as well as the peasant. For instance, the feudal lord provided military and police protection for the peasants, settled disputes, and fed them in times of hardship.

Technological Change and the Rise of Colonialism Near the end of the 15th century, new shipbuilding technologies heralded the beginning of an age of European seafaring exploration and empire building. European imperial- ism included the military control of much of the American continents by Spain, followed by Portuguese colonization of parts of South America. Through military force, Spain extracted vast amounts of wealth from the areas it controlled by forcing the native peoples to work in mines and to produce food on Spanish estates. In North America, the British and the French established colonies in which the native peoples were displaced or killed by the influx of large numbers of colonial settlers. Africa and Asia were also incorporated into the worldwide European network of trade, but European colonial settlements tended to be confined to the coastal areas of these regions, where their primary role was usually to facilitate trade. The areas colonized by Europeans were ones that were attractive because of the luxury goods—such as coffee, tea, tobacco, sugar, and silk—that could be cheaply produced there and the natural resources—such as gold, silver, and hemp (used in Euro- pean manufacturing)—that they had to offer.

The exploitation of colonial resources fueled important changes that were occurring in the Europe. The fundamental technological and economic changes were those involved in industrialization, the process in which agriculture was replaced by manufacturing as the most productive part of an economy and in which work by means of hand tools was gradually replaced by mechanization. Industrialization began with improvement in agri- culture. Prior to the 1700s, agriculture in western Europe was based on the use of a small number of simple tools, including hand tools such as hoes, shovels, rakes, pitchforks, and scythes, along with tools harnessed to animals such as carts and wooden plows. Such tools could require as many as six men and six oxen to plow a single acre in a day. Agri- cultural industrialization in the 1700s included innovations such as the iron plow, mecha- nized seeding, and a shift from oxen to horses in plowing. The increased productivity of mechanized farming required fewer farm laborers while providing food surpluses that fueled population growth. This set the stage for industrialization to proceed in the non- farm sector of the economy. Those who were displaced from farming became laborers in new urban industries. As contracted wage labor replaced the earlier paternalistic feudal system, former agricultural peasants were forced to provide for all their own needs by sell- ing their labor to others to produce income. This upsurge in paid employment involved the commodification of labor: the treatment of human labor as something that can be sold and bought. In the industrialized economic system, the obligations of the propertied classes did not include responsibility for the welfare of workers (as they had in the feudal economy) but ended with the payment of the wage.

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CHAPTER 10Section 10.1 Traditional Peasant Cultures

By the middle of the 18th century, these settlements had become centers from which Euro- pean colonial administrations ruled the native populations through military force and extracted valuable economic resources from the surrounding inland areas. The resources exported from colonies included slaves, ivory, gold, and palm oil from various areas of West Africa, and cotton, spices, and tea from India and Asia.

Finally, during the 18th century, industrialization began to transform the economies of European countries from their earlier rural, feudal focus into a factory-based system built on wage labor. With the development of industrialized food production and transporta- tion technologies, the subordination of colonial peasantries, native peoples in colonized lands, intensified.

Backed by the military power of governments, colonialism produced a new form of peas- ant life in which the traditional concept of mutual obligations between the landowner and the peasants who worked the owner’s lands did not exist. Under colonial rule, peas- ant workers were simply paid a minimum wage for working plantation lands owned by corporations, wealthy elites, governments, and in later times, banks. Colonial peasants were forced, sometimes economically and sometimes by the pressure of military might, to move from the production of food for their own consumption to the production of nonfood export crops and to engage in labor for pay. As Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins (1977) have said:

Colonialism destroyed the cultural patterns of production and exchange by which traditional societies in “underdeveloped” countries previously had met the needs of the people. Many precolonial social structures, while dominated by exploitative elites, had evolved a system of mutual obliga- tions among the classes that helped to ensure at least a minimal diet for all. A friend of mine once said: “Precolonial village existence in subsistence agriculture was a limited life indeed, but it’s certainly not Calcutta.” The misery of starvation in the streets of Calcutta can only be understood as the end-point of a long historical process—one that has destroyed a traditional social system. (p. 76)

The colonial subordination of peasantries can be seen as a process in which some societies have been underdeveloped to the benefit of others (Rodney, 1972; Escobar, 1995). Colonial administrations encouraged the production of cash crops such as cotton, cocoa, coffee, sugar, and tobacco for export at the expense of the staple foods that had been produced previously. The exports from colonial areas consisted basically of two types of commodi- ties: luxury goods valued by consumers in the ruling nations, and resources—including both slave labor for export to other colonies in need of cheap labor and raw materials for use in factories in the colonial homelands. The export crops were not selected for their value as food, but rather for their high-priced value in the home market relative to their shipping costs.

The shift from self-sufficiency by raising subsistence crops that provided most family needs to the production of cash crops did not occur voluntarily among the peoples of colonized areas. In some cases, foreign governments or private individuals claimed own- ership of native lands and forced the inhabitants to work the fields as slaves, wage labor- ers, or dispossessed tenant farmers. The profits remained in the hands of the foreign inter- ests. Where physical force was not used to bring about this shift to cash crop production,

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CHAPTER 10Section 10.1 Traditional Peasant Cultures

taxation was a common means, as the native population had to work for a wage to pay the tax. With government and private businesses pursuing the common goal of benefit- ting the colonial homeland, there was no motivation to set wages high for native workers. Indeed, instead of wages being freely determined by the effects of “supply and demand,” the necessity of a money income meant that the lower the wages were kept, the longer the laborer had to work.

As a result of the forced change to paid labor, previously self-sufficient farmers could no longer grow enough food to meet their own needs. Ironically, even though peasant peoples throughout the world are basically farmers, the peasant societies had to become major food importers to feed themselves. This locked them firmly into economic markets that were dominated by the imperial powers that ruled the colonies. By the end of the 18th century, the economic dependence of the colonial countries was so sufficiently devel- oped that it was no longer necessary to enforce their participation in the network of trade. Gradually, the imperial administrations loosened their holds on the local colonial govern- ments. During the 19th century, British economic power eclipsed that of the European imperial rivals, which even withdrew from many of their colonies, leaving Britain as the dominant world power.

Due to the effects of imperial colonialism, the domination of peasant peoples by military force, the local populations of the colonies had no way to benefit from their participation in the world market. Tremendous wealth was actually being drained from their countries in the form of taxes and the products that were exported. The wealth that flowed into the country in return for the exports enriched the foreign owners of the factories and planta- tions but not the wage laborers who originally owned the lands and resources. As the new elite exploited increasing amounts of land in producing exports, less and less land remained for traditional uses such as growing food crops, grazing animals, or foraging for wild foods. Thus, the same process that locked the native populations of the colonial world into the international cash economy locked them into poverty as well. When impe- rial colonialism ended, the former colonies that had been kept in the subordinate role of resource exporters became today’s Third World countries.

The exception to this pattern of underdevelopment in European colonies were those areas such as North America and southern Africa where colonization involved the displace- ment of the native population by large numbers of European immigrants. These newcom- ers from Europe were already economically market oriented and were able to participate in the benefits of industrialization in their new homelands. Unlike the native populations of other colonial areas, they were not forced to export their products and resources with- out receiving an equitable level of money and useful goods in return. Neither did their participation in external markets interfere with the development of a self-sufficient farm- ing and ranching subsistence base.

During the period from 1870 to 1914, there was a brief resurgence of imperial colonialism as the growth of industrialization outside of Britain created new demands for resources in other parts of the world, including Germany, Italy, Russia, France, Japan, and Amer- ica. This new economic competition among the European industrializing nations led to renewed attempts, by both Britain and the others, to secure colonial sources of raw materials for industry in these countries. During this period, 17% of the world’s land (for example, parts of South Asia, and North and Central Africa) was brought under the

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CHAPTER 10Section 10.1 Traditional Peasant Cultures

domination of the competing European colonial powers. However, this brief resurgence of colonial expansionism ended in military conflict among the European nations, and by the end of World War I, old-style colonialism had begun to come to an end. Most of the earlier colonies remained economically dependent on the colonizers, however, and the flow of resources from the former colonial lands to the industrialized lands has continued since then.

Neocolonialism and the Global Commodities Market Today, the subsistence systems of the world’s various nations are no longer independent entities determined solely by the economic needs of local peoples who interact with their natural environments. Rather, the subsistence activities of each nation are widely intercon- nected in a multinational web of economic exchange that forms a world economy. The core of this world economy is formed by the world’s developed industrial nations, especially western Europe and the United States, whose industries extract tremendous wealth in the form of natural resources from the nations of the less developed areas of the world. This

economic interdependence between the subordinate underdeveloped exporting nations and dominant developed nations has been referred to as neocolonialism because it has much in common with the economic exploitation of colonial nations by the colonial empires of the 18th cen- tury. Unlike traditional economic exploitation of colonial resources, however, the current system does not dominate the colonial regions in ways that treat them as subordinate areas of a political empire. The eco- nomic dependence that colonialism had created in the resource-rich lands made it unnecessary to maintain the system of exchange of resources from the colonial lands for food from the colonial powers because food pro-

duction in the colonial regions had been replaced by wage labor. Even with the coming of self-rule, the former colonial lands had to continue to participate in the system of inter- national trade that colonialism had created, as the money gained by selling luxury goods such as tea, coffee, silk, and tobacco was needed for such things as paying for imported foods. The specialized roles of the least developed countries as resource exporters within the world economic system makes it difficult for them to develop their economies, as the goals of development may be, to various degrees, incompatible with the current subsis- tence systems of these countries. And just as feudal peasants were tied to the land they worked by virtue of their not owning it, peasants in the era of neocolonialism have often been tied to a particular enterprise by virtue of the need to sell their labor under economic circumstances that offered few other alternatives but low-paid work. Today, such people represent over half of the human population of the world.

Paul Chesley/National Geographic Stock The desire for inexpensive goods in industrial societies is often met by utilizing less expensive indigenous labor, often children.

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CHAPTER 10Section 10.2 World Population Growth and Urbanization

10.2 World Population Growth and Urbanization

The world’s population has grown, particularly as industrialization has increased our life expectancy (see Industrialization and the Quality of Life in Section 10.4: The Future of Those in Poverty). The history of human population can be described as a long period of slow growth that ended with the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. More recently, following the Industrial Revolution (beginning in the late 18th century), there was a population explosion that reached its fastest rate of growth in 1965, when the world population was increasing at about 2% per year. Currently, the rate of world population growth is about 1.2%, which means that the world population is growing at a rate of 200,000 people per day (Population Reference Bureau, 2013).

A quarter of a million years ago, the early human population of the entire world was only about a million people. When food domestication began, about 10,000 years ago, there were still fewer than 10 million people in the world. By the year 1 CE, the figure was about 300 million. It reached 500 million in 1650, and the first billion was achieved about 1800. By mid-1987 the figure had reached 5 billion. While the world required more than 300,000 years to reach a population of one billion, the second billion took only about 123 years, the third just 33 years, the fourth only 14 years, and the fifth a mere 13 years! A pop- ulation of 6 billion was achieved near the end of 1999, only 12 years after 5 billion had been reached. The world’s population passed 7 billion by November 1, 2011, and as of the beginning of 2013 it had reached 7.1 billion.

Agriculture created towns and cities long before industrialization began, but industrial- ization greatly fostered the growth of cities. Because the large-scale manufacture of mar- ketable goods and trade go hand-in-hand as industrialization proceeds, industrialized centers of manufacturing tend to be located in urban centers along the routes of trade. As industry produces a growing demand for labor, workers are drawn out of rural areas into the cities to find employment, and urban areas grow in population. This growth of urban population is called urbanization.

In 1900, only 13.6% of the world’s population lived in cities. By the beginning of 2000, the portion of the world’s population living in urban areas had passed to 50%, and it is expected to climb to 60% by the year 2020. This increased urbanization has occurred in both developed and developing countries: In 1960, less than 22% of the population in developing countries lived in cities; by contrast, in 1990, 34% were living in cities (World Bank, 2013a). Part of the process of urbanization has involved an increase in the size of cities. In 1950, there were only two cities with more than 10 million inhabitants: the

Zoonar/Thinkstock The appeal of city life often brings unintended consequences, such as traffic, when rural populations move into the city.

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CHAPTER 10Section 10.3 Globalization, Modernization, and Dependency Theory

Al Qaeda and Modernization

Al Qaeda was born during the Soviet War in Afghanistan. In response to perceived Soviet expansion- ism, the United States funneled money to support the Afghan Mujahideen guerilla fighters who were resisting the Soviets there. The United States was not alone in opposing the Soviets in Afghani- stan. For instance, both the Saudi government and Osama bin Laden supported Arab Mujahideen forces by funding them. In addition to economic support, bin Laden and others built military training camps in Pakistan (near the border with Afghanistan) for guerrilla fighters they were recruiting into the anti-Soviet cause. Their funding organization established recruiting facilities in the United States

(continued)

New York–New Jersey urban complex and London. In 1995, there were 14 such cities, the largest of which was Tokyo–Yokohama with 38.5 million people. As of 2010, Tokyo– Yokohama remained the world’s largest city with nearly 32 1/2 million residents.

10.3 Globalization, Modernization, and Dependency Theory

Societies may be categorized in a number of ways. One simple distinction is often made on the basis of industrialization. Developed countries are the industrialized nations of the world: primarily the countries of North America and Europe, along with Japan, Taiwan, Russia, South Korea, parts of China, and a few others. Developing countries are the remaining, largely nonindustrialized societies of the world, including most of Africa and much of Asia, and Latin America. The distinction between developed and developing countries is widely used, but the dichotomy is simpler than the reality it represents. The world’s developing countries vary from extremely poverty-stricken soci- eties in which hunger and starvation are daily problems to others that have incorporated a great deal of industrialized technology into their economy and will soon be viewed as developed countries. Because the survival of their people depends on their current economic interaction with other nations, many of these poor countries find themselves economically unable to undergo development, largely due to severe shortages of capital and the fact that land is often owned by a small, elite minority. Using their own natu- ral resources for their development remains impossible for them because these resources must be exported in return for needed food imports.

Living standards are very low in many developing countries, and their current economies can rarely support industrial development. Most developing countries suffer from severe shortages of land, capital, or labor. Land is often largely owned by a small, elite minority, with the remaining land fragmented into plots too small to do more than meet the mini- mal needs of the families who farm them. Given the absence of capital, there may be roads that are impassable when it rains, schools that lack enough books, and per capita incomes that are extremely low. While urbanization is occurring everywhere, the concentration of people in cities is much higher in developed countries than in developing countries, where most people still live in rural environments. As of 2008, 74% of people in developed countries lived in urban areas, whereas only 44% of people in less developed countries did so (Population Reference Bureau, 2013).

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CHAPTER 10Section 10.3 Globalization, Modernization, and Dependency Theory

Al Qaeda and Modernization (continued)

to bring fighters to Pakistan for training. In 1989, the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghani- stan, and the communist government of Afghanistan fell to the (mostly Afghan) guerillas 3 years later. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, bin Laden returned to his homeland, Saudi Arabia, which was experiencing threats of possible war with Iraq, a long-time supporter of westernization.

Even though bin Laden saw Iraq as a threat to his own country, he saw the U.S. war with Iraq as sim- ply another example of secular Western expansionism that left American troops on the ground in an Islamic country—and not just Iraq but also his own Saudi Arabia. This led to the United States’s being singled out by al Qaeda as the prime symbol of the Western threat to Islam.

Osama bin Laden was the central figure in organizing al Qaeda, his own faction of Arab Muhajideen, in 1988. Despite the clear political nature of the Arab Muhajideen support of the Afghanistani Muha- jideen war against Soviet occupation and the communist government, bin Laden began formally incorporating the language of an extremist Salafi form of Sunni Muslim religion into his efforts to rally support for al Qaeda’s cause and to resist Western powers—not only in Afghanistan but also elsewhere in the Muslim world. Al Qaeda’s co-opting of extremist Sunni religious language into its political cause was followed by its attacks on moderate Muslim religious groups, especially Shias and Sufis, whom Salafists regard as religious heretics. These attacks included the bombing of Muslim mosques in Iraq. Al Qaeda goals were the elimination of Western influence (which it portrayed as a conspiratorial effort to destroy Islam) in all Muslim countries and the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate that would rule by sharia (Islamic religious law).

Even though al Qaeda fosters its political agenda by supporting an extremist religious ideology, it is best understood as a political movement that uses religion to further its goals—not as a religious movement with a political agenda. The latter view places the cart before the horse. The fundamen- tal political (rather than religious) nature of the movement is well illustrated by the backgrounds of al Qaeda leaders, who were typically educated at universities in Europe and America, not in the extremist religious madrassas (religious schools) that are used to train al Qaeda recruits. In fact, over 60% of the members of al Qaeda have been educated at universities.

Al Qaeda and its supporters do not reject the practical benefits of modernization such as labor- saving devices, electronic devices such as computers and iPads, or the use of the Internet. What they oppose, like fundamentalists in other religious traditions, is the secularization that comes with it—secularization that is fostered by Western education (particularly the humanities and social sci- ences) and Western media and entertainment.

Economic Change Industrialization has greatly influenced the economic and social life of societies in which it has occurred. Preindustrial economies are fundamentally systems of family-based production, with food and other goods produced primarily for the families’ own con- sumption. Traditional farming peoples who produce for their own consumption were likely to produce as many as 20 to 30 different kinds of crops and animals. This diversity minimized risks and maximized their autonomy. Trade existed mostly to distribute the

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CHAPTER 10Section 10.3 Globalization, Modernization, and Dependency Theory

surpluses from the family and community stock rather than to specialize in the produc- tion of food or other goods for the purpose of trade. In contrast, market-oriented farmers tend to invest in a smaller number of more specialized crops for sale, produce less for their own consumption, and rely more on their cash incomes to purchase the foods and other commodities their families need.

With industrialization comes a decline in the value of family-based labor and production and a major increase in the number of specialized paid occupations. Industrialization has created a great demand for wage laborers at centralized locations who do not produce their own food, thus creating a situation where the economy is no longer a family-oriented subsistence activity but a market-oriented enterprise. Industry also fosters the production of nonessential food crops, such as cocoa and coffee, and nonfood products, such as wool for textiles or sisal for twine and cordage manufacturing. So industrialization fosters a move of a large percentage of farmers away from staple food production. In an industri- alized economy, the food-producing sector of farming becomes increasingly mechanized and competitive, so that small-scale farms become less viable.

As was discussed in Chapter 9, societies have changed over the millennia from simple hunting-and-gathering ways of life to extremely complex ones based upon industrialized technologies. The dominant nation-states of the world are now interacting economically in ways that are resulting in even greater interconnectedness. For the most part, the coun- tries of today’s world are no longer economically isolated from other nations. The econo- mies of nations have become a worldwide network that forms a global economy, such that economic changes in one country impact the economies of other nations. The economic interconnectedness of the world has resulted in many social changes, including the wide- spread exchange of knowledge (even on an individual level, particularly via the Internet), political ideologies and practices, music, and even religious practices. Kenny Rogers Roasters and McDonalds outlets are found in Singapore, and Bollywood movies are shown in the United States. And linguistic diversity is declining as smaller ethnic lan- guages are being replaced by Mandarin, English, and Spanish. This ongoing process of cross-border exchanges in cultural characteristics that go far beyond strictly economic influences is called globalization, a new form of worldwide interconnectedness of societies.

Globalization The global economic interdepen- dence of today’s world is not a totally one-sided system. Although the economic roles of developed nations provide their societies with the world’s highest standards of liv- ing, they too are dependent upon the continued participation of develop- ing countries in the world economic system. Thus, although the econo- mies of less developed nations may be extremely dependent on an inflow of loans that allows them to improve their productivity and create new

iStockphoto/Thinkstock Globalization and modernization often bring traditional and industrial societies into close contact.

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CHAPTER 10Section 10.3 Globalization, Modernization, and Dependency Theory

possibilities for employing their growing urban populations, defaults on these loans by impoverished debtor nations would be disastrous for the industrialized countries, whose economies would be impacted if these loans were not repaid. For instance, in 1995, the United States played a major role in helping Mexico avoid defaulting on its international loans. Although this move was not politically popular within the United States, it was not simply a humanistic decision on the part of the U.S. government. Rather, U.S. banks had made major loans to Mexico and benefitted by governmental action that prevented default on their repayment. If Mexico had been allowed to default on its international debts, which in 1995 had reached $150 billion, the loss to American banks would have had tremendous impact on the entire U.S. economy. Today, there are no truly self-suf- ficient economies, and despite the inequalities of the average per capita incomes and standards of living of participating nations, those nations are interdependent parts of the world economic system. This global interdependence is not a new phenomenon, but it has been increasingly fostered during the past 3 decades by a growing number of politi- cal agreements resulting in the faster movement of goods, services, and capital across national boarders.

Moreover, global economic interdependence has had positive effects. Chief among these are that poverty and the wealth gap between rich and poor nations has been reduced for countries undergoing their own industrialization. For instance, 30 years ago Bangladesh, India, and China were among the world’s poorest countries but are now no longer in that category. However, at the same time, there is a significant, and growing, gap between the rich and poor within some developed countries. In the United States today, the wealthi- est 1% of Americans own about one third of the country’s wealth. In 2001, the top 10% of Americans owned about 70% of the country’s wealth. By contrast, in Japan in 1999, the top 10% owned about 40% of that country’s wealth, while in Denmark in 1996, the top 10% owned about 76% of the wealth (Weissman, 2013).

Globalization and Capitalism The new technologies that arose during industrialization led to a new economic system known as capitalism, a form of economy in which the means of production are privately owned, and marketing is based on the profit motive. While industrialization is defined in terms of technology, capitalism is a matter of social organization that focuses on the rela- tionship between employer and employee. Capitalism implies a degree of governmental constraint that permits contractual freedom—acceptance of property rights (in which the government cannot arbitrarily reassign property and does not arbitrarily interfere with prices being set by the marketplace). Capitalism is now the dominant economic form throughout the world, and the primary economic difference among countries is simply the degree to which their governments play a role in making or limiting corporate policies and decision making. No national economy has a truly “free-market” economy. Rather, coun- tries fall along a continuum depending on the degree of governmental involvement in cor- porate practices. For instance, some governments play a strong role in business decisions based on centralized economic planning by the government, even though companies may be privately owned. Other countries give a freer reign to corporate planners themselves. Still others practice various types of middle-ground involvement in the economy, such as simply passing legislation against corporate practices the governments deems unfair or exploitive or mandating various forms of environmental and employee protections. For instance, Brazil illustrates this middle range approach. In Brazil, a rapidly developing country, government does not simply regulate business practices in the effort to minimize

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CHAPTER 10Section 10.3 Globalization, Modernization, and Dependency Theory

what it regards as unfair or harmful economic practices. It is also a frequent minority share- holder in corporations. By buying into companies, the government provides funds to com- panies to stimulate their growth. Yet, because the government is a minority owner of these companies, private owners enact the actual economic decision making.

Modernity Modernity is a term that has come to be used for the shift from feudalism to a lifestyle molded by industrialization, capitalism, increased geographical mobility, widespread secular education, and a rational/secular worldview in the governing of life in nation- states (Barker, 2005). Cultural modernity is spreading as a result of globalization, but it is unclear whether industrialization, globalization, and the spread of modernity are moving the world’s nations toward greater equality. As early as the 1960s, what was called mod- ernization theory argued that the world’s poorer countries would simply move to moder- nity in the same way it originally developed in western Europe and North America. More recently, this view has been criticized by those working in international development, who espouse a different view called dependency theory. Dependency theorists argue that there is evidence that the process of industrialization and economic globalization is not actually moving poorer nations toward equal partnership in a global economy, but that they may simply be moving toward industrialization and modernization in ways that will maintain their economically dependent roles within the global economy.

Dependency Theory According to dependency theory, one of the main reasons why development efforts may not eliminate inequality among nations is poor nations’ continued role in the international economic system as providers of natural resources, cheap labor, and as destinations for obsolete technologies. Moreover, rich nations sometimes adopt policies that inhibit eco- nomic growth in poor nations, including economic sanctions and military intervention in poorer countries. In this view, today’s poorer countries may remain at the periphery of the world economy because the way in which industrialization is occurring within the poorer nations is integrating them into the world economy as suppliers of resources and services rather than as equal consumers of the benefits of those resources and services.

Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory (1974, 2011) seeks to explain today’s capital- ist world economy, which emerged in the late 15th century and spread globally by 1900. He argues that there are no “First” and “Third” Worlds; rather, all countries are now part of one world, connected by economic relationships. Yet there is a stark division of labor among nations, which can be categorized as “core,” “periphery,” or “semi-periphery” nations. Core nations, such as the United States and many western European nations, have more power and wealth due to their greater control over the means of production, ability to accumulate profit, use of technologies, and strong state institutions. Periphery nations, such as parts of South America and much of Africa, tend to be dominated by core nations, exporters of raw materials, less economically diversified, and have weak state institutions. Semi-periphery nations, such as Brazil, India, and China, are either core or periphery nations, depending on the nation with which they are interacting. These dif- ferences among nations, whereby periphery nations provide resources and services that enrich core nations, are integral to perpetuating the capitalist world economy.

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For instance, many of the factories that industrialization is producing in former poor countries are taking the form of contract factories, which employ people locally to pro- duce goods that are contracted by companies, often in “core” nations, that market those goods to consumers within wealthier countries. While the opportunity for relatively well- paid wage labor (by local standards) may benefit the poor who are hired, the goods these factories produce are not available to consumers within the countries in which they are found. Similarly, poorer countries are now providing services, such as “customer service” work, for companies that serve customers in richer countries.

The recent reference to countries such as the United States becoming “postindustrial” societies highlights the possibility of the poorer countries reproducing the former role of peasant cultures as producers whose work maintained the luxury of their own elites. A postindustrial society is one in which the service sector produces more wealth than does manufacturing. In such a system, manual labor and blue-collar workers necessarily decline in value, while professional workers grow in value. The most valued services are those that involve the production of new ideas, which enhances the status of scientists and those involved in information technology services. To enjoy the benefits of a postin- dustrial life, industry would still have to produce needed commodities, but they would be produced elsewhere, in other countries whose own economies could never become postindustrial themselves. This example is, however, purely conjectural, and it is not clear yet whether modernization theory or dependency theory is more correct.

10.4 The Future of Those in Poverty

Today, the world’s poor are no longer simply those who live in peasant conditions (as described earlier in the chapter) but also other rural and urban poor, many of whom are employed by multinational corporations. Development work by applied anthropologists today is overwhelmingly done through transnational nongovernmental organizations, as nation-states have withdrawn from social provisions in response to the demands of free-market or neoliberal policies often attached to World Bank/IMF loans.

The Contemporary Poor Worldwide income inequality remains a major human problem. As of 2007, 40% of the world’s inhabitants lived on only 5% of the world’s total income (United Nations Development Program, 2007). The World Bank (2012) has estimated that 1.29 billion people were living in absolute poverty, poverty that is so great that it entails an absence of basic needs.

The economies of these societies are, themselves, highly influenced by worldwide eco- nomic forces that are beyond their control. Because of the small volume of their special- ized cash crops, peasants lack the cash flow to pay for the equipment and services that would be necessary to industrialize their farming techniques. Nor is their economic base sufficient for state taxation to sustain the bureaucratic social benefits available in urban centers. Traditional credit and rental arrangements in peasant communities are often based on commodities rather than money, and exchange is centered on small market- places in which individual peasants act as “penny capitalists,” selling their few surplus

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products or selling their labor on a piecemeal basis. Because in many peasant societies much of the most productive land is owned by a wealthy elite—who long ago converted it to the production of cash crops—peasants find it difficult to produce sufficient foods on their “postage stamp” farms to meet their own nutritional needs. Much of their cash income is devoted to the purchase of food, and typically the cash incomes that they obtain are insufficient to meet the expenses of life in an industrializing society.

Indigenous Peoples Today, the world is dominated by about 200 nation-states, societies that are generally powerful enough that they have, to a great extent, displaced and even brought to extinc- tion the bands, tribes, and chiefdoms that were once very widespread. This replacement and domination of “less complex” societies is not a new phenomenon: Throughout the history of cultural change, societies with less dense populations have been displaced by those with technologies that have allowed their populations to grow increasingly power- ful. Tribes have displaced bands, and chiefdoms have expanded at the expense of both band and tribal peoples. In earlier times this process was not as thorough as it now is, and less complex and less technologically powerful societies were able to continue to exist in environments that were of little interest to dominant societies. For instance, as agricultural chiefdoms spread at the expense of tribal and band societies, the expansion typically did not extend into physical environments that were less easily used for agricultural life, and areas such as tropical forests and deserts remained havens for tribal horticulturalists or pastoralists and foraging bands. The process continues today as the state societies take control of territories that once belonged to nonstate peoples. However, nation-states have asserted sovereignty over even those natural environments in which their own dominant subsistence technologies are not very suited. In so doing, they have increasingly trans- formed the native peoples of those areas into minority “citizens,” using political, eco- nomic, religious, and educational institutions as the means of transforming people (whose ways of life were not entirely extinguished) into minorities within the larger countries of which they are now a part.

Today, relatively few bands, tribes, and chiefdoms still exist, and the number is declining each year. The expansion of state societies into territories once occupied by nonstate societ- ies has given rise to groups called indigenous people (chapter 8), who are the native people of an area now controlled by a state political system within which they have little or no influence. Indigenous peoples typically have been forced by the dominant nation-states that now control their territories to abandon their traditional cultures. This process, called ethno- cide (chapter 8), has generally involved forcing children to abandon their parental language and religion and to be educated in schools that use only the national language.

One fundamental factor sealing the doom of many nonstate societies and altering the nature of all the world’s cultures has been industrialization. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain in the latter half of the 18th century, many cultures have joined the movement away from home production of goods to large-scale, mechanized factory production requiring great inputs of capital. This shift has brought profound alterations in all aspects of life, including changes in economic systems, growth of populations, and concentration of people around cities. Even those societies that have not industrialized are now defined and affected by their lack of industry.

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The Yąnomamö Since Traditional Times

Frontier lands occupied by indigenous people often attract citizens of the larger nation-states, who then claim sovereignty over them. The Yąnomamö of Brazil and Venezuela have experienced a large influx of Venezuelan and Brazilian farmers, loggers, and miners who are radically changing their ancestral environments in the hopes of quick profits. Like other indigenous peoples who are not well represented in the governments that control them, the Yąnomamö and their traditional way of life have received little protection from either the Venezuelan or Brazilian governments. For instance, in 1975, about 4,500 of Brazil’s 10,000 Yąnomamö Indians lived in an area of northern Amazonia that the government had ostensibly set aside as a reserve to protect them from outside incursion. But this land, now called the Yąnomamö Park, has continued to attract mining companies and illegal set- tlers. By June 1991, some 45,000 gold and tin miners had entered Yąnomamö lands, and opposition to the establishment of a Yąnomamö reserve was strong. For instance, in response to protests about the incursion of others into the Yąnomamö Park, the governor of Roraima, Brazil, said, “An area as rich as this, with gold, diamonds and uranium, cannot afford the luxury of preserving half a dozen Indian tribes which are holding up development” (Wright, 1982, p. 29).

The cavalier attitude of government leaders to the plight of the Yąnomamö is particularly interest- ing when actual government practice is contrasted with what one might expect if the legal rights of the Yąnomamö were actually enforced. For instance, Brazilian law guarantees the rights of Indian peoples to their land. The Indian Statute of December 19, 1973, gave “the Indians and native com- munities in the terms of the constitution, permanent possession of the land they inhabit, recogniz- ing their right to exclusive usufruct of the natural wealth and all the utilities existing on that land” (Act No. 6001, Art. 2, Par. IX). The act also required the government to formally define the exact boundaries of the lands of each Indian group within 5 years. Nevertheless, by 1978, only a third of the native Indian territories had been formally defined, and the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), the government agency charged with the protection of Indian rights, had been taking no action against the non-Indian colonizers who had entered these areas.

In addition to losing their lands to the more powerful immigrants who have laid claim to the resources they contain, the Yąnomamö have suffered tremendously from the diseases that have come with the immigrants. The Venezuelan Yąnomamö have experienced epidemics of measles and whooping cough that have killed as many as 30% of some communities, and they are currently threatened with extinction by diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria. In their isolated frontier setting, the Yąnomamö lack the immunity and the medical facilities to protect them from these diseases.

Efforts to acculturate the Yąnomamö have included the use of enforced recruitment of Yąnomamö children into a boarding school far from their homes. Jacques Lizot (1976) has described how Yąnomamö children were enticed away from their homes with candy, soft drinks, or invitations to ride on motor boats, and then taken to the boarding school with no explanation to their parents. There, every effort was made to eliminate all vestiges of their Yąnomamö identities: Their hair was cut, their names were changed, and they were required to survive on foods to which they were unaccustomed, while adults at the school proceeded to “educate” them about their own inferiority and the necessity of learning a new language and new customs.

(continued)

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The Yąnomamö Since Traditional Times (continued)

The Yąnomamö, like other indigenous peoples, have escalated their efforts to control their own destinies. One Yąnomamö leader, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, has described the current plight of his people:

My Yąnomamö people know, they see what is happening to our community, and they see what is happening to our relatives in other communities. They are terri- fied of the miners, of the [polluted] rivers.

The miners invaded our reserve and came to our communities feigning friendship; they lied to us, they tricked us Indians, and we were taken in. Then their numbers grew; many more arrived, and they began bringing in machinery that polluted the river. The pollution killed the fish and the shrimp, everything that lived in our riv- ers. (Albert, 1991, p. 52)

The outcome of the Yąnomamö efforts to obtain self-determination within a protected reserve is still in question, and their efforts to affect public opinion and national policy continue. However, in the early 1990s they experienced one important breakthrough in their efforts toward their cultural survival. On November 15, 1992, then-Brazilian president Fernando Collor de Mello established the long-promised reserve for the Yąnomamö Indians. The Brazilian reserve is situated next to a similar Venezuelan Yąnomamö reserve, and the two reserves contain 68,331 square miles of land.

Today, there are still about 24,000 Yąnomamö living in small communities of between 50 and 150 people. However, about 70% of the people suffer from the malaria that spread after mining created standing ponds of water that bred the mosquito vectors of that disease. Women now tend gardens and grow about 30% of the food. Poverty is a major fact of life, and many of the people now earn a monetary income that is necessary for buying the metal implements, such as axes, that are used in gardening and hunting, by the sale of basketry, bows, and arrows that are of interest to tourists. Their partial integration into their nations’ money economy has also included the rise of prostitution as a new source of income.

Refugees and Migrants Another major social problem of international scope today is the increasing number of ref- ugees, or displaced people—largely of peasant origin—who have been forced from their homes and means of livelihood because of the fear of political persecution. They include political activists who were dissenting participants in the conflicts from which they are now fleeing; others who are targeted because they are members of some persecuted reli- gious, ethnic, or racial group; and individuals who simply have found themselves in the middle of fighting between two or more other conflicting groups. Refugees are the prod- ucts of economic imbalances and poverty, political upheavals due to war, armed conflict, civil disorder, persecution of ethnic minorities, and governmental human rights abuses.

As of mid-2010, there were over 43.7 million refugees worldwide (UNHCR, 2010). The movement of such large numbers of people either within their own countries or across national borders can have a major disruptive impact on the economies of the areas in

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which they settle. In the eyes of governments and local citizens, the influx of large num- bers of refugees who have no source of income represents a cost rather than an asset. So, typically, refugees are not welcomed. Just as the United States devotes a great investment of federal funds to inhibit the flow of Mexican nationals who are in search of employment in the United States, so too do countries in other parts of the world provide similar bar- riers to both economic and political refugees in their flight from intolerable conditions. International borders are sometimes closed to them, and those who are allowed to cross borders may find themselves in impoverished settlement camps with little or no access to either humanitarian aid or employment.

While refugees may be forced to flee their homelands, migrants may leave for other rea- sons. Migration is integral to globalized markets. Around the world, people increasingly migrate from one place to another to seek the promise of better economic outcomes in urban areas and in response to the rise of new markets that need workers. In fact, today, there are over 215 million people that have migrated to a foreign country (World Bank, 2013b). Disruption to previously stable forms of production at home function to push migrants to new areas, while corporations establishing outlets in parts of the world that are willing to provide unregulated, ultra-cheap labor pulls immigrants to those areas. Thus, migration has become a major livelihood strategy for the poor in the formerly colo- nized Third World. The flow of migrant workers into the United States from Hispanic countries (which has been happening for over half a century) illustrates the role of migra- tion in filling low-paid jobs outside of the migrants’ homelands. The money that they earn doing hard-labor work is often sent back home in the form of remittances—the transfer of money by foreign workers to their families, still living in their homeland. In 2011, remit- tances worldwide totaled approximately $372 billion (World Bank, 2013b). This money is an important basis for the survival of migrants’ families and extended relatives, while the work migrants perform (sometimes as undocumented labor) fuels economic growth and helps maintain a higher standard of living for citizens of the countries in which they work.

One of the effects of globalization of the world’s marketplaces and of the migration it creates has been the increasing urbanization of the world’s population. United Nations forecasts indicate that another 2.5 billion people will be added to urban areas by 2050, while rural areas (which contain all population not urban) will be reduced in population by 300 million. The world’s urban population is expected to rise from today’s nearly 53% to 67%. More than 90% of the urban growth is expected to be in less developed nations. The migration of people has expanded worldwide as a result of the changes wrought by industrialization efforts in poorer countries. As employment in industries demands more educated workers, displaced unskilled laborers seek work elsewhere, and their move- ment sometimes includes migration across borders in search of work. The skilled and educated also migrate from poorer countries to those that offer them better economic possibilities. Many of these people end up having to settle for positions usually held by unskilled workers.

Industrialization and the Quality of Life Industrialization does provide benefits. It makes possible a level of productivity much greater than that based on hand labor, thereby freeing many members of society to pursue specialized occupations that do not exist in preindustrial societies. Thus, industrialization brings to society new goods and new services, not only raising the standard of living but

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also extending life expectancy through better nutrition and security from famine, improved housing and sanitation, and a decline in the rate of infectious diseases and lower mortality rates in all age categories because of immunization and specialized medical care.

But industrialization also has its costs. Growth in industry is paralleled by growth in air and water pollution. As population grows, increased demand for goods can lead to the depletion of nonrenewable resources, such as minerals and fossil fuels, and to the over- use of potentially renewable ones. The urban growth that an expanding population fos- ters leads to crowding and attendant problems of unemployment, poverty, poor health and nutrition, and crime. It is ironic that industrialization can simultane- ously create many new jobs and high unemployment, wealth and poverty, abundant foods and poor nutrition. Many of these problems grow out of the fact that although industrial- ization creates wealth, that wealth is not necessarily equitably distributed. Indeed, the process of industrializa- tion has, without exception, been accompanied by increasing dispari- ties in the wealth, power, and honor of the social classes that are part of all state-level societies. At times, these inequities can be the source of major social problems.

The Green Revolution For those whose livelihood depends primarily on their labor in agricultural settings, the processes of industrialization and globalization have produced mixed results. The spread of scientific farming techniques is the result of what has been called the green revolution—the use of modern plant breeding to produce hybrid crop varieties that are much more productive than many traditional crops. The production of high-yield, fertilizer-intensive, fast-maturing crops is spreading quickly into the world’s villages, along with year-round irrigation and multiple cropping. The green revolution has been particularly successful in improving the income base of peasant farmers in parts of Asia and India. By the early 1980s, the introduction of irrigation systems, modern varieties of increased-yield food plants, and fertilizer technology had begun to counteract the previ- ous inability of peasants to produce enough food to meet the demands created by popu- lation growth. The critical problem in peasant village development is achieving peasant labor productivity sufficient enough to counteract the strong population pressure on lim- ited land resources. The green revolution has been one important factor in solving this problem. The successes have been great enough that a number of developing countries are becoming increasingly competitive in the world marketplace. On the other hand, many poor farmers cannot afford to adopt the costly new technologies such as chemical fertil- izers. Despite the benefits of such technologies (such as increasing farming yields), they also create new environmental problems, such as the leaching of toxic chemicals into local water supplies.

Zoonar/Thinkstock The future of the impoverished world will depend on the availability of resources to improve often deplorable living and economic conditions.

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Population Control in Developing Nations A second major force that has had a tremendous impact on the lives of the world’s poor in the past half century has been the introduction of new, affordable contraception and the subsequent spread of these technologies throughout much of the Third World. Contracep- tion—such as the birth control pill—has proven to be an effective way of countering the problem of population pressure. For instance, Critchfield noted in 1981 that “in places as scattered as China, India’s Kerala and Karnataka states, Sri Lanka, and Java and Bali in Indonesia, annual population growth rates have plummeted from 2 1/2–3% in the early sixties to 1–1 1/2% now—mostly in the five years from 1975 to 1980. Elsewhere, though less spectacularly, fertility [the number of children born per woman] has been declin- ing for the first time in the modern era” (p. 322). Similarly, Mexico witnessed a dramatic decline in its fertility rate: from almost 7 children per woman in 1965 to 2.2 children per woman today. This decline is largely attributed to state-sponsored (and U.S.-funded) fam- ily planning programs that encouraged people (especially women) to adopt contracep- tives and small family ideals. The trend of declining fertility rates has continued in parts of the Third World where governments have advocated the widespread use of contracep- tion to keep population growth from overburdening both state infrastructure and the abil- ity of the agricultural base to provide food. Some countries, such as the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, have adopted even stronger measures, such as legal regulation of family size (for instance, China’s one-child policy) and economic incentives for families to limit the number of children they have.

About than one fifth of the human population (over 1.35 billion people) live in the Peo- ple’s Republic of China, and nearly two thirds of those people are under 35 years of age. Both the absolute size of the Chinese population and the large percentage of the popula- tion represented by people of reproductive age make population control a major concern in China. A high fertility rate would hinder China’s ability to feed its population in the future and to achieve the status of a developed nation. For these reasons, the Chinese government has taken more extreme measures than have many developing countries— measures that have been quite successful at reducing the fertility rate. These measures include delaying the average age of marriage: the current legal age for marriage in China is 20 for women and 22 for men. However, the main efforts to reduce fertility involve direct intervention in family planning. As Article 53 of the revised 1978 constitution of China states, “The state advocates and encourages birth planning.” Using newspapers, radio, and television, the government actively publicizes and encourages the goal of limit- ing births to one child per family. Bonuses, larger pensions, free healthcare for the child, priority in housing, and the promise of education and employment priorities for the child are all used as inducements for voluntary commitment to having only one child. County birth planning offices supply contraceptives and subsidize local health centers for IUD insertions, sterilizations, and abortions.

Peer pressure is also used to achieve the goal of one child per family in China. At the local level, the government has organized a system of fertility committees throughout the country that meet with individuals and create social pressure for conformity to govern- ment goals in family planning. Families are encouraged to publicly commit themselves to having only one child, although in deference to the strong value that Chinese peasants still place on sons, a second child is considered acceptable if the first is a daughter, par- ticularly in rural areas. Female infanticide is practiced in some rural areas of China but is not sanctioned by the Beijing government. The weight of public opinion is brought to bear on individuals who refuse to support the national goal of reduced population growth. A

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liberal policy on abortion and social pressure to terminate pregnancies after the second birth have reduced China’s total fertility rate to only 1.55 children per woman today, a rate that is less than half of what it was in 1970 and comparable to that of developed countries (the fertility rate in the United States is 2.06 children per woman today) (CIA, 2013). More recently, China has increasingly turned to economic measures such as fines levied against families who have too many children, and social policies, such as permitting the adoption of a second child if the first child is a female or has physical disabilities.

Singapore, where about 5.2 million people occupy a mere 247 square miles (an area about the size of New York City), is one of the three most densely populated countries of the world. It has about 21,000 residents per square mile. By 1969, the government began pro- viding free family planning services, including abortion and sterilization. Government policy was to encourage small families. Women received maternity leave only for their first two children. The medical fees for the delivery of babies were greater for each suc- cessive child. Income tax exemptions applied only to the first two children. Subsidized housing was denied to large families. In 1983 the government began offering a cash pay- ment equal to the average yearly income of a family in Singapore to any woman who was sterilized after her second child. Singapore’s strict policies were so successful that by 1985, fertility had dropped from its earlier rate of 4.5 to only 1.4 children per family, and efforts to slow population growth were ended. In 2001, a new governmental policy was instituted in an effort to increase childbearing. This policy offered a 9,000 Singapore dollar (about $7,300 U.S. dollars) bonus to families on the birth of their second child, an 18,000 Singa- pore dollar bonus for a third child (paid over a 6-year period), and a governmental match- ing of dollars for money that parents put into a “Child Development Account.” In 2013 the Singapore government began to realize that its experiment with population control was not as simple as it had thought. Although economic incentives did affect the childbearing choices of families—much more effectively than had the Chinese attempt to reduce family size by legal means—the approach in Singapore had had unanticipated long-term con- sequences. A government white paper issued in 2013 acknowledged that the attempts to prevent overpopulation had lead to a population in which elderly retirees were no longer being matched by the number of young Singaporeans entering the workforce, and this, in turn, meant that the tax base of younger workers might soon be too small to support the elderly. What governments often overlook is that a society is not built out of discrete elements, but all of its institutions are functionally tied together in a system and that the system itself changes over the generations. In this case, governmental efforts to lower the average family size of Singaporeans was, perhaps, too effective: Today, Singapore has a very low fertility rate of 0.79 children per woman (CIA, 2013). These smaller family sizes are now affecting the economic security of retirees and the country as a whole.

In developed countries, where the costs of population growth have not been felt so strongly, it is difficult for many people to accept the degree to which the governments of China and Singapore are intervening in the reproductive lives of their citizens. These measures are more readily comprehended in light of the terrible costs that high fertility rates have had in slowing the process of economic development in much of the world. Remaining underdeveloped takes its toll, not only as an absence of the material luxuries associated with industrialization, but also in the form of hunger and high mortality rates. Life expectancy at birth in the developing countries is now 58 years, compared with 72 years in developed nations. In light of the advantages of successful development, similar governmental measures to control fertility rates may become common in other parts of the developing world.

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CHAPTER 10Section 10.5 Costs of Globalization

Industrialization is gradually occurring in the Third World, but not at the same rate or in the same way as in developed countries. In fact, under the conditions of economic change that have been described in this chapter, it should not be surprising that the per capita level of industrialization actually declined in Third World countries while it was rising in the developed world.

The economic limitations of peasant life are not easily overcome. Economist Robert Cham- bers (1983) has stressed the fact that rural poverty often goes unnoticed or misunderstood by outsiders. Most peasants live in conditions that are geographically or socially too far removed from the lives of urban elite policymakers for governments to understand their real needs. Thus, government efforts to improve the conditions of peasant life are often based on faulty assessments of what needs to be done. They too often fail to appreciate the necessity of incorporating peasants’ own insights about their needs into the policy and process of development. This is where the work of anthropologists, who seek to under- stand local insights and experiences, can be invaluable.

10.5 Costs of Globalization

Another effect of the spread of industrialization is the increasing economic interde-pendence of the entire world. Over 2 decades ago, Eric Wolf (1982) wrote: On one level it has become a commonplace to say that we all inhabit “one world.” There are ecological connections: New York suffers from the Hong Kong flu; the grapevines of Europe are destroyed by American plant lice. There are demographic connections: Jamaicans migrate to London; Chi- nese migrate to Singapore. There are economic connections: a shutdown of oil wells on the Persian Gulf halts generating plants in Ohio; a balance of payments unfavorable to the United States drains American dollars into bank accounts in Frankfurt or Yokohama; Italians produce Fiat automo- biles in the Soviet Union; Japanese build a hydro-electric system in Cey- lon. There are political connections: wars begun in Europe unleash rever- berations around the globe; American troops intervene on the rim of Asia; Finns guard the border between Israel and Egypt. (p. 3)

The interconnectedness of the world is even greater today. This growing interconnected- ness, called globalization, is influenced by many technological and economic changes that are bringing people together in ways that were unheard of in earlier times. These changes include new systems of international communication such as telephones and the Internet, news and entertainment media that cross national boundaries, and the expansion of busi- ness across national boundaries. Today, the multinational McDonald’s has outlets in 119 countries throughout the world. While Toyota is headquartered in Japan, it manufactures vehicles in Kentucky as well as in numerous other parts of the world, and it markets its products in 140 countries.

At one time, it was common for each company to be known for producing and marketing a single product in a single region. Success typically brought two kinds of growth: expan- sion of the market and the introduction of new products. The new products might begin as variations on the original theme, such as the addition of new flavors or diet versions of

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a soda. But, in other cases, single companies have developed into mega-corporations that own numerous subsidiary corporations and market tremendously diverse products. For instance, Kraft Foods does not just market Kraft products but is also the owner of Maxwell House, Trident, Cadbury, and Oscar Mayer. Pepsico, originally known for the soft drink for which it was named, merged with Frito Lay and Quaker Oats and now sells foods and drinks as diverse as Gatorade, Rice-A-Roni, Cheetos, and Cap’n Crunch.

The geographical expansion of companies did not stop at national borders. Economic glo- balization is seen in the rise of international business across national boundaries, multi- national corporations that are headquartered in one country but manufacture and market products in other countries, and even transnational corporations that are not headquar- tered in a single country. Many companies, both large and small, have international con- nections, but the largest have achieved tremendous economic power internationally. For instance, 1,318 companies currently control 60% of world trade, and just 147 of these con- trol two thirds of that trade. Such multi- and transnational corporations are more than sim- ply economically influential; they also have tremendous political influence. For instance, establishing a presence of multinational corporations in Third World countries can have a significant economic effect both in terms of the hiring that such companies will do and in terms of the money they spend in building plants and purchasing resources. This gives such corporations great influence as they negotiate with local governments for their entry and continued presence in the countries they expand into. Even in developed countries, corporations influence legislation and government policies. Advantages for corporations are built into the current structure of governments in all countries. For example, in the United States “insider trading” is a felony under federal law, but members of the congres- sional branch of government are exempted, which allows them to invest legally in corpo- rations based on nonpublic information they acquire from corporations about impending business changes that will affect their stock value. Since legislation that would adversely affect corporate sources could make those sources less forthcoming, legislators may be less likely to support such legislation.

Although multinational corporations have potential long-term economic benefits, they— along with larger processes of industrialization—can produce increased unemployment (because mechanization reduces the need for unskilled labor) and increased inequal- ity, as the wealthiest nations maintain a powerful advantage in their trade with poorer nations and sometimes create barriers to economic development among those nations. For instance, multinational corporations sometimes continue to invest only enough in poorer countries to efficiently extract the resources they produce or to benefit from the low costs of labor obtained there. As countries develop their own industries, they often involve factories that produce for export rather than local consumption. For instance, China cur- rently carries out nearly 20% of the world’s manufacturing, and its Taiwanese Hon Hai Precision Industry Company (commonly called Foxconn) produces consumer electronics that are contracted with companies in wealthier nations. This company offers employ- ment at wages that are good in terms of the local economy, and one of its contract factories (actually a conglomeration of 15 individual factories) covers over a walled square mile that includes dormitories as well as workplaces. This facility may have as many as 300,000 employees and is, essentially, a walled city. Its workers are as young as 16 years of age, and the work day is 12 hours long.

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CHAPTER 10Section 10.6 Progress or Just Increasing Complexity?

10.6 Progress or Just Increasing Complexity?

Does technological progress also produce progress in quality of life? The major changes that occur in societies when technologies harness more energy are increases in population, in the specialization of roles, and in the number of statuses and groups, as well as disparities among them. Inherent in these changes is an increased inter- dependence of everyone in society. Individuals have less autonomy and less ability to ful- fill their own needs and must rely upon others to perform necessary tasks for which they themselves lack the skills. In general, the family continues to play a role as an economic group in consumption but tends to lose its role as a production and distribution group. The role of kinship as an economic and political force also declines. In the realm of ideol- ogy, more and more facets of life need to be understood in mechanistic rather than spiri- tual terms, for the role of religion declines as a culture becomes more technologically and

socially complex. All of these trends tend to make the lives of individuals less secure and less stable.

The major psychological effect of individuals’ decreasing autonomy and control over their own lives under capitalism is referred to as alienation. The concept of alienation is most strongly associated with Karl Marx (1961), who argued in 1844 that alienation develops when the work of individuals ceases to satisfy human needs directly and becomes instead merely a means of satisfying those needs indirectly. The first anthro- pologist to emphasize the concept of alienation in the study of human cultures was Edward Sapir (1924).

He went so far as to suggest that cultures could be rated in terms of how “inherently harmonious, balanced, self-satisfactory” they are, a view that has received little attention from other anthropologists. Although he did not suggest that there is a direct relationship between the complexity of a society and the degree to which its culture is “a spiritual hybrid of contradictory patches, of water-tight compartments of consciousness that avoid participation in a harmonious synthesis” (p. 410), there is an obvious parallel between his views and Marx’s concept of alienation.

For Marx, the alienation we find in capitalist societies is nonexistent in precapitalist societ- ies, where individual roles are highly generalized and each individual possesses most of the skills necessary for survival. For instance, if a woman is hungry, she takes up a basket and a digging stick (often of her own making) and goes in search of food. This direct rela- tionship between work and personal needs leads to a sense of fulfillment in work. As soci- eties become more complex, however, persons work not to satisfy their immediate physi- cal needs but merely to obtain an external object, such as money, that can later be used to

Steve Winter/National Geographic Stock Globalization allows for the spread of modern technology, but does this expansion actually constitute progress?

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CHAPTER 10Chapter Summary

satisfy those needs. The labor is a step removed from the purpose for which it is ultimately performed. A quality assurance employee of an IT company may spend the day checking the working of computer, an activity that has no obvious connection with obtaining food or shelter or any other personal need the way hunting did in preagricultural societies. He or she may receive payment for this work only once a month and is not likely to feel the same personal satisfaction in that daily work as did the hunter in manufacturing the salmon spear or rabbit snare that would be used to obtain the day’s meal.

The effects of alienation are multiplied when individuals must work for others in order to survive. Under such conditions, even the direct products of a worker’s labor do not belong to him or her, and this lack of control reduces the sense of satisfaction for having created some useful or aesthetic object.

High specialization of labor also leads to competition among interdependent specialists. Each attempts to obtain the most possible from his or her goods or services at the expense of others. This competition increases one’s sense of alienation from society, resulting in a loss of human security and meaningfulness, and thereby highlighting the social and per- sonal consequences of the capitalist system in which much of the world is now immersed.

Chapter Summary 1. Cultures change—often in the direction of increasing complexity—through local

discoveries and inventions and borrowed innovations. 2. As changes occur in technology, social organization, or ideology, they affect the

whole culture, which then adjusts. 3. The interrelated signs of increasing complexity include: harnessing of more

energy per capita, increased specialization of labor, greater population density, more status ranking, decreasing emphasis on kinship, decreasing individual independence, more centralized political control, and more secular ideology.

4. Indigenous cultures are becoming more and more scarce, either through adapta- tions to the dominant cultures that surround them or through forced takeovers of their ancestral lands, ethnocide, and genocide.

5. Industrialization has brought profound economic changes, population growth, concentration of population around cities, and both positive and negative effects on the quality of life.

6. Today, the subsistence systems of the world’s various nations are no longer inde- pendent entities determined solely by the economic needs of local peoples who interact with their natural environments. Rather, the subsistence activities of each nation are widely interconnected in a multinational web of economic exchange that forms a world economy.

7. Some anthropologists apply their knowledge of societies around the world to help solve social problems.

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CHAPTER 10Key Terms

absolute poverty Poverty that is so great that it entails an absence of basic needs.

alienation Dissociation of workers from ownership of things they produce, accom- panied by feelings of powerlessness and boredom.

capitalism A form of economy in which the means of production are privately owned, and marketing is based on the profit motive.

colonial peasantries Members of peasant societies that were politically and economi- cally dependent on a foreign state that perpetuated its economic exploitation of the peasant area by military domination.

commodification of labor Treatment of human labor as something that can be sold and bought.

contract factories Factories in relatively poor countries, employing local people, that are contracted by companies in “core” nations.

dependency theory Notion that indus- trialization and economic globalization is moving poorer countries toward industri- alization and modernization in ways that will maintain their economically depen- dent roles within the global economy.

developed countries Nations in which industrialization has become the primary basis of the economy.

developing countries Underdeveloped nations that are either nonindustrialized or are undergoing industrialization.

Discussion Questions 1. Compare and contrast the lives of peasants in feudal times with those of the rural

poor today. 2. What changes led to the development of European colonialism? 3. How does neocolonialism differ from classic colonialism? 4. What is meant by “globalization”? 5. Discuss the differences in the views of modernization theory and dependency

theory. 6. Discuss the major groups of the world’s poor today. 7. How has the process of industrialization led to a decline in the cultural diversity

of the world? 8. How does economic production and consumption differ in industrialized societ-

ies and preindustrialized ones? How does farming for one’s own consumption differ from farming cash crops?

9. How did colonial governments encourage peasants to shift from the raising of food crops for their own consumption to export crops?

10. Why is population growth a problem in some parts of the world, and what meth- ods have been used to slow population growth?

Key Terms

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CHAPTER 10Key Terms

feudal peasants Food producers in prein- dustrialized societies who paid rent or per- formed service for the privilege of farming lands owned by local aristocratic officials, who, in turn, had obligations to provide police and military protection, judicial services, and care for the peasants in times of hardship.

globalization New form of worldwide economic and cultural interconnectedness of societies.

green revolution Use of modern plant breeding to produce high-yield, fertilizer- intensive, fast-maturing crops.

imperial colonialism The domination of peasant peoples by military force.

industrialization The process of change from an economy based on home produc- tion of goods to one based on large-scale, mechanized factory production.

modernity A term used for the shift from feudalism to a lifestyle molded by industrialization, capitalism, increased geographical mobility, widespread secu- lar education, and a rational/secular worldview.

modernization theory The notion that the world’s poorer countries would sim- ply move to modernity in the same way it originally developed in western Europe and North America.

neocolonialism The contemporary world system of economic exploitation of under- developed nations by the developed centers of economic power, in which underdevel- oped nations’ participation is enforced by economic necessity rather than by political coercion.

peasants Largely rural, politically and economically disenfranchised class of small-scale food producers.

postindustrial society Society in which the service sector produces more wealth than the manufacturing sector.

refugees Displaced people who have been forced from their homes and means of livelihood because of the fear of political persecution.

urbanization The growth of the urban population that results as industry pro- duces a growing demand for labor, draw- ing workers out of rural areas into the cities to find employment.

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