Globalization and Culture

Globalization and Culture

• Globalization alters cultures due to connections between different groups.
• Diffusionists studied the spread of cultural attributes between societies in the early 20th century.
• Marxist anthropologists in the 1950s, such as Eric Wolf, argued that non-Western societies must be understood within the context of the global capitalist system.
• Mainstream anthropology focused locally on face-to-face research in village settings until the 1980s.
• Interconnections do not equate to equality; the term "globalization" can exaggerate the extent of global financial and social interactions.
• "Transnational" describes relationships extending beyond nation-state boundaries without assuming worldwide coverage.
• Innovations like cell phones and the internet enable rapid global communication.
• Wealth significantly impacts a person’s ability to participate in global communication.

Changing Scale of Globalization

• Mobility of people is a key factor in shaping globalization.
• Migrants: Temporarily leave their country.
• Immigrants: Leave their country permanently.
• Refugees: Flee their country.
• Exiles: Are involuntarily expelled from their country.
• The use, exploitation, and acceptance/rejection of these people affect globalization.
• Post-WWII decolonization reversed colonial flows as people from non-European and non-US countries moved to Europe and the US.
• Most migrants today stay within their major region of birth.
• Decreasing air travel costs significantly impact mobility.

Financial Globalization

• Starting in the 1870s, increased international trade and reduced tariffs led to a global economy that has greatly accelerated.
• This results in exploitation of poorer countries, benefiting corporations with cheaper costs.
• Globalization can promote interconnectedness, benefitting some at the expense of others.
• World Systems Theory: The world is divided into a dominant "core" and a dependent "periphery."
• Core nations develop their economies by exploiting periphery nations.
• Periphery states provide labor and raw materials to the core, perpetuating their poverty and dependency.
• This is especially relevant to postcolonialism studies.
• Cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism help understand links between local social relations and broader political-economic activity.
• Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History challenged stereotypes of Indigenous people as passive victims.

Resistance at the Periphery

• Resistance can range from open rebellion to subtle forms of protest.
• Subtle forms of resistance might not be recognized by outsiders.
• Spirit possession was used by female Malaysian factory workers to protest working conditions.
• Localization/Glocalization: Reflected in consumption patterns where cultures use clothing to convey messages.
• People engage in global and local communities simultaneously, but rarely equally.
• Colonial governments justified their actions as bringing civilization to the "uncivilized."
• In 1949, Harry Truman aimed to assist the underdeveloped world.
• Development goal: improve material conditions while maintaining diversity, or eliminate diversity for uniformity.
• Exploitative development: Profiting off of the community
• Developmental Anthropologists: Guide projects to benefit local populations.

Cultural Convergence and Hybridization

• Cultures modify each other rather than completely converging.
• Cultures adapt things to fit their own desires, keeping the culture intact and expanding, rather than homogenizing.
• Ernest Gellner (1983): Local traditions may fade as Western ideas replace them.
• McDonaldization: Emphasizes efficiency, calculability, predictability, control, and mechanization.
• Multisited Ethnography: Studies culture holistically in multiple locations for a broader understanding.

Sustainability: Environment and Foodways

• People conceptualize nature and their relationship to it differently, affecting other cultural aspects.
• Indigenous peoples of Southern Mexico and Central America differ from the Spanish colonizers in their views of nature and their relationship to it.
• Indigenous groups saw themselves as part of nature.
• Spanish colonizers saw themselves as dominant over nature.
• Foragers often use familial metaphors to describe human-nature relations.

Four Major Modes of Agriculture

• Foraging: Searching for edible things.
• Horticulture: Small-scale subsistence agriculture.
• Pastoralism: Raising of animal herds.
• Intensive Agriculture: Large-scale commercial agriculture.
• Foodways are shaped by cultural beliefs, rules, and etiquette.
• Rules regulate what animals are hunted, what plants are grown, and how food is shared and eaten.
• Eating practices can signify gender, ethnic, regional, professional, or class differences.
• Food communicates social class, division, and power imbalances.
• "Sumptuary Laws" restricted certain foods to preferred classes.
• Mary Douglas compared food to language as symbolic communication.
• Formal English dinners have a precise serving order.
• Food taboos, like Jewish dietary laws, symbolize religious piety.
• Gerd Spittler: Varied diets can be seen as signs of poverty.
• Foodways change due to availability, perceived health, technology, affordability, and social motivations.

Cultural Basis of Knowledge About Nature

• All systems of knowledge about nature are culturally biased, including science.
• Ethnoscience: Aims to describe and understand the conceptual models and rules by which a society operates.
• Indigenous peoples possess ecological knowledge unknown to Western science.
• Thomas Malthus (1700s): Populations grow exponentially, overexploiting resources.
• Paul Ehrlich (1968): Revisited overpopulation in The Population Bomb.
• Industrial agriculture is based on limitless productivity and profit accumulation.
• Global industrialization harms rural populations; family farms have declined due to policies favoring industrial agriculture.
• Modern industrial agriculture's requirements, such as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and water, harm the environment.
• Ethnographic fieldwork focuses on social complexities of knowledge about climate change.
• Ethnography shows different societies conceptualize and deal with climate variability differently.

Are Natives “Natural Environmentalists”?

• Indigenous people are susceptible to overexploitation.
• Closeness to nature is associated with ‘primitiveness,’ something ‘civilized’ people cannot be.
• Most 'natural' Western landscapes are the result of Indigenous involvement and manipulation.
• Fortress Conservation: Western idea that nature must be empty of people to be "pristine."
• Game reserves: Enclosures of land to keep them ‘natural’ and untouched.

Economics

• Culture and economy interpenetrate each other; some things are ‘priceless’.
• Anthropologists study economics cross-culturally.
• Neoclassical Economics: Studies how people make decisions and allocate resources to maximize personal benefit.
• Adam Smith: The invisible hand of the market channeled natural competitiveness into wealth.
• Division of Labour: Individuals completing one step of the production of a complete object.
• Exchange: Transfer of objects and services between social actors.
• Market: A social institution in which people come together to buy and sell goods and services.
• Karl Polanyi: The rise of capitalist markets was not inevitable but a product of historic and cultural circumstances.

Substantive vs. Formal Economics

• Substantive Economics: Daily transactions are inseparable from social institutions.
• Formal Economics: Studies the underlying logic and rules that economic exchanges depend on, such as self-interest and rational thought.
• Cultural Capital: Accumulation of knowledge, behaviors, and skills that demonstrate cultural competence and social standing.
• Social Capital: Resources available to a group due to their social standing.
• Maya Cofradia System: Politico-religious system that requires men to share with the community to maintain prestige.
• Converts labor, generosity, and money into prestige.
• Sociocultural relationships play a primary role in creating value.
• Economic systems cannot be considered independently of culture.
• Tiv Pastoralists: Bride price was paid with cattle, which had to be purchased with brass rods.
• The Tiv have three separate spheres of exchange: ordinary substance goods, prestige goods, and rights in people.
• Debts need to be repaid, even if it causes suffering.
• Commodity money is tied to debt, violence, and control.

Gift Exchange & Market Economics

• Gift Exchange: Includes expectations of reciprocity.
• Malinowski: Focused on how gift giving generates individual status.
• Mauss: Focused on how gift exchange generates social relationships and obligations.
• Marcel Mauss: Gift exchange generates and sustains social relationships.
• Mauss focus on group solidarity and the moral and spiritual dimensions of gift giving.
• Marshall Sahlins and Reciprocity
  • Generalized Reciprocity: Gifts given freely without expectation of return.
  • Balanced Reciprocity: Exchange of gifts of equal value.
  • Negative Reciprocity: Attempting to profit from gift giving.
• Market Economics: Guided by implicit rules.
• Political bribes are disguised as "gifts" with the expectation of favors.
• Personal gifts fall on a personal-impersonal spectrum.
• Giving commodities can create moral dilemmas.
• Ownership involves interactions between people and declarations rooted in cultural forms of communication.

Appropriation & Consumption

• Appropriation: For example, owning a phone identifies socioeconomic status.
• Consumption: Modifying, decorating, and ultimately, using the appropriated item.
• Consumption: People recreate and modify cultural meanings and social relationships.
• Aitape of Papua New Guinea: Exchanging objects from afar signifies a wide circle of friends.
• Capitalism has spread, but it is not uniform.
• Richard Robbins: Capitalists invest, workers work, and consumers consume; the state ensures each fulfills its role.
• Variety exists between cultures.
• Wall Street: Shifted from benefiting investors, workers, and consumers to limitless investor profits.
• Personal relationships and local knowledge are essential to transactions.
• Malaysian Entrepreneurs: Adhere to Islamic values, family, and community obligations while pursuing self-interest.

Politics: Cooperation, Conflict, and Power Relations

• Politics: How people manage social relations through persuasion, force, and control over resources.
• Some societies have centralized political authority.
• Other societies have historically lived in acephalous societies.
• !Kung: Decisions were made by group consensus; food sharing was key.
• !Kung hunters avoided appearing arrogant.
• Informal social controls regulated !Kung behaviour.
• Thomas Hobbes called life without formal political control "nasty, brutish, and short," requiring an absolute monarch.
• John Locke argued for a "social contract" and "rule of law."
• Colonial governance involved imposing similar forms of government on colonized peoples.
• Provides opportunities to study societies without government or leaders.
• Religious Ritual reinforces political power, maintains solidarity, and resolves disputes.
• Witchcraft operated as a rudimentary criminal justice system.
• Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service defined four types of society based on control of resources:
  • Band (noncentralized)
  • Tribe (noncentralized)
  • Chiefdom (centralized)
  • State (centralized)
• Emphasis shifted to how individuals acquire and use power.
• Political power must be based on a culturally accepted source.
• Power derives from material, human, symbolic, or ideological resources.
• People manage power through decision-making, cooperation, opportunism, compromise, charm, conflict etc.
• Action theory focuses on these processes.
• Normative Rules: Ethical norms.
• Pragmatic Rules: Manipulations needed to win.

Structural Power, Violence & Dispute Management

• Cultural anthropologists recognized the need to investigate structural power.
• David Horn: Used structural power to trace Italian acceptance of state intervention in healthcare.
• Global capitalism is a source of structural power because it affects economic and political choices.
• Weapons of the Weak: An abused woman’s 'shame suicide' shifts shame to her abuser.
• In nonstate societies, leadership is temporary, informal, and based on personal attributes.
• The power of an Amazonian headman is based on charisma.
• Leaders cannot transfer power through inheritance in non-state societies.
• Power in states and chiefdoms is controlled by officials and institutions.
• States control populations through surveillance, terror, and genocide.
• Many people live in nation-states formed by conquest and colonialism.
• These conquered people often become ethnic minorities.
• Every society has multiple forms of power.
• Violence is rooted in cultural processes and meanings.
• Culture shapes "legitimate violence."
• The Hobbesian view believes violence is part of human nature.
• Violence tends to follow cultural patterns, rules, and ethics.
• Violence happens within specific cultural and historical contexts.
• Potential for violence/nonviolence exists within all cultural groups.
• Interethnic violence is not inevitable; violence is a meaningful political strategy.
• Formal Dispute Managements
  • Adjudication: (legal, formal)
  • Negotiation: (parties work it out with each other)
  • Mediation: (a 3rd party helps the conflicting parties compromise)
• Harmony may be romanticized but is a cultural ideology.
• Laura Nader suggests disputants prefer fairness, justice, and rule of law.
• Conflict may promote change.

Race, Ethnicity, and Class

• Stratified societies use categories of difference to uphold social order.
• BiDil was developed and tested on African Americans, but is likely effective for anyone.
• Scientists have tried to divide human variability into races.
• No diagnostic genes or genetic traits belong to only one race.
• Adaptational approach to race links physical traits with environment.
• Identifies actual biological patterning relating to this.
• Any lines meant to designate where one race ends and one begins are arbitrary.
• Belief in race has cultural consequences such as rates of disease discrepancies and average life span discrepancies
• In early North American colonies, Africans were not seen as racially inferior.
• Class rebellion spurred leaders to divide people along color lines to control people and prevent future rebellions.
• By dividing poor people among races, anger could be directed toward each other, rather than toward the wealthy elite
• Any male and any female from anywhere on the planet can mate and potentially produce viable offspring
• Racial categories are culturally constructed differently.

Race vs. Ethnicity

• Latin America, colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese, had fluid racial construction.
• Racial groupings come with discrimination and privilege.
• Race is not a stand-alone concept, but is often co-mingled wealth, ability, intelligence and “fitness”.
• Race and Ethnicity are often used interchangeably; however, they have different meanings.
• Race is genetic heritage.
• Ethnicity: Is a personal choice taken on through culture, religion, etc.
• Primordialism: National/ethnic identities are fixed.
• Instrumentalism: National/ethnic identities are constructed to serve power structures.
• 'Hispanics,’ ‘Latinos,’ and ‘Latinas’ do not fit neatly into preexisting American racial social order
• Socioeconomic background profoundly impacts education and occupation.
• Meritocracy: Where wealth is earned through respect, has turned into a "luck of the draw", and still reinforces preexisting racial hierarchies

Caste and Discrimination

• Westerners use the term ‘Caste’ to refer to the Indian system which, internally is split into Varna and Jati
• Varna is the hierarchy of Brahmans, Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), vaishyas (traders), and shudras (artisans and servants).
• 'Untouchables' are 'polluted' due to their work: metalwork, garbage collecting, etc.
• Urban Indians promote the decline of the caste hierarchy.
• Legislation against discrimination differs from the actual end of everyday discrimination.
• Unearned Privilege: The most disguised, unrecognized aspect of discrimination.
• Peggy McIntosh: Having light skin pigmentation in the US is an unearned privilege.
• Prejudice is acquired through enculturation from authority figures and media.
• Explicit v. Implicit Discrimination: Explicit discrimination is easier to confront.
• Disguised discrimination may live well beyond the end of its explicit source.