Chapter 5 Student Activities

Your Globalized Household Activity

Familiarity makes it easy to forget that most of our household possessions are manufactured in other countries. (For example, we may have a bronze Buddha statue purchased in Japan, sitting next to a Sony Blu-ray player bought at Best Buy that is equally Japanese, but most of us will think of only the first item as Japanese). Pick ten distinctive items of clothing that have tags identifying where they were made. How American is your wardrobe? How do you think you could reconstruct the global travels of these objects?

A Thought Activity: The World Cup, Basketball, and the NFL as World Culture

Consider three prominent international sports: the World Cup, basketball, and the NFL. What is their international fan base, and why are these sports popular in some countries and not others? What does this tell us about the homogenization of the world’s cultures?