Chapter 5 Summary

Introduction

Refugees flood to Europe with the hope of obtaining visas and escaping violence and political unrest. Meanwhile, international aid organizations and efforts grow stronger around the world.

The Syrian civil war has led to the displacement of as many as 11 million people, with many of the refugees fleeing to Jordan and Turkey. As more Syrians seek asylum, policies of acceptance and refuge continue to change, complicating the nature of the conflict.

This chapter focuses on the question, What do intensive global interconnections mean for understanding cultural processes in the contemporary world? And within this general question:

Is the world really getting smaller?
What are the outcomes of global integration?
Doesn’t everyone want to be developed?
If the world is not becoming homogenized, what is actually happening?
How can anthropologists study global interconnections?

Globalization illustrates how people change their cultures because of their connections with other groups.

Is the World Really Getting Smaller?

The evidence around us certainly makes it seem that the world is getting smaller and more interconnected. The process of globalization affects us all, especially anthropologists who seek to understand the differences and similarities between human groups and cultures.

To discuss globalization, we must first define it, a surprisingly difficult task.
Globalization is defined differently in different disciplines; an economist has a different focus from a political scientist, a sociologist, or an anthropologist. Another difficulty: Is globalization a process, a system, a goal, or some combination of these things?
Here’s an anthropological definition of globalization: the widening scale of cross-cultural interactions caused by the rapid movement of money, people, goods, images, and ideas within nations and across national boundaries.
Social, economic, and political interconnections are not new developments. Human groups have always been interconnected, though the scale of modern globalization is extraordinary. Further, anthropologists have recognized the importance of these links for a long time.
Franz Boas and his students Alfred Kroeber and Ralph Linton were diffusionists: early twentieth-century anthropologists who held that cultural characteristics result from either internal historical dynamism or a spread (diffusion) of cultural attributes from other societies.

In the 1950s, Marxist anthropologists like Eric Wolf suggested that non-Western societies could not be understood without reference to their place within a global capitalist system.

But until the 1980s, mainstream anthropology was locally focused on research in face-to-face village settings. As globalization has increased pace, anthropologists now realize that too narrow a focus gives an incomplete understanding of peoples’ lives and the underlying causes of cultural differences.

Several factors characterize today’s world, notably the scale of human interconnections and a growing awareness of these interconnections. But intense interconnections should not imply that everyone is an equal participant in the process of globalization. Unfortunately, the word “globalization,” with its emphasis on globe, exaggerates the scale of financial and social interconnections.

Some anthropologists avoid the term “globalization” in favor of transnational: referring to relationships that extend beyond nation-state boundaries without assuming they cover the whole world.
Still, “globalization” is a useful (and widely used) term, indicating persistent interactions across widening scales of social activity in areas such as communication, migration, and finances.
Innovations like cell phones, the Internet, and e-mail allow rapid and frequent communication between any two parts of the world. Wealth and poverty play a large role in a person’s ability to participate in global communication.
Human beings have always been a mobile species but not like this. In the globalized world, we must distinguish between different circumstances of movement.

Migrants: people who leave their homes to work for a time in other regions or countries
Immigrants: people who leave their countries with no expectation of ever returning
Refugees: people who migrate because of political oppression or war, usually with legal permission to stay in a different country
Exiles: people who are expelled by the authorities of their home countries

Financial globalization began in the 1870s. More recently, rapid financial exchange has allowed corporations to move factories from one country to another very quickly.

These transnational corporations have set up shop in countries with low hourly wages and lax environmental regulations—and accumulated vast amounts of capital assets in the process. For example, if Walmart were a nation-state, it would have the world’s tenth largest economy.
See “Thinking Like an Anthropologist: Understanding Global Integration Through Commodities”

What Are the Outcomes of Global Integration?

Promoters of globalization tend to emphasize the “winners” of this interconnectedness (unprecedented prosperity, economic growth). Opponents emphasize the “losers” (poverty, widening gap between rich and poor).
An anthropological analysis of globalization must explore cultural nuances of global interconnections, including inequality, confrontation, domination, accommodation, and resistance.
World-systems theory provides one framework for understanding global inequality. It is the theory that capitalism has expanded on the basis of unequal exchange throughout the world, creating a global market and global division of labor, dividing the world between a dominant “core” and a dependent “periphery.”

According to this theory, core nations develop their economies at the expense of periphery nations. The role of the periphery is to provide labor and raw materials for the core’s consumption, resulting in the periphery’s poverty, underdevelopment, and dependency on the core.
Anthropologists have contributed to world system studies by asking the question, How has this world system affected the native peoples and cultural systems of the periphery?
Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1984) challenged popular stereotypes of indigenous people as isolated and passive. Wolf also challenged anthropology’s traditional focus on small, local groups of people, while neglecting the world system’s influence.
World systems theory has been especially relevant to scholars of postcolonialism: the field that studies the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism. It has also helped anthropologists understand the linkages between local social relations and larger regional, national, and transnational levels of political–economic activity.

According to world systems theory, the same conditions that produced an unbalanced world order have also generated displacement and population flows.

Social scientists study global migratory flows in terms of push–pull factors—the social, economic, and political factors that “push” people to migrate from their homes and that “pull” them to host countries.
Cultural attitudes, perceptions, and symbolic values also shape migration, creating a culture of migration.

Anthropologists have devoted much attention to resistance by groups on the periphery, ranging from open rebellion to subtle forms of protest and opposition. Some forms of resistance are so subtle that they might not be recognized by outsiders.

For example, female workers in a Malaysian factory were offended by working side by side with men and having male supervisors monitor their work—both violate moral boundaries. These violations caused the women to become possessed by spirits, making them violent, loud, and disruptive.
Examples like this interest anthropologists because they show how people interpret and challenge global processes through local cultural idioms and beliefs.

A complementary process of globalization is localization: the creation and assertion of highly particular, often place-based, identities and communities.

Localization is reflected in the recent rise of political and social movements that emphasize local control as well as patterns of consumption. In our own society, people make fashion choices based on what they believe it says about them as individuals. Many other cultures use clothing to convey messages, but consumption patterns may communicate very different things, depending on specific cultural and historical influences.
For example, sapeurs, young Bakongo men from the Democratic Republic of the Congo compete with one another by acquiring fancy French and Italian clothes. They do this not to copy wealthy Europeans but to accumulate prestige and project self-worth to the upper classes of Congolese society.
What the examples of the Malay women and sapeurs demonstrate is that people continue to define their identities locally, despite globalization. Today, people increasingly express their local identities through interactions with transnational communications, consumption, and businesses.

People simultaneously engage in global processes and local communities but rarely on equal footing. Much depends on their placement within the sphere of the world system. Most anthropologists would agree that dividing people into “winners” and “losers” is an overly simplistic way to view globalization.

Doesn’t Everyone Want to Be Developed?

Colonial governments often referred to their desire to bring civilization to the “uncivilized” parts of the world. The language has changed, but the motivation to make other countries more like us has not.
In 1949, US president Harry Truman sought to fight communism by spreading Western scientific advances and industrial progress with the two-thirds of the world he described as “underdeveloped.” It seemed natural to Truman, and many others since that time, that everyone would want to be developed.
Contemporary international development is promoted by the United Nations, government aid agencies, lending agencies, and nongovernmental organizations. Just as in the days of colonialism, technologically advanced capitalist countries are the model for “ideal” social and economic development.
The most important aspect of continued global development is the issue of cultural diversity. Is the goal of development to improve material conditions while maintaining diversity? Or is it to eliminate diversity in an attempt to make everyone the same? There are two anthropological approaches to development:

Development anthropology: the application of anthropological knowledge and research methods to the practical aspects of shaping and implementing development projects.
Anthropology of development: the field of study within anthropology concerned with understanding the cultural conditions for proper development or, alternatively, the negative impacts of development projects.

Development anthropologists guide development projects in ways that are beneficial for local people, in addition to the plans of outside agencies.

Gerald Murray’s work to reduce deforestation in Haiti in the 1970s and 1980s: USAID invested millions of dollars in reforestation projects but without consulting with Haitian farmers about their particular perspectives or needs. Murray bridged the gap between the goals of the planners and farmers, suggesting efficient, mutually beneficial solutions.

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

Anthropologist James Ferguson’s research on the World Bank– and FAO-sponsored Thaba-Tseka Rural Development Project in Lesotho (1975–1984): the project’s goal was to decrease poverty and increase economic output in rural villages by building roads, providing fuel and construction materials, and improving water supply and sanitation.
Ferguson’s research indicated that people in rural Lesotho are poor not because they live in a rural area but because their labor is exploited in South Africa. The project focused on an effect (rural poverty) rather than its underlying causes (socioeconomic inequalities and subordination).
Ferguson pessimistically concluded that development does little to reduce poverty and only expands bureaucratic state power at the expense of local communities.
Some anthropologists are more optimistic about development, arguing that there are really a variety of perspectives among developers and that development is less paternalistic and more accountable to impacted communities than it once was.

In indigenous and impoverished societies around the world, there is a common perception that outside help isn’t necessarily virtuous and cannot help but undermine self-determination.

Change enforced from outside local communities is particularly ineffective since people want to preserve traditions that give their lives meaning. This is a key to understanding culture in the context of global change.

If the World Is Not Becoming Homogenized, What Is Actually Happening?

Like the previous question, this one is complex and without easy answers. Theories that address global change are cultural convergence theories and hybridization.
The British social anthropologist Ernest Gellner (1983) proposed one convergence theory, suggesting that local traditions are gradually fading as Western ideas replace those in non-Western communities.

A variation on convergence theory is “Coca-Colonization” (Westernization or Americanization). According to this convergence model, the culturally and economically powerful Western nations (especially the United States) impose their products and beliefs on the rest of the world.
This is also called cultural imperialism: the promotion of one culture over others, through formal policy or less formal means, like the spread of technology and material culture.
Convergence theories explain the emergence of world culture: norms and values that extend across national boundaries. However, shared foods, entertainment, and clothing do not necessarily mean that humans are culturally homogenous in other respects. One major limitation of convergence theories is that they equate material goods with cultural and personal identity.

An alternative preferred by anthropologists is hybridization: persistent cultural mixing that has no predetermined direction or end point. While the convergence and clash of civilization theories predict a world moving toward cultural purities, hybridization emphasizes a world based on cultural mixing, border crossing, and persistent cultural diversity.

Some critics of hybridization theory argue that cultural mixing is a superficial phenomenon, with reality moving toward convergence. Others suggest that the theory ignores political power, economic power, and inequality.

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

How Can Anthropologists Study Global Interconnections?

Today, anthropologists are well aware that it is impossible to make sense of local cultural realities without understanding broader political, economic, and social conditions.
But anthropologists most often conduct fieldwork at a single location. How can they study a local phenomenon in a community without losing sight of the international factors and forces shaping that community? This raises questions about the adequacy of anthropology’s most distinctive methodological tool, ethnographic research.
One solution is multi-sited ethnography: an ethnographic research strategy of following connections, associations, and putative relationships from place to place.
Multisited research is fast becoming a common anthropological research strategy for investigating transnational phenomena like environmental issues, the media, international religious groupings, and the continual spread of science and technology.

Conclusion

Anthropologists have no easy answers to the problems raised by globalization. Nevertheless, anthropological research can provide critical perspectives on how and why people relate to large-scale social, economic, and political changes in the ways they do.
The culture of any particular group helps people make sense of and respond to the constant changes in the world. Cultures change at different paces, and there is much to be learned about what leads some groups to embrace change while others fight to prevent change.