Chapter 4 Outline

Cross-Cultural Interactions: Understanding Global Culture

Introduction

Between 2013 and 2017, a Hawai’ian sailing canoe, the Hōkūle‘a, circumnavigated the globe. The jouney was done to raise awareness about global environmental sustainability and cross-cultural exchange.

The Hōkūle‘a’s journey also said something about humanity’s past, as it was done with no navigational instruments or technologies and the crew guided the ship via traditional Polynesian navigation knowledge and techniques.
When the Hōkūle‘a was built in the 1970s, some argued that Polynesian peoples were fairly isolated and their migration patterns were based on chance, not design. But the combination of anthropological data and indigenous knowledge demonstrates how sophisticatedly interlinked Polynesian people were historically.

The Hōkūle‘a’s successful journey is just further evidence that the kind of human movement, trade, and cross-cultural interactions we today call globalization are far from new. And some the of supposedly most remote and isolated peoples in the world have long been agents of globalization.
This chapter focuses on the question, What do intensive cross-cultural interactions and interconnections mean for understanding cultural processes?. Embedded in that question are the following problems, around which this chapter is organized:

Are cross-cultural interactions all that new?
Is the contemporary 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?

Globalization illustrates how people change their cultures because of their connections with other groups and how dynamics of power and social inequality shape those connections.

Are Cross-Cultural Interactions All That New?

Through research done in the past century and a half, archaeologists and cultural anthropologists have learned that while there are new kinds of cross-cultural interaction today, human groups have been interacting with groups who are culturally and linguistically different from themselves for thousands of years.

One example is the presence of ancient Neanderthal DNA in modern humans, indicating that early humans and Neanderthals reproduced (and, correspondingly, interacted regularly).
Archaeologist James Van Stone’s work on the material culture of the Polar Inuit indicates that this group, previously thought to be entirely isolated until the arrival of European whalers, were in fact engaged in intercultural connections.
Nearly all people in prehistoric and early historic societies interacted with people beyond their own cultural and linguistic communities through trade and the exchange of material culture. Weapons, tools, and technologies were borrowed, imitated, or taken by neighboring communities, sometimes through means of domination and oppression.
Archaeological evidence shows that prehistoric peoples in Mesopotamia were importing and exchanging Obsidian from over 400 miles away as early as the fourth millennium BCE.
Similar dynamics were happening elsewhere in the ancient world, including on the north coast of New Guinea, were prehistoric peoples were importing obsidian from 800 to up to 1,500 miles away, much across ocean.
Ancient state societies like Mesopotamia and Persia also had extensive trading networks to get food and supplies distributed across empires and cross-cultural interactions were part and parcel of building ancient kingdoms.

All this evidence reinforces the view that extensive and persistent cross-cultural interactions characterize human history. What about the present?

Is the Contemporary 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.
In order 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 contemporary widening scale of cross-cultural interactions owing to 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. While use of these technologies is taken for granted in the United States, only 36% of people in Sub-Saharan Africa use the internet. 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, with the reduction or elimination of tariffs to promote trade across boundaries.
Under these conditions of globalized capital, many 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.

Economic growth and trade is highly uneven as corporations increase power, it is important to ask who benefits from and who pays the cost of global interconnections.

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, passive victims of colonialism and capitalism. Wolf also challenged anthropology’s traditional focus on small, local groups of people, while neglecting the world system’s influence.

See “Classic Contributions: Eric Wolf, Culture, and the World System”

The theory helped anthropologists better explain the historical emergence and contemporary persistence of uneven development patterns around the world and has been especially relevant to scholars of postcolonialism: the field that studies the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism.
World Systems Theory argues that the same conditions that produce an uneven distribution of development across the globe have also generated populations’ displacements and migration patterns designed to supply labor for capitalist needs
Migratory flows involve push-pull factors. Factors that push people to migrate include poverty, violence, conflict, and political uncertainties. Factors that pull people to host countries include economic possibilities, and social and political opportunities.
While push-pull factors are important, migration is complex. Migrates rarely act in isolation, the ability to migrate is unevenly distributed, and often, migrants move within and between preexisting social networks.
Sometimes, these social networks are so spatially extended, anthropologists call them transnational communities.
There are also cultures of migration, which are composed of the cultural attitudes, perceptions, and symbolic values that shape decision-making processes around, and experiences 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 patterns of consumption, a common way people express local identities. 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 example of the sapeurs demonstrates is that people continue to define their identities locally, often through their interaction with transnational processes.
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?

Long before the current globalization craze, discussions about global integration were often framed as the problem of bringing “civilization” (Western, that is), and later economic development, to non-European societies. But the question—Doesn’t everyone want to be developed?—has no easy answer. Ideas differ about what development is and how to achieve it, so first we must ask: What is development?
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. It is a branch of applied anthropology.
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.

For example, 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.

For example, 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).
The presence of outsiders also undermined the power traditionally held by village chiefs. Ferguson pessimistically concluded that development does little to reduce poverty and only expands bureaucratic state power at the expense of local communities.

Some anthropologists 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 It Becoming?

Like the previous question, this one is complex and without easy answers. Twp theories that address global change are cultural convergence theory 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.
Another version of convergence theory is called “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 attempt to 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 two theories needn’t be mutually exclusive; convergence is happening in some places and hybridization is happening everywhere at the same time.

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. \
Globalization affects populations in uneven ways, and there are many socio-economic and political inequalities that are results of globalization, many of which give rise to the persistence of cultural diversity,
Even though there are things that make the world seem smaller, it is essential to remember that cultures are always created in connection with other cultures, not in isolation.