Modern World Order

Question 1

Humans are Social Creatures

Answer 1

• Humans live in social groups or societies
• Society = a group of people who engage in recurrent patterns of interaction and (traditionally) share a common language and culture

Question 2

Humans are Cultural Creatures

Answer 2

• Culture is our means of securing our individual and collective needs
• Culture provides the means to coordinate group actions

Question 3

Tradition and Culture

Answer 3

• Culture can be a storehouse of knowledge and a vital part of “tradition”
  
  • Tradition = practices and beliefs that group members believe represent the historical foundations of the group
• Traditions are the things “passed down” from generation to generation

Question 4

Society and Bounded Groups

Answer 4

Members of a society can think of themselves as being a distinct, bounded group, separate from other groups

Question 5

Not Constant

Answer 5

• Despite appearances, cultures are not a matter of tradition
  
  • The concept of tradition implies something static and unchanging
• The modern world provides evidence of continual and increasing change

Question 6

What kinds of things cross borders or boundaries

Answer 6

• Trade – goods and services.
  
  • You can buy a TV from China, car from Japan, clothes from Indonesia or Italy
  • You can hire someone from India to write software or answer your telephone 
• Capital – money, investment
  
  • You can put your savings into a bank in Zurich
  • You can buy stock in SONY, a Japanese company
  • corporations can relocate manufacturing facilities rapidly and cheaply 
• People – immigrants, refugees, tourists
  
  • Immigrants come to Calgary from Asia, Africa, S. America, Europe
  • You can easily travel to Europe, Asia, S. America 
• Communication
  
  • You can call, email, Zoom or Facetime people around the world 
• Culture (art, music, cuisine) 
• Ideas

Question 7

Cultural Change

Answer 7

• The cultures we study are continually changing
• The pace of social change has been steadily increasing
• Social change can be explained in terms of (1) innovation and (2) political economic forces

Question 8

Innovation

Answer 8

• Invention, diffusion
  
  • All societies invent/create things and borrow things (technology, ideas, forms of organization)
• Some things are invented more than once (e.g., bows and arrows, agriculture, money)

Question 9

Political Economy and the ‘World System’ - Globalization

Answer 9

• The ‘world system’ is the main source of innovation in the Modern World
• The ‘world system’ is formed by two parallel political processes: coercion (economic and political), and ethnic consolidation under state authority
• It has had profound impact on all societies, but particularly on preindustrial societies

Question 10

Globalization

Answer 10

• Global + industrialization
• The concept refers to the spread of a certain economic system and its corresponding values between all the peoples of the world
• We could break it into three phases
  
  • 1500 – 1800
  • 1800 – 1960(?)
  • 1960 – present

Question 11

Phase I

Answer 11

• European powers (political powers and corporate organisations) succeed in consolidating regional trade networks into a single, global, maritime trade system
• They conquer the Americas

Phase I The Columbian Exchange

• Exchange of diseases, people, and cultural knowledge between the New World and Old World
  
  • Disease decimates New World populations
  • Lack of labour to extract resources motivates growth in the Atlantic slave trade
  • Europeans acquire precious goods from Asia

Question 12

Phase II

Answer 12

• Altered the nature of European economic and political interest
• Industrial production was developed first in England, quickly spread to France and Germany
• 1900 England, Germany, France, and the United States produced approximately 80% of the world’s industrial output
  
  • military advantage

Phase II Colonization

• Europe expanded and colonized—to establish political hegemony over most of the world, thereby gaining political control of raw materials, markets, and labour
• The world system is a market and not a political organization, but a great deal of political power was involved in its creation

Phase II Building the World System

• The formation of the world system involved two parallel political processes
  
  • the use of economic inducements and political force to convince populations everywhere to participate in the world capitalist economy
  • the consolidation of diverse ethnic groups under state authority

Phase II Impacts

• Preindustrial societies are changed directly or indirectly by participation in the system
• Profound economic and political change
• Major changes in Industrial societies
  
  • Shift in values that stresses consumption

Question 13

Consumption: A Cherished Value

Answer 13

• Samuel Strauss (1870-1953) writes in the 1920s – “a philosophy of life that committed human beings to the production of more and more things—more this year than last year, more next year than this— and that emphasized the “standard of living” above all other values”
• Mary Douglas (1921-2007) writes that “we have come literally to use commodities as the language of modern social life. We think with them, define ourselves in commodity terms, and communicate our cultural orientations to others by using them”

Question 14

Phase III

Answer 14

Phase III

• Shift in the location of export production - from industrialized European countries to “developing” countries – from core to semi-periphery or even periphery
• Facilitated by:
  
  • Improved transportation and communication
  • Changes in taxation of imported goods
  • Multinational, or more properly, Transnational Corporations - TNCs

TNCs

• Large private enterprises
  
  • Chartered in one country, but draw investors from all over the world
  • Ownership is international
• Any nation that attempts labor reforms or ecological restrictions on TNCs runs the risk of losing their operations
  
  • National governments have a difficult time monitoring and taxing TNCs

Impacts

• Moving the center of export production has had two major impacts of anthropological interest
  
  • It has created some underdeveloped areas in the old core states
    
    • Consider Detroit…
  • It has created demand for labour that has affected many of the groups that anthropologists conventionally have studied

Question 15

Consequence for Anthropologists

Answer 15

• Situating the local in the global
• Multi-sited ethnography
• Flows
• Hybridity
• Contingency