p5 Flashcards
Cultural diffusion and its causes:
Powerful civilisations have brought cultural change to other places for thousands of years.
This spread is called cultural diffusion.
Sometimes it is achieved through coercion, using legal or even military tools.
Forced assimilation of culture is also called cultural imperialism.
Languages, religions and customs were spread around the world using force by the Roman and British empires, for instance.
Today, countries like the USA and UK play a role in bringing cultural change to other places through their use of soft power.
No force is involved. Instead, these powerful, wealthy states shape global culture through their disproportionately large influence over global media and entertainment.
The growth of a global culture:
The specific cultural influence of the USA on other places is called ‘Americanisation.
The joint role played by European and North American countries in bringing about cultural change on a global scale is called ‘Westernisation’.
Several factors help explain the emergence of a Western-influenced ‘global culture’
TNCS:
Influence:
The global dispersal of food, clothes and other goods by TNCs has played a major role in shaping a common culture.
Some corporations, such as Nike, Apple and Lego, have ‘rolled out’ uniform products globally, bringing cultural change to places.
Evaluation:
Chapter 12 introduced the concept of glocalisation.
When TNCs engage with new markets and cultures, they often adapt their products and services to suit different places better.
As a result, the products that are sold in different places increasingly reflect local cultures.
You will be familiar with examples of this, such as McDonald’s menus. In your view, is glocalisation merely a sophisticated form of cultural imperialism?
Global media
Media giant Disney has exported its stories of superheroes and princesses everywhere.
Western festivals of Halloween and Christmas feature prominently in its films.
The BBC helps maintain the UK’s cultural influence overseas (especially the World Service radio station).
Evaluation:
Other places gain a ‘window’ on American and British culture through shows such as period drama Downton Abbey.
However, many reality and celebrity shows, such as Strictly Come Dancing, are entirely re-filmed for different national markets.
Also, there are many non-Western influences on global culture, including the TV channels Russia Today and Qatar’s Al Jazeera.
Japanese children’s TV has been highly influential, notably Pokémon.
Migration and tourism:
Migration brings enormous cultural changes to places. Europeans travelled widely around the world during the age of empires, taking their languages and customs with them.
Today, tourists introduce cultural change to the distant places they visit.
Evaluation:
Migrants can affect the culture of host regions, but the change may only be partial.
British migrants took their language and love of cricket to many places but often had little effect on other cultural traits, notably religion.
When carrying out an evaluation, it is important to ask if cultural changes for places are superficial, or more meaningful?
We can also explore the effect of out-migration on the culture of source regions.
Changing diets in Asia: how cultural change affects people and the environment:
Traditional Asian diets are often low in meat and high in vegetables.
This healthy mix is giving way to more meat and fast food among the emerging middle classes, especially in China.
During the 1990s, China’s annual meat consumption per capita increased tenfold from 5 to 50 kg.
By 2015, China had also become the world’s biggest market for processed food.
The physical environment is affected by this at both the local and global scale.
Livestock farming has become the new focus of Asian agriculture, bringing a steep rise in emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Crops are imported from across the world to feed China’s farm animals.
Vast tracts of pristine Amazonian rainforest have been cleared during the last decade to make space for soya cultivation to feed Chinese cattle (Figure 13.13).
China’s food demands will only continue to grow as more people escape poverty.
Mindful of this, the Chinese government has embarked on a programme of land acquisition in poorer countries, including Cuba and Kazakhstan.
Rising affluence also puts pressure on particular plant and animal species if their use or consumption is culturally linked with social prestige.
Shark fin soup is an important but expensive dish traditionally consumed at Chinese weddings by those who could afford it.
As incomes have risen, the number of sharks killed worldwide to meet growing demand has doubled
Athletes at the Rio 2016 Summer Paralympic Games
Cultural attitudes towards disability are changing on a global scale, with 1983-92 being declared the Decade of Disabled Persons’ by the UN.
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities seeks to bring cultural change on a global scale in line with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
The UN has reaffirmed: the universality, indivisibility, interdependence and interrelatedness of all human rights and fundamental freedoms and the need for persons with disabilities to be guaranteed their full enjoyment without discrimination.’
It was not always the case that disabled people enjoyed equal rights. In the USA, sterilisation programmes that sometimes targeted disabled people lasted until well into the twentieth century.
Since then, a seismic shift in cultural attitudes has taken places in the USA and elsewhere.
Global media has helped turn the Paralympic Games into one of the world’s biggest sporting events by celebrating the physical achievements of elite athletes with disabilities (Figure 13.15).
Sporting events specifically for those with disabilities first began in 1948 with Second World War veterans participating.
The first official Paralympic Games were held in 1960 in Rome with participants from just 23 countries.
Today, the event has grown significantly and athletes from 159 nations took part in the fifteenth Summer Paralympic Games in Rio, 2016 (with 107 medals, China was the winner).
Attitudes towards disability are changing in more and more places.
Cultural erosion:
loss of language, traditional food, music, clothes, social relations
Indigenous people of Amazonia and Papua New Guinea
Amazonia and Papua New Guinea’s tropical rainforest tribes are among the world’s last isolated groups of indigenous people.
These ethnic groups have occupied the place where they live for thousands of years without interruption.
More members of rainforest tribes are becoming aware of Western culture and lifestyles, however (Figure 13.14).
Due to the tropical climate, indigenous people traditionally wore little in the way of clothing.
Today, many Amazonians and New Guineans are wearing modern, Westernised clothing.
The T-shirt has become ubiquitous.
Increasingly, many young Amazonians are moving from the rainforest to urban areas like Manaus.
They leave behind their traditional thatched homes, often built on stilts.
One outside view of the changes is that indigenous people no longer value local ecosystems the way they used to, on account of cultural erosion.
Like people everywhere, they want income, education and health improvements for their children.
Inevitably, social goals are becoming more important and this can drive indigenous people to hunt endangered species for food or to sell.
Papua New Guinea’s Tree Kangaroo is under threat; so too are Peru’s jaguars.
Cultural Erosion:
The ease and frequency with which people move around the world, and improvements in communication and the global marketing of styles, places and images can lead to a cultural supermarket effect.
People are no longer confined to developing an identity based upon the place in which they live, but can choose from a wide range of different identities.
They now adopt clothes, ways of speaking, values and lifestyles from any group of their choice.
In some places this can lead to cultural erosion, including the loss of language, tradition and social relations.
Cultural erosion can also change the built and natural environments.
Landscapes are shaped by our culture as they may be historic (such as Stonehenge), modern (London Docklands) or mixed.
As a result, most cultural landscapes are mixed and complex, with traces of past cultures in those of today.
Developed countries protect their cultural landscapes.
For example, the UK has 400,000 listed buildings, 20,000 scheduled ancient monuments and over 40 registered historic battlefields.
Emerging countries may have limited capacity to directly protect their cultural landscapes, in particular their ethnographic landscapes, but UNESCO aims to help preserve and promote the common heritage of humanity, protecting nearly 1000 natural, cultural and mixed sites worldwide.
CASE STUDY - LOSS OF TRIBAL LIFESTYLES IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA:
It is estimated than more than 7000 different cultural groups exist in Papua New Guinea, and most of them have their own language.
Due to this diversity, there are many different cultural forms of art, dance, weaponry, costumes, singing, music and architecture.
People typically live in villages or dispersed hamlets and rely on the subsistence farming of yams.
The principal livestock is the Oceanic Pig.
To balance their diet, people hunt, collect wild plants and fish.
People who become skilled at farming, hunting or fishing earn a great deal of respect.
The island became a party British and party German colony in 1884.
Contrasting views of the potential impacts of cultural globalisation:
Hyper - globalisers:
They believe that globalisation is a successful process.
Cultures will become ever more integrated as the economies become integrated.
The world will move towards more homogeneous cultures as a result.
An example of this is TNCs marketing strategies create similar consumer demand across cultures, leading to uniformity in the components of culture and therefore a decline in local and national identity.
Transformalists:
They believe that cultures are dynamic in their response to globalisation, so it is not inevitable that they world will move to a homogeneous culture.
They think that all cultures will change but in different ways, and new hybrid cultures will emerge.
Sceptics
They believe that globalisation is profound in the core capital economies and reflects their interdependence, however beyond this core, there is marginalisation, not destruction, of poorer groups and their cultures.
An example of this, is the rise of India, China and Iran will limit the dominance of ‘Western’ cultures.
Cultural erosion and opposition to globalisation:
Concern about cultural impacts and economic and environmental exploitation has led to opposition to globalisation from some groups.
These concerns are similar to those expressed during the independence movements and struggled during the process of decolonisation, when poverty was regarded as a product of colonial history.
These groups are known as structuralists, as they explain the inequalities arising from globalisation which structures such as ‘capital vs labour ‘, ‘men vs women’ or ‘one race vs another’.
These groups often oppose globalisation and argue that inequality in the global economy will only be resolved by structural change.
However other groups regard inequality in a globalised world, as the product of winners and losers in global competition, and promote free trade and free markets as a means of eradicating inequality.
They support globalisation as they believe that all countries will eventually receive the same benefits as Western economies.
Selected reactions against globalisation:
France
France is fiercely protective of its culture and language, particularly in a world heavily influence by the internet and the English language.
The French government is extremely supportive of French filmmakers and subsidises works filmed in the French language.
Under local content law, 40 percent of television output must consist of French productions.
French language music is heavily promoted on radio stations.
