A Global World

Views of the Political Economy:

• Modernization theory: a theory that argues that they social change occurring in non­Western societies under colonial rule was a necessary and inevitable prelude to higher levels of social development that had been reached by the more ‘modern' nations
• Dependency theory: a theory that argues that the success of 'independent' capitalist nations has required the failure of ‘dependent' colonies or nations whose economies have been distorted to serve the needs of dominant capitalist outsiders
• World-system theory: a theory that argues that, from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, European capitalism began to incorporate other regions and peoples into a world system whose parts were linked economically but not politically
• Core: in world-system theory, the nations specializing in banking, finance, and highly skilled industrial production
• Periphery: in world-system theory, those exploited former colonies that supply the core with cheap food and raw materials
• Semi-periphery: in world-system theory, states that have played peripheral roles in the past but that now have sufficient industrial capacity and other resources to possibly achieve core status in the future

Cultural Processes in a Global World:

• Globalization: reshaping of local conditions by powerful global forces on an ever­intensifying scale
• 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd world countries (way of ranking the world)

Globalization and the Nation-State:

• Diaspora: migrant populations with a shared identity who live in a variety of different locales around the world; a form of transborder identity that does not focus on nation-building

o Indian Diaspora - nationality Diaspora

o Sikh Diaspora (Khalistan movement) -religious Diaspora

o Telugu Diaspora - language Diaspora

• Diaspora implies a return to the homeland in the future

o Leave and come back (focus on the return)

o Reasons for leaving: economic, voluntarily, by force, etc

• Long-distance nationalists: members of a Diaspora who begin to organize in support of nationalist struggles in their homeland or to agitate for a state of their own

o Ex: Khalistan movement (Sikh's living outside of India, in Canada and US, who are fighting for a homeland (Palestine)

• Transborder state: a form of state in which it is claimed that those people who left the country and their descendants remain part of their ancestral state, even if they are citizens of another state
• Transborder citizenry: a group made up of citizens of a country who continue to live in the homeland plus the people who have emigrated from the country and their descendants, regardless of their current citizenship

o Ex: non-resident Indian (NRI) - whether they live in India or not, they are still apart of the nation and considered Indian (have special rights - financial incentives)

• Legal citizenship: the rights and obligations of citizenship accorded by the laws of a state
• Substantive citizenship: the actions people take, regardless of their legal citizenship status, to assert their membership in a state and to bring about political changes that will improve their lives
• Transnational nation-states: nation-states in which the relationships between citizens and their states extend to wherever citizens reside

o Ex: being on the move (living in multiple countries in a year)

o Ex: being born abroad

• Many people from transnational nation-states have flexible citizenship
• Flexible citizenship: the strategies and effects employed by managers, technocrats, and professionals who regularly move across state boundaries and who seek both to circumvent and benefit from different nation-state regimes
• Sexual citizenship: the concept of sexual citizenship bridges the private and public, and stresses the cultural and political sides of sexual expression
• All of our citizenship is sexed
• Post-national ethos: an attitude toward the world in which people submit to the governmentality of the capitalist market while trying to evade the governmentality of nation-states

o People will soon swear loyalty to corporations/corporate groups rather than a nation-state

• Multiculturalism: living permanently in settings surrounded by people with cultural backgrounds different from your own and struggling to define the degree to which the cultural beliefs and practices of different groups should or should not be accorded respect and recognition by the wider society

Rights versus Culture:

• Human rights: a set of rights that should be accorded to all human beings everywhere in the world

o 2 major arguments:

• Human rights are opposed to culture and that they two cannot be reconciled
• A key universal human right is precisely ones right to culture

Rights to Culture:

• Anthropologists' contributions to debates about rights and culture:

o Anthropologists have addressed the ways in which human rights discourse can be seen as culture

o They have mounted a critique of some of the ways that the concept of culture has been mobilized in the discussion of human rights

Culture as a Way of Thinking about Rights:

• Two lessons:

o It is possible to find ways of accommodating the universal discourse of human rights to the particularities of local conditions

o No single model of the relationship between rights and culture will fit all cases

Cultural Imperialism:

• The idea that some cultures dominate other cultures and that cultural domination by one culture leads inevitably to the destruction of subordinated cultures and their replacement by the culture of those in power

o Ex: Halloween in Australia, Easter

• Cultural imperialism does not seem to explain the spread of Western music, fashion, food, and technology for 3 reasons:

o It denies agency to non-Western peoples who make use of Western cultural forms

o It assumes that non-Western cultural forms never move ‘from the rest to the West' - ex: anamay from Japan

o It ignores the fact that cultural form sand practices sometimes move from one part of the non-Western world to other parts of the non-Western world, bypassing the West entirely - we are not always the center

• Global flows are uneven (not smooth)
• Global flows vs. globe-hopping

Cultural Hybridization and Cosmopolitanism:

• Hybridity: cultural mixing

o Ex: immigration policies in North America to encourage Sikh men to marry Mexican women (cultural mixing)

o Not such thing as a pure culture - mixing cultures is always tainted

• Cosmopolitanism: being at ease in more than one cultural setting

o Ex: travel without feeling culture shock, not at ease, etc