INTERNATIONAL RELATION

International Relation

International Relation

Globalization

Globalization is an inconsistent concept, and definitions of it abound. However, most anthropologists agree that, experientially, globalization refers to a reorganization of time and space in which many movements of peoples, things, and ideas throughout much of the world have become increasingly faster and effortless. Spatially and temporally, cities and towns, individuals and groups, institutions and governments have become linked in ways that are fundamentally new in many regards, especially in terms of the potential speed of interactions among them. Examples of these interactions are myriad: The click of a mouse button on a Wall Street computer can have immediate financial effects thousands of miles away on another continent, and events like the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or footage of the 2005 tsunami in southern Asia can be televised internationally, whereby millions of viewers interpret the same images concurrently.

Beyond these shared perspectives on and approaches to globalization, anthropologists disagree with one another in important regards. The first concerns the “what”: Does globalization name a more-or-less singular and radical transformation that encompasses the globe, in which techno economic advancements have fundamentally reorganized time-space, bringing people, places, things, and ideas from all corners of the world into closer contact with one another? Or, is globalization a misnomer, even a fad, a term too general to describe a vast array of situated processes and projects that are inconsistent and never entirely “global”?

Earlier Attempts to Grasp Translocal Phenomena

While often understated in current anthropological scholarship on globalization, early anthropological attempts to grasp translocal phenomena greatly influenced the discipline's development. Indeed, anthropology has a history of engagement with translocal phenomena and has long argued that exchange across sometimes vast distances has been and is common to human social interaction. Arguably the first incarnation of such a notion is seen in the works of late 19th- and early 20th-century diffusionists, who held that cultural change was a product of initially distinct cultural traits being appropriated and dispersed among individuals and groups over great geographic distances. Franz Boas, often called the father of American anthropology, saw diffusionism as a corrective to unilineal evolutionary conceptions of culture change, which articulated the development of cultural traits as a product of independent and isolated trial and error rather than as a product of permeable social worlds facilitating cultural exchange. Boas argued as follows:

It would be an error to assume that a cultural trait had its original home in the area in which it is now most strongly developed. Christianity did not originate in Europe or America. The manufacture of iron did not originate in America or northern Europe. It was the same in early times (Stiglitz, 2003: 35-45).

Contemporary Anthropological Approaches to Globalization

Much the same as intellectual forebears like Boas, Malinowski, and Mintz, anthropologists today are apt to favor specificity and variation over generalization and central tendency. Anthropology has, subsequently, tended to shy away from grand theories that can essentialize peoples and characterize histories as predetermined. Indeed, a continued interest of anthropologists is to ...