A Global World

1. Chapter 14 A Global World

2. Chapter 14 takes up again the story of how the Western world and the societies where anthropologists work are interrelated, and how these interrelations have changed over the last 50 years.

3. What happened to the global economy after the Cold War? new social movements the rise of neoliberalism Globalization Reshaping local conditions by powerful global forces on an every-intensifying scale.

4. The effects of globalization are uneven: stratified reproduction transnational corporations tourism deterritorialization and reterritorialization

5. The anthropology of globalization emphasizes the ways in which the global articulates with the local. Anthropologists study global flows of people, technology, wealth, images, and ideologies.

6. Important areas in the anthropological study of globalization: the effect of global forces on nation-states human rights as the emerging discourse of globalization cosmopolitanism the emergence of new global assemblages

7. Globalization and the nation-state Massive global displacements of people have characterized Western modernity. Today, desperate situations in migrants� home territories plus ease of transportation have increased the volume and speed of migration. But market crises in the countries where migrants have settled have sharply reduced opportunities available once they arrive.

8. Diaspora Migrant populations with a shared identity who live in a variety of locales around the world; a form of transborder identity that does not focus on nation-building. Long-distance nationalism Members of a diaspora begin to organize in support of nationalist struggles in their homeland, or to agitate for a state of their own.

9. Transborder state A form of state in which it is claimed that those people who left a country and their descendents 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 form the country and their descendents, regardless of their current citizenship.

10. 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.

11. How is immigration understood in Europe? French ethnocentric assimilationism British uneven pluralism German institutionalization of precariousness Belgian pillorization

12. Flexible citizenship The strategies and effects employed by managers, technocrats, and professionals who move regularly across state boundaries, seeking both to circumvent and benefit from different nation-state regimes. 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.

13. Human rightsA set of rights that should be accorded to all human beings everywhere in the world. Human rights discourse is emerging as the global language of social justice.

14. How do people talk about the relationship between human rights and culture? The argument that human rights are opposed to culture The argument that a key human right is one�s right to culture.

15. Rights versus culture If �cultures� are homogeneous, bounded, and unchanging, and if each society has only one �culture,� then international interference with customs said to violate human rights would seem itself to constitute a human rights violation. Thus, cultures should be allowed to enjoy absolute, inviolable protection from interference from outsiders.

16. Example: the CEDAW declaration that violence against women violates women�s human rights Is this an unwelcome colonial imposition of Western Enlightenment ideas? Are �cultural values� responsible for everything that people do in any society? Can members of a society disagree and sometimes change their minds about their �cultural values�?

17. Is �culture� sometimes used as a scapegoat to mask the unwillingness of a government to extend certain rights to its citizens for reasons that have nothing to do with culture? Example: Indonesia and Singapore have positioned themselves as defenders of �Asian values,� but have also welcomed Western capitalism. Is this an inconsistent attitude toward Westernization?

18. Rights to culture The argument: Universal human rights do exist. One such human right is the right to one�s own distinct culture.

19. What legal mechanisms are needed to protect the right to culture? The UN Declaration on Human Rights seems to promise people the chance to bring allegations of human rights abuses to an international forum to seek redress. But this is not what such documents do.

20. How do such documents understand human rights? Human rights are legally interpreted as individual rights, not group rights. People must demand that the governments of the nation-states in which they are citizens recognize and enforce the individual rights defended in international documents.

21. Is defending all human rights by depending on the policies of national governments a serious contradiction in human rights discourse? Example: Talal Asad�s comparison of the strategies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s

22. The right-to-culture movement has succeeded in recent years in eroding the traditionally recognized right of nation-states to determine the kinds of rights their citizens will be accorded. However, the right-to-culture argument can be called on to legitimate reactionary and progressive projects alike.

23. Rights as Culture Like other cultures, the culture of human rights is based on ideas about human beings, their needs, and their ability to exercise agency, as well as the kinds of social connections between human beings that are considered legitimate and illegitimate.

24. The �culture of human rights,� however, has clear origins in Western secular discourse. It focuses on the rights of individuals. It proposes to relieve human suffering through technical rather than ethical solutions. It emphasizes rights over duties or needs.

25. Human rights and the law Groups and individuals who assert that their human rights have been violated regularly take their cases to courts of law. They must be aware of the kinds of claims that the law pays attention to and the kinds of claims that will be dismissed.

26. The �essentializing proclivities of the law� The Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement: Successfully achieved some of their political goals by making claims based on �traditional culture.� But they live in a society that is �willing to recognize claims on the basis of cultural authenticity and tradition but not reparations based on acts of conquest and violation� (Merry, 2001).

27. Local adaptations of the rights model do take place. Example: Feminist programs in Hawaii and New Zealand that work to combat violence against women by tailoring programs to local circumstances and using local images and examples.

28. Child prostitution in Thailand Commercial sex and even child prostitution are not new in Thailand. In recent years, however, many Thais have denounced child sex tourism and have tried to force the national government to put a stop to it. Human rights discourse has played a prominent role in this campaign.

29. Since 1924, nine separate international documents have discussed human rights and the rights of the child. But anthropologist Heather Montgomery notes �it does not take an anthropologist to recognize that a child marrying at 15 in full accordance with traditional norms and local custom in India is very different from a child marrying at 15 in the UK.�

30. Declarations on the rights of the child normally emphasize: Western middle-class ideas about what constitutes an acceptable human childhood Western ideas of when childhood begins and ends The importance of rights over duties

31. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child includes the idea that every child has a right to a childhood that is free from the responsibilities of work, money, and sex.

32. This standard: fits poorly with understandings of childhood in which children are expected (or needed) to work for money to support the family. seems unable to imagine situations in which the entire support of a family depends on a child�s earnings from prostitution. But this is an accurate description for many families of child prostitutes in Thailand.

33. Conclusions It is possible to find ways of accommodating the universal discourse on human rights to local conditions. No single model of the relationship between rights and culture will fit all cases. Struggles over human rights are unlikely to go away. They are among the prime struggles of our time.

34. Cultural imperialism The idea that: some cultures dominate other cultures, and cultural domination by one culture leads inevitably to the destruction of subordinated cultures and their replacement by the culture of those in power.

35. Cultural hybridity Cultural mixing; borrowing-with-modification; domesticating or indigenizing cultural forms or practices from elsewhere. Example: Otavalan weavers� adoption of televisions and cookstoves to increase the production of traditional textiles.

36. People in multicultural settings deal daily with tempting cultural alternatives emanating from more powerful groups. It is not surprising that they regularly struggle to control processes of cultural borrowing and to contain domesticated cultural practices within certain contexts, or in the hands of certain people only. The commodification of hybridity is problematic because it offers multiculturalism as an array of tempting consumables for outsiders.

37. Elite experiences of cultural hybridization are different from nonelite experiences of cultural hybridization. Example: the reception of Salman Rushdie�s novel The Satanic Verses: by elite South Asian migrants to Britain and by socially and culturally marginalized South Asian migrants to Britain.

38. Cosmopolitanism Being at ease in more than one cultural setting. Different processes of cultural hybridization and cultural resistance: privileged cosmopolitanisms �minoritarian� or �discrepant� cosmopolitanisms

39. Friction The awkward, unequal, unstable aspects of interconnection across difference. Examples: How capitalist interests brought about the destruction of Indonesian rainforests in the 1980s and 1990s. How environmental movements emerged to defend the forests and the people who live in them.

40. According to anthropologist Anna Tsing, friction prevented Japanese lumber traders from getting what they wanted right away. Three specific transformations had to occur: The forest had to be �simplified� Forests had to be reconfigured as a �sustainable resource.� The destruction of the forest had to be linked to nation-building.

41. �Together, they transformed the countryside into a free-for-all frontier.� Tsing argues that a strong Indonesian environmental movement came in to existence, but friction had to be overcome here as well. �The movement was an amalgam of odd parts: engineers, nature lovers, reformers, technocrats.�

42. Border thinking In a globalized world, concepts like �democracy� and �justice� can no longer be defined within a single Western logic, or from the perspective of the political left or the political right.

43. Critical cosmopolitanism Detaching concepts from their �Western� meanings, using them as tools for imagining and negotiating new understandings of human rights and global citizenship that can dismantle barriers of gender and race�the historical legacies of colonialism.