From Marketing Slogan to Anthropological Reality
In Cultural Anthropology 2024, we explored “what is globalization and how does it affect anthropology?” using Kenneth Guest’s Essentials of Cultural Anthropology. (Commissions earned)
What is globalization? For most people, it’s the idea that emerged about 30 years ago with the fall of the Berlin Wall—a “smaller world” where we all communicate through devices and happily sell things to each other under capitalism. Kenneth Guest immediately asks, “And why is it important for anthropology?” (21) as if we already know what it is.
But the word’s history is confusing. The term “globalization” emerged from marketing—the Harvard Business Review and people who wanted to sell you things. They promoted the glib idea that the world is getting smaller, we’re all going to talk to each other, travel everywhere, and be one big happy capitalist place.
Anthropology’s Deeper Perspective
Anthropology knows that globalization is much older than 30 years. As Guest tells us, “people are interconnected” (14) and have never been isolated. The key moment came 500 years ago when transoceanic voyages tied the Americas, Eurasia-Africa, and Australia into a global trade system—people, products, animals, and diseases moved across the entire globe.
Guest also notes that “anthropology emerged in the mid-nineteenth century during an earlier era of globalization” (21)—the 1850s-1890s period of colonial encounter, the slave trade, and emerging capitalism. Yet paradoxically, early anthropology (1880s-1950s) often portrayed people as living in isolated, disconnected worlds. The truth? Before anthropologists arrived, many societies were already producing the West’s biggest commodities—coffee, sugar, tea—and had been swept into global trade networks.
Big Words for Small Things
Social scientists developed marketing slogans into analytical concepts. “Time-space compression” (22) means we can talk to people worldwide and travel faster. “Flexible accumulation” (23) refers to offshoring production and outsourcing work globally. “Uneven development” (24) describes how different places and people within them get richer or poorer at accelerating rates.
Is Globalization Really Bigger Now?
Guest argues that while globalization is hundreds of years old, now it’s bigger, faster, worse. But consider: the percentage of foreign-born people in the US today is less than in 1910. In the early 1900s, there weren’t even border walls—people crossed freely. Since 1990, more borders and walls have been erected than any other period in human history. The Economist coined “Slowbalisation” to describe declining business interconnection.
Are We Still in an Age of Globalization?
The last 20 years have seen a huge rise in ethnonationalism—the idea that nations should be composed of one ethnic group. Brexit, Trump’s rhetoric, movements in France, Germany, Italy, Brazil all embrace this anti-global vision. The world’s two largest economies (US and China) are technologically dividing.
As I noted in class: “Donald Trump versus Joe Biden. If you just had to look at these guys, where would you say they live on the globalization continuum?” Both came of age when foreign-born percentages were lowest (around 1970). Kamala Harris, by contrast—with an Indian mother meeting a Jamaican father in California—”embodies globalization.”
Global Issues Demand Global Solutions
Guest’s crucial quote: “Solving the challenges that face the human race in your lifetime will require greater engagement, interaction, and cooperation, not more isolation and ignorance” (30).
The issues we face span the globe. Climate change: “Whereas our ancestors struggled to adapt to the uncertainties of heat, cold, solar radiation, disease, natural disasters, famines, and droughts, today we confront changes in social forces that we ourselves have set in motion” (26). COVID-19 showed borders couldn’t contain disease. Black Lives Matter protests went global—Guest shows a George Floyd mural in Gaza City (126-127). Indigenous self-determination movements span continents. Migration creates people without countries—even teams in the Olympics for refugees.
The Nation-State Problem
Can individual nations solve these problems? Consider Ukraine and Russia, or Israel-Palestine. The official positions assume bounded nation-states with clear borders, but reality on the ground makes this increasingly difficult to imagine. As I argued: “The idea that you can have a country and you have these borders…there’s one group of people on one side of the border and another group of people on the other side. There are places where we can keep that fiction alive, but there’s a lot of places where that’s become really difficult.”
Living in an Interconnected World
Whether globalization is progressing or retreating, we’ve been inextricably tied together in ways that the nation-state simply cannot handle. The issues we face—climate change, pandemics, inequality—cannot be confronted country-by-country. We need cross-border, cross-national solutions. As Guest emphasizes, this will require “greater engagement, interaction, and cooperation.”
The question isn’t whether we’re globalizing faster or slower, but how we navigate a world where our biggest challenges ignore the borders we keep trying to reinforce.
Course Navigation
This lecture on globalization in anthropology uses chapter 1 of Essentials of Cultural Anthropology by Kenneth Guest. (Commissions earned) Following Anthropology’s Unique Approach, the course continues with Coffee, Colonialism, and Anthropology’s Origins. For more on these themes, see the Global Transformations Hub.