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The cultural
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dimensions of
global change
An anthropological approach
UNESCO Publishing
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The authors are responsible for the choice and the presentation of the facts con-
tained in this book and for the opinions expressed therein, which are not necessarily
those of UNESCO and do not commit the Organization. The designations em-
ployed and the presentation of material throughout this book do not imply the ex-
pression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNESCO concerning the legal
status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the
delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.
UNESCO 1996
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Preface
In his essay in the present volume, author Michael Redclift states: The
problem with our discourse about the environment and development
is that it meets the criteria of yesterday. That such a crucial debate
should be so locked into the past for the great majority of people
while at the same time humankind goes hurtling into the future
points to the urgent need at the very least to completely overhaul our
terms of reference.
This collection of essays conveys some recent thinking on the part
of thirteen anthropologists and ethnologists, and boldly proposes a
change of perspective to explore the boundaries of the new global con-
text that the world is now entering at precipitate speed. A number of
questions arise in this connection, not least of which is the challenge of
assuming a quantum leap in our understanding of what is at stake in
the current interchange of cultures around the world, not to speak of
what lies ahead.
The editor of this study, Lourdes Arizpe, who is Assistant Director-
General for Culture at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization, contributes to the debate and concludes that
this type of exchange places a vital instrument in the hands of human-
kind as it enters a new era of technology and of cultural and social plu-
ralism.
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Contents
Abbreviations 9
Contributors 257
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Abbreviations
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Introduction
Lourdes Arizpe
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Introduction
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Introduction
form to the civic conception of the uniform state, but are more fre-
quently defined in terms of manipulable symbolic systems of inclusion
and exclusion. In contrast, he states, American countries that had
large indigenous populations were set up as exclusionary states in
which Indians were, in practice, denied full citizenship. He goes on to
give examples from Africa and Asia. Most importantly, he calls atten-
tion to the potential for political manipulation of ethnicity in all but a
few homogeneous states, adding that such manipulation may also be
international. Maybury-Lewis concludes by stating that a new ap-
proach is obviously called for which would seek to deal with ethnicity
by devising social and political systems that can accommodate it.
The scale and complexity of present-day cultural and social phe-
nomena, Lourdes Arizpe points out, call for a new understanding of
the interactions between cultures, nation-states, regional markets and
emerging global information and communication systems. Cultural
thresholds are being crossed as migrations, demographic changes, eth-
nic claims and interpretations of global cultural processes change the
reference domains in which people define their identities and beha-
viour patterns. For this task, she proposes, we need to gee-reference
cultural data, develop more accurate translational data sets and deal
with the new globality as a new locality. Arizpe uses fieldwork data
from the Lacandn rain-forest in southern Mexico to show how local
people are quickly reorganizing their perception of the relationship be-
tween their locality, now drawing attention because of rapid defor-
estation, and the new globality in which they interpret the interests of
other communities and countries. A new anthropological approach to
culture in a global setting, she suggests, is needed for guidance in estab-
lishing national and international development policies in this new
context.
Karl-Eric Knutsson brings peoples reality to the discussion by
describing how the world is moving into the hills of the Tamang people
in rural Nepal: he analyses one particularly horrifying way in which
the global market is expanding, made explicit in the title of the first sec-
tion of his chapter, Selling Ones Daughter to Buy a TV: Global Con-
sumerisms Latest Frontier. He targets the problem directly by stating
that the income-generating potential of the sex market has few, if any,
rivals at the village level. . . . The brutalization of relationships among
families . . . aggravates gender disparity and gender in feriority. Faced
with such realities, he argues that a new perspective must link ethno-
graphic analysis with reflections on globalization. Yet, he states, the
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really new issue is not that the world is becoming one, but that it is
at least for some considerable time to come becoming many, oper-
ating increasingly on a global scale. How can we analyse these new
realities? The author quotes a provocative statement by J. Wallerstein
in which he claims that culture is a non-subject, invented for us by
nineteenth-century social science. . . . Emphasizing culture in order
to counterbalance the emphases others have put on the economy or
the polity does not solve the problem. . . . So I fall back on using the
existing conceptual language in order to communicate. But I assert
that I am in search of [a] better [term]. To overcome this problem,
Knutsson proposes the concept of cultural constellation to describe
images, idioms and expressions of meaning that tend to coincide with
social gravity fields.
Changes in the role of women and in gender relations are high on
the agenda of culture, development and globalization. One of their
most visible effects has been the feminization of labour in the global
economy, here analysed in Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Re-
public by Helen Safa. Her data show some weakening of the occupa-
tional segregation by gender as growing numbers of women enter the
professions, clerical positions and the public sector. Are there cultural
changes stemming from this increase in womens labour participation?
Safa found that earning a wage indeed gave women greater autonomy,
thereby leading to greater negotiating power in the household; this,
however, did not extend to the workplace or the state level which are
still regarded as the preserve of men.
Another of the main issues in culture and development, as is widely
acknowledged, is ethnicity. This has emerged with particular bellig-
erence in Eastern Europe. Recent events in post-Communist countries
have exposed a quite common tendency, Valery Tishkov writes,
which is. . . in the midst of deep social change and radical reform, [to]
develop an ethnic content in a highly manifest form. He goes on to
examine how ethnicity is constructed and reconstructed by certain
verbal actions that reflect contemporary conditions: among them,
power relations between social groups and those interpretative
meanings that people give to these conditions. Acknowledging the
long and extremely painful injustices committed in the past against
ethnic groups in the former USSR, he goes onto describe the attempts
at reconstructing ethnic allegiances in Russia and the northern Cau-
casus, taking into account the role of the intelligentsia and the struc-
ture of power relations. The most difficult problem, Tishkov stresses,
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Introduction
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C HAPTER 1
Global cultural diversity
in a full world economy
Fredrik Barth
The term globalization is often used to evoke any and every one of
a wide range of current trends in the world. It will be more helpful
if we use it to mark those changes that entail real paradigm shifts,
signaling the need to develop new concepts and theories to under-
stand events that are under way. One such shift is in the parameters
of global economics, with enormous implications for anthropologi-
cal thinking.
Briefly, an urgent need to shift from single-purpose to multiple-
consequence rationality in our economic thought arises from the fact
that industrial productive activity has passed a fateful threshold of
scale in relation to the global ecosystem. Economists Goodland
et al. (1991: 17) have diagramed it (see Fig. 1). In this repre-
sentation, the (now swiftly growing) economic subsystem is depicted
as having two interfaces with the encompassing global ecosystem,
namely through the ecosystems source function and its sink func-
tion respectively.
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because of the growth of the scale of the economy they could be sup-
plemented by drawing on energy or resources elsewhere in an empty
world. A major impetus to the growth of imperialism and the world
system arises from these activities of locating and exploiting new
sources. Equally significantly, the development of technology has ex-
panded the exploitable energy and natural resource base, allowing fur-
ther growth, particularly during the hectic industrialization of the
present century.
The other interface between the economic subsystem and the en-
compassing ecosystem is represented by the sink functions. Every pro-
ductive economic activity generates what the producers regard as
waste and transforms other forms of energy into heat. These effects are
diffused and thrown away; in the global ecosystem, waste has been nat-
urally recycled and thereby removed, while heat has been dissipated
and lost through radiation.
Under conditions of an empty world economy, there have always
been new supplies or resources to discover, and only very localized and
temporary congestions of heat and waste to contend with, which have
appeared to be without global consequences. The crucial point is that
in such an empty world, it has seemed both sensible and possible to ig-
nore most of the wide range of direct material consequences of produc-
tive activity as being quite irrelevant to the economy and to operate
narrowly with an economics focused on commodity production, and
energy and resource costs. Thus, in the economy as it has been institu-
tionalized in the modern world system, it is only these two classes of
consequences, together with the variable of demand, that are reflected
in the market prices of commodities. We might say that if a set of pro-
ductive activities has the material consequences c1, C2, c3. . . cn, it is
only c1 (the commodity produced) and c2 (the resources consumed in
the production) that are considered relevant to economics, while the
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to precisely what point may have been reached at the present moment
in any particular such course under or past the threshold are of sec-
ondary import; the point is their common structure and their entail-
ment of a paradigm shift to a full world condition.
This is the general and crucial point. With the growth of an econ-
omic subsystem within a finite ecosystem, an increasing number of
thresholds will be passed where sink functions start to fail because of
the overloading of ecosystem processes, which in the empty world
economy affected the dissipation and recycling of waste. In conse-
quence, entirely unsought and unwanted habitat changes result from
activities aimed narrowly at commodity production. Some of this
damage even acts to reduce the ecosystems self-cleansing capacity fur-
ther, thereby exacerbating a vicious circle of deterioration.
2. Thus, for example, any concern they may have with regard to the conditions
of labour, the protection of local environmental reserves, or the observation
of rights in patents or property, must be conveyed by institutional means
other than markets and prices, largely through special legislation.
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The cultural dimensions of global change
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The cultural dimensions of global change
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References
GOODLAND, R.; DALY, H.; EL SERAFY, S.; VON DROSTE, B. (eds.). 1991.
Environmentally Sustainable Economic Development: Building on
Brundtland. Paris, UNESCO.
M EADOWS, D.; RANDERS, J.; BARENS, W. W. 1972. The Limits of Growth.
New York, Universe Books.
VITOUSEK , P. M.; EHRLICH, P. R.; EHRLICH, A. H.; MATSON, P. A. 1986.
Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis. Bioscience
34 (6): 368-73.
WORLD COMMISSION ON ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT . 1987. Our
Common Future (The Brundtland Report). Oxford, Oxford University
Press.
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C H A P T E R 2
Global perspectives in anthropology:
problems and prospects
Eric R. Wolf
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The cultural dimensions of global change
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The cultural dimensions of global change
may have formal aspects, but they have functions to perform in the ser-
vice of psychobiological needs or of social structural requirements. Yet
this mode of analysis still grounded its inquiry in the study of social in-
teraction as such.
We may ask, however, whether references to needs and structures
are self-evident or self-explanatory, or whether needs and structures do
not have to be explained themselves. We can make this point by con-
sidering the work of Julian Steward. Steward had developed a mode of
study he called cultural ecology, which sought explanations in the in-
teraction of groups of culture-bearers with particular microenviron-
ment.
When he launched his study of Puerto Rico in the late 1940s, how-
ever, Steward found himself confronted by a new, additional problem
that raised questions about the relation of local or regional ecosystems
to the processes generated by a transformative capitalism. Detailing
how the people of Puerto Rico drew energy from their particular habi-
tats could not of itself make it apparent that the production of various
crops might be facilitated by the island environment, but was not dic-
tated by that environment (Steward, 1956). The particular choice of
crops was governed by the operations of the capitalist market, under
the political aegis of the United States, a much wider, non-local dy-
namic.
To understand systems like that of Puerto Rico, cultural ecology
needed to come to grips with the notion that among humans certain
strategic social relations intervene between the environment and its oc-
cupants. These are what Marx called the social relations of produc-
tion, the relations that control the mobilization and deployment of
labour in societys transformation of nature. Marx argued that these
relations generate forces that do not stop at the confines of particular
social scenarios, but reach through and beyond them. The Marxists
also argued that since these modes of control had not existed for all
times, but had a history, historical inquiry could produce an under-
standing of their development. The vicissitudes of contemporary
politics now threaten to submerge these insights, but a global anthro-
pology would neglect them at its peril.
This lesson was brought home to anthropology in the late 1950s
when social scientists especially in Latin America began to address
the issue of power differentials between entire societies, regions and
communities, and of the people within them. This questioning initially
took the form of dependency theory, which tried to address the
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The cultural dimensions of global change
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ico border zone; more recently Ulf Hannerz (1987) has spoken of the
cultural creolization in the world, drawing the term creole from the
simplified and composite languages that grew up to facilitate cross-cul-
tural communication within the advancing world system of the recent
centuries.
Today we are all pocho or creoles, though we must ask what that
really means. Raised in a tradition in which all elements of a culture
were thought of as tightly interrelated, either functionally or structu-
rally, we anthropologists are ill-prepared for situations in which
cultural repertoires appear to be put together contextually, like tinker
toys and unlike any embodied forms of a unitary vision. We are all
heirs to ways of thinking about cultures, especially those of the so-
called primitive world, as totalities or organisms in which all aspects
dovetailed or were embedded in each other and were given compre-
hensive meaning through a common sign-system dramatized in myth
and ritual. Maybe even the classical anthropological cultures on
which we cut our eye-teeth were never like this, but were rather held
together by organizing processes of power, control and influence that
promised support in exchange for conformity and threatened loss of
that support for non-performance.
If so much of present-day cultural learning depends upon situation
and context, how do the resulting assemblages acquire an organized
coherence? One way in which this issue is being raised in anthropology
today is through the concern with identity, whether identity be defined
as that of the person, of an ethnic group, or of an entire nation. But
identities are not given, they are made. If definitions of identity involve
characterizations of attributes and a drawing of boundaries around the
units so defined in contrast to other units, this must have a causal con-
text. Moreover, we know that the search for identity varies histori-
cally, intensifying or slackening over time. Thus, there was a major rise
in the demand for identity with the advent of the nation-state and the
collateral development of nationalism, which hoped to create a unified
and identifiable people out of diverse populations with identities of
their own. Now the demand for identities has risen once again, pre-
cisely as people are responding to changes in the social division of la-
bour, in their relation to governments, in reaction to new modes of
communication, and as their cultural repertoires are becoming more
heterogeneous.
These repertoires of cultural understanding and practices do not
easily fit any traditional notion of culture as an integrated set of forms
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References
DE LA FUENTE, J. 1948. Cambios Socioculturales en Mxico. Acta Antro-
polgica (Mexico City) 3 (4).
F RANK, A. G. 1966. The Development of Underdevelopment. Monthly
Review (New York) 8 (4): 17-31.
FRIEDRICH, P. 1979. The Symbol and its Relative Non-Arbitrariness. In:
A. S. Dil (ed.), Language, Context and the Imagination: Essays by Paul
Friedrich, 161, Stanford, Stanford University Press.
HANNERZ, U. 1987, The World in Creolization. Africa (London) 57 (4):
546-59.
LVI-STRAUSS , C. 1966. The Savage Mind. London, Weidenfeld & Nicol-
son.
MALINOWSKI, B. 1935. Coral Gardens and their Magic. Vol. 2, Part 4: An
Ethnographic Theory of Language and Some Practical Corollaries. New
York, American Book Company.
PALERM, A. 1974, 1976, 1977. Historia de la Etnologa. Mexico City, SEP-
INAH (3 vols.).
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C H A P T E R 3
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that the liberal state is entitled to assert its rights in practice and
even go as far as mobilizing its citizens in defence of them. Neverthe-
less, we must accept that he also recognized values that transcend
individual cultures and for which reason should be enshrined in the
Declaration of Human Rights and hence be universally valid. The
fact that Herskovits failed to look more deeply into this highly ethi-
cal issue trapped him in his own contradictions. It is as if anthropol-
ogy, as an independent discipline, has been unable to research
thoroughly the issue using its own resources, irrespective of Her-
skovitss ideological position. Almost half a century later, we need
ask whether we have come any closer to resolving this contradiction
(or other similar ones). I think the best approach is to draw on
other disciplines especially philosophy. I shall not try to address
philosophical matters like the final justification (Letzbegrndung) of
moral standards or the meaning of the rationality/irrationality an-
tithesis of moral norms from a scientific standpoint. This also means
avoiding the naturalist fallacy, in other words, not confusing em-
pirical propositions about what is with moral propositions about
what ought to be. These issues, though important, like so many
others associated with philosophical inquiry, must not deflect us
from the substantive matter under investigation. I contend that, al-
though borrowing from a related discipline, I can in anthropological
terms demonstrate that morality is not an irreducible phenomenon.
On two occasions (Cardoso de Oliveira, 1990a, 1990b), I have
already resorted to the traditional critical hermeneutics treatment of
morality as exemplified by authors like Karl-Otto Apel and Jrgen
Habermas. Although there are differences in their approaches, they
are not relevant to the matter I intend to address. To simplify, I
shall use Habermass expression discursive ethics to describe
roughly the line of reasoning I shall adopt, at least initially. I shall
merely set forth a number of concepts which, for the purposes of this
discussion, I consider central to discursive ethics. But first it must be
clear that any attempt to reduce anything to discursive ethics would
be a gross oversimplification, since the whole theory is in a flux and
is fraught with controversy. For the time being, let us see what we
can usefully derive from a work like the anthology entitled The
Communicative Ethics Controversy (Benhabib and Dallmayr, 1990)
published in the United States, with contributions from both Apel
and Habermas as well as their critics. Firstly, it is essential for us,
as anthropologists, to distinguish between custom (conventions),
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tween the two (cf. Simmel, 1950: 100).2 The interlacing dynamics of
this continuum, the very fact that custom oscillates between two
poles, demonstrates that these three societal dimensions not only
can be, but must be, considered distinct from one another. Thus we
can establish the difference pointed out between custom and mo-
rality and identify reason as an essential operator in the latter.
Therefore we can apply this distinction in our consideration of mor-
ality in our field of study.
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The cultural dimensions of global change
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level, a couple could have no more than three children. Once the prac-
tice had become established, it was going to be difficult to eradicate
even after a dramatic fall in population which at the time we were con-
ducting the fieldwork stood at a mere fifty-four individuals! In the end,
the missionaries, thanks to a few initiatives of which there are various
recorded versions persuaded the indigenous group to abandon in fan-
ticide,3 Communicative interaction of a very positive kind was brought
to bear within the local interethnic system made up of the missionaries
and the Indians and bearing the hallmark of democratic sociability.
Wagley and I observed a genuine community of communication (as I
now interpret what I then saw) between the two groups. None of the
usual repressive and authoritarian mechanisms associated with
missionaries was in evidence. It is true to say that the Little Sisters of
Jesus Mission was directly responsible for skilfully putting forward
pertinent arguments in favour of doing away with infanticide. Whether
or not this was fully achieved is irrelevant. Wagley has his doubts. He
claimed not to be at all sure whether there were more cases of infan-
ticide after the nuns persuaded the Tapirap to break the rules con-
cerning family size. He preferred to doubt that infanticide had
completely disappeared despite the fact that the nuns kept a careful
watch over pregnant women (Wagley, 1977). Although missionary in-
tervention upon deliverance may not have been totally effective, this
does not detract from its ethical meaning (from the nuns point of view
they had fulfilled their duty to preserve life). Nor does it diminish its
moral sense (to eliminate from the indigenous culture a habit which the
sisters felt jeopardized a good and upright existence. They attached the
highest value to the individual, while the Tapirap clearly placed the
community above all other values). Two moralities amenable to ex-
change through persuasive dialogue, in other words, by dint of rea-
soned argument.
In analysing this event, we have an opportunity both to explore
a clash of moral values (the relative value of an individual life to the
3. There are at least two versions of these inducements; one I took down
in 1957 (Cardoso de Oliveira, 1959: 10) and another by Cecilia Roxo Wa-
gley, collected in 1965 (Wagley, 1977: 136, n. 64). Granted there are a few
discrepancies between them, but they both confirm the part played by the
missionaries in eliminating Tapirap infanticide through dialogue. Is it then
fair to say that we have at work here something akin to an ethical discourse
or quasi-discourse? Perhaps we shall be able to verify this later.
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value divergences can have far more serious consequences and affect
not only individuals but the whole population. Unfortunately, there
are always numerous examples in casework; many will spring to the
readers mind.
Let me go back to the work of religious missions (Catholic and
Protestant) with indigenous peoples aimed at having them behave ac-
cording to the principles of Christian morality. The case of the Salesian
Mission and the Borro Indians illustrates my earlier argument. The
Salesians forced the Borro to get rid of their communal houses for
fear that these were conducive to the sin of incest. The missionaries
thus revealed their inability to understand that the Indians would
never violate clan incest rules. This reversal of tribal culture interfered
with the circular organization of their villages and hence their symbolic
parameters of social organization and their cosmology. The Christian
morality that permeated missionary policy no doubt prevented the
missionaries from learning about a different, equally good and up-
right, lifestyle from the Borro. The poetic ethnography of Levi-
Strauss (1955) illustrates the moral content of this lifestyle. He warns:
The Borro society has a lesson for the moralist. He must listen to in-
digenous informants. As they did with me, they described the dance
representation in which each moiety of the village is compelled to live
and breathe through the other moiety, each for the other. They ex-
change their women, goods and services with fervent mutual care, their
sons and daughters intermarry, and they bury one anothers dead,
each moiety reassuring the other that life is eternal, the world secure
and society just. To confirm these truths and support their beliefs, their
sages drew up a magnificent cosmology. They had integrated it into
the planning of their villages and the design of their houses.
All that the monks achieved was to destroy their way of life and bring
about the breakdown of Borro society.
It would not be hard to cite dozens of cases that testify to intereth-
nic confrontation where moral assumptions and ethnic duties have
done untold damage, sometimes with the best of intentions. The short-
sighted way in which the Salesians changed the Borro cultural order,
thinking that they were doing their duty, marks the limits of the reli-
gious missionary mode of action. Nowadays, they are considered
ultra-conservative. True, the Catholic Church in Latin America, en-
couraged by liberation theology, is eager to change its style and draw
on very different ethics, and hence a different conception of duty as is
now evident in CIMI. It is clear that the lines of demarcation have
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References
APEL, K.-O. 1985. El a priori de la comunidad de comunicacin y los fun-
damentos de la tica. La Transformacin de la Filosofia 2. Madrid,
Tauros Ediciones.
BENHABIB, S.; DALLMAYR , F. (eds.). 1990. The Communicative Ethics Con-
troversy. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
BIDNEY, D. 1954. The Concept of Value in Modem Anthropology. In:
A. L. Kroeber (cd.), Anthropology Today. An Encyclopedic Inventory,
2nd cd.: 68299. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
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C H A P T E R 4
Is the West the mirror or the mirage
of the evolution of humankind?
Reelections on the process of Westernization of the world
and its links with the development of anthropology
Maurice Godelier
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Is the West the mirror or the mirage of the evolution of humankind?
its scientific core by refocusing its analyses and concepts away from
certain dominant representations in the West, while, on the other
hand, it led to the construction in Ancient Society (1877) of a specula-
tive vision of the history of humankind that is portrayed as having
travelled down a long road from primitive savagery and barbarity to
ultimate civilization (Morgan, 1963). This view, naturally, first estab-
lished itself in Western Europe, and subsequently in Anglo-Saxon, re-
publican and democratic America. Once again, Europe and North
America operated as the mirror and yardstick of the development of
humankind. Be that as it may, we shall come back later to the nature
of the break made by Morgan, which enables him to give a partially
scientific status to anthropology.
Let us first go back to this central, global and twofold process
which, on the one hand, is reflected by the worldwide expansion of the
West and, on the other hand, by the gradual Westernization of the rest
of the world under the direct or indirect influence of the West.
This global process, which had begun before 1492, was both con-
tinuous and discontinuous, diverse and similar and, as it went on for
five centuries, it inevitably changed in form and in effect according to
the times and according to the countries that at some time or other
were at the forefront of the West (England, France, Holland and
Spain) and according to the societies ruled by this process. What is
fundamental, however, is the fact that the transformations so induced
became gradually irreversible, both for the West and for the rest of the
world. Roughly speaking, three distinct eras can be identified in the
gradual formation of the capitalist West.
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the prelude, the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries the early stages and, from the mid-nine-
teenth century onwards, in some countries, the system had already
begun to blossom. Western Europe and the United States of America
became the permanent centres of the continuous expansion of this type
of economy and society and, in relation to this centre, the rest of the
world became divided into several peripheries which were, to varying
degrees, remote from the centre and subordinated to it. The initial pe-
riphery of the West was within Europe itself, namely Central and East-
ern Europe. The other peripheries were firstly those peoples that the
West had directly colonized, but a distinction must be made between the
colonies that were populated by the Europeans and those that they were
content with subjecting to their rule without actually populating them.
It is quite clear that the effects could not be the same on tribal
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The cultural dimensions of global change
societies of Africa and New Guinea, which had never been integrated
within a pre-colonial state or on societies, whether tribal or not, which
were already an integral part of multi-ethnic states such as the Aztec or
Inca empires. In Europe, tribal society had already disappeared long
before, except perhaps for a few vestiges still to be found in Albania or in
the Caucasus. What had not disappeared, however, were ethnic groups.
Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that an ethnic group in New
Guinea is not quite the same thing as an ethnic group in Europe.
However, before analysing the Westernization of the world, we must
provide ourselves with a definition of what the West is today. What are
the fundamental components which, when linked and combined in the
West, may be dissociated and recombined with other forms of social
and cultural reality in other parts of the world? In my view, the West, as
in the case of any form of society, is a mixture of what is real and what
is imaginary, of facts and standards and of material products and ways
of thinking that now makeup a formidable field of activity which, at the
same time, has powers of attraction over other societies. This energy is
drawn from four different sources and focuses around four different
axes, four institutional systems, each of which possesses its own logic,
values and symbols. Today, the West is a combination of:
1. The market economy, though not any sort of market economy, but
rather an economy based on the capitalist system that presupposes
the private ownership of the means of production and money;
which is driven by the transformation of money into capital and
has, as its aim, the enhancement of such capital, that is to say, the
accumulation of profit. All this is achieved through competition be-
tween producers and between consumers.
2. Industrialized mass production of producer and consumer goods,
means of communication and of destruction. This mass production
presupposes the continuous application to industry of the dis-
coveries of the natural sciences and information sciences.
3. Parliamentary democracy combined with a multiparty system.
4. Lastly, the ideology of human rights, as the case may be, has re-
placed or supplemented Christianity. Up until the end of the nine-
teenth century, the countries of the West, namely Europe and
North America, claimed to have provided civilization with the
true religion, that of Christ. Today, Christianity is no longer an
affair of state for those countries and the charter that they now
share is that of human rights which also serves as a reference for
that of the United Nations.
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once they had been colonized, they had increasingly to pay for what
they wanted in Western currency.
Lastly, and this is perhaps the aspect of Westernization that is most
difficult to analyse, it would seem that a non-Western society could be
considered as virtually Westernized once, not content with giving itself
a parliamentary regime, it referred openly to the Declaration of
Human Rights as a universal standard which it strove to apply. It
should be remembered, so that there may be no ambiguity or contra-
diction in what I have to say, that the Declaration of Human Rights in
Europe was the fruit of a gigantic struggle against serfdom and servi-
tude under the earlier feudal regimes, and that it constituted an im-
mense popular victory whereby people could think, act and express
themselves without being arrested by the royal police and imprisoned.
The Declaration of Human Rights will undoubtedly continue for a
long time to exercise a liberating influence on the world. However, as
in the case of any abstract text, the Declaration maybe used in another
historical context with quite different intentions.
It will be recalled that this declaration, born as it was in the West,
did not limit itself to demanding similar political rights for all citizens
of a given state. It also asserted, in abstract terms, that any individual,
regardless of sex or social status, should enjoy in society rights equal to
those of others, namely the right to think, speak and act freely.
The Declaration of Human Rights may therefore be seen as the ul-
timate standard that all societies worldwide have to implement in
order to ensure that their citizens enjoy development and freedom.
Consequently, it serves to some extent as a definition of the true na-
ture of man and of what in the nature of man transcends all cultural
and historical differences.
Therein lies a definition that must be adhered to in the name of pro-
gress and can serve to measure the degree of progress achieved in
various cultures and societies on a global human scale. At the top of
this scale, it will hardly be surprising to find the peoples of the West,
who were the authors of the Declaration of Human Rights. The true
nature of man is therefore likely to play the same part as that of the
former obligation imposed on all peoples of the earth to recognize
Christianity as the true religion.
By this political use of the Declaration of Human Rights, the West
appears once again as the mirror in which is reflected and whereby is
measured the degree of development of all societies that make up hu-
mankind.
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became aware of the fact that the immense empirical diversity of the
terminologies of kinship represented as many variations in a limited
number of fundamental types of organization of the terminology of
kinship, contemporary types which, after Murdock, we have called
Hawaiian, Eskimo, Dravidian, and so forth. These discoveries
were of fundamental importance as they enabled a number of hypo-
theses to be put forward, namely that relations of kinship form the
basis of a system, that the empirical diversity of such relations can be
reduced to a number of major types and that change affecting relations
of kinship is not completely the result of coincidence but displays cer-
tain patterns of regularity.
At the time, in view of the manner in which science was popularly
perceived, it was thought that, subsequently, something amounting to
laws would be discovered beneath these patterns of regularity, similar
to the laws that govern nature itself.
It is clear that the break with the ethnography of missionaries was
the result of a refocusing of ethnological analysis in relation to the
thought patterns and social reality of the West.
After Morgan, Western systems of kinship, of a cognitive type,
could no longer be seen as other than particular cases of the human ex-
perience of kinship, forms of kinship with their own logic, which ad-
mittedly distinguished them from others that were more exotic but in
which a specific logic had also to be recognized. After Morgan, it was
now possible to ask the question as to what a father is. What is pater-
nity in societies in which individuals use the term father to designate
a whole range of men who may even belong to generations younger
than their own? Furthermore, it was also possible to ask whether the
European concept of consanguinity, the idea that an individual
shares the blood of his father and his mother, had a universal meaning.
This is certainly not the case in many matrilinear societies in which a
mans sperm is considered to play no part in the conception of a child.
Let us turn again to Morgan who, after having given ethnology a
new purpose, new methods and initial scientific results, then endeav-
oured to use what he had discovered to construct in his Ancient Society
a speculative vision of the evolution of humankind in which the latter
was observed moving through the phases of savagery, barbarism and
civilization, leaving traces at each stage of some of the types of kinship
that he had highlighted in his previous work, Systems of Consanguinity
and Affinity of the Human Family (1853). Once again, the West became
the mirror and measure of the development of humankind.
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The lesson and moral of this story are therefore quite clear. An-
thropology can only exist and develop as a scientific discipline by
methodically moving off-centre not only in relation to the West but
also in relation to all standard cultural environments to which anthro-
pologists belong by birth or education. The theoretical analysis of cul-
tures also belongs of course to a particular culture. It is, however, a
culture induced by scientific practice subjected to criteria and methods
of verification and which pursues objectives that have nothing to do
with the criteria and objectives of spontaneous cultural environments
embedded in the functioning of historical societies.
As an illustration, let us take the example of myths. Not so long
ago, a theory was put forward in the West according to which society
can be reduced to a game with three players: the market, the state and
the individual, while religion, art and other aspects of culture can be
seen as expressions of private domains, whether or not shared by indi-
viduals and the exercise of which is guaranteed by human rights. More
recently, another theory attempted to reduce this triad to a dyad. The
idea was put forward quite seriously that a further step could be taken
and that all collective responsibilities assumed by the state could be
privatized. Society would be no more than the sum of individuals com-
peting with each other in a vast market of goods and services in order
to satisfy their needs and desires. Naturally, this vision was based, as
the previous one, on the idea that was never brought into question
whereby all needs and all the means of satisfying them can be measured
in terms of money. It also presupposed even more fundamentally that
everything in the social domain could be the subject of trade.
It is not too difficult to see that such theories are merely myths
and mirages, as not everything can be the subject of trade in the social
domain, nor can social relationships be reduced to the sum of con-
tracts negotiated and agreements entered into between individuals.
Such representations of society and the individual are myths
which, as such, reveal something of the social order in the West and
capture in an illusory way the aspirations that stem from the depths of
that order. Consequently, these theories operate not only as myths but
also as mirages.
According to this utilitarian vision, the individual has become a
being without any particular cultural content, sexless, an abstract
operator possessing the illusory power of buying and selling all his re-
lationships with others both within the market and within the state ac-
cording to the principle of what he understands his interests to be. It is
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Reference
MORGAN, L. H. 1963. Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human
Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877).
Ed. by Eleanor Burke Leacock. (Reprint of 1877 edition.) Cleve-
land/New York, World Publishing Co.
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C H A P T E R 5
Living with ethnicity:
the need for a new paradigm
David Maybury-Lewis
The Cold War is over. As little as a decade ago, the prospect of an end
to the nuclear stand-off between the superpowers would have occa-
sioned a combination of disbelief and rejoicing. Now that it has ac-
tually happened, it seems to have generated remarkably little
excitement. Even in Germany, where a kind of mass euphoria accom-
panied the tearing-down of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of the
country, the mood now seems to be one of sour disappointment and
dissatisfaction.
Much of this present anxiety stems, it seems, from a general feeling
that, although the world may not be on the brink of nuclear annihila-
tion, it remains a chaotic, violent and now not even predictable place.
It is as if we have awoken from the nuclear nightmare to find our worst
fears realized in terms of ethnic conflict and internecine warfare. The
dreadful happenings in the former Yugoslavia are only one example
among many of ethnic strife. The prevalence and savagery of these con-
flicts are being taken in the West to confirm our conventional wisdom
that ethnicity is a pernicious element in human affairs which sensible
people and rational states should try to abolish, or at least to mini-
mize.
The Enlightenment tradition of Western political thought empha-
sizes the state as the rational and progressive matrix of human social or-
ganization. In fact Rousseau argued in The Social Contract that the
state should represent the general will of the people who, in an egalitar-
ian society, deal as equals with the state that represents them. Since
Rousseaus time, Western political thought has tended to focus on this
civic conception of the state as the most desirable form of social or-
ganization, especially when it was thought of as the vehicle for a single
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6. See, for example, the essays in Urban and Scherzer, 1991; especially May-
bury-Lewis, On Becoming Indian in Lowland South America.
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7. See the special issue of The Times Literary Supplement (16 July 1993) con-
taining Gellners article on the future of social anthropology.
8. This point was made over and over again in the essays in Maybury-Lewis,
1984a; see especially Despres, 1984, and Maybury-Lewis, 1984b.
9. See especially his introductory paper, The Dialectics of Cultural Pluralism:
Concept and Reality.
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the hopes of the rationalists writing at the time of the French Revolu-
tion. They hoped that the states of the future would be informed by
liberal values and that in them citizens would interact on an equal foot-
ing, regardless of ethnic identity. In Peter Worsleys (1984) terms this
was the uniform mode of the state and it is still the ideal in much of the
world. More common, however, is the hegemonic mode, in which only
one ethnic identity is acknowledged as legitimate for the state. The
state is thus taken to correspond with a nation, possessing a singular
ethnic identity. Those who do not, or may not, subscribe to this iden-
tity become second-class citizens. West Europeans have all along been
aware of their difficult struggles to co-ordinate states with nations 10
and they have now realized that they still have to deal with this unfin-
ished business. Their nations do not conform to the civic conception of
the uniform state, but are more frequently defined in terms of manipul-
able symbolic systems of inclusion and exclusion. The spectre of ethnic
cleansing haunts the continent, not only in Bosnia and other parts of
Eastern Europe, where it is carried out in its most brutal forms, but
elsewhere. Anxiety over outsiders, discrimination and even violence
against them is widespread, although such violence has received most
attention in Germany and France, where the outsiders attacked have
often been fellow-citizens.
The Americas have by contrast been historically the classic region
of melting-pot societies.People of all nationalities were encouraged
to emigrate to the American republics and were even permitted to re-
tain their ethnic attachments to their own kind after doing so, pro-
vided that these ethnicities were clearly understood to be secondary to
the dominant culture of the state to which they had come. The major
exceptions were the Indians, who had always been there, and Blacks
who had been brought there against their will. Both these categories
were historically excluded from citizenship at the same time as system-
atic efforts were made to destroy their sense of ethnic identity. Later
they were urged to abandon their ethnicity and to merge into the main-
stream, even though most of them met rejection and discrimination
when they tried to.
Those American countries that had large indigenous populations
10. On this question, see Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Seton-Watson, 1977;
Smith, 1971, 1981; and especially Hobsbawm, 1990.
11. My argument in these paragraphs on the Americas has been published in
extended form in Maybury-Lewis, 1993.
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12. Especially since, as I edit this paper in the aftermath of the Zapatista up-
rising in the state of Chiapas in January 1994, the government negotiators
with the rebels seem unwilling to concede to them the local autonomy for
indigenous groups that they are demanding.
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Living with ethnicity: the need for a new paradigm
then their demands are too threatening to be met. If they are not so
numerous, their demands can safely be ignored.
So it was thought in Canada, where indigenous demands to be rec-
ognized as distinct societies within the Canadian Federation were rou-
tinely ignored. The policy however was one of the factors that
destroyed the Conservative administration of Prime Minister Mulro-
ney. He had succeeded in drafting a new constitution for Canada,
which he hoped would go some way to healing the rift between Eng-
lish-speaking Canadians and the French-speaking population of Que-
bec. The new constitution, recognizing Quebec as a distinct society
within Canada, having its own laws and customs, had to be ratified by
all the provincial legislatures before it became law. All the legislatures
save two had ratified it, but the constitution finally failed in the legisla-
ture of Manitoba, where a provincial member of parliament, an
Ojibwa-Cree Indian by the name of Elijah Harper, used the parliamen-
tary procedures of the house to prevent ratification. He refused to vote
for a constitution granting the Province of Quebec special status
within Canada as a distinct society, when similar requests from Ca-
nadas indigenous peoples had never been taken seriously.
In spite of this somewhat depressing summary of the treatment of in-
digenous rights in the Americas, this region of the world is currently
considered to be somewhat fortunate compared with continents such as
Africa and Asia. Gurr (1993) points out that there is less ethnic violence
in the Americas than in Africa and Asia, and Horowitz (1985) suggests
that this is because many countries of Africa and Asia are still struggling
with their post-colonial heritage. In this connection it is worth stressing
that the Americas were colonized at the very beginning of European ex-
pansion. Colonialism in the Americas is the oldest of the European co-
lonialism and, from the point of view of American Indians, it is one that
still continues. The history of European and later post-European rule in
the Americas has been punctuated by constant conflict between the in-
digenous inhabitants and the invaders. If we are to compare levels of
ethnic conflict in the Americas with those in other colonized continents,
then the longer time span would need to be taken into account.
It is certainly true however that the recently decolonized areas of
Africa and Asia are particularly subject to ethnic conflict at present.13
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ity.14 Second, India demonstrates once again that the liberal state is
vulnerable to ethnic conflict, if it either ignores or suppresses eth-
nicity. Third, India shows yet again the fearful consequences that
ensue once ethnicity becomes politicized.
The potential for the political manipulation of ethnicity is present
in all but a very few homogeneous states. In a country such as India,
huge, diverse and with millennial traditions of cleavage as well as ac-
commodation, the potential is an ever-present danger, waiting only for
the right circumstances when unscrupulous politicians would seek to
inflame ethnic animosities for their own advantage.
Such manipulation may also be international. States have always
tried to exploit the internal dissensions of their enemies. After the de-
feat of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires in the
First World War, a patchwork of new states was created in Europe
and the Near East. The boundaries of these states were drawn to grant
self-determination to the ethnic majorities within them. Since the new
states also inevitably contained other ethnic groups, the status and le-
gitimacy of the minorities became an issue, which the Nazis exploited
quite cynically in preparation for the Second World War. Now, with
globalization proceeding rapidly, everything from business to employ-
ment, from politics to ethnicity is more and more affected by interna-
tional forces. The international manipulation of ethnicity by
co-religionists, terrorists and governments is becoming the rule rather
than the exception. Tambiah (1986) has written about this in a reflec-
tion on his own ravaged country of origin, Sri Lanka.
In this connection, the contrast between Malaysia and Sri Lanka is
instructive. Both of them are bipolar states. In Malaysia the Chinese
and the Malays comprise the two major ethnic blocs, as do the Sin-
halese and the Tamils in Sri Lanka. Horowitz describes15 how a com-
bination of chance events and careful political management
enabled UMNO, the Alliance party in Malaysia, to appeal successfully
to a multi-ethnic constituency, cutting across the major cleavage in
Malaysia. In Sri Lanka, by contrast, different circumstances and differ-
ent ethnic arrangements made it advantageous for politicians to run on
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Living with ethnicity: the need for a new paradigm
References
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Spread of Nationalism. London, Verso Editions.
BARTH, F. (cd.). 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Boston, Little Brown.
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DESPRES, L. 1984. Ethnicity: What Data and Theory Portend for Plural
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cieties. Washington, D. C., American Ethnological Society.
ENLOE, C. 1973. Ethnic Conflict and Political Development. Boston, Little
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KAMENKA, E. 1973. Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea.
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1984b. Introduction: Alternatives to Extinction. The Prospects
for Plural Societies. Washington, D. C., American Ethnological
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1984c. Living in Leviathan. The Prospects for Plural Societies.
Washington, D. C., American Ethnological Society.
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SCHLESINGER JR, A. 1991. The Disuniting of America. New York,
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C H A P T E R 6
Lourdes Arizpe
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Scale and interaction in cultural processes:
towards an anthropological perspective of global change
5. Headed by Javier Prez de Cu11ar, its members are Claude Ake, Yoro Fall,
Kurt Furgler, Celso Furtado, Niki Goulandris, Mahbub ul Haq, Elisabeth
Jelin, Angeline Kamba, Ole-Henrik Magga, Nikita Mikhalkov, Chic Na-
kane, LeilaTakla, Elie Wiesel and the author of this chapter, Lourdes Arizpe.
6. S. Huntington, The Clash of Cultures, Foreign Affairs, March 1993.
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The cultural dimensions of global change
Cultural thresholds
In the mass media it has become commonplace to refer to the Microelec-
tronic Revolution, the Third Wave or the New Age to establish a tech-
nological and social boundary that divides our present era.
Anthropology should ask whether this is an expected fin-de-sicle phe-
nomenon or whether a new civilizational era is beginning. We know of
the intricacies of periodization and of the term civilization, so I suggest
we begin, more modestly, by asking about the nature and direction of
certain cultural and social thresholds that have been observed.
Population thresholds certainly have implications for the human
cultural future. Other than the magic of the psychologically resonant
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The cultural dimensions of global change
having received 7.3 million legal and 2.7 million illegal immigrants. Be-
tween 1980 and 1992, Western Europe as a whole received some 15 mil-
lion immigrants, while the Persian Gulf States received 5.1 million. 10
A significant feature of such migratory flows is that the amount of
remittances sent back home by migrants, estimated at $66 billion
in 1989, is higher than the total amount of international development
aid for that year (i.e. $46 billion). Since so many of the migrants come
from low-income, rural, many times indigenous communities, such
economic flows also alter any economic analysis carried out in tradi-
tional anthropological community research.
All forecasts indicate that such international migratory flows, pre-
dominantly South to North, and South to South are set to increase in
the near future. Boat people are no longer a feature of Asia alone, but
of the Caribbean and the Mediterranean as well. Needless to say, in
cultural terms, such massive population shifts, coupled with the expan-
sion of the mass media and telecommunications, will completely alter
cultural patterns, behaviour and generational forms of cultural trans-
mission. They are also leading to new phenomena such as that of the
traveling cultures in the Pacific.
For some time now, internal migrations have also been shattering
traditional cultural maps. A United Nations estimate based on census
data of the 1960s and 1970s shows that 33 per cent of the rural popula-
tion increase in Africa and Asia and 58 per cent in Latin America were
lost to migration or to reclassification of rural settlements as urban
ones. Although in absolute numbers the rural population is still the
majority on a global scale, the trends towards the year 2025 indicate
that most of the population will be living in urban settings by then.
Again, this unprecedented geographical mobility of Homo sapiens
in such numbers marks a threshold in history which anthropologists
cannot ignore, especially given the centrality of culture in ethnic and
nationalistic conflicts, and the unequal development accompanying
emigration in the region of origin and the xenophobia attitudes accom-
panying it at the receiving end.
Given these historical thresholds, I would contend that, if we are to
continue to use the analytical tool of culture, we must recognize atheo-
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12 Ibid., p. 16.
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Scale and interaction in cultural processes:
towards an anthropological perspective of global change
13. The original Atlas Narodov Mira was published in 1964 in Moscow. An
English translation was published in 1965 by V. G. Telberg, New York,
Telberg.
14. R. Spencer and E. Johnson, Atlas for Anthropology. New York, William
Brown, 1960.
15. D. Price, Atlas of World Cultures: A Geographical Guide to Ethnographic
Literature, p. 8, London, Sage Publications, 1990.
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The cultural dimensions of global change
Never in their cultural histories had there been such rules, and this
necessitated a rapid revision of their cultural elements to put it into
perspective.
Such a field situation also required a different field approach, be-
ginning with the fact that the research team had to be multidiscipli-
nary. Communities had settled in the rain-forest in the 1980s with
immigrants from all over Mexico and their diverse cultural back-
grounds: Indian, mestizo, northern and even urban backgrounds.
Land allotments by the Agrarian Reform Programme provided the
only organizational structure in the communities, although extended
family ties and loyalties to ethnic groups soon began to stratify them.
In cultural terms the only divide that exists is that between Indians and
mestizos, but each of these groups is also highly fragmented except in
the case of the few monocultural Lacandn and Chol communities.
Hence, the traditional anthropological tools focusing on cultural
traits, values or culturemes could not be applied to this situation. After
a period of exploration, we decided to use the term social perceptions.
This was chiefly because the ban on tree-cutting was so recent that
farmers were only beginning to grope for socially negotiated reactions
to it. Notably, the only instance which we found of a conceptualization
being put in place was when some local people used the method of
backtracking to religion to come up with a ready-made-but-applic-
able-to-reinforcing-a-new-concept of the nature of nature. For the
most part, when we were in the field, local people were simply trying to
grapple with the problem of how to perceive what this thing about de-
forestation is, in the words of Higinio Ortiz.
Interestingly, one of the salient features of this process was that
people in the communities began to speak in terms of their own local-
ism vis--vis the international community, whereas previously their
outside frame of reference had always been national. Different occupa-
tional and ethnic groups had different ways of dealing with this new
perception.
Local ranchers, some of whose forebears had sold bananas or other
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tropical fruits on the international market, and who now sell their beef
on the meat market in central Mexico, had no difficulty in under-
standing the challenges of the world situation. Luis Pedrero, a de-
scendant of a prosperous export-oriented ranching family in Las
Mercedes, when asked what the future of Mexico would be like,
answered: Well, not too good, but not of Mexico but of the whole
community, of the whole world. . . . What is needed is culture and
knowledge. Otherwise we will destroy the world.
Nor do the people living in the town of Palenque have any difficulty
understanding the links of the local to the outside world. However, since
they are far removed from the problems of deforestation their region
was deforested in the 1960s they are not concerned so much with glo-
bal change problems (though some of them repeat what they hear on
television about the ozone hole) as with the more traditional frame-
work of international relations. Miguel Hernandez, a night watchman,
when asked the same question about Mexicos future, said:
I see the future of the world as going badly. Governments are taking
each other by the hand, but the moment one of them gets angry,
theyre going to start shooting. Theres a lot of violence in Central
America, we must be ready for the future, to see whats going to hap-
pen. In the common market industrialized countries take the best, they
take advantage.
Although starting out from different viewpoints, the same reliance on
previous frameworks of international relations was found in other oc-
cupational groups in Palenque. Local government officials, discussing
international matters, immediately set the discussion in the framework
of sovereignty:
What happened in Marques all has to do with sovereignty. First they
began to colonize Palestina and Corozal during the regime of Echever-
ria; then, beginning in 1978, along the Lacantm river, the ejidos on the
eastern banks; but in 1980/81, the government-driven colonization
went along the banks of the Chixoy river, to [the ejidos] Roberto Bar-
rios, Flor de Cacao and Quetzalcoatl. There they got all the help they
needed with mechanical saws, a years corn and so on. It was all due to
the Guatemala undocumented migrants that pushed out Mexican ag-
ricultural labourers. More people came in and decided to go to the
ejidos along the border: Nuevo Orizaba . . Boca de Chajul. It all had
to do with defending national sovereignty.
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24. The term americano in many parts of Latin America is used generally for
anyone living in the New World, as it was used in colonial times. In con-
trast, citizens of the United States are called norteamericanos or estadou-
nidenses or are referred to by the handy term gringos.
25. Note that his interview was made in the summer of 1991, after the fall of
the Berlin Wall.
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Scale and interaction in cultural processes:
towards an anthropological perspective of global change
worse over there, the Mexican Government has to protect us; it [the
Government] must take this into account because we are defending
our land.
Among Indians the question of national sovereignty is rarely men-
tioned and the framework of international or global matters is practi-
cally absent. Their main concern is their treatment by ladinos and the
national government. In the rain-forest communities, Chol, Tzeltal
and Tojolabal migrants tend to live among themselves although they
share community grounds with the mestizos. A special case is that of
the Lacandn Indians, descendants of the Maya who have lived in the
rain-forest for millennia. Both groups of Lacandn, those of Metzabok
and those of Naj, have a clear idea of international links because they
have had such contacts through the lifelong work of Gertrude Duby,
an admirable advocate of the preservation of the forest and of the La-
candn culture.
Social perceptions about local/global links among these different
groups in the region were influenced in the beginning of the 1990s by
several events. First, by visits of high officials from international in-
stitutions World Bank, FAO, organizations such as Conservation
International and others. Second, by a much talked-about visit by an
official from the World Bank who actually arrived by helicopter to the
heart of the Marqus de Comillas area the World Bank is funding
several sustainable agriculture programmes, including a rubber plan-
tation and reforestation schemes. Previously, only the state governor
and the President, or officials at similar levels were regarded as heli-
copter travelers. With this visit a new level of reference was clearly es-
tablished in local peoples minds, and with a handy name attached:
Washington.
In 1991 a newspaper article appeared in one of the major Mexican
newspapers signed by the president of the Grupo de los Cien (Group
of One Hundred), an international environmentalist group headed by
Mexican writers and artists, directly accusing farmers in the Lacandn
rain-forest of destroying the forest resources. At a farmers meeting, as
the article was being read aloud, the farmers cursed, spat and were
ready to challenge the writer to a fist fight. Speaking to them later on,
it was clear that they had begun to perceive that a national group had
made an alliance with the international environmentalists and that this
coalition was bent on taking away their trees and/or livelihoods.
To arrive at a comparative view of such perceptions among differ-
ent groups in the region, a survey was conducted in which 13.4 per cent
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The cultural dimensions of global change
Summary
To sum up, research in the Lacandn rain-forest showed why and how
local people are beginning to create conceptualizations and symbols
related to global change. Comparative studies of this kind in different
regions of the world will, I believe, enrich the current discussion on
sustainable development and globalization.
26. A sample of 432 persons were interviewed from the following communities:
four villages in the rain-forest; two farming villages in the region of Palen-
que where most farmers have become ranch employees and labourers; two
urban groups in the town of Palenque, the highest-income groups of mer-
chants and proprietors and the lowest-income group of employees and la-
bourers; finally, cattle ranchers were surveyed as a special group, given
their influence on local and regional events.
27. Arizpe et al., op. cit., p. 145.
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Research recommendations
Based on the discussion in this chapter, I would make the following
recommendations for future anthropological research on global
change:
1. Gee-coding anthropological ethnographies and cultural data to
permit an analysis of levels of magnitude, world distribution and
spatial dynamics of cultural interactions.
2. Enhancing the anthropological analysis of population movements,
particularly the dynamics of culture in migration, and the differen-
tial fertility among ethnic, religious or national groups.
3. Using the comparative method to establish the main trends in cul-
tural interactions in different continents and regions in order to
understand global cultural processes.
4. Analysing the ethic and symbolic interactions among macro-scale
cultures through global communications.
5. Exploring new methods to link local social perceptions to meso-
and global-level cultural trends.
On a broader front, anthropology has to update its theoretical models
to go beyond the unitary/relativist opposition, by proposing a broader
definition of the object of its study, and by incorporating into its intel-
lectual and theoretical corpus the temporal, humanistic and particu-
larist trends embodied in its traditional ethnographic methods.
In my view, all the knowledge that anthropology has amassed in
the last century should be put to use today not only to examine but
also to propose. Anthropology has not always been a passive science:
it has been an active science, for example, in formulating and revising
state policies towards ethnic groups. Why then could it not actively
propose a theoretical explanation of global cultural processes in order
to inform appropriate policies for emerging national and international
intercultural relations?
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C H A P T E R 7
Social field
and cultural constellations:
reflections on some aspects
of globalization
Karl-Eric Knutsson
Introduction
I begin with a snapshot of my environment in Nepal where I live and
work at the moment. It illustrates some fundamental empirical, theo-
retical and ethical challenges for societies in a world of accelerating
globalization.
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Social field and cultural constellations:
reelections on some aspects of globalization
spectable persons with dignity and freedom to sellers of sex and slav-
ery (Rozario, in ODea, 1993: 9). Sadly, the outside world is moving
into the Himalayan hills in company with the underworld, generating
new aspirations, images and resources. But the price of change is high.
The expanding market is sex that brings sexual diseases transmitted by
returnees escaped, rescued or retired HIV and AIDS, and, worse, a
new generation of violated children robbed of their childhood and
human rights and often traumatized for life.
In discussing this pyramid of torment one cannot neglect the impli-
cations of the flow of corruption money that the maintenance of the sex
market requires. After all, the huge enterprise continues though both
girl trafficking and prostitution are illegal in the countries of the region
and though all have ratified the International Convention on the
Rights of the Child and thereby turned this instrument into national
law. This is a clear indication of how the sex market has managed to
penetrate all levels of society local, regional and international.
Behind all the immediate controllers, other forces personal and
impersonal are working directly or indirectly to create and maintain
a situation that finally turns young girls into commodities of exchange
in a regional and ultimately global market of gender exploitation and
sexual violence. Among these are global, regional and national in-
equities, generating and maintaining poverty, and consumerism urges,
effectively communicated by media, tourism and globalization of mar-
kets. The abuse of female children in the Himalayan hills is a horrifying
yardstick of the successful expansion of such global forces.
In summary, the world is moving into the hills of the Tamang, and
the Tamang are expanding their contacts with the world. In some
sense, this has always been the case. But it is obviously occurring in
new ways today, over shorter time-spans, and with more radical con-
sequences for this peoples ongoing construction and management of
reality. It is as if the Tamang were both viewing and acting in quite
different videos at the same time: some locally produced, some pasted
together and subtitled in nearby towns, and some copied from distant
places.
What is global about this? Can we arrive at a more helpful theore-
tical perspective for our social and cultural questions by combining
our ethnography with reflections on globalization?
Perhaps so. But, and this is my main argument in this chapter, only
if we are willing at the same time to discuss some fundamental di-
lemmas within the theory of social science. In so doing, we may also
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to levels where they seem to take on a life of their own, tend to stop the
brain working rather than stimulate it. Phrases such as development
requires, we are all interdependent and globalization is the future
are bandied about as if they referred to irrefutable values. The
year 1984 has come and gone, but the language of Orwells book of the
same name lives on and is becoming ever more frequent and persua-
sive. We should beware of these dangers so that we do not create a new
terminology for the continued distortion of knowledge and abuse of
power.
What, then, is global about globalization? Despite what we per-
ceive as the shrinking of the world, we do not in fact live on a global
level but in some localized context such as the village of Tokha in
Kathmandu Valley or the Upper East Side in New York City. What
may be global in both these places is the increasing possibility and even
probability that in leading my life I will draw on physical, social or
mental resources that are primarily located in some other locality on
earth or some derivative of such resources. Consequently, these are not
global per se but rather are localized expressions or manifestations of
something from another part of the globe that attracts me as I imple-
ment various projects, or that is powerful enough to influence the con-
ditions in which I may design and manage them. Thus, what is global
cannot be restricted to any kind of specific entity. The only other possi-
bility, therefore, is to search for the global in the sphere of relation-
ships. Something is global because it is generated and maintained
through relationships that connect, combine and direct the use of
physical, social and mental resources located in various parts of the
globe.
The really new issue, then, is not so much that the world is becom-
ing one, but that it is, at least for a considerable time to come, becom-
ing many, and which increasingly operate on a global scale and relate
to each other in new and rapidly changing ways. Accordingly, we have
to proceed forward from a study of more or less discrete units in order
to face situations in which different means of access to technology,
transportation, communication and information generate a series of
worlds that are smaller or larger, accessible or unreachable, mana-
geable or unmanageable, depending on ones relative control of these
telescoping factors.
Here I wish to point out what might appear to be a paradox. There
are certainly a number of contacts, interactions and flows between
these many worlds (or fields). There is therefore an openness between
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them. But, as they are all limited in some way by the global envelope,
they are increasingly affected by the transition from open systems in
both practical and theoretical terms to systems that are closed or
closing. It does not take much reflection to realize that hypotheses that
might seem meaningful to make for theoretically open systems may be
irrelevant or misleading if a system is closed or closing. The recent dis-
cussions of full world economics illustrate this point.
Let me point to another seeming paradox: in order to deal with the
problem of a shrinking world, anthropologists need to broaden their
territories of research. This requires, among other things, that what-
ever conceptual frameworks or tools we propose, they need to be con-
structed so that they can serve us in exploring, describing, analysing
and reflecting about any social or cultural issue, whatever its nature
and on whatever scale or level it may be located. It also requires that
we take a closer look at our conceptualization on all levels, including
the most aggregate and, thereby, the least scrutinized ones.
For example, although I must use broad terms like society for
convenience and communication, such terms are not very helpful in a
meaningful attempt to understand the many different aspects and
dimensions of the human condition, or of processes of globalization
for that matter. By their summary nature and unmanageability, these
archetypical constructions illustrate Kants worst fears about large
concepts that describe little and explain less. They serve as blankets,
covering rather than revealing. Perhaps a reasonable compromise be-
tween conceptual clarity and convenience would be to use them as
denotative terms in the way that Eric Wolf (1982: 18) has suggested for
society: To designate an empirically verifiable cluster of interconnec-
tions among people, as long as no evaluative prejudgements are added
about its state of internal cohesion or boundedness in relation to the
external world.
The concept of culture gives rise to similar worries. The recent dis-
cussion between Wallerstein and Boyne (in Featherstone, 1990) sup-
ports the relevance of my concerns. With all his dependency on
evolutionism and positivistic Marxism, Wallerstein (1990: 65) actually
comes out of this debate with fewer scars than Boyne if for no other
reason than the following insight:
On the importance of studying culture, I feel about it the same way as
I feel about studying economics or politics. It is a non-subject, in-
vented for us by nineteenth-century social science. The sooner we un-
think this unholy trinity, the sooner we shall begin to construct a new
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language flow and change in the same way as Anna Livia Plurabelle
environs Here Comes Everybody in her incessant permutations.
In spite of our tragic destiny there might be something that we can
do rather simply. We can, for instance, choose to use a language indi-
cating even if it fails to capture the flows of reality. We can use
structuring instead of structure, valuating instead of values, acting in-
stead of action, and so forth.
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ture, society and other similar blanket concepts. We might create an-
other set of assumptions that consciously or unconsciously can
transform the proposed tools for orientation, search and analysis into
metaphysical premises rather than as they are intended. To some ex-
tent these risks are created by the freezing nature of human language.
Nevertheless they have to be vigorously exposed and resisted. The best
antidote perhaps the only one is to be aware of them.
These risks are especially great in relation to the concept of interest.
Here I only stress that interest always needs to be contextually defined.
It is always acted upon by an individual. It does not follow that it is re-
stricted to the individual. As in the case of community that I have al-
ready discussed, interests can be transmitted in such a way and overlap
to such an extent that individuals easily and preferably share them with-
out any serious or noticeable consideration of alternative choices
(cf. Bourdieu, 1990: 108). Without attempting to sort out other epi-
stemological complications, I suggest that we identify such an empirical
aggregation of interests as the source of social gravity with the potential
of generating a social gravity field. This does not exclude the possibility
that such sharing can also be imposed by the very power behind a domi-
nant interest, without the voluntary consent of all members in a field.
Depending on the degree of relationships and the compatibility of
their sources of gravity (interests), fields can combine into constella-
tions of fields such as might occur in a neighbourhood, business firm
or nation. But they can also disaggregate temporarily or more perma-
nently into simpler componential gravity fields as well as reassociate
themselves temporarily or permanently with other fields, again de-
pending on the nature and compatibility of the field-generating gravity
sources. This oscillation between aggregation and separation and reas-
sociation, in varying combinations and with different durations, ap-
pears to represent admittedly in very abstract and generalized
terms what is happening today, also on a global scale.
Cultural constellations
While proposing the metaphor of social gravity fields, I should point
out that the source of such a field-generating gravity force cannot be
reduced to any simplistic organizational purpose or some kind of in-
terest as such. It invariably contains values, knowledge, assumptions,
beliefs, preferences of habits and styles of behaviour, idioms and codes
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Negotiating world-views:
the case of international adoption of children
One comparatively minor aspect of the rapid globalization of ex-
change is the internationally managed adoption of children. This has
sometimes taken and continues to take exploitative and abusive forms.
Children are treated as commodities and sold for export by unscrupu-
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Postscript
These briefly summarized cases and challenges bring me back to where
I started with reality as lived by people. Such cases help to emphasize
that the issue of globalization must be considered not as a new fad but
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References
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BOULDING , K. E. 1956. General Systems Theory, the Skeleton of Science in
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1978. Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Societal Evolution. London,
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BOURDIEU , P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge/New
York, Cambridge University Press.
1990. In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology. Stan-
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BOYNE , R. 1990. Culture and the World System. In: M. Featherstone (ed.),
Global Culture, Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. London,
Sage.
ODEA, P. 1993. Gender Exploitation and Violence: The Market in Women,
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FEATHERSTONE, M. (cd.). 1990. Global Culture, Nationalism, Globalization
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GRIFFIN, K.; KHAN, R. 1992. Globalization and the Developing World. UN-
RISD.
HAGERSTRAND, T. 1986. Time-geography: Focus on the Corporeality of
Man, Society and Environment. In: E. W. Ploman (ed.), The Science
and Praxis of Complexity. Tokyo, UNU.
HANNERZ , U. 1986. The World Creolization. University of Pennsylvania.
.1987. American Culture: Creolized, Creolizing. Uppsala.
.1990. Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture. In: M. Feather-
stone (ed.), Global Culture, Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity.
London, Sage.
HECHTER, M. 1987. Principles of Group Solidarity. Berkeley/Los Angeles.
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C H A P T E R 8
Helen I. Safa
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also increased the demand for female labour in the new maquilladora or
export-led industries promoted by the shift away from import substitu-
tion and the domestic economy towards export promotion in the inter-
national economy. The increased economic importance of women
coupled with the rise of female-headed households is challenging the
myth of the man as the principal breadwinner in Latin American and
Caribbean households.
This massive increase in womens wage labour as a result of econ-
omic restructuring has generated intense debate over its effects on
womens status. Does wage labour merely exploit women as a source
of cheap labour and add to the burden of their domestic chores? Or
does wage labour give women greater autonomy and raise their con-
sciousness regarding gender subordination? This chapter will attempt
to answer these questions by examining the factors affecting the impact
of paid labour on womens status in three countries of the Hispanic
Caribbean, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, in which
I have conducted extensive research on women industrial workers
since 1980.2 These countries share common cultural and historical pat-
terns rooted in Spanish colonialism, plantation slavery and United
States hegemony, but differ radically in terms of state policy.
Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic have followed export-led
industrialization policies, which began in Puerto Rico as early as
the 1950s under Operation Bootstrap, and served as a model of ex-
port-led industrialization for other developing countries, even in Asia.
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Despite its current decline, the Puerto Rican model can offer impor-
tant lessons on the limitations of this model for self-sustaining growth.
The Dominican Republicj by contrast, is a classic case of recently ini-
tiated export manufacturing, with a total of 135,000 workers in
385 firms in free-trade zones in 1991 (Fundapec, 1992: 30), and has
become the leading source of exports under the Caribbean Basic
Initiative (CBI) in the Caribbean. Its success is directly attributable to
currency devaluations mandated by the IMF, which lowered the cost
of labour and other expenses in the Dominican Republic to one of the
lowest levels in the Caribbean,
The Cuban revolution in 1959 led to a radical transformation into
a socialist economy whereby the state took over most forms of produc-
tion and focused primarily on sugar exports and import substitution
industrialization. These policies provided full male employment in
Cuba until the economic crisis in 1990, resulting from the collapse of
Cubas trade with the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union, which significantly altered many of the results de-
scribed here. However, as we shall see, the redistributive policies of the
Cuban socialist state also led to a decline in dependence on the male
breadwinner, even within a context of full male employment.
Differences in government policy have led to differential impacts
on male and female participation rates in Cuba, Puerto Rico and
the Dominican Republic, which have had profound implications for
the gender composition of the labour force in each country. In the
Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, male labour-force participa-
tion rates have declined or stagnated as a result of the disintegration
of the sugar economy and the emphasis on labour-intensive export
manufacturing and the growth of the service sector, employing
largely women. The more gradual decline in agricultural employ-
ment in Cuba and the absorption of men into import substitution
industrialization provided a stable source of male employment, at
the same time that the wage and consumer policies of the Cuban
state instituted in the 1970s promoted womens incorporation into
paid employment. However, the redistributive mechanisms of the
Cuban socialist state also made the household less dependent on
purchasing power to assure its basic needs, and lessened womens
dependence on male wages. The increased importance of womens
contribution to the household economy in all three countries eroded
male authority and led women to redefine their domestic role and
challenge the myth of the male breadwinner.
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The cultural dimensions of global change
State policy
In Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, the states principal role
in export manufacturing is to create a favourable climate for foreign in-
vestment through investment incentives and the control of wages and
labour. Most garment-export manufacturing firms are direct subsi-
diaries of United States multinationals rather than domestic producers
subcontracted to these foreign investors. Workers in export processing
zones are generally entitled to the minimum wage, provided they can
meet their production quotas, since very few production workers are
paid a fixed wage, but operate on a piece-rate system. Labour control
can be achieved through outright repression or prohibition of unions
in free-trade zones, as in the Dominican Republic, or through co-opta-
tion of labour, as in Puerto Rico. Both repression and co-optation lead
to a weak and fragmented labour movement, which increases the vul-
nerability of female (and male) workers in both countries. Labour is
also weakened by structural adjustment measures which have resulted
in higher levels of unemployment and lower real wages. For example,
the real hourly minimum wage in the Dominican Republic declined by
62.3 per cent between 1984 and 1990, at the height of the crisis, while
unemployment rates in the same period never fell below 26 per cent,
and continue to be higher for women than for men. In Puerto Rico,
however, since 1950, unemployment rates have been higher for men
than for women, and in our sample survey of garment workers, 90 per
cent say it is easier for a woman than for a man to find a job.
Increased demand for female labour in export manufacturing and
the tertiary sector has contributed to rising female participation rates
in both countries, particularly in the Dominican Republic, where fe-
male labour-force participation increased from 9.3 per cent in 1960 to
38 per cent in 1991 (Ramrez et al., 1988; Baz, 1991). This rapid in-
crease also reflects the economic crisis, which forced women to com-
pensate for the declining employment opportunities and real wages of
men. As a result, working women are becoming major economic con-
tributors to the household and, in our sample of women workers in ex-
port manufacturing, 38 per cent consider themselves to be the major
economic provider. In Puerto Rico, too, the working womans salary
never represents less than 40 per cent of the total household income,
and for married women and female heads of household, is often much
higher.
In Cuba, the state is committed to a policy of full employment for
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men, and has actively promoted womens incorporation into the la-
bour force as a means of promoting greater gender equality. In addi-
tion, the Cuban state instituted several measures to encourage women
to seek gainful employment, including: (a) greater educational oppor-
tunities, which eliminated illiteracy and led to a significant increase in
the number of women professionals and technicians; (b) special sup-
port services to alleviate womens domestic load, such as day care
centres, lunchrooms for students and workers, laundries, housing,
transportation to work sites, and special shopping plans; (c) puestos
preferences, or positions in which women would have preference, a
kind of affirmative action plan; and (d) the Family Code enacted
in 1975 to encourage couples to share household responsibilities and
child-rearing. Mass organizations such as the Federation of Cuban
Women (FMC) and the Frente Feminino or Feminine Front of
the CTC (Confederation of Cuban Workers) were also instructed to
promote the incorporation of women into the labour force. These
policies did not have any real impact until the 1970s when wage and
consumer policies reinforced womens desire to earn additional in-
come. At this point, womens share of the labour force climbed steadily
from 15.9 per cent in 1970 to 34.8 per cent in 1990 (Instituto de la
Mujer and FLACSO, 1992: 38).
In short, in all three countries, women are assuming greater econ-
omic responsibility in the household, but in Puerto Rico and the Do-
minican Republic this is also due to a decline in real wages and male
employment opportunities. Dominican and Puerto Rican women are
not only challenging the mans role as principal breadwinner, but are
in some cases being asked to assume that role, which may add to the
womans burden in the household.
Access to resources
State policy also plays an important role in determining women
workers access to resources, since it can influence wages and working
conditions (through the minimum wage and other regulations), pro-
vide social services such as education and day care centres, and re-
distribute income through transfer payments and redistributive
mechanisms such as rent control or agrarian reform. In a socialist state
such as Cuba, where almost all workers are employed by the state, and
where virtually all sectors of the economy have been nationalized, state
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Women and industrialization in the Caribbean:
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The cultural dimensions of global change
their parents, the older generation continue to make the decisions and
administer expenses, and the mother often takes care of the children
while the daughter works. While this provides assistance to young
working mothers, it also perpetuates traditional gender roles and dis-
courages any challenge to male dominance. Crowded living quarters
also contribute to marital instability.
Three-generation households are even more frequent among fe-
male-headed households, which in our sample are almost equally
divided between these young single mothers and older women who
have their daughters living with them. Female-headed households
constitute 35 percent of the Cuban sample, higher than in Puerto Rico
or the Dominican Republic, even though the national percentage in
Cuba is lower than in either of the other two countries. Contrary to
the norm for larger extended families, 62 per cent of female heads of
household have only one or two wage-earners in the household and re-
ceive no assistance from the government, except for some priority in
obtaining employment. The fathers of these children are supposed to
contribute to their support, but few do, and several young single
mothers claim they do not want to press claims for support, because
this would give the father more authority over his child. For example,
Odalys receives no assistance from the father of her 3-year-old twins
and does not want any, because now they are mine alone and he has
no rights at all. Here we can see a clear correlation between economic
support and authority patterns.
As in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, paid employment
in Cuba has had an impact on authority patterns, since more than half
of the married women interviewed maintain that they make decisions
jointly with their husbands, and also administer expenses together.
Both husband and wife contribute heavily to the household, and they
often have the best-equipped households, with washing machines, re-
frigerators, radios and televisions. However, despite the Family Code
and the massive incorporation of women into the labour force, mens
household responsibilities have changed little. While men accept the
idea that their wives work, and probably also welcome the added in-
3. One reason for this discrepancy maybe the failure of national census figures
to list female heads of household who continue to live with their parents, in
which case the parents are considered as the head of the household.
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Women and industrialization in the Caribbean:
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come, most of them do not share in the housework or child care, nor
do their wives appear to encourage them.
The extended family pattern found in Cuba tends to perpetuate this
traditional division of labour, but it is also prevalent in Puerto Rican
and Dominican households where nuclear families predominate. In
none of the households in our study do men do much of the housework
or child care, except for occasional chores like shopping or paying the
bills. This suggests that authority patterns have changed more than the
gender division of labour, and can be partly explained by the perpetu-
ation of traditional gender ideology.
To summarize, there are clear variations both within and between
the samples in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in
terms of family size, number of wage-earners in the household, age and
marital status of the household head, marital stability and aid from
kin, all of which affect household authority patterns as well as their
standard of living. Legally married, better educated couples in which
both husband and wife have stable jobs seem closer to an egalitarian
model of conjugal relations in each country, but they represent a dis-
tinct minority. Where women have had to assume the role of bread-
winner, this may produce conflict and lead to higher levels of marital
instability and female-headed households, as we have seen here. While
this form of economic restructuring may challenge the myth of the
male breadwinner, it merely shifts the burden of family survival from
men to women.
Gender ideology
Traditional gender ideology is more difficult to document than many
of the structural changes analysed thus far, because it is rooted in
womens dual productive/reproductive role. Traditionally, women are
charged with primary responsibility for domestic chores and child
care, whereas men are championed as the primary breadwinners. Des-
ignating men as the primary breadwinners maintains male control
over female labour, and creates separate spheres in which women are
confined to the private sphere, while men control the public sphere of
work and politics.
The public/private split in Western industrial society is even
stronger in Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean, and dates back
to the Spanish colonial tradition of the casa/calle, where women were
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Women and industrialization in the Caribbean:
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Conclusions
Has the casa/calle division been eroded through the massive incorpor-
ation of women into the labour force? Certainly working women in
Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic now have a more
visible presence in the public sphere, but as we have seen, they are still
clearly subordinated in the workplace and in the polity. In part, the
confinement of women to the home has been replaced by occupational
segregation, which allows women a limited representation in the work-
place in selected female occupations, which are often extensions of
their female role, even among professionals such as teachers and
nurses. Wage differentials between genders at all class levels also re-
inforce the notion of women as supplementary wage-earners depend-
ent on primary male breadwinners.
The lack of change in the gender division of household labour
among most of the women studied here is also evidence of the mainten-
ance of the casa/calle distinction. The fault lies not only with men but
with women themselves, who continue to define household chores and
child care as their primary responsibility, even if they are working full-
time and making a major contribution to the household economy. As
Stolcke (1984) notes, the family provides women with a social identity
which proletarianization as wage workers has not diminished. In fact
most of these women now consider paid employment part of their do-
mestic role, because they are working to contribute to the household
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Women and industrialization in the Caribbean:
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C H A P T E R 9
Nationalities
in post-Soviet global changes
Valery A. Tishkov
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setians, whose bones are scattered all over the northern Caucasus.
Political and heavily ideological archaeology and ethnography have
been flourishing for decades in peripheral as well as central Soviet aca-
demias (Shnirelman, 1993).
The many so-called national histories, encyclopedias and cultural
research studies often have little in common with the peoples actual
history and ethnography. The very nomenclature of the peoples them-
selves, especially their names, is the result of outsiders prescriptions,
whether by ancient authors, travelers who first contacted and de-
scribed the peoples, or contemporary scholars and politicians.
The definition of a people in the sense of an ethnic community is
most often understood in contemporary scholarship as a group of
people whose members share a common name and common elements
of culture, possess a myth of common origin and a common historical
memory, who associate themselves with a particular territory and
possess a feeling of solidarity. All these indicators are the result of spe-
cial efforts, especially of the process of nation-building; the most im-
portant of them is solidarity. National affiliation is a sort of constant
internal referendum on affiliation and loyalty to one collective com-
munity or other. It is the result of a persons family education and so-
cialization. In the same way, nations are, according to B. Andersons
(1983) widely accepted definition, imagined communities.
Nationality or ethnic identity is not an innate human trait, though
it is most often perceived as such. Nations are also created by people,
by the efforts of intellectuals and by the states political will. Nation
is an in-group definition. It is not possible to assign it strictly scientific
or legal formulae. This also pertains to the more mystical category of
ethnos which was enthusiastically developed by Soviet social scientists,
and, as a result, in public discourse it became much more than a scho-
larly construction. Unfortunately, both primordial definitions (nation
and ethnos) are widely and thoughtlessly used in contemporary politi-
cal language and normative and legal texts. For example, aspirations
for achieving certain political aims through the mobilization of mem-
ory about the sociocultural characteristics of Russian Cossacks finally
resulted in the official definition of Cossacks as an ethnocultural en-
tity at the highest state level in Yeltsins decree and Supreme Soviet
law. It may be considered a classic example of Bakhtins raising
myths and memories from root level under the pressure of politics and
as a form of populist gesture.
Although the concept of ethnonational communities may be an
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The cultural dimensions of global change
imaginary one, this does not prevent it from becoming a powerful re-
ality and an important basis for collective action. Without leaving the
historical arena, peoples ethnocultural diversity is moving increas-
ingly from the domain of material culture to that of consciousness and
values. A person needs ethnic identity and affiliation as a means of
adaptation and better orientation in a modern and complex world and
as a mechanism for achieving certain social goals. In the Russian
Federation, citizens thus regain their lost feeling of personal worth and
collective pride through ethnicity, while leaders realize social control
and political mobilization.
This intellectual construct is directly projected on to the phenome-
non of power. It is often coupled with the achievement of a political
will, ensuring for this a necessary arsenal of arguments and recruits/ex-
ecutors. The former right of Communist Party high priests to formu-
late from above and transmit downward their programmatic
postulates was one of their most important pillars of power, along with
the repressive party/state apparatus. Even today, the search for expla-
nations for disorder, crisis and conflict continues in parliamentary de-
bates, political discussions and the media, in view of the absence of
scientific formulae, conceptions and so forth.
A society used to living in unidimensional symbolism cannot in-
stantly become a multidimensional arena. The excessive emphasis on
learning formulae proposed by intellectual and political elites, and
their use, became almost a genetic trait of the Soviet people, Post-
Communist countries do not yet have powerful elements of civil, that
is, private, society expressed to a high degree in individual autonomy
and self-organization of social groupings on various levels. Such a so-
ciety is the ideal material for a mythological colonization of the mass
consciousness because, during crisis situations and radical social trans-
formations, when the perception of the world slips away, the magic of
the word, the right and ability to label and call into existence, with the
help of nomination, have become one of the simplest and most ac-
cessible forms of political power.
As in ancient times, the task of explaining and producing the sym-
bolic is granted to poets, artists and sculptors and now also to
playwrights, film-makers, scholars, humanitarians and, first and fore-
most, historians, ethnographers and archaeologists. No single histori-
cal period and region of the world has experienced such a wide-scale
escalation of power positions of Ph.D. social scientists and other intel-
lectuals as maybe observed in the post-Soviet space. The twenty-eight
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olution swept the life of the Russian intelligentsia from its heights, here,
by contrast, the history of Transcaucasia during its troubled years has
been a history of its predominantly socialist intelligentsia. Only the in-
telligentsia could determine domestic events, and on it alone lies the
historic responsibility for the fate of the Transcaucasian peoples
[Denikin, 1992: 92].
A most important part of my approach to the problems of ethnicity lies
in not accepting the arrogance of the objective-positivist paradigm,
which is at the root of the contemporary crisis in domestic social
science. This approach is not so burdened by circumstances as to ac-
centuate the essence, that is, the groups, including ethnic groups, by
their membership, borders, rights and so forth, to the detriment of re-
lations in the social realm. It allows us to rid ourselves of illusions that
see theoretically constructed classifications as objectively existing
groups of people or as laws of social life. It does not allow senseless
haste in translating mythical constructs and the symbolic struggle into
a language of state laws, presidential decrees or military orders.
Russian social scientists, who substantially constructed the subject
of their studies while, at the same time, refusing to recognize their co-
authorship of a perverted reality, through their indifference to relativ-
ist and constructivist approaches, actually limit the possibilities for
influence and participation in the processes of change and innovation.
The understanding that ethnicity is a social construct, according to the
opinion of M. P. Smith (1992: 526),
give[s] greater opportunities for mediating political and socio-cultural
interactions within and among ethnic groups through the same con-
structed symbolic action than are available to those who consider eth-
nicity either in naturalistic categories, regarding Ethnos (like Eros
and Thanatos) as a deep structural parameter of consciousness, or
else in existential categories as a component of personal identity, so
deeply rooted in past historical memory that no present-day human
influence is capable of forming the character of this identity or mitigat-
ing antagonistic manifestations on the parts of certain ethnic groups
vis--vis others.
Such an innovative approach might represent a breakthrough from the
grand methodological impasse and from such discouraging political
helplessness in the sphere of inter-ethnic relations. One needs only to
accept that ethnicity is constructed and reconstructed by certain verbal
actions that reflect contemporary conditions. Among these conditions
are power relations between social groups and those interpretative
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The cultural dimensions of global change
meanings that people give to these conditions. One must not look at
ethnicity as a timeless or primordial parameter of human existence. In
such a case, the activity of leaders from the political and cultural elites
and the daily intervention of ordinary citizens into ethnic discourse ac-
quire new meaning and new recognition.
We need a deeper understanding of the fact that social experience is
not constructed with a single meaning and that professional historical
data are being used to create a particular version of the ideal present.
We must not continue to subscribe to the primitive formula that the his-
torian learns from the past so as to understand the present and predict
the future. This new understanding would not make social scientists and
political activists naive enthusiasts of the Wilsonian-Leninist interpre-
tation of the right to self-determination in its narrowly ethnic variant.
It is extremely risky to conclude that after Yugoslavia, Czechoslo-
vakia, southern Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, the Crimea and Transd-
nestria (Moldova) in the twenty-first century this problem of
self-determination will confront the African continent, too, where
post-colonial borders artificially divided ethnic territories (Starovoi-
tova and Kedrov, 1992). A sounder opinion states that in the existing
world system, formulae for sovereignty from the epochs of Sauares,
Boden and even Rousseau are just ridiculous, and that in the coun-
tries of a former empire it is the elites of the new political formations
that are self-determined and inter-determined (Fillipov, 1992: 112).
The drama of the position of scholars who directly or indirectly partici-
pate in radical Russian transformations lies in their ability or inability
to differentiate between myth-making rhetoric and real interests, and
in the need to act amid everyday dogmatism and political motives.
Thus, my approach, since it is not arrogant or prescriptive in rela-
tion to societal reality, is not a refusal to understand or participate, but
rather a platform for participation based on understanding and greater
guarantees against irresponsible social engineering. It does not pre-
clude the possibility of formulating suggestions for governing eth-
nicity, including mechanisms for managing inter-ethnic controversy
and conflict in the former Soviet Union.
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may be lasting and costly, especially if resources and energy are directed
to reconcile the past and to return the norm of existence once lost. For
some groups and leaders this might mean the moment before the col-
lapse of the USSR or before 1917 (groups of Russian national-patriots);
for others, before the start of massive deportations (the Ingush, Volga
Germans, Crimean Tatars and others); for a third group, before the pre-
war annexations (the Baltic peoples, Moldovans); for a fourth group be-
fore the Civil War and Red Terror (Transcaucasian peoples, Kazaks);
for a fifth group, before their inclusion into the Russian Empire and col-
onization (the peoples of the northern Caucasus, Central Asia and Sibe-
ria); for a sixth group, before the expansion of the Muscovite state
(Tatars of the Volga region); and for a seventh group, before the period
of ancient state formations or even ancient cultures.
In any case, the ideal is represented by that historical period from
which the most arguments in favour of the currently desirable territor-
ial borders, political status and cultural conditions can be derived. The
further one looks for the roots of the past, the more mythologized the
concepts of historical territories, nation-state, and cultural tradi-
tions become.
Past traumas endured by externally introduced consciousness
(only a small proportion of citizens lived through them personally) are
complicated by recent challenges, of which the most serious is the
search for new identities in the context of the newly forming states.
The USSRs collapse occurred under the defining influence of the doc-
trine of ethnic nationalism or the ideas of national self-determination.
The realities that have emerged, however, are quite far from the pro-
posed goal. The new states are multi-ethnic formations in which the
titular population comprises from 80 per cent (Russia, Lithuania)
to 40 to 50 per cent (Latvia, Kazakstan, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan) of the
overall population.
Former Soviet minorities have now become dominating majorities
in fourteen successor states, having discovered new minorities just as
hungry for their own national self-determination. The majority of
these groups are homogeneously settled, regard their cultural charac-
teristics and leaders highly, and are able to formulate their own na-
tional ideas. Strictly speaking, the latter is already a reality for those
groups that had autonomous status in the former Soviet republics or
gained it in recent years (e.g. the Crimean Republic in Ukraine, new re-
publics in the Russian Federation). As the events in Georgia show,
eliminating such status is practically impossible.
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On national self-determination
About three years ago the academician Sakharov proposed a Constitu-
tion of the United States of Europe and Asia, which called for the crea-
tion of a union of nation-states with equal status from the fifty-three
nation-state formations that existed at that moment in the USSR. Thus,
Sakharov envisioned the realization of the right of a people to national
self-determination as a part of democratic transformation. At the begin-
ning of 1993, G. Popov proposed to solve all mans national problems
by allotting him rights and national-cultural autonomy for all nations
both on the level of Russia and on the level of lands. Fifteen to twenty
federal lands must comprise Russia, he suggested, and there must be no
national-territorial structures. Whoever does not agree with this may
leave the Federation (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 26 January 1993).
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The cultural dimensions of global change
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colonizers, but rather the inability and difficulty of these states to solve
social and political problems.
It is important to recognize that all borders are the result of politi-
cal will and historical precedent, and searching for natural or just
borders, especially along ethnic lines in Africa or the regions of Central
Asia, the Caucasus and the Volga, is both absurd and extremely dan-
gerous. Responsible politicians or scholars would not dare draw a new
map of re-self-determined Africa or the ethnic states of the Eastern
European plain and the Caucasus, let alone those of Central Asia,
where ethnic nations were constructed in the Soviet period and where
religious, dynastic and regional identities were always much stronger
than ethnic ones, and therefore served as a basis for politics.
The disintegration of the USSR and Yugoslavia and the division of
Czechoslovakia have had internal and international repercussions. The
readiness of the world community, especially the West, to recognize the
separatists claims to their own states could initially be explained by
world sympathy for the Baltic countries, which had a legitimate basis
for their claims to independence. With respect to Yugoslavia, the propi-
tious positions of Germany towards Croatia and of Austria towards
Slovenia played decisive roles in the support and recognition of se-
cession. In addition, the inertia and logic of superpower confrontation
during the Cold War years influenced the departure from previous prin-
ciples of non-support for separatism and of respect for territorial integ-
rity. It seemed natural to enhance the victory of Western democracy not
only by overthrowing totalitarian regimes in the Soviet bloc and agree-
ing to radical disarmament, but also by reducing the size, and therefore
the resources, of the state that had been seen as the source of the nuclear
threat. Yugoslavia, too, may have seemed powerful and unstable to the
small countries of Western Europe, although the Yugoslav state was no
less legitimate than other European states.
In this way, the geopolitical factor for the Western states that won
a liberal victory over Communism encouraged them to overcome their
resistance to the principle of national self-determination in its most
radical form. This is the third time in the twentieth century that the vic-
tors have dictated, albeit in camouflaged form, terms to the van-
quished. Following the initiative of Woodrow Wilson after the First
World War, the Entente leaders created a new political map for Eu-
rope under the slogan of self-determination. Leaders of ethnonational
movements in Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire acquired
their own states. In the final analysis, however, the same unsolved
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into interstate military action. The probability that this might happen
is increased when the new state boundaries separate culturally related
communities from the general tract of their brethren, or divide some
groups almost in half, as in the case, for example, of the Lezgin be-
tween Azerbaijan and Russia. The participation of Russians in military
action in Moldova, of the Abkhaz-Adygei peoples in Georgia, and of
the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia is evidence of the internationalization
of ethnic conflicts. Separatism almost inevitably engenders its antipode
irredentism, that is, the desire to be reunited. This phenomenon is
nothing new and was made familiar by the bloody wars in Bangladesh
and Biafra.
Thirdly, the growth in the number of states resulting from the dis-
memberment of superpowers such as the USSR opens the way to a new
asymmetry in world geopolitics. A number of powerful and centralized
Western European states, as well as China, Japan and the United
States, are averse to using the principle of national self-determination
with regard to their own ethnic minorities. In China, 55 million such
people live quite densely along the Han Chinese periphery. In Western
Europe there are about fifty ethnic minorities, each of them numbering
at least 100,000 people, who are able to formulate their demands. How-
ever, it is doubtful that these states will allow themselves to be bal-
kanized. The new asymmetry caused by the now unchallenged military
dominance of the United States could tempt it to dictate its will and
understanding of international norms by more forceful means. This can
hardly be called global and definitive stability, since such was not the
case during the United StatesSoviet confrontation in recent decades.
Secession under the slogan of national self-determination is still not
a response to the mission of a state, that is, the safeguarding of proper
conditions of social existence for its citizens. Rather it is a reaction to,
and the result of, the inability of existing political regimes to meet this
challenge. If the newly self-determined states fail to do so, the same fate
of disintegration awaits them too.
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The cultural dimensions of global change
References
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flicts. Washington, D. C., United States Institute of Peace Press.
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C H A P T E R 1 0
In our image: the environment
and society as global discourse
Michael Redclift
Summary
The environment is clearly shaped by human hands, but it is also
shaped by the human mind. This chapter examines the way in which
the environment is produced, as intellectual capital. It questions the
extent to which the environment can be understood by science and
through science. It also explores the way in which science, as a cultural
form, enables us to construct an environment that is manageable but
prevents us from coming to terms with increased uncertainty. Environ-
mental management is the province of economics. The chapter
observes that establishing economic penalties for transgressing envi-
ronmental standards removes these standards from the context in
which they were developed.
This essay is about how the environment is produced. It is about
the physical landscape that results from human activities and ingenuity
and the mental landscape that shapes these activities and is shaped by
them. It is also about the value that we place on the environment and
the extent to which anthropologists should be prepared to endorse
their own societies view of environmental valuation.
The chapter asks whether our environment, indeed, any environ-
ment, can be understood by science or through science. It explores the
way in which our science, as a cultural form, gives rise to our construc-
tion of the environment.
Drawing on research about the Canadian frontier in the 1840s and
current critiques of environmental economics, I conclude by sugges-
ting that research on the global environment should recognize the ex-
istence of different and divergent understandings of what the global
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It is reluctantly accepted that the new road will have to pass through
Devils Copse but not that lay-bys should be located in this attractive,
natural, untouched woodland which is worth preserving. It would be a
deplorable and needless extravagance to destroy a small proportion of
a small copse used, with permission, by the British Trust for Ornitho-
logy and by members of the public, and believed to be rich in wildlife
and flowers, simply to provide lay-bys which could be placed on
the A27.
The Department of Transports view was rather different:
Devils Copse is an overgrown and neglected piece of woodland. . . .
Most of the trees are not of a great age being up to around 80 years old
and no coppicing has taken place for some 20 years. There is no public
footpath running through the wood and footpath 251 passes along its
south-western boundary. A survey of the copse concluded that its flora
and fauna were unlikely to be rich and varied [p. 7].
Was the woodland bordering the A27 attractive, natural and un-
touched or overgrown and neglected? The point is that assessments
of the environment are informed by a variety of social commitments,
and these assessments are used to pursue specific social goals. We are
not simply talking about a piece of woodland, we are talking about it
in a social context. That context is provided by us.
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The cultural dimensions of global change
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their lives or he risked losing his own. By April 1847 he had found
great favour with all the people . . . but the cares and duties of a doc-
tors life are greater even than I expected.
As Careless (1967: 28) points out, Canada West . . . was so full of
recent immigrants and so much in the stage of extensive rather than in-
tensive growth, that its social structure was naturally ill-defined. On
the frontier a distinctive lumber community had developed, which
combined logging in the winter with farming in the summer. During
the 1840s more hired labour was used in the lumber industry, the shan-
tymen whom Careless (1967: 30) refers to as a forest proletariat.
Francis Codd found many of his patients within this unruly frater-
nity. He was expected to distance himself from them: I cannot farm
and practice medicine, patients would not like it and I would not have
the time. Indeed, he was told by an admirer that he was not half
roughian enough for this place. Nevertheless, those who did succeed
earned his admiration. Soon after arriving he met a woman from Nor-
folk who told him Lank, Sir, if the poor creatures at home only knew
what a place Canada is, it would be good for em. Eight months later
he wrote that if he still had the 200 with which he landed in Canada
he would go into the bush and become a farmer rather than a doctor.
Typical of the success stories he encounters is a man named Pinhey
who lived near Bytown. Francis noted that although he was not a
poor man when he migrated, now he is probably in ten times the living
and independence he did in England . . . had he stayed in England he
would still have been a nobody. . . now he is a member of Legislative
Council . . . is the founder perhaps of a noble Canadian family and
owns the greater part of the township of March.
The frontier seems to have been distinguished by property-owning
anarchy as much as by a forest proletariat. Land was cheap and easily
available, especially since the land grant system had been abandoned.
Cowan (1961: 113) notes: The government [in England] began to ap-
peal to mans purely selfish instincts by making his reward depend
solely upon his own efforts. The land market developed in competi-
tion with that of the United States: Between 1844 and 1848 purchases
of land to the amount of almost one million dollars were made
(through scrip) . . . the greater part of it for speculative purposes
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the same time the frontier was changing. By December 1849a division
court had been established in Renfrew for small debts. Francis came to
take a very positive view of the efforts that were made to build a net-
work of local magistrates with a high degree of legitimacy. He was at-
tracted to the makeshift democracy of frontier Canada. By
January 1852 he was writing:
A magistrate in this country is, however, a very different animal from
the same in England he need not spend a dollar a year the more for
being a magistrate many of our magistrates are plain farmers who
can just read and write decently but their authority seems to be just as
much respected as in England. One of the two magistrates in this vil-
lage is an old pensioner-sergeant who was quartered in Holt (Norfolk)
in the Artillery in 1806.
Civil disturbances were still common, of course, but there were
signs that support existed for genuine community-based efforts at law
enforcement. In the same letter, in 1852, Francis referred to a concert
performed by a local music club, mostly young ladies taught and led
by Mr. Thompson, the blacksmith, which succeeded, despite derisive
shouting from the audience, in raising money for a Renfrew Mech-
anics Institute Library. Francis noted that if the township can raise
f25 the government is bound to give f50.
Between 1847 and 1852 Francis Codds view of Canada changed
dramatically. At the beginning he sought to survive and to establish
himself professionally. He was in no doubt as to the drawbacks of liv-
ing on the frontier. There are no emigrants up here, he complains in
June 1847, they stay in the more popular parts of Canada where land
is more expensive and everything else cheaper. He toyed with the
thought of returning to Montreal, where he could earn a regular salary
as a doctor in the governments employ.
The longer Francis stayed in Canada the more he liked the frontier.
He assured his parents that although he was returning to see them he
intended leaving old England perhaps for ever. His complaints were
directed at individual misconduct rather than Canada.
Before returning to England briefly in 1848 he wrote to urge his
brother Henry to come to Canada to qualify as a lawyer. Half the
members of the Canadian Parliament were lawyers or doctors, chiefly
lawyers. He said he prefers Canada to England under any circum-
stances, and fears that already he would feel more like a stranger in
England than Canada.
The second phase of Francis Codds correspondence after 1849 and
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his return to Canada is punctuated with repeated pleas for his family
to join him there. Although he returned to the same part of the
country, he regretted that he had not settled further west, for the
farmers can always get cash for their wheat and here [in Renfrew] the
markets are very uncertain because everything depends on the lumber
trade. In 1849 he was 26 years old: Where shall I be next birthday?
Here I hope, although of course I should like to see you all.
Franciss attachment to the frontier grew with familiarity. Local
society began to develop. In nearby Packenham village there were
two doctors, four clergymen, a lawyer, several storekeepers and lots of
civilised girls. This was in January 1850. Soon Francis was established
in his own house with a housekeeper who is clean and honest but apt
to get drunk occasionally. He reviewed the prospect of his parents
emigrating to Canada and decided that they were too old to uproot
themselves. Anybody intending to emigrate should spend between two
months and a year having a look at the country first.
But an extraordinary coincidence occurred. As his own fortunes
improved so did those of his adopted country. Increasingly Francis
referred to the advantages of Canada over England. He was critical
of Lord John Russells proposals on Catholic emancipation (in
March 1851). In Canada the government does not try to interfere with
the Catholic Church: Canada is freer. When his brother Henry com-
plained about the Canadian winter, Francis retorted: There can be no
worse climate than that of England. Canadian wheat is so good. It
was even sold in New York last year! Canada is flourishing and all
parties feel that it is getting strong enough to defy any attempt at tyran-
nizing either by Great Britain or the United States. His first obliga-
tion, as a Canadian, was to learn French. Three years earlier Francis
bemoaned his inability to talk to the French women in a shanty on the
Madawasha River. Now he has commenced learning French again
and means to stick to it until I can talk fluently.
He began to take delight in the company of others during his fre-
quent trips into the bush. In January 1852 Francis accompanied the
new Presbyterian minister none of the evangelical humbug about
him that most of the Scotch have - to an Indian camp, seven miles up
the ice. They feasted on venison and he noted how delighted
Mr Thomson, the minister, was: He likes Canada very much, he says,
and his wife and eight children are coming out next Spring.
The last letters are full of advice on how to survive with limited fin-
ancial resources in an alien environment. Francis noted that, It takes
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a man several years to open his eyes to what maybe done with a little
capital in Canada, and by that time an emigrant has generally fooled
away all he brought. Franciss expenses increased as his practice
began to flourish, but he was evidently in demand not only as a doctor.
He is asked to give a lecture in aid of the Mechanics Institute Library
Fund and was called as a key witness in a murder case held in Perth.
Francis Codds experiences illustrate my point about the way we
construct the environment out of human ingenuity and then go on to
impart normative value to it. Francis invested Canada with his own as-
pirations and constructed a view of the environment that could be
defended solidly, which was part of himself.
The people were rough . . . but they were often courageous. They
had no money . but . . they were worth a lot more than they had been
in England. Civilization was spreading . . . but not at the expense of
the wilderness, which left Francis awestruck and admiring. This, of
course, is the stuff of movies and novels, of Canadian consciousness.
Perhaps it helps explain why Canada, despite failing to resolve its eth-
nic differences internally, has taken the environment so much to its
heart. The Canadian Green Plan is supposed to inform research in the
universities and in the sciences. It is the inspiration behind the Cana-
dian Global Change Programme. The representations of nature and
the environment contained in letters like those of Francis Codd tell us
much about the societies from which they sprang and the societies
they produced.
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The cultural dimensions of global change
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In our image: the environment and society as global discourse
opment model has channeled the material wealth that fossil hydrocar-
bons have helped to create, towards the creation of capital goods,
themselves dependent on further fossil-fuel exploitation. The model
thus ensures a continued and spiraling demand for scarce and ulti-
mately finite resources, which are fast contributing to global nemesis
by posing the ultimate, unsustainable problem for the economies that
consume them. Global warming, the loss of biodiversity, the problems
associated with the ozone hole, and other global environmental
changes represent the ultimate externality and point to problems in
the growth model itself.
As Caring for the Earth (IUCN, 1991) points out, by concentrating
investment on surplus value to maximize the accumulation of indus-
trial capital, we have tended to neglect natural capital (environmental
goods and services). Instead, we have focused our support on the de-
velopment of human capital, within a small intellectual elite, working
within spheres of knowledge that are closely allied to new technologies
and often wasteful resource uses. This, in a nutshell, is the problem of
unsustainable development.
It also illustrates the lack of congruity between technological and
scientific knowledge and the social implications of using that knowl-
edge in specific ways. Wherever we look nuclear power, toxic wastes,
pesticides, air pollution, water quality we see examples of our failure
to grasp the social implications of the scientific knowledge we possess
and the costs that are passed onto the environment. We know that en-
vironmental science cannot make political choices about the conse-
quences of technology for the environment. At the same time,
environmental policy is nothing more than the formulation of one set
of social and political choices, governing environmental uses, over an-
other set of choices.
It is hardly surprising that the discussion and practice of sustain-
able development are intimately linked to the social authority of our
science and technology. In the North this authority is increasingly con-
tested, especially by environmental groups and interested citizens. In
the South it is frequently ignored, notably by development institutions
whose model of development often acknowledges no social authority
but that of science. As I have argued, that is why development in the
South is, ultimately, not socially or politically sustainable.
Where does this leave our discussion of the environment and devel-
opment? It is clear that we cannot achieve more ecologically sustain-
able development without ensuring that it is also socially sustainable.
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References
BARTHES , R. 1973. Mythologies. London, Granada.
BURNINGHAM , K.; OBRIEN, M. 1992. Values and the Environment. Guild-
ford, University of Surrey, Department of Sociology.
CARELESS , J. 1967. The Union of the Canadas, 18411857. Montreal,
McLelland & Stewart.
COWAN , H. I. 1961. British Emigration to British North America. Toronto,
Toronto University Press.
EKINS , P.; MAX-NEEF, M. (eds.). 1992. Real Life Economics. London,
Routledge.
ELSON, D.; REDCLIFT, N. 1992. Gender and Sustainable Development. Lon-
don, Overseas Development Agency.
GLEICH , J. 1987. Chaos Theory. London, Cardinal.
HODGSON, G. 1992. In: P. Ekins and Max-Neef (eds.), Real Life Econ-
omics 40-8. London, Routledge.
IUCN (INTERNATIONAL UNION FOR CONSERVATION OF NATURE). 1991.
Caring for the Earth. Gland, Switzerland, IUCN/UNEP/WWF.
KATZ, M. B. 1978. The People of Hamilton, Canada West. Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press.
MACDONALD , N. 1966. Canada, Immigration and Colonisation. Aberdeen,
Aberdeen University Press.
ODUM, H. E. 1971. Environment, Power and Society. New York, John
Wiley.
PEARCE, D.; BARBIER E.; MARKANDYA , A. 1989. Sustainable Development:
Economics and Environment in the Third World. London, Earthscan.
REDCLIFT , M. R. 1993. Backwoods Doctor: Survival on the Canada West
Frontier: 1847-1852. The Beaver 40 (6, April/May).
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C HAPTER 1 1
The electronic Trojan horse:
television in the globalization
of paramodern cultures
Introduction
Arriving several years ago in highland Sardinia, in mountain com-
munities renowned for intrepid shepherds and their sheep rustling, on-
going vendettas and notorious kidnappings communities widely
characterized, even locally, as isolated, closed and backward I was
struck by finding in the centre of each home, in the heart of each fam-
ily, connected by an electronic umbilical cord to Rome, Milan, Paris,
London and Los Angeles, and attended extensively and closely by
individuals and groups of family members or friends, a large colour
television set overflowing with sounds and images, purveying multitu-
dinous messages, apparently tying each island highland household
with the wide world. This reminded me of other similar instances that
had given me pause: the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara, postponing
(according to a brief human interest newspaper account) a major mi-
gration in order to find out who had shot J. R.; the Bedouin tent with
its electronic spire, a television antenna, that I had seen alongside a
road in the Negev; my Jodhpur landlord Bagh Singh puzzling over an
English detective programme on Doordarshan, the Indian television
network, just arrived in Rajasthan.
The theme I address here is the impact of television upon local life
as lived in communities around the world. The thesis proposed is that,
while the world may never quite become the global village rhap-
sodized by Marshall McLuhan, each village, whether rustic or urban,
pre- or post-industrial, is becoming more and more global as, elec-
tronically, the world increasingly comes to each village and neighborh-
ood, hamlet and settlement, quarter and suburb. The cultural vision
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what they call the death star, a satellite transmitter capable of sending
hundreds of channels to anyone with a small dish receiver. And in
India,
In the past 18 months tens of thousands of Indian viewers have aban-
doned Doordarshan for cable and satellite outlets that offer such inter-
national fare as MTV, British comedies, American soap operas and
Japanese entertainment shows. The [Doordarshan national] network,
best known for boring, stodgy, government-controlled fare, is hoping
that opening [five] new channels to private producers will result in
flashier sports, entertainment and news programmes that will win
back viewers who have deserted it [Montreal Gazette, 1993, A4].
Perhaps the most important feature of television as a medium of
cultural influence is its benign presence, its apparently pleasant, gratif-
ying and unthreatening nature. Obviously critical is the entertainment
that television provides, drawing people for the pleasure they gain
from watching. People watch to enjoy themselves, to feel good and to
relax. Television gives them what they want. Or it allows them to take
what they want, for it is the viewer who chooses to watch or not to
watch and who selects the programme. That the television is, or ap-
pears to be, under the control of the viewer is another aspect of the
benign nature of television. In addition, partly because of the variety of
views and positions expressed in programmes, and partly because of
viewer control, television is generally not overtly critical of viewers nor
usually explicitly judgmental about local culture or cultures. In con-
sequence, television is not threatening and does not generate a defen-
sive stance among viewers.
The easy availability, broad scope and apparently benign nature of
television make it a particularly effective medium of cultural influence.
Radio pales beside television, surviving primarily due to portability.
Movies have largely been encompassed by television and videotape re-
corders, making redundant to a considerable degree the expensive and
inconvenient cinemas. Some of the non-electronic print media, par-
ticularly newspapers and magazines, have a number of these same
characteristics, and they, too, are important influences. However, the
availability of print media is inferior to that of television, owing to
awkward physical transportation and the demands of literacy and the
effort of reading. Books are expensive (the cost of fifteen or twenty will
buy a colour television set), not well distributed and require effort to
read. Institutionalized face-to-face cultural influences, such as schools
and churches, are to a significant degree imposed rather than
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and whose strongest desires are to leave Eressos for the city. Among
older women, discontent, although verbalized by a few, is more widely
reflected in the frequent consumption of prescribed tranquilizers for
nerves [p. 92].
In this case also, local vision of possibilities and desirabilities is chal-
lenged by television and the images and messages it carries. Local
viewers conceptions of possibilities, hopes for themselves and their fu-
ture, and assessments of local life and opportunities appear to be in-
creasingly based upon the models provided by television.
The messages from TV go well beyond providing attractive
models. Television can at the same time, or more directly and didacti-
cally, challenge approaches, attitudes and beliefs. An example is pro-
vided by Carol Delaney (1991: 155) in her study of reproduction and
gender ideology in a Turkish village, The Seed and the Soil.
The government [of Turkey] . . . launched a campaign to discourage
marriages between close kin, arguing that marriages between blood
kin . . . produce . . . deformed, disabled, crippled children. Short televi-
sion programmes described the lives of deaf, blind and crippled people
alleged to be products of such marriages. . . . This] message was
shocking to villagers, since it called into question their most fun-
damental ideas about inherent differences between the sexes, ideas that
are basic to their beliefs about the nature of the universe and the social
order.
Messages that influence viewers attitudes need not result from pur-
poseful campaigns. Soap operas, which reflect and highlight certain
daily family problems in a particular social context, can become per-
suasive models for change in different cultural settings. Janice Boddy
(1989: 321) reports, in her important study of gender and culture in
northern Sudan, Wombs and Alien Spirits, that Egyptian family
dramas shown on Sudanese television are generating major changes in
attitudes among rural Hofriyati viewers.
Egyptian video plays . . deal with themes of problematic kinship,
marital intrigue and thwarted ambition, often absorbing current issues
within traditional [Egyptian] frameworks where they are, in a sense,
naturalized.
The impact of these television dramas [in Hofriyat, northern
Sudan] can be seen in an increased use of Egyptian dialect words in
everyday speech, in a concern to acquire the material goods displayed
in Egyptian households and TV advertisements (so reinforcing the la-
bour emigration of village men) and, more subtly, in ideas about fer-
tility and the ideal relationship between spouses. A few young people I
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The electronic Trojan horse:
television in the globalization of paramodern cultures
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The cultural dimensions of global change
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The cultural dimensions of global change
the way of life of middle-aged and older people, on the one hand, and
the way of life of youths and younger men and women. Therefore,
while before the way of life and the habits and customs of life were simi-
lar for young and old alike, today there is this great difference. It takes
its starting point, these [new] habits and customs of life of the youth
and young adults, from television programmes as from other experi-
ences that they may have had. Meanwhile, the life of the older adults is
still somewhat tied to the old Villagrande way of life.
The youths and young adults of Villagrande try to imitate what they
see on television completely and in every way.
The youths and young adults tend to imitate the way of life presented
on television in various programmes.
Everyone dreams of this world [seen on television], but then when we
turn to our real lives, things are different. This is a bad thing; the young
people are not contented, because what they see [on television] is bet-
ter, much better. Therefore they are not content with what they have
and constantly search for more, for what they see on television. This is
why there is this discontent, this malaise, especially among young
adults, because of what they see on television.
The young people - not all but unfortunately there are many - identify
with people [on television], and for them they are fantasies that one day
could become real.
For older Villangrandesi, many of the attitudes and modes of beha-
viour of younger Villagrandesi, which are seen as significantly diver-
gent, are believed to come from the influence of television on the young
people, who identify with people they see on television, who seek to
imitate what they see, and who want what they see on television.
One clue to the denials of young Villagrandesi of the influence of
television on them is their response to questions about who, seen on
television, might be a good model for Villagrandesi to follow. While a
number did name various people seen on television, some half dozen re-
jected the idea of such a model: No, no, I think that each must be him-
self without imitating others; Each creates the model for himself;
There is no need for young people of Villagrande to have anyone to fol-
low. . . . Each young person of Villagrande lives his own reality, which is
completely subjective rather than objective. I think that they must cre-
ate their own models for themselves; Each follows his own destiny.
This assertion of the autonomy of the individual and the individual
creation of direction, bespeaks an individualism and a pluralism that
are themselves a testimony to television and a serious departure from
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Conclusion
How is it, we might ask, that television (and other media) can influence
people to change their societies and cultures? This influence would be
a puzzle if we were to view social life and meaning systems as somehow
rooted in the local earth and determined by topography and climate.
But culture, the established ways in which we construe and cope with
our surroundings, each other and ourselves is an ongoing creative ef-
fort with an interplay between reproduction of the constructed and in-
novation directed to the imagined. The flows of the media, directed
beyond the metropolis and beyond centres of wealth and technology to
rural communities and agrarian societies, do not so much intrude
upon static, rigid, closed traditional structures as feed into thereby
enriching and diversifying the flows of meaning constantly being re-
vised and transformed even as they are reproducing so-called tradi-
tional cultures.
The ongoing creative construction and reproduction of culture in
rural communities and agrarian societies are inevitably based heavily
upon local experience, but not totally constrained by the boundaries of
local activities. For thousands of years, in China, India, Persia, Meso-
potamia, the Mediterranean, Central America and elsewhere, centres
of high culture have generated and broadcast refined and elaborate
myth and poetry, science and theology, stimulating and enriching and
expanding the worlds of local community members widespread among
fragile and turbulent political realms. So, too, have the strengthened
state and Church through the last millennium. Printing and literacy,
newspapers and magazines radically expanded the flow of information
to even the most far-flung local communities.
Now the electronic media, most notably television, have added
their inflow to the ongoing creative processes of cultural reproduc-
tion and enactment. Through television, viewers not only broaden
their views from the rich flow of information but, because of televi-
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Acknowledgements
References
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The cultural dimensions of global change
DELANEY , C. 1991. The Seed and the Soil. Berkeley, University of Califor-
nia Press.
GALATY , J. G. 1992. Post-modern Predicaments in Para-modern Cultures.
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropologi-
cal Association, San Francisco.
GRANZBERG , G. 1982. Television as Storyteller: The Algonkian Indians of
Central Canada. Journal of Communication 32 (l): 43-52.
1985. Television and Self-concept Formation in Developing Areas.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 16 (3): 313-28.
GRANZBERG , G.; STEINBRING , J.; HAMER , J. 1977. New Magic for Old:
TV in Cree Culture. Journal of Communication 27 (4): 154-7.
KOTTAK , C. P. 1990. Prime-time Society. Belmont, Calif., Wadsworth.
LIECHTY , M. 1992. Body and Face: Mass Media, Gender and the Con-
struction of Consumer Identities in Kathmandu, Nepal. Paper
presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological As-
sociation, San Francisco.
MONTREAL GAZETTE . 1993. Bizarre Network Offer Triggers a Soap Opera
on New Delhi Streets (A1-4). Montreal, 21 July.
PAVLIDES , E.; HESSER, J. 1986. Womens Roles and House Form and Dec-
oration in Eressos, Greece. In: J. Dubisch (ed.), Gender and Power in
Rural Greece. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
SILVERMAN, S. 1975. Three Bells of Civilization. New York, Columbia
University Press.
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C HAPTER 1 2
The ethnography of development:
an African anthropologists vision
of the development process
Historical background
PRECOLONIAL AFRICA
According to fossil records, all the human species originated in Africa.
Scientific literature demonstrates that Homo sapiens lived in Africa
long before migrating to the Middle East or to Europe (Robins, 1991).
Molecular and linguistic studies also show the African roots of todays
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goods. In return for these goods, the rulers and their peoples received
a large enough variety of European goods to support an economic
base of great importance. The more goods, including slaves that were
produced in or channeled through his kingdom, the more imported
goods a king and his people were able to acquire. With these imported
goods a ruler could equip at least some of his soldiers with European
weaponry, This gave him an enormous advantage over neighboring
peoples who fought with traditional African weapons. And the spread
of attractive foreign goods served as a powerful inducement to the
rulers followers and vassals to support him in wars of conquest, which
usually increased the supply of African goods, including slaves.
Africas human resource base was significantly depleted by the slave
trade, which began to decline as European nations moved into the
continent and partitioned as though it were war booty.
COLONIZATION
The cultural, economic and political dependence of Africa on the West
began with colonialism. The new order gradually paved the way for
economic exploitation of Africas natural and mineral resources by the
West.
Like the slave trade, colonization was a further significant con-
tributor to the drama of African underdevelopment. When the Indus-
trial Revolution made the slave trade less profitable than before, the
huge natural resources of the colonies emerged as a more attractive
economic asset. As the United States was gradually gaining its political
autonomy and Europes disengagement was inevitable, the need arose
for strategy revision. Instead of transporting labour from Africa to the
Americas, human labour would now be used to exploit natural re-
sources on the African continent. The slave trade was replaced by ser-
vitude and hard labour on plantations. Large farms and plantations
were established through surreptitiously expropriating land from the
indigenous people with no compensation. The Bakweri lite have at-
tempted over the years to recover land expropriated by the German
colonial government between 1884 and 1916 but to no avail. Expro-
priated land became a valuable commodity for the plantation econ-
omy that required African labour.
In 1892 a German colonial officer, Eugen Zintgraff, called on the
German Government to recruit Africans massively to work on the
newly established plantations in Cameroon. The colonial policy re-
garding Africa was Africa for Africans and Africans for us. If the Ger-
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NEO-COLONIALISM
Most African countries won independence in the 1960s and 1970s
after many years of liberation struggles. This marked the official end
of colonial administration and political control. However, no colo-
nial power had prepared the ground for a strong and vibrant econ-
omy of its former colonies. Attempts by the Casablanca group of
nations (Egypt, Ghana, Guinea and Morocco) to forge a new econ-
omic, political, military and monetary policy for independent Africa
were sabotaged by neo-colonial forces operating inside the newly in-
dependent countries of the 1960s. What emerged as the Organiza-
tion of African Unity in Lagos in 1963 was Africa disarmed.
Continuous neo-colonial control has been achieved through:
(a) conservation of economic monopolies to the detriment of local
initiative; (b) political institutions tailored to suit neo-colonial inter-
ests, and (c) a civil service made up of Westernized Africans, more
Western than Westerners themselves. The colonial administration
created four social classes: (a) a foreign imperialist bourgeoisie;
(b) an indigenous bourgeoisie (assimilated Africans); (c) a lower
middle class (office clerks, messengers, etc.); and (d) the peasantry,
made up of uneducated farmers with little control over natural re-
sources (Owona, 1990).
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littered with expensive airports and five-star hotels, although less than
0.5 per cent of the population use these facilities. In a 1992 speech in
the capital of the least-developed province of the country, the Presi-
dent of the country in question noted with complacency that the road
network in the province was poor due to the fact that funds allotted for
road development in the area had been diverted to loftier projects,
i.e. building the airport in question and a three-star hotel, all in the
said province.
In the same province, two donor nations were each awarded pro-
jects. One concerned the promotion of swamp-rice cultivation: the
other the building of a dam to provide more water to a hydroelectric
plant in the dry season. Experts on both projects knew that the dam
would flood the rice-fields. They did not indicate the implications of
the dam on the rice project to the government. When the dam project
was completed, not only were rice-fields flooded: so too were cultural
and archaeological sites.
Assisting independent African countries was, in neo-colonial
terms, maintaining a colonial grip on these nation-states. Decades
of colonial exploitation were forgotten. Development assistance was
not seen in terms of being a partial return of the economic riches of
the colonies. European museums are tilled with the pillage of Afri-
can material culture. There has been an outcry for the return of Af-
ricas finest objets dart: but this has not taken place. It is difficult to
assess the extent of the economic looting of Africas natural and
mineral resources. Development assistance by former colonial
powers, considered today to be among the richest countries in the
world, must be seen as a form of restitution or repatriation of the
continents wealth.
For historical reasons, France has been deeply implanted in Africa.
Its political, cultural, technical, financial and scientific involvement in
its former African colonies is enormous and pervading. The French
Fends dAide et Coopration (FAC) allocates funds or loans to coun-
tries of the FAC zone, consisting of all the former French colonies as
well as Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland. The non-FAC
zone countries receive assistance for investment exclusively from the
French treasury, whereas technical assistance is in the hands of the
General Directorate of Cultural, Scientific and Technical Co-oper-
ation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Freud, 1988: 36). Other in-
stitutions such as the Caisse Franaise de Dveloppement (ex-CCCE)
and some ministries (Co-operation, Finance and Economy, and Edu-
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The cultural dimensions of global change
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that Africas debt grew much faster than that of other developing re-
gions. Today, Africas debt is evaluated at about $170 billion. Inter-
national experts are unanimous in their views regarding the
consequences of this huge debt for African development. If the alloca-
tion of new funds for development is henceforth to be linked to the re-
payment of external debt and the democratic process, Africas
economic take-off is still several decades away. The Structural Adjust-
ment Programme (SAP) of the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) has further confirmed that Africa needs to wait
several decades to join the community of developed nations. The poor
have become poorer, while corrupt governments are still very much in
place.
It is undeniable that the crisis is partly the cause of accumulated ex-
ternal debt (Berg and Whitaker, 1990: 482). Initially, development aid
was conceived and considered an urgent necessity for the improve-
ment of living conditions, but thirty years have proved that it was an
enslaving and subjugating practice (Jalee, 1965: 92) that has only
succeeded in worsening Africas underdevelopment. If Africas debt
can be written off or swapped for environment, there is a slim hope that
it will see better days. But Africa must be able to handle its own destiny
and control market forces.
An anthropological perspective
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The cultural dimensions of global change
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The cultural dimensions of global change
hoe. This time the hoe was not made by Africans, it was imported (Tin-
dimubona, 1992: 2).
The anthropological approach maintains that major break-
throughs in the development process can only be achieved if local
populations and cultures participate in designing, planning and imple-
menting development projects. Local people must be fully engaged in
self-reliant development (see Bodley, 1975; Pitt, 1976; Fahim, 1982) if
development efforts are to be sustainable. Reliance on culture and its
strengths becomes a vital ingredient.
Culture is to a people as the heart is to the body. The pervasive na-
ture of Western cultures has deprived most African ethnic groups of
their strong cultural base. Indigenous cultural values have been aban-
doned in favour of imported Western models that local people can
neither afford nor reproduce. The net effect has been the emergence of
cultural mulattos or mttissage'. According to some authors, contacts
with European cultures have acquainted local people with great
wealth, opportunity and privilege, but only very limited avenues by
which to acquire these things (see Bodley, 1975; Ela, 1990). In cultural
dynamics, acculturation is a positive mechanism that permits the cul-
ture to readjust to new demands and conditions without destroying its
very essence.
With the Meiji Restoration in Japan in 1868, one of the five oaths
the emperor took was that knowledge will be sought and acquired
from any source with all the means at our disposal, for the greatness
and security of Japan (Salam, 1988: 20). The Japanese have reached
technological heights without destroying their culture and socio-cultu-
ral behaviour. The anthropological approach does not suggest the cre-
ation of cultural zoos in which the overwhelming influence of wider
society will be completely cut off, but rather a cultural selection process
that is entirely determined by societal actors. These actors are the Afri-
can traditional or modern leaders who seek to build a great and secure
Africa. They cannot do so while ignoring the vital social entities of the
nation-states. Ethnic groups or tribal societies are still very much part
of the modern state seeking to join the community of developed na-
tions. The continent cannot but adjust appropriately to changing
times.
Cultural dynamics teach us that cultures continue to adjust accord-
ing as opportunities for the re-examination of existing social structures
occur. Technology has made the world a global or planetary village.
Events in one part of the world are seen, heard and felt everywhere.
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TV has brought the world into the living rooms or huts of even the
poorest and remotest African household. Social protests in the admin-
istrative capitals of Abuja, Dakar, Johannesburg, Libreville and Nai-
robi filter instantly into the African hinterlands. Protest rallies in
Germany, riots in California or demonstrations in Japan are immedi-
ately integrated into the democratic culture of a new Africa by CNN
anchorperson. New cultural invasion is threatening Africas future.
Anthropology argues for an integrated approach in which the over-
whelming influence of a wider culture is curbed to accommodate the dis-
tinctive characters of local cultures without creatinga feeling of cultural
deprivation from the global benefits. Development agencies, govern-
ment planners and implementers must be aware of this and work with
the people to enhance local talents and skills capable of promoting the
integration of positive cultural values into the development process.
This will reinforce the peoples dignity, prestige and satisfaction.
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The cultural dimensions of global change
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The cultural dimensions of global change
bank had to address grass-roots issues. This could not be done without
turning to anthropology, which focuses on such microstudies.
Anthropological expertise needs to be deployed to save Africa
from the threatening economic holocaust. The environment, popula-
tion, nutrition, health, education, national integration, sociocultural
change, community development and so forth require unique an-
thropological insights, methods and approaches, Let us look at
three areas:
Environment. Desertification, deforestation, soil erosion and the lower-
ing of the water-table can be handled successfully if knowledge of
local perceptions is harnessed for a more sustainable local manage-
ment. Ethnographic surveys can determine alternative approaches.
Understanding the social behaviour and attitudes of local people
towards major environmental issues is vital for any meaningful
policy and management. Incorporating peoples attitudes, tradi-
tions, customs and behaviour into environmental policy design
and implementation may save our planet.
Nutrition. It is estimated that about 150 million Africans live on the
verge of starvation (United Nations, 1987). Sociocultural barriers
to improving food production, consumption and land manage-
ment are equally formidable. To overcome these barriers, local
populations must be the main agents of change. Ethnographic sur-
veys can indicate the best approaches in confronting the problems.
Why are millions of African women malnourished? Nutrition
strategies cannot be directed towards overcoming poor dietary
habits and specific deficiencies unless we know what these habits
and deficiencies are (World Bank, 1989).
Population. Early marriage and high fertility enable the average Afri-
can household to have at least seven children. With the average
population increasing at 3 per cent per annum, it is estimated that
any African country that has such an increase needs to invest 6 per
cent of its GNP each year to meet the increase without in any way
improving living standards (Rosen and Jones, 1980: 148). With
such a rapid population increase, the net capacity to meet the de-
mands progressively diminishes. Anthropological research should
indicate how appropriate family-planning methods could be intro-
duced; how socio-economic barriers to family planning can be
handled; and how indigenous decision-making processes and in-
formation can be used to achieve family-planning strategies and
goals.
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The African masses have been excluded from participating in the devel-
opment process. The involvement of the local people through appro-
priate institutional mechanisms such as direct functional democracy is
essential as a take-off point for Africa (Arthorpe, 1976: 27; Cochraine,
1976; Husain, 1976). African populations with their sociocultural
diversities need to be well understood. Ethnographic surveys are most
appropriate for use in project implementation. Such projects can only
be sustainable if the local people are part of the process.
Given this perspective, development should emerge as a logical
outcome of individual communities efforts, and external assistance
should only reinforce this. The Global Coalition for Africa (Freud,
1992) shares this view when it states that its concern is based on the
premise that Africa can grow only from within, but that to do so, it
needs sustained and well-co-ordinated outside support and a stronger
working partnership with Northern donors.
If the essence of development today is peoples participation in the
improvement of their quality of life, anthropological research should
focus on strategies to maximize this participation. In this endeavour,
attention should be paid to the role and improvement of the status of
women, African social stratification and leadership patterns, local in-
dustry and competition, co-operative movement, rotating credit asso-
ciations, empowerment of local populations, agricultural production
and marketing, kinship networks and collective responsibility.
While targeting ways of improving popular participation, anthro-
pological research should also aim at: (a) identifying incentives for
participation; (b) identifying cultural values that can enhance produc-
tivity; (c) determining gender roles and their relevance to participation
in development; (d) identifying the decision-making process within the
family set-up and its implications for family planning; (e) studying
traditional land tenure and its effects on development; (f) identifying
local priority projects and their possible impact on living standards of
the local populations; (g) identifying the local decision-making process
and its implications for development policy and strategies, and
(h) highlighting strategies through which the local savings and invest-
ment habits of the people can be improved.
Ethnographic information will certainly help development project
designers avoid pitfalls. In short, projects must be elaborated by the
local people, for the people, and be executed by the people. Individual
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References
ADEDEJI, A. 1990. The African Alternative: Putting People First. Contribu-
tions to the International Conference on Populations, Participation in
the Recovery of Africa, Arusha, United Republic of Tanzania.
ARTHORPE, R. 1976. Peasants and Planistrators in Eastern Africa, 196@
1970. In: D. C. Pitt (cd.), Development from Below: Anthropologists
and Development Situations: 2156. The Hague, Mouton.
AYITTEY , G. B. 1991. Indigenous African Institutions. Washington, D. C.,
Translational.
BERG, R. J.; WHITAKER , J. S. 1990. Stratgies pour un nouveau dveloppe-
ment en Afrique: nouveaux horizons [Strategies for New Development
in Africa: New Horizons]. Paris, Economica.
BODLEY , J. H. 1975. Victims of Progress. Pullman, Washington State
University.
COCHRAINE , G. 1976. The Perils of Unconventional Anthropology. In
D. C. Pitt (cd.), Development from Below: Anthropologists and Devel-
opment Situations: 5770. The Hague, Mouton.
DESCHAMPS,e H. 1953. Les mthodes et les doctrines coloniales de la France:
du XVI sicle nos jours [French Colonial Practices and Doctrines:
from the Sixteenth Century to the Present]. Paris, Colin.
DIOP, C. A. 1981. Civilisation or Barbarism? Paris, Prsence Africaine.
DUMONT , R. 1982. LAfrique trangle. Paris, Le Seuil.
ELA, J.-M. 1990. Quand ltat pntre en brousse: les ripostes paysannes
la crise [When the State Steps into the Bush: Peasant Reactions to the
Crisis]. Paris, Karthala.
FAHIM, H. 1982. Indigenous Anthropology in Non-Western Countries.
University of South Carolina Press.
FANON , F. 1983. The Wretched of the Earth. New York, Penguin Books.
FREUD, C. 1988. Quelle coopration? Un bilan de laide au dveloppement
[What Co-operation? Development Aid Assessed]. Paris, Karthala.
(Global Coalition for Africa.)
. 1992. Africa and Economic Trends. Washington, D. C., World Bank.
241
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The ethnography of development: an African
anthropologists vision of the development process
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C HAPTER 1 3
Anthropology and global science:
a multidisciplinary perspective
Paul T. Baker
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in detail, but also in the hope that these studies would elucidate how
these characteristics helped the groups adapt to their environmental
niche.
To increase the probability of detecting such adaptations, Weiner
encouraged studies of groups that had remained removed from mod-
ern culture and/or lived in extreme environments. Although initial
plans in the large multinational and multidisciplinary project were
never completely realized, a remarkable number of such studies were
conducted and integrated in some form of published synthesis (Collins
and Weiner, 1977).
The detailed planning for the Human Adaptability Project was
completed in seven international meetings with between twenty and
forty participants. These included human geneticists, physiologists, bi-
ological anthropologists, cultural anthropologists and psychologists.
The background papers assembled into several books provided the
basis for the projects rationale and its direction (IBP, 1968; Baker and
Weiner, 1966; Yoshimura and Weiner, 1966). As a participant in four
of these seven conferences, I know how difficult it was to reach an
agreement on the rationale and structure for projects. The geneticists
and biological anthropologists agreed on theory but differed on re-
search strategies. The physiologists believed in precise measurements
but were unconcerned with sample sizes or individual variability. Most
of the cultural anthropologists involved also felt that survey ap-
proaches were unimportant but some went further by doubting the im-
portance of environment or biology to human population differences
in behaviour. Despite these differences, a number of integrated multi-
disciplinary projects were developed and completed as part of IBP.
In each instance, it is reasonable to conclude that the projects were
initiated because the project initiators needed information that could
not be generated without participants from several disciplines. On the
other hand, additional professionals later joined the effort to obtain
specific information they found difficult to access without the financial
and other types of support from the larger project.
The beginning of the International Biological Programme was
rapidly followed by the MAB programme, which is continuing,
whereas the IBP officially ended in 1975. Although both of these pro-
grammes were concerned with assessing the worlds environmental
conditions, there was a major difference in both the types of problems
emphasized and the kind of planning structure utilized for the research
programmes. The research agenda for the IBP was established
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(11)Northen Algonkian
Project
,<
(12) Multinational Andean ,:;
Genetic and Health
Project (MaB)
(13) Samoan Migrant Project
(MaB)
Planning
Fieldwork and data-gathering
Publication and synthesis
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The future
The most pressing problems in the world today are the changes now
occurring in the worlds atmosphere and biosphere. These changes
bode ill for our future as well as for the future of other life on the planet.
Coping with the problems calls for data on the rates of change, the
cause of change and the consequences of change. As stated in the intro-
duction, I believe that anthropologists should be substantially in-
volved in this process, including the advanced planning of research
and policy. Unfortunately, only a few have been involved to date.
In 1992 the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
published two major reports on environmental change. The first was
Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming: Mitigation, Adaptation and
the Science Base, a more than 900 page report requested by the United
States Congress (NAS, 1992). This study was the work of four panels
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made up of fifty scientists and engineers. Only one panellist was an an-
thropologist. The second report was Global Environmental Change: The
Human Dimensions (Stern et al., 1992). This book provides a back-
ground on the importance of the social sciences in understanding both
the human cause for and responses to environmental change. It also de-
velops a proposed national research programme. The book was pre-
pared by a sixteen-person committee with the aid of a staff of four. Only
one of the committee members was an anthropologist.
It is not clear why anthropology was so poorly represented on pa-
nels that will have a strong influence on the future directions of United
States research. It would be inappropriate to criticize the contents of
these reports in detail, but it is apparent that they do not significantly re-
flect anthropological theory and method. In the past, anthropology has
been presented as a science that, by integrating information about our
cultural and biological past, has much to offer in explaining present
human biology and behaviour. While the data sources for archaeolog-
ists and biological anthropologists interested in reconstructing the past
remain, the traditional isolated human groups that formed the major re-
source in cultural anthropology are now disappearing. Thus, I suggest
that if cultural anthropology is to remain as a research science, its pres-
ent and future practitioners must go beyond the present tendency to de-
scribe, theorize and apply. Instead, they need to join the other social and
biological sciences in co-operative endeavors based on theories amen-
able to quantitative testing and subject to repeatable verification.
References
BARER, P. T.; LITTLE, M. A. (eds.). 1976. Man in the Andes: A Multidisci-
plinary Study of High Altitude Quechua. Stroudsburg, Pa., Dowden,
Hutchison & Ross.
BAKER , P. T.; WEINER , J. S. (eds.). 1966. The Biology of Human Adapta-
bility. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
COLLINS, K. C.; WEINER, J. S. 1977. Human Adaptability: A History and
Compendium of Research in the International Biological Programme.
London, Taylor & Francis.
DI CASTRI , F.; BAKER , F. W. G.; HADLEY , M. (eds.). 1984. Ecology in
Practice. Dublin, Tycooly International Publishing. 2 vols.
IBP (INTERNATIONAL BIOLOGICAL PROGRAMME ). 1968. Problems in
Human Adaptability. Materialy i prace anthropologizne 75. Wroclaw,
Polskiej Academii Nauk.
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Contributors
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Contributors
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