Diversity in Culture of Different Places and at Different Times - Literature review Example

Student Name: Tutor: Title: Case Study Course: - I agree with the anthropologists’ perspective of a world full of contact and linkages, movement and mixture, as well as cultural exchange and interaction. The world is highly connected where rapid flows of people, capital, images, goods as well as ideologies changes the globe into webs of communication compressing the sense of space and time. Commodity chains are usually analyzed in terms of broadly spread industrial production features of contemporary transnational trade. Nevertheless, the concept is useful in the interpretation of the fluidity with regard to other types of global distribution and production, incorporating the social place of small scale entrepreneurship as well as agricultural commodities’ global distribution. The cultural power is in the hands of producers whose impact is felt through the commodity chains to urban markets that are far places. In regard to Atlantic bluefin tuna, the predominant cultural power goes beyond a uniform market core to peripheral diverse production, but accommodations of local and core systems of cultural and economic production are locally specific. This is the view according to Bestor (2001, p.80). This paper explores this perspective while examining Linda and Rosaldo and Schultz and Lavenda observation. Globalization represents diversity in culture of different places and at different times. All this illustrations point to the compression of time and space hence enhancing globalization. Linda and Rosaldo (2002, p6) are of the opinion that globalization is not only concerned with mapping the shape taken by specific flows of people, capital, images, goods, and ideologies that go around the globe, but further with the experiences of people residing in particular places when more and more of their daily lives are contingent on social processes that are globally extensive. They point out that anthropology provides what is missing in other disciplines which are a concrete attentiveness to the practices of daily lives, human agency, and generally how subjects integrate globalization processes. Having an anthropological introduction to globalization is focusing precisely on large-scale processes by which the world is increasingly becoming interconnected and the manner in which subjects react to the processes in ways that are culturally oriented. The world of globalization somehow point outs human imagination and agency. Inda and Rosaldo (2002, p6) point out the basic reorganization of space and time besides the global interconnectedness. This is the same view held by Bestor (2001, p83) in his article. Globalization is largely about intensified global interconnectedness as well as intensification of circuits of political, economic, ecological, and cultural interdependence. This is a world where radical increase in the flow of people, capital, goods, ideologies, and images across the face of the world has enabled even the most remote places of the world in interaction with metropolitan centers. Globalization suggests basic reordering of space and time. Bestor (2001, p.82) supports Inda and Rosaldo (2002, p.6) sentiments by providing practical examples in Pacific and Atlantic region between Japanese and North Americans. Globalization has been principally captured as a manifestation of the changing experience of space and time. The world at large is experientially shrinking. Innovations in technology in 20th-century-particularly in communication and transportation-have made it quicker and easier for things and people to interact. The globalization experience is uneven process. For example, whereas some individuals may have the economic and political processes to explore the world, many others have limited or no access to means of communication and transport: the cost of a phone call or an airplane ticket is just too unreachable for them (Inda & Rosaldo, 2002 p.7) Moreover, there exist large expanses of the earth only tangentially linked into the webs of interconnection that involves the globe. Dunn talks about the transformation of market economy system from previous socialism to capitalism via media and technology as agents of globalization, as well as how by their mediation, new versions of personhood with regard to the niche labour market and personal identity have come up; both of which are often traverse and fluid boundaries. This view supports the compression of time. Anthropologists have accepted the concept of globalization as being a rubric for a lot of work only in recent years. It is suggested that multi-sited ethnography is the sine quo non of future and present anthropology. The objective of multi-ethnography is excellent, but more often it is honored in breach as opposed to observance. The entire framework fails to offer a theme that is unifying that can be regarded as phenomenological reality which gives credence of the juxtapositions of settings and scenes. It is obvious that there are glaring exceptions and many of them are about commodities circulation. Analysis puts the commodity at the convergence of Caribbean slave trade, Western European industrialization and imperialism. It is observed that production of commodities is also a cognitive and cultural process; commodities are not produced materially as only things, but rather culturally marked as representing a certain type of thing. Bestor (2001, p82) observes that global culture flows and ebbs in multiple directions as well as along different dimensions concurrently. Whereas the general economic association between the United States and Japan has transformed to be complexly intertwined in the couple of year, cultural interplay and trade issues have remained separate from one another. Many people from North America are of the view that basic direction of influence of culture is from West to East. Japan has grown to be a core source of North America consumption as well as popular culture. North America is full of Japanese cultural material and motifs. Sushi is regarded as one of such influence that is directed towards the Eastern shore of the Pacific/Asia region. By mid-1970s Sushi started to grow in popularity regarded as an indicator of educational standing and class. Sushi together with other elements that dots the Japanese cuisine has grown increasingly to become mainstream within North America. Likewise some parts of maritime economy of North America have been increasingly drawn into the realm of the fishing industry in Japan. Bestor (2001, p83) does not propose a direct cause and effect connection or relationship, but rather suggests that global circuits of capital, both symbolic and productive, are being reconstructed, just as in the illustration of yuppie coffee. People connect through familiarity. Economic production and ideational production intermingle and intersect in this domain as in other many other areas. Cultural familiarity in one area assist in enabling and is in turn sustained through familiarity of another sort, in another area, in another area, the North America maritime life economic integration into Asian-concentrated trade networks and Asian markets, supportive to the Tokyo-Osaka metropolitan core. This integration is of many kinds. Buyers of fish from Asia operate in many ports in North America, and the Japanese market craves for many fisheries. Traders from Japan have also cultivated domestic market in America for fewer grades as compared to the fish exported to Japan. Cultural capital and commodity intersect at a central place in the seafood global trade. The commodity chains and the auction system that flow out of and into the market are elaborate institutions which socially construct integration across levels in the market, as well as the market and the world producers. In the creation of Japanese cuisine as national identity one should consider ‘imagined cuisines’ and ‘imagined communities’; sushi comes out as tremendously large. Sushi characteristic of cuisine in Tokyo was an innovation of mid-19th century (Bestor, 2001, p.87). Tastes have continued to change over time. North American fishers point to the evidence of cross-Atlantic migration and intermingling genetic studies to assert that if Western Atlantic stocks are crashing or reducing, then Europeans have responsibility to get involved in efforts to conserve the Mediterranean as well as Eastern Atlantic stocks. Seasonality is an important aspect in Japanese food culture in determining specific varieties not just by quality and availability by using fundamental characteristics (Bestor, 2001, p.88). Fish from the same species will be referred to differently in names depending on the season of the year that it was caught, their maturity, size, or the place where they were caught. Bestor (2001, p.89) observes that language and culture are strategic tools in business not always used to pass around information or understanding but in some places to obstruct its flow. World culture or globalization is not a repetition of uniformity but rather an organization of diversity that can be described as a growingly interconnectedness of varying local cultures. Schultz and Lavenda (2005, p.362) have taken a historical perspective to discuss the impact of globalization with regard to increased interconnectedness. They have explores the time of the cold were and how time and space is important in the definition of globalization. First World leaders were in support of modernization theory, the perspective that newly independent states resulting from colonial empires would grow to become self-sustaining, prosperous countries similar to United States or Britain as long as they copied the practices and policies believed to have been responsible for the basic successes of these countries. Colonization was seen as a positive process where backward people were taught the skills needed to advance forward. Schultz and Lavenda (2005, p.363) have explored interconnectedness brought about by globalization through phases of history from the post-colonial period to the present. Bestor (2001, p.94) is of the view that the complex and temporal structure of the trade needs coordination of markets and producers, demand and supply among various irreconcilable clocks. Globalization is responsible for linking the timescapes together without forcing a uniform logic on every place but through filling in the gaps, coordination of activities at locations that are disparate, changing perspectives on mosaic chips to make them apparently fit; as opposed to organizing diversity but also being an arbitrageur, utilizing the minute differences in place and time in order to gain from the diversity that has been exposed and later juxtaposed. Globalization changes connections among various parts of the world and reconstruct the circuits of capital flow in the changing representations. Meanings transformation attached to relationships as well as commodities are equally fundamental for understanding the markets’ global role, the markets’ cultural processes, and commodity chains, as well as the ever-shifting relationships between global stages and local actors. All the various phenomena take place through the interaction of place and market. The intermingling of cultural meanings, social structural forms, and economic processes along various dimensions, in varied juxtapositions of local places, in accelerating time, attain ‘diversity organization’ of globalization, but they accomplish this by substantially urban means: hierarchy, market, place, and linkage. Bestor (2001, p83) has explained how culture and connectedness has been replicated in the supply chain in trade. Anthropologists analyze globalization beyond mere interconnectedness. The understanding of time and space plays an important role in interpretation and definition of globalization. The other writers have echoed Bestor’s sentiments while adding another twist to the entire matter of globalization. Production and distribution of goods and means of communication have played an important part in globalization. Cultural exchange and interaction has been aided by globalization. References Bestor, T.C., 2001, Supply-side Sushi: Commodity, Market, and the Global City, American Anthropologist, 103 (1): 76-95. Inda, J.X., & Rosaldo, R., 2002, The Anthropology of globalization, Blackwell Publishers, Malden, MA. Lavenda, R.H., & Schultz, E.A., 2005, Anthropology: A perspective on the human condition, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Read More