Causes underlying the increase in transnational arranged marriages - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages... The tradition of arranged marriages persist in Asian countries, where the elders in the family as well as the community help in finding suitable spouses for young men and women of marriageable age, and parents take the responsibility of getting their children married. With increasing globalization and job opportunities in foreign locales in the west, growing numbers of young men from Asian countries work in the west, and prefer to marry a person from their homeland. Similarly, several American men voluntarily seek wives from Russia and other Asian countries. Subsequently, young married women are transported across nations to cultures different from their own.Their family expands, and the children grow up as citizens of the adopted country. From an anthropological perspective, it is interesting to investigate the reasons for the inter-cultural marriages across nations, which require tremendous adjustments among the spouses who move to the new environment to make a new life for themselves and their families.
The phenomenon of globalization over the last thirty years is the “increased interdependence among countries resulting from the flow of people, trade, finance and ideas from one nation to another” (Bishop, Reinke & Adams, 2011, p.117). The World Bank strongly supports globalization, and defines it as an ongoing process underscoring the growing integration of economies and societies around the world, states Mukherjee (2008). With technological innovations such as the World Wide Web or Internet helping to optimize the speed and ease of international communication and transactions, the impact of globalization continues to increase. Thesis Statement: The purpose of this paper is to determine the causes for increasing transnational arranged marriages, between people in Asia and the advanced western countries. 2. The Wide-Spread Effects of Globalization With the improved communication networks of technological development and globalization bringing widely located businesses and workplaces together, there is simultaneous integration of different cultures. The concept of globalization increasingly encompasses the media, politics, social concepts, the arts and other cultural artifacts across the world. Developing beyond its economic roots, globalization has expanded into “human rights, the environment, and even national security” (Bishop et al, 2011, p.117). These new initiatives and agreements are equipped with their own governance structures, thereby leading to a radical shift in the right to formulate policies, from individual nation-states to a large number of new, higher level political institutions. Conventional wisdom today considers political institutions coming together and growing in size and significance to be a commendable development. Besides ongoing technological development, the liberalization of governmental policies have led to globalization increasing in leaps and bounds over the last three decades. This radical growth in globalization has resulted in increasing inequality amongst nations, and in increasing inequalities between social classes of individual countries. The three main perspectives evident in globalization literature today are related to what causes globalization, how globalization impacts society, and the future of globalization. Bishop et al (2011) reitrate that the trends and approaches explaining globaliztion help in understanding how it impacts several spheres such as politics, society, culture, the economy and business. The assumption in Bishop et al’s (2011) definition of globalization is that countries mutually depend on one another for the “flow of people, trade, finance and ideas” (p.117). On the other hand, the limitation of this definition is that it portrays an idealistic picture of globalizat ...Download file to see next pagesRead More