Causes Underlying the Increase in Transnational Arranged Marriages - Literature review Example

Download file to see previous pages 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 of increasing transnational arranged marriages, between people in Asia and the advanced western countries.
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 government policies has 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) reiterate that the trends and approaches explaining globalization 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 globalization. The fact is that generally, the flow of people and ideas known as the ‘brain-drain’ is one-way, from the developing countries to the industrially advanced western nations, while the flow of new technological development and finance in payment for work and trade are from the developed to the poorer nations, and only the movement of trade is mutual between nations.   ...Download file to see next pagesRead More