Global Challenges, Local Responses, and the Role of Anthropology

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Chapter 16

• Global Challenges,Local Responses, andthe Role
  of Anthropology

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Chapter Outline

• What can anthropologists tell us of the future?
• What are todays cultural trends?
• What problems must be solved for humans to have a
  viable future?

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Anthropologists Contribution to the Study of the
Future of Humanity

• Anthropologists see things in context.
• They have a long-term historical perspective and
  recognize culture bound biases.
• Anthropologists are concerned with the tendency
  to treat traditional societies as obsolete when
  they appear to stand in the way of development.

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Migration
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Multiculturalism

• An policy of mutual respect and tolerance for
  cultural differences.
• Ethnic tension, common in pluralistic societies,
  sometimes turns violent, leading to formal
  separation.
• To manage cultural diversity within such
  societies, some countries have adopted
  multiculturalism as an official public policy.

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Global Corporations

• Their power and wealth, often exceeding that of
  national governments, has increased dramatically
  through media expansion.
• Megacorporations have enormous influence on the
  ideas and behavior of hundreds of millions of
  people worldwide.
• States and corporations compete for scarce
  natural resources, cheap labor, new commercial
  markets, and ever-larger profits in a political
  arena that spans the entire globe.

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Structural power

• The global forces that direct economic and
  political institutions and shape public ideas and
  values.
• Hard power is backed up by economic and military
  force.
• Soft power is ideological persuasion.
• The worlds largest corporations are almost all
  based in a small group of wealthy states, which
  dominate international trade and finance
  organizations.

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Globalization and Corporations

• Globalization provides megaprofits for large
  corporations but wreaks havoc in traditional
  cultures.
• Globalization is marketed as positive for
  everyone, but the poor are becoming poorer and
  the rich richer.
• Globalization engenders worldwide resistance
  against superpower domination.
• For this reason, the emerging world system is
  unstable, vulnerable, and unpredictable.

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Results of Globalization

• Worldwide and growing structural
  violence-physical and/or psychological harm
• Repression
• cultural and environmental destruction
• Poverty
• hunger and obesity
• illness, and premature death
• Caused by exploitative and unjust social,
  political, and economical systems.

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A Sustainable Future

• Dramatic changes in cultural values and
  motivations, as well as in social institutions
  and the types of technologies we employ, are
  required if humans are going to realize a
  sustainable future.
• Shortsighted emphasis on consumerism and
  individual self-interest needs to be abandoned in
  favor of a more balanced social and environmental
  ethic.

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Pollution and Over Population

• A direct threat to humanity.
• Western societies have protected their
  environment only when a crisis warranted.
• Many of the worlds developing countries have
  policies for population growth that conflict with
  other policies.
• Even with replacement reproduction, the
  population would continue to grow for 50 years.

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Energy Consumption
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Population