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Global Challenges, Local Responses, and the Role of Anthropology. Part II. Structural Power in the Age of Globalization:. A new form of expansive international capitalism has emerged since the mid-1990s.
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Global Challenges, Local Responses, and the Role of Anthropology Part II
Structural Power in the Age of Globalization: • A new form of expansive international capitalism has emerged since the mid-1990s. • Operating under the banner of globalization, it builds on earlier cultural structures of worldwide trade networks, and it is the successor to a system of colonialism in which a handful of powerful, mainly European, capitalist states ruled and exploited foreign nations inhabiting distant territories. • Power plays a major role in coordinating and regulating collective behavior toward imposing or maintaining law and order within, and beyond, a particular community or society.
Structural Power in the Age of Globalization: • Structural power: power that organizes and orchestrates the systemic interaction within and among societies, directing economic and political forces on the one hand and ideological forces that shape public ideas, values, and beliefs on the other • It focuses attention on the systematic interaction between the global forces directing the world’s changing economies and political institutions on the one and hand those that shape public ideas, values, and beliefs on the other
Structural Power in the Age of Globalization: • Hard power: coercive power that is backed up by economies and military forces. • Soft power: co-optive power that presses others through attraction and persuasion to change their ideas, beliefs, values and behavior • The U.S. is the global leader in military expenditure, spending more than $420 billion in 2005, followed by China ($62 billion), Russia ($62 billion), Britain ($51 billion), Japan ($45 billion) and Germany ($30 billion).
Structural Power in the Age of Globalization: • In addition to military might, hard power involves the use of economic strength as a political instrument of coercion or intimidation in the global structuring process. • As the world’s largest economy and leading exporter, the United States has long pushed for free trade for its corporations doing business on a global scale.
Structural Power in the Age of Globalization: • International Monetary Fund (IMF) • Specializing in short-term loans to assist poor or developing countries, the IMF’s financial resources weigh in at about $300 billion. • The five wealthiest countries in the world (U.S., Japan, Germany, France and Britain) control 40% of this global fund and dominate its executive board. • The IMF’s structural power is evident not only in which development projects and policies it chooses to give financial support, but also in its surveillance practices, which involve monitoring borrower’s economic and financial developments.
Structural Power in the Age of Globalization: • Like IMF, the World Bank is largely controlled by a handful or powerful capitalist states. • Operating under geopolitical constraints, these global banking institutions strategically direct capital flows to projects in certain parts of the world, financially supporting some governments and withholding capital from others. • Both IMF and the World Bank have been accused of being insensitive to the political and cultural consequences of the projects they support.
Structural Power in the Age of Globalization: • Globalization wreaks havoc in many traditional cultures and disrupts long-established social organizations everywhere. • By the early 21st century, the global trend of economic inequality is becoming clear: The poor are becoming poorer, and the rich are becoming richer.
Structural Power in the Age of Globalization: • One of the major tasks of soft power is to package and sell the general idea of globalization as something positive and progressive (as “freedom”, “free” trade, “free” market) and to frame or brand anything that opposes capitalism in negative terms. • Structural power and its associated concepts of hard and soft power enable us to better understand the wider field of force in which local communities throughout the world are now compelled to operate.
Structural Power in the Age of Globalization: • No matter how effectively a dominant state or corporation combines its hard and soft power, globalization does run into opposition • While it is true that states and big corporations have expanded their power and influence through electronic communication technologies, it is also true that these same technologies present opportunities to individuals and groups that have traditionally been powerless • Together with radio and television, the Internet is now the dominant means of mass communication around the world.
Problems of Structural Violence: • Based on their capacity to harness, direct, and distribute global resources and energy flows, heavily armed states, megacorporations, and very wealthy elites are using their coercive and co-optive powers to structure or rearrange the emerging world system and direct global processes to their own competitive advantage. • Structural violence: physical and/or psychological harm (including repression, environmental destruction, poverty, hunger, illness, and premature death) caused by impersonal, exploitative, and unjust social, political, and economic systems.
Problems of Structural Violence: • Every day millions of people around the world face: • famine • ecological disasters • health problems • political instability • violence rooted in development programs of profit-making maneuvers directed by powerful states of global corporations.
Problems of Structural Violence: • Although human rights abuses are nothing new, globalization has enormously expanded and intensified structural violence. • In 1960 the average income for the twenty wealthiest countries it the world was fifteen times that of the twenty poorest. • Today it is thirty times higher.
Problems of Structural Violence: • More remarkable is the fact that the world’s 225 riches individuals have a combined wealth equal to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the entire world population. • The poorest 80% of the human population make do with 14% of all goods and services in the world. • Meanwhile, the richest 20% enjoy 86%.
Overpopulation and Poverty: • Although controlling population growth does not by itself make the other problems go away, it is unlikely those other problems can be solved unless population growth is stopped or even reversed. • For a population to hold steady, there must be a balance between birthrates and death rates. • Replacement reproduction: the point at which birthrates and death rates are in equilibrium; people producing only enough offspring to replace themselves when they die.
Overpopulation and Poverty: • Despite progress in population control, the number of humans on earth continues to grow overall. • The problem’s severity becomes clear when it is realized that the present world population of more than 6 billion people can be sustained only by using up non-renewable resources such as oil, which is like living off income-producing capital.
Hunger and Obesity: • Today, over a quarter of the world’s countries to not produce enough food to feed their populations and cannot afford to import what is needed. • About 1 billion people in the world are undernourished. • Some 6 million children aged 5and under die every year due to hunger, and those who survive often suffer from physical and mental impairment.
Hunger and Obesity: • While millions of people in some parts of the world are starving, many millions of others are overeating • The obesity epidemic is not due solely to excessive eating and lack of physical activity. • The highest rates of obesity in the world now exist among the Pacific Islanders living in places such as Samoa and Fiji.
Hunger and Obesity: • As for hunger cases, about 10% of them can be traced to specific events; droughts or floods, as well as various social, economic, and political disruptions, including warfare. • During the 20th century 44 million people died due to human-made famine.
Hunger and Obesity: • U.S. style farming has additional problems, including energy inefficiency. • For every calorie produced, at least 8 (some say as many as 20) calories go into its production and distribution. • By contrast, an Asian wet-rice framer using traditional methods produces 300 calories for each 1 expended.
Hunger and Obesity: • North American agriculture is wasteful of other resources as well: About 30 pounds of fertile topsoil are ruined for every pound of food produced. • Toxic substances from chemical nutrients and pesticides pile up in unexpected places, poisoning ground and surface waters; killing fish, birds, and other useful forms of life’ upsetting natural ecological cycles; and causing major public health problems.
Hunger and Obesity: • Confronted with such economic forces in the global arena, small farmers in poor countries find themselves in serious trouble when trying to sell their products on markets open to subsidized agricultural corporations dumping mass-produced and often genetically engineered crops and other farm products. • Such is the fate of many Maya Indians today
Pollution: • Industrial activities are producing highly toxic waste at unprecedented rates, and factory emissions are poisoning the air. • For instance, aluminum contamination is high enough on 17% of the world’s farmland to be toxic to plants, and has been linked to senile dementia, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s diseases, three major health problems in industrial countries. • Added to this is the problem of global warming, the greenhouse effect, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.
Pollution: • Structural violence also manifests itself in the shifting of manufacturing and hazardous waste disposal from developed to developing countries. • Seeking cheaper ways to get rid of the wastes, “toxic traders” began shipping hazardous waste to Eastern Europe and especially to poor and underdeveloped countries in Western Africa.
The Culture of Discontent: • For the past several decades, the world’s poor countries have been sold on the idea they should and actually can enjoy as standard of living comparable to that of the rich countries. • The problem involves not just population growth outstripping available natural resources, but also un-equal access to decent jobs, housing, sanitation, health care, leisure and adequate police and fire protection. • This culture of discontent is not limited to people living in poor and overpopulated countries.
The Culture of Discontent: • The short-sighted emphasis on consumerism and individual self-interest so characteristic of the world’s affluent countries needs to be abandoned in favor of a more balanced social and environmental ethic. • Such values include a worldview that sees humanity as part of the natural world rather than superior to it. • Included, too is a sense of social responsibility that recognizes that no individual, people, or state has the right to expropriate resources at he expense of others. • Awareness is needed of how important supportive ties are for individuals, such as seen in kinship or other associations in the world’s traditional societies.
Question • One of the consequences of the development of global culture has been _______________. • the disappearance of differences between people • reduction in the possibility of war • a resurgence of separatist movements • the replacement of traditional cultures by more adaptive, modern cultures • reduction in the number of anthropologists
Answer: C • One of the consequences of the development of global culture has been a resurgence of separatist movements.
Question • An Asian wet rice farmer might choose not to adopt North American techniques of intensive agriculture because _______________. • he cannot afford to buy the chemical products typically used in this type of agriculture • the North American method requires at least 8 calories of energy to be expended for every calorie produced, whereas the wet rice farmer produces 300 calories for every calorie he invests • the North American method produces toxic substances that destroy delicate ecological balances • the North American method, while successful for a short period of time, is sowing the seed of its own destruction • all of the above
Answer: E • An Asian wet rice farmer might choose not to adopt North American techniques of intensive agriculture because all of the above.
Question • The worldwide spread of such products as Pepsi is taken by some as a sign that a _______________ world culture is developing. • Standardized • Heterogeneous • Homogeneous • Motley • Varied
Answer: C • The worldwide spread of such products as Pepsi is taken by some as a sign that a homogenous world culture is developing.
Question • Coercive power that is backed up by economic and military force is called _______________. • structural violence • imposed force • coercion • hard power • soft power
Answer: D • Coercive power that is backed up by economic and military force is called hard power.
