American Center Bulletin

Globalization and Culture by Ruth Bennett
East and Southeast Asia: An Annotated Directory of Internet Resources
A Word from the Center
Notes from the AIRC

Globalization and Culture by Ruth Bennett

Mention "culture" and "globalization" in the same sentence to anyone, and see if they don’t get a vision of an empire of golden arches, shimmering to an endless horizon under a never-setting sun.

This view is as unfortunate as it is unfair.

Do a little conversational digging with any self-designated defender of culture, and odds are you’ll quickly discern the – often implicit – assumption that culture can be understood in an economic model. The defender’s worry is often a variation on the theme that an economic superpower can’t help but dispense fries with its F-16s or TV shows with its trade agreements – or that the economic muscle behind these cultural imports will necessarily strong-arm the local cultural equivalent off the shelves in the marketplace of ideas and into the storeroom of history.

People who like to talk of culture in economic ways often don’t like to volunteer definitions of "culture." In their view, culture is an intangible intellectual product that can probably be approximated by the rules of economics, because economics provides us with the only rigorous way to quantify human behavior. But culture isn’t peanut butter, and its shoppers don’t come armed with lists or budgets, and economics isn’t the only game in town.

One branch of social psychology offering some new ideas on the problem of globalization comes from a surprisingly old source: Darwin’s theory of evolution. In this school of thought, culture can be defined as the set of answers that a region or a people arrive at in response to evolution’s age-old pressures: What food do I eat? How do I cement alliances and vanquish foes? How do I raise a family? How do I survive to old age? Because these problems are human universals, what is striking, under this view, is not cultural diversity, but similarity. Rather than get caught up in the differences between a Hindu wedding and a Protestant one, the evolutionary psychologist is more likely to marvel at the fact that all known human cultures have some version of a marriage ceremony – and the elements, if not the exact form, are likely to be recognizable across language, religion, or land. Cultural variation gives us different avatars of the same underlying human experience, rather than representing vastly different ways of being.

This mind-frame gives us a useful way to reconceptualize the globalization debate. A cultural product can’t be mentally framed in the same way as, say, a jar of peanut butter that might gain market share if it’s sold for a few cents less, because it’s for a different purpose. Cultural practices aren’t merely charming folkways that accidentally sprouted in different places, but finely-honed responses to problems that vary by environmental niche. The cultural answer to the evolutionary question of how large a village should be, for example, is going to be different in a niche where food grows abundantly outside the front door than it is in Mongolia. Cultural norms about the ideal number of children are going to vary depending on traditional child mortality rates. And just as a "cultural practice" of wearing bikinis in Siberia is unlikely to take hold, regardless of the hegemonic power of the donor culture, there are less obvious but every bit as real psychosocial constraints in other parts of the world. Like the beaks on Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos, cultural practices are adaptive tools and will not spread where they will not work.

"Ah," the sly critic might counter, "but doesn’t globalization mean the world itself is now more homogeneous and possesses fewer adaptive niches?"

The short answer to this question is "perhaps." The longer answer is "but so what?"

Explaining this answer requires unpacking another assumption of the cultural protector: the idea of culture as static. When the protector of French culture protests the invasion of English words, he or she is defending the French culture of the moment, or, more likely, of his or her lifetime. It’s unlikely, however, that the defender is also protesting the Viking invasions of the ninth century that resulted in the influx of Scandinavian words into the French language. Culture is a composite – or, more poetically, a palimpsest, in which the smudged traces of what’s come before are always visible, even as they form part of the fabric that supports the latest words. Cultural artifacts – food, dances, masks, clothing – can and should be preserved. But culture itself, much like sharks and language, has to stay in motion or die.

Often, the notion that culture should be frozen in ice and kept to admire comes from the culture that wants to visit the museum, not the one that would end up behind the velvet ropes. As Princeton University philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah asks, "Are we to stop the importation of baseball caps into Vietnam so that the Zao will continue to wear their colorful red headdresses? Why not ask the Zao? Shouldn’t the choice be theirs?" According to the evolutionary psychologist, if the Zao find that baseball caps are a better answer to the problem that inspired them to adopt headdresses (which may have ranged from protection from the sun to desire to attract a mate), they are likely to make the practice theirs – and in so doing, are very likely to add their own twist. Not only should self-designated cultural defenders ask themselves on what moral authority they demand that a group stick with a practice solely in the name of "authenticity," but they should also bear in mind that because culture operates as a composite, the very idea of authenticity is nonsensical. Five centuries hence, anthropologists are as likely to regard the baseball-inspired Zaoian headdress as "authentically" Zaoian as the linguist regards the "French-ness" of words contributed by Scandinavia many hundreds of years ago.

As Appiah asks, how far must one go back in peeling "the cultural onion"? He points out that, "The textiles most people think of as traditional West African cloths are known as Java prints; they arrived in the nineteenth century with the Javanese batiks sold, and often milled, by the Dutch. The traditional garb of Herero women in Namibia derives from the attire of nineteenth-century German missionaries, though it is still unmistakably Herero, not least because the fabrics used have a distinctly un-Lutheran range of colors." Culture is appetitive and dynamic. It needs raw materials to appropriate and mold in its own image. A few foreign "rocks" thrown into a gushing torrent that’s been forging its own course for hundreds of years is only going to add texture; it’s not going to alter the course of the river.

As for the idea that the end of the unique cultural twist is nigh, that niches are disappearing and we all, increasingly, live in the same world, this is a question that’s open to debate. Certainly, the internet is a leveling force, and the new set of problems facing the world – wealth disparity, climate change, pandemics like HIV/AIDS – are distinctly global in their reach. Personally, I’d argue that regional niches are alive and well outside cosmopolitan city centers, but the argument is beside the point. The hidden fear of the cultural defender bemoaning the supposed homogenization of the planet is that globalization is equivalent to westernization. This was not true when India spread the decimal system to the Arab world in the second century and thereafter to Europe, it was not true when China contributed the printing press and the magnetic compass to the world in 1000 A.D., and it’s not true now.

When globalization removes barriers, the result is cross-pollination, not cultural imperialism. As economist Tyler Cowen notes in his book Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures: "A typical American yuppie drinks French wine, listens to Beethoven on a Japanese audio system, uses the Internet to buy Persian textiles from a dealer in London, watches Hollywood movies funded by foreign capital and filmed by European directors, and vacations in Bali; an upper-middle-class Japanese may do much the same. A teenager in Bangkok may see Hollywood movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (an Austrian), study Japanese, and listen to new pop music from Hong Kong and China, in addition to the Latino singer Ricky Martin."

Nowhere is this cultural interchange more evident than in the United States, the nation of immigrants. Any claim that the U.S. is exporting its culture is, at most, a claim that the U.S. is adept at repackaging other cultures in unique ways. The reviled symbol of the cultural preservationist, the Big Mac, is a perfect example. The fries in the meal are hardly an American invention, with the potatoes hailing from Peru and Bolivia and notion of turning them into bite-sized morsels derived from French pommes frites. The burger has its beginnings in the ground meat eaten by ancient Egyptians, with a hefty debt of invention owed to the probably under-credited Earl of Sandwich. The pièce de résistance – to use a standard American phrase – comes in the way the product is distributed around the world, from the veggie Quorn option in green London, to the presence of beer in the meal package in Germany, to the deletion of the usually key ingredient in the whole ensemble in India. To suggest, somehow, that this is creeping Americanism coopting the local culture is to suggest the tail is wagging the dog. Rather, the Big Mac is a perfect example of a "boomerang" product, assembled from ingredients around the world, and sent back out to be remodified. It succeeds to the extent that it readily gives itself over to cultural processes that actively adapt, refine and sort their inputs, as they have always done and will always do.

If culture represents solutions to the problems people have faced in their struggle for survival, and those problems are today as likely to affect the planet as a single region, then what better tactic exists than what is in effect a global brainstorming session? Cultural exchange allows the swapping and "trying on" of each region’s "best practices." This may lead to the occasional short-term unfortunate fit between niche and practice, but the functional role of culture, developed over millennia of evolution, keeps the process self-correcting. Creativity, innovation, and synergistic hybrid ideas all come from contact with "the strange," refracted through the lens of the host culture. The key to maintaining perspective in the globalization debate – to keeping "the culture wars" as "the culture discussions" – is to remember that even while we’re cloaked in the comforting mantle of our own culture, its apparent permanence and solidity is illusory. Look more closely, and you’ll see a ragged, riotous collection of individual threads, holes, and patchwork. This is no cause for alarm. Rather, it’s a reminder that we’re all cut from the same cloth.