Cultures Interact and Change

Cultures interact with one another and change each other through contact by various means such as trade networks, telecommunications and migration. Globalization, or the "process of intense global interconnectedness and movement of goods, information, and people", is perhaps the most important force of contemporary cultural change (Miller, 16).

Globalization does not spread evenly, nor are its interactions with, and effects on, local cultures always positive. The change caused by globalization varies from positive change seen by culture's becoming more "worldly" and less isolated to cultural destruction and extinction, seen primarily through interactions with indigenous cultures. The book explains four models of cultural interaction that capture the variations of change, of which three I found to be the most interesting.

The clash of civilizations argument claims that the spread of Euro-American capitalism and lifestyle throughout the modern world has created a sense of disenchantment, alienation, and resentment among other cultural systems (Miller, 17). This model expresses the contemporary phrase of the "West versus the Rest", otherwise seen as Us versus Them in contemporary historical debate.

My favorite model, simply due to its title, is the McDonaldization model. It states that, under the influence of the U.S.-dominated corporate culture, the world is becoming culturally homogenous (Miller, 17). This is the model many people consider when they think of Globalization in my opinion. A "Fast-food culture," with its cultural principles being morphed into a conglomerate of the major corporate principles of mass production, speed, standardization and impersonal service. This method, among all others, poses the greatest threat to cultural homogeneity in my opinion because it essentially stamps out any indigenous cultures who's values may interfere with it.

Another pattern recognized is localization, "the transformation of global culture by local microcultures into something new" (Miller, 17). This model works off of and further explains the effects of the McDonald's example. For example, in many Asian settings, people are less concerned with time than in America; therefore, people resist the pattern of eating quickly and insist on family gatherings in a more leisurely setting. McDonald's managers in Asia accommodate this cultural preference by altering food service to create a slower turnover of tables. In this method, the global umbrella culture is forced to adapt to and transform because of the microcultures' values it covers resistance. This model, in my opinion, explains where contemporary society and culture are heading; towards a more homogenous global culture, but with each region's microcultures forcing the globalized culture to adapt in order to survive with contrasting beliefs and values.

In studying globalization cultural anthropologists have labeled two distinct attitudes that people express when their culture comes into contact with that of another. Ethnocentrism is when one judges other cultures by the standards of one's own culture rather than by the standards of other cultures (Miller, 20). This has fueled centuries of trying to change "other" people in the world, sometimes through religious missionary work or in the form of colonial domination, but in either scenario ethnocentrism fuels the idea of "Us versus Them". Cultural relativism, on the other hand, is the idea that each culture must be understood in terms of its own values and beliefs and not by the standards of one's own culture (Miller, 20). This form of theory offers a much more civilized approach, except when taken to the extreme form of absolute cultural relativism, and is the greatest hope for a globalized and truly homogeneous world culture.

After all, as Claude Levi-Strauss said, "No society is perfect".