Why are many anthropologists convinced that cultural imperialism is not an adequate explanation for the spread of Western cultural forms?

What Happened to the Global Economy after the Cold War?
Cultural Processes in a Global World
Globalization and the Nation-State

Are Global Flows Undermining Nation-States? Migration, Transborder Identities, and Long-Distance Nationalism Anthropology and Multicultural Politics in the New Europe Flexible Citizenship The Postnational Ethos    

Are Human Rights Universal?

Human Rights Discourse as the Global Language of Social Justice Rights versus Culture Rights to Culture Rights as Culture

How Can Culture Help in Thinking about Rights?

Violence Against Women in Hawaii Child Prostitution in Thailand

Cultural Imperialism or Cultural Hybridization?

Cultural Imperialism Cultural Hybridity The Limits of Cultural Hybridity

Can We Be at Home in a Global World?

Cosmopolitanism Friction Border Thinking

Why Study Anthropology?

Main Points

1. Anthropologists have made use of a variety of theoretical perspectives to explain the relationship between the West and the rest of the world. During the Cold War, anthropologists debated the relative merits of modernization theory and dependency theory. Later, they were influenced by world system theory, which divided the territories controlled by capitalism into core, periphery, and semiperiphery, and argued that the relationships between these regions had been established during the years when capitalism was introduced outside Europe.
2. The end of the Cold War and the fall of communism led to a crisis in Marxian thought, and many of the tenets of modernization theory were revived in neoliberal economic theory, which promised to bring prosperity to any nation-state to find its niche in the globalizing capitalist market.
3. Globalization is understood and evaluated differently by different observers, but most anthropologists agree that the effects of globalization are uneven. In a globalizing world, wealth, images, people, things, and ideologies are deterritorialized. Some groups in some parts of the world benefit from global flows, contacts, and exchanges, whereas others are bypassed entirely.
4. Anthropologists and others disagree about whether these global processes are or are not systemic, or whether they are only the latest in a series of expansions and contractions that can be traced back to the rise of the first commercial civilizations several thousand years ago. But none of these overall schemas can by itself account for the historically specific local details of the effects of global forces in local settings, which is what most anthropologists aim to document and analyze.
5. The flows unleashed by globalization have undermined the ability of nation-states to police their boundaries effectively, suggesting that conventional ideas about nation-states require revision. Contemporary migrants across national borders have developed a variety of transborder identities. Some become involved in long-distance nationalism that leads to the emergence of transborder states claiming emigrants as transborder citizens of their ancestral homelands even if they are legal citizens of another state. Some transborder citizenries call for the establishment of fully fledged transnational nation-states.
6. The contrasts between formal and substantive citizenship suggest that conventional notions of citizenship are breaking down in the context of globalization. Diaspora communities of elite Chinese families have developed a strategy of flexible citizenship that allows them both to circumvent and benefit from different nation-state regimes by investing, working, and settling their families in different sites. For these elite Chinese, the concept of nationalism has lost its meaning, and they seem to subscribe instead to a postnational ethos in which their only true loyalty is to the family business.
7. Discussions of human rights have intensified as global flows juxtapose and at least implicitly challenge different understandings of what it means to be human, or what kinds of rights people may be entitled to under radically changed conditions of everyday life. But different participants in this discourse have different ideas about the relationship that human rights and culture have with one another. As talk about human rights becomes incorporated into local cultural discussions, the notion is transformed to make sense in local contexts. Sometimes, "culture" may be used as a scapegoat for a government unwilling to extend certain rights to its citizens.
8. Some arguments about human rights include the right to one's culture. One of the key issues involved concerns the kinds of legal mechanisms needed to ensure such protection. But most international human rights documents protect only individual human rights, not group rights. And even those who seek to protect their individual rights are supposed to appeal to the governments of their own nation-states to enforce rights defended in international documents. Many activists and others view this factor as a serious contradiction in human rights discourse that undermines its effectiveness.
9. Some anthropologists argue that a "culture of human rights" has emerged in recent years that is based on certain ideas about human beings, their needs, and their abilities that originated in the West. Some consider this culture of human rights to be the culture of a globalizing world that emphasizes individual rights over duties or needs, and that proposes only technical rather than ethical solutions to human suffering. Anthropologists disagree about the value of such a culture of human rights in contemporary circumstances.
10. Groups and individuals who assert that their human rights have been violated regularly take their cases to courts of law. But because human rights law recognizes only certain kinds of rights violations, groups with grievances must tailor those grievances to fit the violations that human rights law recognizes. Groups that enter into the human rights process are entering into ethically ambiguous territory that is both enabling and constraining.
11. Debates about women's rights in Hawaii and children's rights in Thailand show both that it is possible to accommodate the universal discourse of human rights to local conditions and that no single model of the relationship between rights and culture will fit all cases. Struggles over human rights, along with struggles over global citizenship, can be seen as the prime struggles of our time.
12. The discourse of cultural imperialism, which developed primarily outside anthropology, tried to explain the spread of Western cultural forms outside the West. But anthropologists reject cultural imperialism as an explanation because it denies agency to non-Western peoples, because it assumes that cultural forms never move "from the rest to the West," and because it ignores flows of cultural forms that bypass the West entirely.
13. Anthropologists have developed alternatives to the discourse of cultural imperialism. They speak about borrowing-with-modification, domestication, indigenization, or customization of practices or objects imported from elsewhere. Many anthropologists describe these processes as examples of cultural hybridization or hybridity.
14. Talk of cultural hybridization has been criticized because the very attempt to talk about cultural mixtures assumes that "pure" cultures existed prior to mixing. Others object to discussions of cultural hybridization that fail to recognize that its effects are experienced differently by those with power and those without power. Cultural hybridization is unobjectionable when actors perceive it to be under their own control, but is resisted when they see it threatening their moral integrity.
15. Some anthropologists are working to devise ways of coping with the uncertainties and insecurities of globalization. Some would like to revive the notion of cosmopolitanism originally associated with Western elite forms of cultural hybridization and rework it in order to be able to speak about alternative or discrepant cosmopolitanisms that reflect the experiences of those who have been the victims of modernity. The ideal end result would be a critical cosmopolitanism capable of negotiating new understandings of human rights and global citizenship in ways that can dismantle barriers of gender and race that are the historical legacies of colonialism.

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