What is Globalization and How Does it Transform Anthropology?

Globalization is the worldwide intensification of interactions and increased movement of money, goods, ideas, and most importantly people within and across national borders. It’s the process of integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations. Globalization assists in breakthroughs in communication and transportation to bring the world’s people closer together. While new technologies allow more people to communicate in a positive way, billions of other people are still being left out from these progresses.

Key dynamics within globalization restructure the ways humans adjust to their surroundings as well as how the world adapts to humans. Time-space compression, the rapid innovation of communication and transportation technologies, has transformed the way people think about space and time. The Internet, phones, and plane travel are some examples of how technology has compressed space and time. Flexible accumulations, the increasingly flexible strategies that corporations use to accumulate profits, shows how companies have utilized advances in communication and transportation to spread their production facilities across the globe. Increasing migration has given rural workers the chance to move to urban areas in order to improve the lives of their families and themselves. Migration is constructing connections to distant parts of the world. Uneven development, the unequal distribution of globalization benefits, is a downside. Patrice Hill from The Washington Times explains the increase in immigration makes a strong growth in the economy. He thinks the bipartisan immigration bill passed by the Senate last year has advanced the economy’s accomplishments.

While the global economy creates wealth, it also has increased poverty. Many people have no access to any form of transportation. Rapid change, the dramatic transformations of economics, politics, and culture, can also be an issue. The rate of change is unlike anything humans have experienced in the past. Globalization is transforming anthropology through the creation of new diversity of experiences spreading across the world. As new ideas and customs spread, many local cultural patterns are being forced to adapt. Along with the changing communities, anthropologists need to adjust the strategies they use to study humankind. They now need to consider the global forces affecting the local community they are researching. Through research, I found an interesting piece describing negative effects of globalization, such as loss of individualism, and positive effects, such as advances in technology.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/19/economistsincreasingimmigration-is-one-of-the-wa/

http://etec.ctlt.ubc.ca/510wiki/Globalization_and_its_Effect_on_Cultural_Diversity