Kottak Ch. 10, World System & Colonialization

Rarely do we consider that music and dance and poetry play a key role in how everyday people learn about the global politics of the world. Kottak's title "World System" might be today referred to as the global economy and how capitalism came to be. Colonialization played a huge role in shaping the power dynamics and relationship between nations and its peoples.

This chapter reveals the etic framework. The song "ARE MY HANDS CLEAN?" helps us make the macro level of the economics more real and palpable...and uneasy. This is not a nice story or a myth about how the core nations came to be connected through power, wealth and prestige over the periphery and semi-peripheral nations. But it makes it real. Gets to the emic level of looking at from the outside in and the inside out.

Are My Hands Clean?
Lyrics and music by Bernice Johnson Reagon. Songtalk Publishing Co. 1985
Performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock from the album Live at Carnegie Hall (1988)

I wear garments touched by hands from all over the world
35% cotton, 65% polyester, the journey begins in Central America
In the cotton fields of El Salvador
In a province soaked in blood,
Pesticide-sprayed workers toil in a broiling sun
Pulling cotton for two dollars a day.

Then we move on up to another rung—Cargill
A top-forty trading conglomerate, takes the cotton through the Panama Canal
Up the Eastern seaboard, coming to the US of A for the first time
In South Carolina
At the Burlington mills
Joins a shipment of polyester filament courtesy of the New Jersey petro-chemical mills of Dupont
Dupont strands of filament begin in the South American country of Venezuela
Where oil riggers bring up oil from the earth for six dollars a day

Then Exxon, largest oil company in the world,
Upgrades the product in the country of Trinidad and Tobago
Then back into the Caribbean and Atlantic Seas
To the factories of Dupont
On the way to the Burlington mills
In South Carolina
To meet the cotton from the blood-soaked fields of El Salvador
In South Carolina

Burlington factories hum with the business of weaving oil and cotton into miles of fabric
for Sears
Who takes this bounty back into the Caribbean Sea
Headed for Haiti this time—May she be one day soon free—

Far from the Port-au-Prince palace
Third world women toil doing piece work to Sears specifications
For three dollars a day
My sisters make my blouse
It leaves the third world for the last time
Coming back into the sea to be sealed in plastic for me
This third world sister
And I go to the Sears department store where I buy my blouse
On sale for 20% discount
Are my hands clean?

Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world

Another Ted Talk video!


What point is Professor Gosling making with his finale? Does it work? Why or why not? And for whom might it work? Why or why not?

Chap 11 The Modern World System

DID YOU ALREADY READ CHAPTER 11?

• Show your comprehension and apply the new anthropological terms in a thoughtful response.
• Cite pages of the terms you discuss and write ideas in your own words (avoid quoting).
• Your post will count in the AMNESTY period as extra credit towards your blog/blackboard grade.
• If you continue through December consistently, you could make up all the points you missed.

I want to offer some contemporary issues about the world system that are relevant to your future as prospective elites. Read the entire post and then respond to one of the two (2) questions posed below. Reading at least 5 other comments will augment the thinking in your post.

On page 237, Kottak states:

The modern world system is cross-cut by collective identities based on ethnicity, religion, and nationality (Shannon 1996). Class conflicts tend to occur within nations, and nationalism has prevented global class solidarity, particularly of proletarians....The current world stratification system features substantial contrast between both capitalists and workers in the core nations and workers on the periphery.

In 1999, the proletariat from around the world banded together in Seattle at the international meeting of the World Trade Organization (the WTO).


World Trade Organization(WTO) the truth

Where we are today: For a glimpse of how intertwined the US economy is with other countries including core, periphery and semiperiphery nations take a look at this Fact Sheet on the WTO from the Office of the United States Trade Representive. The two page document shows the results of cases filed against other countries and the results of cases filed against the U.S. regarding free trade agreements.

QUESTION #1: Given the stratification of classes within the US and the seeming separation of those in the US from the working classes in other nations, how might global class solidarity become a reality given new technologies, new classes of US educated international students, and the desire to resist global corporate power? How might anthropological methods assist us in learning solutions that benefit everyone involved?

In a journal article published in Human Organization by Weaver, Thomas Summer 2001 we get an interesting analysis of how the modern world system works:

The world economy is made up of "commodity chains"-forward and backward connections in the processing of a commodity within and across these regions. These commodity chains encompass the exploitation of raw materials, labor, its reproduction, levels of processing, transportation, and consumption. The capitalist world-system in this context forces unequal exchange that simultaneously promotes core development and peripheral poverty and dependence (Grimes 2000:34). The collaboration of elite classes between and within core and periphery supports this transformation [italics added for emphasis].

QUESTION #2: First, determine if the country in which you were born is a core, periphery or semiperiphery nation and according to what source? As a prospective "collaborator," as a future member of the elite class, what do you imagine you will do about the "unequal exchange" between the elite and the proletarian classes? How might anthropological methods assist us in learning solutions that benefit everyone involved?

Remember: The impossible is possible. Think Paul Farmer. Think William McDonough (Ted Talkster architect who is building new cities in China). “The impossible - what nobody can do until somebody does” Could you be that somebody in your small or large way? Will you?

TED TALK: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen

Thursday September 27th, in our Introduction to Cultural Anthro at Baruch College, we watched a TED TALK video (Technology Entertainment and Design) of Hans Gosling Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen.

In the video he uses the acronym "OECD" that stands for:
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an international organization of those developed countries that accept the principles of representative democracy and a free market economy. For more see, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD. Here's the video for those who missed class Thursday.


After the 4:05 section, one student asked a great question, which went over my head at the time. Gosling is debunking third-world myths but after viewing the video, the student said, they are still considered third-world myths after viewing the video. Gosling doesn't ask us to stop using "third world". I explained his intention but I had an epiphany about his question just after the student left class. We think we are trying to change things (change "third-world" to ???). But this video is about attacking people's PERCEPTIONS. Perceptions are the front-line of sustaining "social constructs" and this is why the study of cultural anthropology can be so meaningful with its emic and etic perspectives on the so-called Third World or on those who led us to using those terms in the first place (precursors to OECD??).

What do you think is the power of the video? What does it attack in your own preconceptions of the world not just the "third world"?