In a passionate defense of real multiculturalism delivered back in 2003 at TED, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis used the wealth of his experiences with some of the most fascinating indigenous cultures of the world to build a powerful argument in favor of the value of cultural diversity:
The world in which we live in does not exist in some absolute sense but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adapted choices that our lineage made albeit successfully many generations ago. And of course we all share the same adaptive imperative, we are all born, we all bring our children to world, we go through initiation rights, we have to deal with inexplicable separation of death so it shouldn’t surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, we all have art. But what is interesting is the unique cadence of the song, the rhythm of the dance in every culture.
Resurfaced as part of the TEDTalks series, Dr. Davis talk introduces the audience to the idea of ethnosphere:
Together the myriad cultures of the world make up a web of spiritual life and culture life that envelops the planet and that is [...]
A very detailed portrait of a typical middle-class chinese family serves as the background for the story The New Superpower: China’s Emerging Middle Class by Noreen O’Leary in a recent issue of Adweek Magazine. The story, intended for an audience fascinated with marketing strategies, is full of success stories of global brands making their way into the chinese market place. But it provides a lot more insight into the mindset of a new generation of consumers than other articles I’ve read recently. It is as if this new generation of chinese consumers is defined by the products they buy.
While I had provided a brief snapshot of the massive changes underway in countries like China, understanding how the social unit (the family) thinks reveals a lot more about their future than those statistics. The subject of this article is a family which does really well compared with the 3/4 of the population living in poverty but is still considered lower-middle-class with an:
annual household income equals about $26,700 a year. Much of that comes from Bin, 30, who earns 10,000 yuan ($1,280) a month in his shift job as a supervisor at car manufacturer Volkswagen; his wife [...]
Although the Face of Tomorrow project seems to have come to a halt after 2004, the idea that cities assimilate their migrants and eventually their inhabitants mix giving place to new generations of cosmopolitan beings with ancestors from all over the globe is still a powerful one.
The large metropolises of the world are magnets for migrants from all parts of the planet resulting in new mixtures of peoples. What might a typical inhabitant of this new metropolis look like in one or two hundred years if they were to become more integrated?
In Turkey and particularly in Istanbul, situated as it is at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, you can see how this process has been at work over the last thousand years as waves of humanity from Central Asia, Arabia, Greece and Rome have been absorbed. The resulting population is fairly uniform suggesting that if you could combine all the faces in a city right now you would be looking at the future face of that city.
With a larger inventory of faces it would be possible to compare how highly cosmopolitan cities differ from those with a strong hegemony of a predominant [...]
Every year, Foreign Policy and A.T.Kearney partner to produce the Globalization Index. Collecting data for the most populated countries in areas such as Foreign Investment, International Travel, Internet Users and Servers, Remittances, Involvement in International Organizations and Missions the analysis tries to provide a measure of how well countries are playing the globalization game. According to them, these are the most globalized:
Singapore Switzerland United States Ireland Denmark Canada Netherlands Australia Austria Sweden New Zealand United Kingdom Finland Norway Israel Czech Republic Slovenia Germany Malaysia Hungary
The editorial in the report is not anything radically new (at least for the usual readers of this blog), but it’s still worth reviewing:
The imminent awakening of Brazil, Russia, India & China that so far were lagging in terms of the metrics used by this ranking
The growth of the billionares club and their influence in the economy and politics of their countries
The direct relationship between ‘being globalized’ and ‘being a polluter’
The inverse relationship between informal economies and the level of globalizations of the countries that host them, and more
Using my very own heuristic method based on personal observation, I can argue that to transform a measure of globalization into a Global Culture Index, [...]
Globalization is likely one of those words that must appear in newspapers every day. But the recent post about an article canadians & globalization got me thinking about doing a little historical research of my own: browsing through the digital archive of the Toronto Star (Canada), I found the first use of “globalization” was in the Sunday edition of May 20, 1984.
From a conversation with then Harvard professor Kenneth Goodpaster “There is a globalization of business” was the quote used in the article. This in the context of a discussion about the ethics that business must adhere to specially in an increasingly global economy. You have to admit that it is a bit ironic that the first reference I found deals with ethical problems such as worker’s rights, the rights of citizens in other countries and the rights of the environment. I guess it wasn’t hard to forecast the sort of damage that uncontrolled businesses could do if left unchecked.
I’m loving every page of the new book by Alex MacGillivray A Brief History of Globalization, where he attempts to address one of the very few areas that has not been discussed enough when it comes to globalization: it’s origins. The wide scope of his project doesn’t deviates attention from the key milestones that have progressively made our planet smaller for all practical purposes, and the thoroughness of his research has uncovered some amazing gems, one of which I took from the introduction:
In fact, the earliest use of the adjective ‘global’ I have been able to find dates back to 1892, and appears in the pages of Harper’s Magazine. But it was not coined by an American.
The Harper’s article describes a Monsieur de Vog√º√©, a Frenchman who ‘loves to travel; he goes to the East and to the West for colors and ideas; his interests are as wide as the universe; his ambition, to use a word of his own, is to be “global”‘
I found amusing the fact that a history of globalization would refer back to such a noble intent. Still in its infancy, the Global Culture project is likely a bit guilty of being as [...]
Last week columnist David Crane from the Toronto Star (one of my local newspapers) wrote and article entitled Don’t discount the positive side of globalization to which I barely paid attention because it didn’t provide any new information that readers from this blog would already be aware of. I had my own attempt to provide positive arguments for globalization with the post pro-globalization. However in his latest article, Globalization column touched a raw nerve, Mr. Crane admits the reaction of the (Canadian) public to his previous column was:
much more negative than I had contemplated, and much more pessimistic about our own future.
A quick scan of some phrases in the replies he received will give you an idea of what the concerned readers had to say:
“growing polarization of the rich and poor”, “wages are on a downward spiral due to trade”, “corporate oligarchy with no sense of responsibility”, “growth in poverty, disappearance of the middle class in developed countries and the radical further enrichment of the wealthy”
All of which are topics I have discussed in the recent past in this blog: Corporations and their irresponsible behavior, statistics supporting the argument of the scary gap between rich and poor, [...]
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