Transnational Processes

Migrations, Borderlands, Globalization

We live in a world of transnational corporations and global media, where movies made in Hollywood shape the dreams of people in Cairo. Capital, goods and people all cross borders frequently and with ease. Corporations have become fast and flexible in seeking out resources, labor and new markets and hardly seem loyal to any particular state. States themselves struggle to control their borders and their policies as a wide range of supranational organizations (the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, etc.) seem to undermine their authority. The increasingly complex ways the world's regions are tied together seem to defy easy description.

Do these processes signal the end of cultural diversity and the rise of an increasingly homogenous world? Individuals and communities are confronted with choices - the seeds farmers can use, the kinds of jobs available in cities and even the political and religious ideologies they can use to think about these things - that seem determined by distant people and forces. What happens to local ideas and practices when confronted with global goods (McDonald's, Coca Cola), multinational corporations (manufacturing clothing or technology in Malaysia or Mexico for consumption in Europe or America) and cosmopolitan ideas (Hollywood's or Bollywood's movies)?

In this course we will explore the unique insights anthropology - a discipline designed to study the local and particular - has developed for work in a globalizing world. Globalization has contributed to important shifts in those aspects of social life - kinship and marriage, gender, sexuality, religion and cosmology, political authority, etc. - that have been the traditional focus of ethnographic research. What is the proper framework for a study of the local impact of a factory owned by a transnational corporation? How can ethnographic methods be adapted to communities that are spread across borders? What does it mean to live on or across a political border? We will examine these and other issues with ethnographic material from a wide range of sources.

Home

UNO Anthropology

http://fs.uno.edu/dberiss/transnational/
Revised 1/28//04