Globalization and the domestic group.

Publication: Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development

Publication Date: 22-MAR-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation

Globalization is often considered to be the process by which the world became the same or similar in certain aspects through the spread of modern western ways. In this discussion I stress that it is not just a western process but that many similarities in social behavior, including those in the family, have long been present.

Globalization has become a prominent topic in recent years largely because of the extension of systems and modes of communication, by which I refer to the media, the telegraph, the postal service, the newspaper, the radio, TV, e-mail, etc. as well as to transport, the 14th century Chinese boats (junks), the improved sails of the smaller boats that took Vasco da Gama around the Cape to India and Columbus to the Americas. This latter was not only a European process involving the so-called expansion of Europe, important as that was; China too put out its feelers by land along the Silk Road to Europe, at least indirectly, and by sea into southeast Asia and then to India and Africa, exporting manufactures (especially silk and ceramics) to the West long before the latter exported much to the East. Nevertheless much of the later global framework was established as the result of the European voyages of the later 15th century onward and of the expansion of the media (initially printing) from the same period. Such activities were spurred on by commerce.

Let us remember that commerce neither by land nor sea was an invention of the West. The Semitic sailor-merchants of the Middle East, and here I refer to the Phoenicians and the Arabs generally as well as to the Jews, developed the trade route from the Suez area of Egypt down to Western India, Gujerat and Kerala. (1) There was an active seaborne trade in pepper and other spices, as well as other transportable luxuries, from early on in the modern era. (2) Indians too were coming to Africa and the Middle East. Indeed it was Gujarat pilots, presumably Muslim since Hindus were more wary of the Five Seas, that directed Vasco da Gama's voyage from Malindi, a Muslim town on the East African coast, to Gujarat in Western India. And in an eastward direction, the Portuguese Pires, and before him the Chinese, found many Indians inhabiting the entrepot of Malacca in present-day Malaysia.

This trade and commerce indeed brought about some interesting convergences, not only in consumption (of what was being traded). Whether over land or over sea, trade leads to developments that while not inevitable are encouraged or fostered. There is the organization of the voyage itself and the problem of the cargo, the dangers of losing it, that lead to rather similar arrangements for the sharing of risk and for the distribution of profit, what developed into maritime insurance and the joint stock company. It led to communities of merchants, some rich, some less so, who developed similar cultural features in different parts of the world. For example, broadly similar artistic forms appeared in various urban communities. In the West merchants encouraged the secular theatre, Marlowe and Shakespeare in England especially in the City of London, in the East, in Tokyo (Edo), at roughly the same time, it was Kabuki. In China artistic activity flourished, not only at court but especially in the merchant quarters. In port towns, members of different nations met, feasting together, and developed ways of cooking and preparing food that emerged out of these long-term encounters. Some convergence came from contact, even indirect, some from structural similarities in the situation, the fundamental requirements of parallel activities.

By structural similarities I mean that if you want to build a house or roof it to keep out sun, rain and other individuals, you can lean or bend the uprights together like teepee, or you can curve the building blocks together as in an igloo or a mosque. If you want a flat roof, you need supporting posts or pillars and then long beams (only wood, traditionally), cross beams and slats, then a surface. Ceilings or roofs of this kind you find in the LoDagaa compounds...

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