Globalisation involves the reorganisation of time and space generating increased flows of goods, services, money, people and images across borders resulting in demands for both the liberalisation and regulation of economies, societies and cultural values and practices.  As globalisation makes the world smaller, cultures that were once relatively distant and insulated from each other are increasingly coming into contact. The spread of consumer capitalism is bringing western cultural forms to non-western societies, while people migrating from the global periphery to its developed cores are bringing about the cultural pluralisation of the west. Other, non east-west cultural and migratory circuits have also come into being. The results of these encounters are diverse and often unpredictable, ranging from clash to creolisation, and from the reaffirmation of tradition to radical cultural transformation.

The aim of this course is to explore the complex cultural dynamics of globalisation from an anthropological perspective. It will take a person-centred and “ground-up” point of view on globalisation, with special attention to non-western cultures and societies. We will take care always to ground our analysis of global processes in real life ethnographic contexts.  Themes to be covered include: the imbrication of local, embodied everyday lives in globally extensive social processes; global production, consumption and distribution circuits; the global corporation; financial collapses, money laundering and terrorist financing; the state, elites and the gendered character of global money; the local appropriation and indigenisation of global cultural forms (for example, popular music and dance); alternative cultural flows and new “culture areas”; essentialism, hybridity and new global cultural identities.  

By negotiation: 6,000 words

2 hours of lectures and one hour of tutorial per week