Monday, April 9, 2012

Globalization and the Pervasiveness of Culture


Hello, It's a Small World fellers!

Today, I'll be giving you the breakdown of our recent globalization seminar!

It started out a bit rough - we had to switch rooms and adjust to not having a projector on the fly. Once we had a room, though, everything came together.  Bobby presented first, and focused on the globalization of Asian trade routes. Next, I shared my research on the globalization of martial arts.  The highlight of my presentation was a shoutout to Bruce Lee.  Finally, Frances offered several minutes on the globalization of meditation, and treated us to a few minutes of meditating.  Overall, it went very well.

An important, underlying theme in all of our presentations was that through globalization, countries, borders, and large geological separation between people can no longer contain a culture.  Pieces of individual cultures spread like wildfire into other nations, and some form of that cultural practice finds a permanent place in the nations it encounters.  No nation can avoid contact with other cultures.  Whether it was merchants going to and from China. or martial art masters leaving their home area to search for new pupils, people come into contact with cultures different from their own.  

At the same time, it’s fallacious to conclude that globalization will lead to a fusion of all cultures.  In contemporary America, a first-world country with internet connecting it to almost every other nation in the world, many citizens exist without knowing key elements of foriegn cultures, like how many Middle Eastern cultures consider showing the bottoms of one's feet a major insult.  People are slowly becoming aware of other people's cultures as we move towards tolerance among cultures, but we are far from a giant conglomerate of all the cultures of the world smashed together.  

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