2 sides of Globalization ... the good and the bad.

back to Yali’s Question – Why are we unequal? Why are we so poor and you so rich?

Diamond’s answer (Guns, Steel, Production of Cereals to 4 groups)
- Answer incomplete – Why now? Why still? Why is it growing?
Why are some starving? (The world is more unequal now than ever before)

The World as a System
Diamond has the wrong question: “Why is our system better than their system?”
A: We are one system.

Start with BIG QUESTIONS.
How DOES the world work?
How are we all interrelated?
Why are "we" so rich, and they so poor?
Why do the rich keep getting richer?
Why do we fight?
-- How can we survive as a species for the next 100, 1000, 10000, 1 million years?
-- How can we assure equality and human rights to all?
o What are rights?
o Who decides?
o What is "human"? (What is human nature?)
-- What societal/world changes should be encouraged? Discouraged? Why?
-- Who are you? Who are those around you? (pluralize your answer)
How do you fit into the world?
IS GLOBALIZATION GOOD OR BAD? or asked in a better way ...
WHAT IS GOOD ABOUT GLOBALIZATION, and WHAT IS BAD ABOUT IT?
WHAT ARE ITS POSSIBILITIES?
WHAT ARE ITS PITFALLS?
UNDERDEVELOPMENT

World System develops through colonialism ...

Let's take a closer look at colonialism - as it sets the stage for the World System as we know it today.

Justification for Colonialism:
This poem expresses some of the justification for colonialism (which illustrates the ethnocentrism of the time)
"The White Man's Burden"
Take up the White Man's burden -
Send forth the best ye breed -
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild -
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
- Rudyard Kipling 1899
It is also illustrated in this political cartoon:
Colonized peoples were drawn into the global market through 2 colonial strategies:
1. Force locals to grow cash crops through Physical Force, Taxation, or Sanctions (Africa)
2. Take the land and run plantations (Sri Lanka – Sumatra)

Consequences of Colonialism on Local Economies
1. Market value trumps nutrition value (grow cash crops for money, while suffering malnutrition) - Sugar, Tobacco, Coffee, Rubber, Chili Peppers

Single crop cultivation (often non-nutritious) – Ghana => Cocoa, Liberia =>Rubber
Nigeria => Palm Oil, Uganda => Cotton

2. Hunger and unsustainability

3. Most become property-less low-wage laborers - Policies ensure this – taxes, reservations, own all the good land, subsidies on imports


Colonialism created the "World System"

World System Theory was created by Immanuel Wallerstein to try to map and understand global economic flows and their social and cultural consequences. The following diagram summarizes his view of the World System.



http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/wallerstein.html

We then looked at the Huaorani of Ecuador to show how the world system works.

The Huaorani story represents the best and worst of humanity coming together. Many people with good intentions having unseen negative consequences – the world system sucking in previously disconnected people ... complexity beyond one lecture, but worth exploring ...

Several books – Savages by Joe Kane --- End of the Spear by son of slain missionary, Steve Saint, Countless Mining Documents and Maps, 2 anthropologists, 2 psychologists, and only 600 people (now 2,000)

Huaorani called the Auca – savages – kill virtually everybody who ever came into their territory. Rubber seekers, Oil seekers ... 1956 ...

VIDEO ONE: END OF THE SPEAR

The first missionaries to visit the Huaorani were killed by the Huaorani.

Story: young couple on beach – others angry – they lie and say foreigners trying to kill them.

A sister of one of these missionaries went back the Huaorani, viewing her job as even more important because of their horrific act.

She began working closely with oil companies in trying to control the protests of Huaorani so that oil could be extracted from their land.

VIDEO TWO: Working with Oil Companies – moving them onto reservations

They were moved onto a reservation and are no longer allowed to hunt (their traditional mode of subsistence) because they are on a "nature reserve"

The pollution to their land was devastating.
Neighboring Cofan went from 15,000 to 1,000 today


VIDEO THREE: Pollution => Protests in Quito

They are now forced to work to make enough money to eat and survive.
The videos illustrate the world system.
The CORE are the largely US-based oil companies.
The SEMIPERIPHERY is Ecuador, through whom the US oil companies obtain mining rights.
The PERIPHERY are the Huaorani who give up their raw materials (oil) and are then forced into working, providing cheap labor for their own exploitation.

There is $1.5 billion worth of oil on Huaorani land ... enough to power vehicles in the USA for 13 days.

Culture Loss video

Carlton Brown on Oil

We talk about “the economy” and we don’t see Yali ... the rubber plantation worker ...

Luk Luk and Tiin Tiin – We don’t see Yali

The tremendous growth of Europe and America is at least partially on the backs of the colonized – and now on the third world ...