A complete summary of the course Globalising Cultures (7332C004AY) for the study of Sociology at the UvA. This summary contains all the reading material and all the lectures summarised. A table of contents at the front makes the 50-page file manageable.
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,Articles ................................................................................................................................. 3
Time, sugar and sweetness ............................................................................................... 3
Chapter 1: Globalization: Liquids, Flows & Structures ........................................................ 5
Chapter 9: Global Culture and Cultural Flows .................................................................... 7
Chapter 8: Expanding World Culture: Pentecostalism as a Global Movement.................... 8
Imperial Screens: The Illusion of Cosmopolitanism in the Netflix Documentary Genre ......10
Studying at the source: Ashtanga yoga tourism and the search for authenticity in Mysore,
India ..................................................................................................................................14
Transnationalism, Localization, and Fast Foods in East Asia ............................................15
Discourse on Colonialism..................................................................................................18
The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism..................................................19
Memorializing Colonial Power: The Death of Frank Paul ..................................................22
Diplomacy, Conditionality and Transnational LGBTI Rights ..............................................24
Rethinking Homonationalism ............................................................................................27
Beyond the ‘most homophobic’ .........................................................................................28
Global Black Lives Matter .................................................................................................29
Metoo: Has the ‘Sisterhood’ Finally Become Global or Just Another Product of Neoliberal
Feminism? ........................................................................................................................30
The Slut Walk Movement: A Study in Transnational Feminist Activity ...............................33
Lectures ...............................................................................................................................35
Lecture 1 – Introduction ....................................................................................................35
Lecture 2 – Does globalization make cultures (look) the same, is that a problem, and what
are the engines of this convergence? ...............................................................................37
Lecture 3 – What happens when different cultures mix across the globe? ........................39
Lecture 4 – Understanding Globalization through colonial, anti-colonial and indigenous
discourses ........................................................................................................................41
Lecture 5 – Globalizing Progressive Values and Manufacturing ........................................44
Lecture 6 – Contemporary Movements: Globalizing Resistance to Oppression,
Discrimination and Violence ..............................................................................................48
2
,Articles
Time, sugar and sweetness
Mintz
Food and eating are once again becoming of interest to anthropologists, who are concerned
with resources, including variant forms of energy and the relative costs of their trade-offs.
Here, I shall suggest some topics for a study of which the skills of anthropology and
history might be usefully combined; and I shall raise questions about the relationship between
production and consumption, with respect to some specific ingestible, for some specific time
period, in order to see if light may be thrown on what foods mean to those who consume them.
During the Age of Discovery, the New World – within the sphere of European power –
experienced a lot of new substances, including foods, such as papaya, peppers and cacao.
Two major introductions since the ‘discovery’ of America were tea and coffee. Another item
that was already known, but not yet diffused to the new world was the sugar cane.
Since its uses are interlaced with those of many other substances, it would be neither
feasible nor convincing to study sugar in isolation. Sweetness is a “taste,” sugar a product of
seemingly infinite uses and functions; but the foods that satisfy a taste for sweetness vary
immensely. Thus, a host of problems arise.
By the fifteenth century, sugar had entered into the tastes and recipe books of the rich.
Sugar consumption in Great Britain rose together with the consumption of other tropical
ingestibles, though at differing rates for different regions, groups, and classes. France never
became the sugar or tea consumer that Britain became, though coffee was more successful
in France than in Britain. Yet, the general spread of these substances through the Western
world since the seventeenth century has been one of the truly important economic and cultural
phenomena of the modern age. These were, it seems, the first edible luxuries to become
proletarian commonplaces; they were surely the first luxuries to become regarded as
necessities by vast masses of people who had not produced them, and they were probably the
first substances to become the basis of advertising campaigns to increase consumption. In all
of these ways, they, particularly sugar, have remained unmistakably modern.
Though research by chemists and physiologists on these substances continues apace,
some general statements about them are probably safe. Coffee and tea are stimulants without
calories or other food value. Sugar, consisting of about 99.9% pure sucrose, is, together with
salt, the purest chemical substance human beings ingest and is often labelled “empty calories”
by physicians and nutritionists.
Though remote from his principal concerns, Marx considered the plantations of the New
World among “the chief momenta of primitive accumulation”. In recent years, a lively
controversy has developed over the precise contribution of the West India plantations to
capitalist growth in the metropolises, particularly Britain. The potential contribution of the
plantations has been viewed in two principal ways, but there is a third which is currently only a
hunch.
1. fairly direct capital transfers of plantation profits to European banks for reinvestment
2. the demand created by the needs of the plantations for such metropolitan products as
machinery, cloth, torture instruments, and other industrial commodities
3. Possibly, European enterprise accumulated considerable savings by the provision of
low-cost foods and food substitutes to European working classes. Even if not, an
attractive argument may be made that Europeans consumed more and more of these
products simply because they were so good to consume
A few comments on sweetness may be in order. The general position on sweetness appears
to be that our hominid capacity to identify it had some positive evolutionary significance — that
it enabled omnivores to locate and use suitable plant nutrients in the environment. The eating
experience is heavily overladen with cultural preferences.
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, Overlaid preferences can run against what appears to be “natural,” as well as with it.
For the moment, let it suffice that, whether there exists a natural craving for sweetness, few
are the world’s peoples who respond negatively to sugar, whatever their prior experience, and
countless those who have reacted to it with intensified craving and enthusiasm.
Before Britons had sugar, they had honey. Honey was a common ingredient in
prescriptions; in time, sugar supplanted it in many or most of them. Honey had also been used
as a preservative of sorts; sugar turned out to be much better and, eventually, cheaper. Honey
also provided the basis of such alcohol drinks as mead, metheglin, and hypomel. Sugar used
with wine and fruit to make hypocras became an important alternative to these drinks; ciders
and other fermented fruit drinks made with English fruit and West Indian sugars represented
another; and rum manufactured from molasses represented an important third. Here again,
sugar soon bested honey.
Until nearly the end of the seventeenth century, a yearly shortage of cattle fodder in
Western Europe resulted in heavy fall butchering and the preservation of large quantities of
meat by salting, pickling, and other methods. Sugar was employed, as were spices, with
cooked meats, sometimes combined with fruits. Much as the spices of holiday cookies—
ginger, mace, cinnamon—suggest the past, so too do the brown sugar, molasses, and cloves
of the holiday ham.
In conclusion, sugar served many purposes. It was a medicine, or a sweetener to
disguise the bitterness of other medicines. It was a sweetener for bitter foods and drinks, It
was a food, it was a preservative, etc.
The period during which so many new ingestibles became encysted within European
diet was also the period when the factory system took root, flourished, and spread. Massive
increases in consumption of the drug-food complex occurred during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. There also appears to have been some sequence of uses in the case of
sugar; and there seems no doubt that there were changes in the use, by class, of sugar and
these other products over time, much as the substances in association with which sugar was
used also changed.
Only the privileged few could enjoy these luxuries even in the sixteenth century in
England. In subsequent centuries, however, the combination of sugars and fruit became more
common, and the cost of jams, jellies, marmalades, and preserved fruits declined. These
changes accompanied many other dietary changes, such as the development of ready-made
(store-bought) bread, the gradual replacement of milk-drinking by tea-drinking, a sharp decline
in the preparation of oatmeal and a decrease in the use of butter.
It is true that the changes mentioned fit well with a reduction in the time which must be
spent in the kitchen or in obtaining foodstuffs, and that they have eased the transition to the
taking of more and more meals outside the home. The composition of the family diet appears
to change sharply when the housewife goes to work. There, it was noted that such time-
consuming practices as broth- making and oatmeal-cooking dropped out of domestic cuisine.
As people produced less and less of their own food, they ate more and more food produced
by others, elsewhere. As they spent more and more time away from farm and home, the kinds
of foods they ate changed. Those changes reflected changing availabilities of a kind. But the
availabilities themselves were functions of economic and political forces remote from the
consumers and not at all understood as “forces.”
Such substances as sugar are, from the point of view of the metropolis, raw materials,
until systems of symbolic extrusion and transformation can operate upon them. But those
systems do not bring them forth or make them available; such availabilities are differently
determined. To find out what these substances come to mean is to reunite their availabilities
with their uses — in space and in time.
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