Cult. Anth. BLOG #6: Adaptions Lost Through World System Integration

For thousands of years, humans have learned how to physically adapt into their environment to survive. Humans had learned how to forage by gathering plants, become pastoral by domesticating animals, develop horticulture by manual labor of planting, and creating agriculture with the invention of new farm machinery. These types of survival form into different cultures, the systems by which humans learn to survive. Whereas animals survive by whether they have the preferable traits to an environment, humans create their own suitable behavior to survive in the environment and pass the information along for future generations. Each way of living, or culture, is best because it is suited to its own unique environment, after years of trial and error.

As more people have filled the planet, different cultures have increasingly come into contact with one another, creating conflict. When culture is taught within a group of people, the people of that group will usually believe that this way of living is the only proper way to live. This way of thinking is called ethnocentrism. Sometimes ethnocentrism can be so strong that people will try to enforce their own ideas on how to live onto other groups of people. These enforcements of new rules are usually ill-fitting and detrimental to the new society because the perceived "right" way to live usually does not best utilize the resources of the new environment. The society which lives in the environment usually knows the best way of how to use it.

As these different types of cultures merge, there can be confusion and conflict about what things should be valued. Pastoralists sense that their animals symbolize the group's own well-being and sense of identity. Cultivators in horticulture will bless the crops that they receive from the earth, and will connect crop production with their own sexual fertility and human worth. More modern farmers who use technology in agriculture still have pride in their crops, but also in how big of land or how much technology they use, as that is what will provide them with the biggest yield. Americans believe that if you have more money, you will have a happier life, not because paper money is intrinsically valuable, but because it represents all of the other things which one can buy with money. These cultures all value things that give them the ability to survive. By growing up and believing that these things are what gives one life in their particular situation, humans will connect their own well-being and identity to things which ensure their survival. This is why indigenous peoples and capitalist countries alike will strive to keep their cultures alive, so the meaning of their own lives can remain alive as well.

Anthropologists believe that there is a world system that is creating relationships between different cultures that are defined by power. According to Lassiter, the world system is "the culture that mediates our relationship with the environment, writ on an international scale" (120). Whoever has more control over the environment and resources will have more control of what kind of relationship will come between the two cultures. Most often, if a more powerful, “core” country values capitalism, other countries will be forced to compete for power, or else they will end up as dependents of the more powerful country and in effect, the nation will have its culture ripped away and it will lose the ability to survive on its own.

As capitalism becomes more affluent in the world, there becomes a greater struggle for indigenous or rural groups of people to maintain their own cultural identities. The capitalist "core" countries of Britain and America have found their way into gaining profit from the cocaine industry in Bolivia. In effect, the Bolivian peoples have struggled to maintain their culture, their personal identity, and their ability to survive. As more men are enlisted to work for the cocaine industry, there are less laborers to work the fields of the small villages. One village, Pocona, is run by almost all women now, as the men have all left to process cocaine. This loss of workers leaves Pocona with a lack of diversity in their horticulture, less food, and broken-up families. Even the men who are supposedly earning money by processing cocaine end up not earning a good wage, addicted to crack, and possibly receiving a venereal disease from a local prostitute. Both the men and the village left behind suffer in health because the capitalistic, profiting cocaine industry pushes out the people's natural ability to care for themselves.

I see this pattern of the world system pushing out individual cultures in the way that more and more international students are attending private, liberal-arts colleges. I find it ironic that while I was college-searching, colleges would advertise that their campuses were more diverse, meaning that they had a larger percentage of international students on campus. However, as more and more international students become accustomed the fast-paced, competitive, and American way of life, their native diversity naturally fades. I see that the capitalist economy "pushes" these students away from their culture and into American life. When I've asked some international friends of mine why they came to Luther, they have told me that their parents wanted them to have a good education, and Luther provided them with good financial aid packages. There is no intrinsic reason that someone would want to come live in Decorah, Iowa. The parents of international students feel the "push" of the world system, as more capitalistic competition in the world means that their children need a higher education to succeed. Although they may still have parents back at home who live a more rural lifestyle than college life in America, the students will eventually start to talk, act, and be more like Americans, therefore leaving their own cultural ways behind, and making room for more American, and capitalistic ways of living.