Viewing Globalization at Various Lenses
I came across with an American girl while watching at my stories in Instragram last night. And of course, I took that as an opportunity to make new friends. In the verge of our conversation, we had an informal form of communication and exchanged informations about ourselves. When she knew that I'm from the Philippines, she immediately asked me about Anne Curtis, a Filipina actress and said that she is a fan. I was surprised that she also watched her movie "Buy bust" that was aired few years ago. What shocked me the most was, her favorite food is"adobo", a Filipino dish and she used to eat it in a Filipino restaurant somewhere in Los Angeles, California.
There, I realized that the encounter I had with her was a plausible exemplification of globalization. The spread of Filipino movie in the America suggests how fast this renowned culture has proliferated and cris-crossed in Western country. Now, the concept of globalization in this scenario just begins with the intuitive sense that something is going on, however, it does not affect anyone in homologous way. Here comes the concept of viewing globalization in different lenses.
Firstly, let's take a look at globalization in a brighter lens.
In general, many accounts view globalization as primarily an "economic process". Manfred Steger provided a best scholarly definition of globalization as the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and across world-space".⁴ Accordingly, the term expansion pertains to the "creation of new social networks, and the multiplication of the existing connections that cut across traditional, economic, cultural and geographic boundaries".¹ For example, social media has established novel global connections between people. What happened last night was because of social media. Further, international groups of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) arr networks that connect a more specific groups, like social workers across the different corners of the globe.
Moreover, intensification is an expansion, stretching and acceleration of those aforementioned networks.² It's not just the global connections that are multiplying, but are also becoming closely-knit and are expanding their reach. For example, in 2019, Philippines and Japan has always had a strong financial market connection.³ Due to the advent of electronic trading, the volume trade increases exponentially. Thus, they 2nd out of 225 countries with total trade amounting to USD 21.38 billion.³
However, globalization also has its downsides. Let's take a closer look in a darker lens.
Activists register to the "anti-globalization" movement of the 1990s, and they are resisting the trade deals among countries facilitated and promoted by global organizations like the World Trade Organization. For example: governments that decide to allow foreign investments on the belief that they provide jobs and capital for the country, and offer public lands for industrialization. As a result, poor people in "urban poor communities" are greatly affected, and are even coerced to leave the lands. Ironically, these poor people arebthe labor force sought by foreign companies. Globalization scholars do not disagree with them. In fact, they are sympathetic to the critique of economic globalization.globalization
All of these things may be confusing. Now we begin to develop and ask questions such as, is globalization bad? Is it essential or detrimental? But, let's take it from anthropologist Arjun Appadurai who states that various types of globalization takes place on multiple and intersecting dimensions of integration he mentions as "scapes". Like ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, financescape and ideoscape, they are distinct windows into the broader phenomenon of globalization. In simpler term, Apparudai means there are multiple globalization.. And, it would be hard to deny Appadurai's central thurst of viewing globalization through various lenses. Therefore, instead of asking those questions above, try asking, "what is/are being globalized"?". Crafting questions dependent to this questions, the vista and conclusions of globalization can change in various lenses.
References:
Ibid., 13
Ibid.,14
Department of Trade and Industry. (n.d). PHILIPPINES-JAPAN ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT (PJEPA). Retrieved at: https://www.dti.gov.ph/philippines-japan-economic-partnership-agreement-pjepa/
Steger, M. (2013). Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3rd edition. pp.15
