Week 15 · Chapter

Chapter 15 — Globalization, Colonialism, and Applied Anthropology, and the Course Synthesis

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~35–45 minutes · Objective 9 (analyze globalization, colonialism, migration, cultural heritage, and repatriation, describe applied and public anthropology, and synthesize the course's concepts in an ethnographic reading of one fieldwork site), Objective 4 (compare how societies make a living and exchange goods: the subsistence strategies as a model, generalized, balanced, and negative reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange, the obligations a gift creates, and documented cases such as the kula and the potlatch) · Read it first this week; the lecture, the slides, the tutorial, and the quiz all build on it.

In plain language

Every place you have studied this term is tied to places far away. This week you will meet globalization (the growing flow of goods, people, money, and ideas across the world) and colonialism (one society ruling another and using its land, labor, and resources). You will follow migration (people moving to live somewhere new) and remittances (money migrants send home). You will see how communities protect their cultural heritage (the practices and objects they count as their own) and win the repatriation (return) of objects taken from them. Last, you will read the running market one more time, through every idea the course has taught.

Why you already care about this

Picture an illustrative cup of coffee, bought on your way to class. The beans were grown on a farm in one region of the world. They were picked, dried, and shipped across an ocean. A company in another country roasted them, and a worker near you poured the cup.

You never met the grower, the shipper, or the roaster. Yet your morning depends on all of them, and theirs depends a little on you. That chain of people did not appear by accident. Routes like it have old roots, and much of that history is a history of empires.

You have your own ties like this. Maybe a cousin lives in another country, a parent sends money to a grandparent, or a dish your family cooks came from somewhere else long ago. Anthropology asks how such ties work, who gains from them, and how people remake what arrives.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

define globalization and trace a familiar product through a chain of places;
state the history of colonialism plainly, with a documented example of a colonial law;
use the world-system as a model of core and periphery linked by unequal exchange;
work the UN's 2024 migration figures and explain transnational ties and remittances;
explain cultural heritage and repatriation, and say why repatriation is law for covered institutions in the United States;
describe applied and public anthropology, and explain why globalization is not homogenization;
read the running fieldwork site through every lens the course has taught, and say the reading in one plain sentence.

Carry this sentence with you: one market, many ties — local and global at once.

Where we are

Already covered: Week 1 taught holism and comparison. Week 2 defined acculturation. Weeks 3 and 4 gave you field notes and the vendors' emic terms. Week 5 taught subsistence, Week 6 exchange, and Week 7 authority. Weeks 9 to 11 read the family-run stall's kinship, households, and division of labor. Week 13 read the opening bell as a ritual, and Week 14 read healing.
This week: globalization; colonialism and its legacies; the world-system as a model; migration, transnational ties, and remittances; cultural heritage and repatriation; applied and public anthropology; and the course synthesis.
How they connect: Week 6's forms of exchange return as unequal exchange and as remittances, Week 2's acculturation returns with migration, and Week 6's potlatch ban returns as a colonial law.
Where we're going next: this is the last module of new material. Week 16 holds the cumulative final and its review bundle, with no new lessons.

Two earlier ideas carry this week. From Week 2, acculturation is the cultural change that follows sustained contact between groups. From Week 6, the potlatch is a feast of the Kwakwaka'wakw and other Northwest Coast peoples at which hosts give away goods to validate names, rank, and rights before invited witnesses. Both return here, in a much wider frame.

1. Trace a coffee: globalization and its long history

Go back to the cup of coffee. Ask four questions about it: where did it come from, who handled it, where did the money go, and how did people here make it their own? Those four questions are a quick way into this week's first idea.

Globalization is the intensifying flow of goods, people, money, and ideas across the world; it has a long history, much of it colonial, and it does not make every culture the same.

The word "intensifying" matters. The flows are not new; what the word stresses is that they keep growing. Much of their history is colonial, as the next section shows.

Worked example — the coffee route in four moves (illustrative). The route is constructed for this chapter. Walk it the way the course walks every reading.

What was observed. Beans grown on a farm in one region, shipped across an ocean, roasted in another country, and poured at a counter near you.
What it might mean to the people involved. To the grower, the beans may be a family's main income. To the roaster, they are a product to sell. To you, they are a morning habit.
What the concept calls it. A flow of goods and money across borders, which is globalization.
What a comparison adds. A loaf of bread from the running market's bread stall travels a few miles. The coffee crosses an ocean, so the two foods sit in very different webs.

In words: the coffee route is globalization in miniature, because one cup ties a grower, a shipper, a roaster, and a buyer in different countries into one chain.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Pick one thing you used this morning, such as a phone, a shirt, or a breakfast food. Trace where it might have come from, and say what you do not know about its route.
(b) Why might a grower and a buyer at opposite ends of the coffee route describe the same chain in very different words?

Misconception check. Students often think globalization began with the internet, as if the world got connected in their own lifetime. That is tempting, because phones and social media make the ties feel new. But after 1492, crops, animals, and diseases were already moving between the Americas and the rest of the world, and much of that movement ran through empires. The cure: when you trace a global tie, ask how old the route is before you call it new.

2. State colonialism plainly: rule, land, labor, and legacies

Think about a building where one group wrote the rules for everyone else and kept the best rooms for itself. The others still lived there, worked there, and kept their own ways as best they could. Over time the house rules shaped who owned what, which language people used at the front desk, and who could leave.

That picture is a small version of a large and documented history.

Colonialism is one society's rule over another and the use of its land, labor, and resources; its legacies include borders, languages, economies, and inequalities that continue in the present.

The course states this history plainly. It is not a debate about whether harm occurred; the harms are documented.

One sweeping change came with it. After 1492, crops, animals, and diseases moved between the Americas and the rest of the world. That movement changed diets, economies, and populations on every continent. The course describes it in plain words and keeps to that one documented sentence.

The course has already met one colonial law. Canada banned the potlatch under the Indian Act from 1885 until 1951. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights describes the ban as part of an effort to destroy Indigenous culture and religion.

Worked example — reading the potlatch ban in four moves. Walk the course's order for any reading, and keep the documented facts plain.

What was observed. A national government made a feast of the Kwakwaka'wakw and other Northwest Coast peoples illegal, from 1885 until 1951.
What it meant to the people involved. The potlatch validated names, rank, and rights before witnesses, so the ban reached into how those rights were recognized.
What the concept calls it. Colonialism: one society ruling another and reaching into its law, land, and ceremonial life.
What a comparison adds. In Week 6 you read the potlatch as exchange; here the same feast shows how a colonial state used law against a people's own institutions.

In words: the potlatch ban was colonialism in law, a documented effort to suppress a people's ceremonies that lasted from 1885 until 1951.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Name one legacy of colonialism you can see in the present, such as a border, a language, or a crop grown far from where it began. How might it shape daily life for the people who live with it?
(b) Why does the course state colonial harms as documented history instead of presenting them as a debate with two sides?

Misconception check. Students often read colonialism as a debate about whether harm occurred, as if a fair class must give "both sides" of every colonial law. That is tempting, because the course does present real scholarly debates with each side at full strength. But a law that banned a people's ceremonies for decades is a documented fact, not an open question. The cure: debate what scholars disagree about, and state documented harms as facts.

3. Use the world-system as a model: core, periphery, and unequal exchange

Think about a shopping mall where one large store sets the rents, the hours, and the prices for every small shop around it. The small shops do the selling, but the big store collects a share of every sale. Each side needs the other, yet the gains do not flow evenly.

Anthropologists and other scholars built a model for that shape at the scale of the world. Wallerstein's world-system idea, from The Modern World-System (1974, named in words), describes a world economy in which the core, the regions that gain, draws on the periphery, the regions drawn on, through unequal exchange.

World-system is Wallerstein's model of a world economy in which core regions draw on peripheral regions through unequal exchange; it is a classroom tool for comparison, not a verdict on any real place.
Core is, in the world-system model, a region that draws wealth from other regions through unequal exchange.
Periphery is, in the world-system model, a region whose land, labor, and goods are drawn on by core regions through unequal exchange.
Unequal exchange is trade between regions in which one side steadily gains more than it gives, the link that joins core and periphery in the world-system model.

Two anthropologists carried this kind of thinking into the discipline's own cases. Wolf's Europe and the People Without History (1982, named in words) argued that the peoples anthropologists studied were never outside history. Mintz's Sweetness and Power (1985, named in words) traced how sugar linked plantation labor to European diets.

Wolf's point corrects an old habit. Early accounts often wrote about a people as if they had always lived the same way, untouched by trade, war, or empire. Wolf's argument is that the communities anthropologists visited had long been tied into wider webs. That is one reason this course writes every ethnographic account in the past tense with its fieldwork decade.

Worked example — the coffee route through the model (illustrative). Use the four model terms on the route from Section 1. The route is constructed for this chapter.

Where the beans are grown. In the model's terms, the growing region sits in the periphery: its land and labor supply the good.
Where the beans are roasted and sold. The roasting and selling country sits in the core: it turns the beans into a branded product.
The exchange. If, in this illustrative chain, most of the price of a cup stays with the roaster and the café, the exchange is unequal in the model's sense.
The limit. The model sorts a route into roles; it does not describe any real country, and a real route may mix roles.

In words: read through the world-system model, the illustrative coffee route links a periphery that grows the beans to a core that roasts and sells them, through an exchange that can be unequal.

Week 6 gave you a tool for this. Reciprocity is exchange between social equals. Unequal exchange is the opposite case: a link between parties who do not stand as equals, where one side steadily gains more.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Pick a product you buy often. Using the model's terms, where might its core and periphery be, and what would you need to check before you believed your guess?
(b) Wolf argued that the peoples anthropologists studied were never outside history. Why might a writer be tempted to describe a far-off community as if it had never changed?

Misconception check. Students often treat the world-system as a map that tells them which real countries are "core" and which are "periphery", once and for all. That is tempting, because the model's two labels are easy to stick on places. But the world-system is a classroom model, and real places can shift and mix roles. The cure: use the labels to ask questions about a route, and check every claim about a real place against an issuing-body source.

4. Follow people and money: migration, transnational ties, and remittances

Picture an illustrative family group chat that spans three countries. A grandmother posts a photo of a garden in one country. Two cousins reply from a second country, and a teenager answers from a third, switching between two languages in one message. Somebody asks whether this month's money has arrived.

That chat is a small window onto a large movement of people.

Migration is the movement of people from one place to live in another, including across national borders.

The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs counted about 304 million (304,000,000) international migrants in 2024, 3.7 percent of the world's population. That count was nearly double the estimated 154 million of 1990.

Worked example — the 2024 migration figures (Dataset G, real). Work the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs' figures step by step.

The increase. About 304 million international migrants in 2024 and an estimated 154 million in 1990, so 304 − 154 = 150 million more.
Nearly double. Double the 1990 count is 2 × 154 = 308 million, and 308 − 304 = 4 million, so the 2024 count is 4 million short of double.
The share. International migrants were 3.7 percent of the world's population in 2024 and 2.9 percent in 1990, so 3.7 − 2.9 = 0.8 percentage points.

Put as a ratio, 304 million versus 154 million is nearly a 2-fold change. In words: the number of international migrants nearly doubled from 1990 to 2024, while their share of the world's population rose by 0.8 percentage points, because the world's population grew too.

Notice the units in step 3. The share is a percentage, and the change between two percentages is in percentage points. Week 6 used the same rule for the market's tally.

Migrants rarely cut their ties when they move.

Transnational ties are the family, economic, and cultural links that migrants keep across borders, such as remittances, regular calls, and return visits.
Remittances are money that migrants send to family and communities at home.

The World Bank estimated that remittances to low- and middle-income countries would reach about 685 billion dollars in 2024. The course teaches that estimate in words and never tests it, because it is an estimate.

Week 6's tools help you read a remittance without deciding for any real family what it means. Money sent to a parent with no count kept looks like generalized reciprocity. Money that cousins expect to be repaid looks more like balanced reciprocity. Mauss's essay on the gift, named in words, adds the three obligations: to give, to receive, and to give back. Any real family's meaning is a question for fieldwork, not for a model.

Week 2's acculturation returns here too. When people from two groups live in sustained contact, both groups change. The teenager in the group chat who switches between two languages is an illustrative case of that change, and of Week 4's code-switching.

An honesty note: the course argues no current immigration policy. It studies how people move, what ties they keep, and how they make a life, the way it studies any other practice.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Describe a tie you or someone you know keeps with people far away, such as a weekly call, a shared playlist, or a holiday visit. What does the tie carry besides information?
(b) A remittance can be read as generalized or balanced reciprocity. What would you need to learn from a family before you chose between those readings?

Misconception check. Students often treat the 3.7 percent share and the 0.8 change as the same kind of number, writing that the share "grew 0.8 percent". That is tempting, because both carry the word percent nearby. But 3.7 percent is a share of the world's population, and 0.8 is a difference between two shares, so it is 0.8 percentage points. The cure: say "percent" for a share and "percentage points" for a gap between shares.

5. Protect and return: cultural heritage and repatriation

Think about a family recipe card, stained and worn, that a grandparent wrote out by hand. Now picture a stranger borrowing it, never returning it, and putting it in a glass case in another city. The card would still exist, but the family would have lost something that was theirs to keep and use.

Communities think about their heritage in a similar way, at a far larger scale.

Cultural heritage is the practices, places, objects, and knowledge that a community recognizes as its own and hands on to later generations.

Some heritage is a thing you can hold. Some of it is a way of doing things. UNESCO's Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was adopted in Paris in 2003.

Intangible cultural heritage is practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and skills that communities recognize as their heritage, such as oral traditions, performing arts, rituals and festive events, and traditional craftsmanship, as UNESCO's 2003 convention describes them.

A museum can hold objects that were taken from communities without their consent. Returning them has a name.

Repatriation is the return of human remains and cultural objects to the communities they came from; for covered institutions in the United States, it is required by law rather than offered as goodwill.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act is a United States law, signed in 1990, that requires federal agencies and federally funded institutions to return Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian returns such items under its own law. The course describes repatriation from the law and the issuing body, and it describes no sacred object and links no image of human remains.

One documented case ties this section to Week 6. After the 1921 potlatch, authorities charged 45 participants and seized about 750 ceremonial objects. After decades of negotiation, the objects began returning to two community cultural centres, opened in 1979 and 1980.

Worked example — the dated cases on one line (Dataset H, real). Put the three gradable years in order, then measure the gaps.

The order. The potlatch ban was dropped in 1951, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was signed in 1990, and UNESCO's convention was adopted in 2003.
The gaps. From 1951 to 1990 is 1990 − 1951 = 39 years, and from 1990 to 2003 is 2003 − 1990 = 13 years.
The check. 39 + 13 = 52 = 2003 − 1951, so the whole line spans 52 years.
The seized regalia. The first community cultural centre to receive returned objects opened in 1979, so 1979 − 1921 = 58 years after the seizure.

In words: across 52 years, a ban on a ceremony ended, a law began requiring returns in the United States, and a convention began protecting living heritage, while the seized regalia took 58 years to start coming home.

Read the sequence with care. These are three separate cases, in two countries and one international body; the course does not claim that one caused the next.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Name a practice, skill, or story from your own family or community that you would call heritage. Who should decide how it is shared?
(b) Why might a community want a seized object returned even when a museum promises to care for it well?

Misconception check. Students often read repatriation as optional goodwill, a kind gesture a museum may or may not choose. That is tempting, because news stories about returns often sound like acts of generosity. But for federal agencies and institutions that receive federal funds in the United States, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires it. The cure: ask first what the law requires, then ask what goes beyond it.

6. Put anthropology to work: applied and public anthropology, and why globalization is not homogenization

Picture an illustrative museum that plans to rewrite the labels in one gallery. Instead of writing them alone, the staff invite members of the community whose objects are on display. Together they decide which words to use, which stories to tell, and which objects should not be shown at all.

That project uses anthropology's tools outside a classroom. You met the name in Week 1: applied anthropology uses anthropology's methods to address practical problems. This week adds a partner idea.

Public anthropology is anthropological work brought to wide audiences and public debates.

Week 8 said that present-day practice is often reflexive, collaborative, applied, and public, working with communities as partners. The museum label project is all four at once.

Worked example — the museum label rewritten with a community (illustrative). The museum and the community are constructed for this chapter. Read the project with the course's tools.

What was observed. Staff and community members meet, draft labels together, and agree on what stays off display.
What it might mean to the people involved. For the community, the labels become their own account; for the staff, the gallery becomes more accurate.
What the concept calls it. Applied anthropology, because it solves a practical problem, and public anthropology, because the result speaks to every visitor.
What a comparison adds. Week 3's emic and etic return: the old labels gave an outsider's account, and the new ones add the insiders' terms.

In words: rewriting a museum label with a community is applied and public anthropology, because it uses the discipline's methods to solve a practical problem and puts the result before a wide audience.

Now test a common fear about globalization.

Homogenization is the idea that global flows make every culture the same; anthropologists find instead that global goods and media are taken up and remade locally.

Think about an illustrative neighborhood restaurant that serves pizza, a dish that began far away. The cooks top it with the herbs and peppers their own families grew up with, and regulars order it with a local drink. The dish traveled, but the meal belongs to the neighborhood.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Describe a global product, song, or app that people you know use in their own way. What did they change to make it theirs?
(b) Make the strongest case that global flows make places more alike, and then the strongest case that people remake what arrives.

Misconception check. Students often read applied anthropology as separate from "real" anthropology, as if fieldwork were the science and applied work only a side job. That is tempting, because applied projects happen in museums, clinics, and offices rather than in a field site. But applied work uses the same methods, ethics, and comparisons, and Week 1 placed it across all four subfields. The cure: judge applied work by its methods, not by where it happens.

Misconception check — homogenization. Students also read globalization as making every culture the same. That is tempting, because the same brands and songs now appear in many countries. But people take up global goods and remake them, as the illustrative restaurant remakes pizza. The cure: before you call two places "the same", look at how each one uses what arrived.

7. Read the running site through every lens: the course synthesis

Walk back into the running fieldwork site one last time: the illustrative, unnamed weekly neighborhood farmers' market of 24 stalls (Dataset A, illustrative, constructed for this course, not a real place). You first looked at it in Week 1 as a first-time visitor. Now you can read it the way an anthropologist would after a full term of fieldwork.

Course synthesis is a reading of one fieldwork site through every concept the course has taught, set side by side so the parts of a way of life can be seen together.

Week 1 called that move holism: looking at how the parts of a way of life fit together. The synthesis is holism done with every tool at once.

Dataset A (illustrative): ten lenses the course used on the running market, the week each came from, and what each lens showed
Lens	Week	What the market showed
Field notes	Week 3	10 field-note entries from Visit 1, in two columns, naming roles, never people
Language	Week 4	4 emic terms: "regulars", "seconds", "the swap", and "the bell"
Subsistence	Week 5	The family-run stall's intensive agriculture meeting wage-earning buyers
Exchange	Week 6	The coded tally of 50 exchanges, with market exchange at 66 percent
Authority	Week 7	The manager's authority and the vendors' association as the source of legitimacy
Kinship and residence	Weeks 9 and 10	The stall's 3-generation diagram, with one patrilocal and one neolocal couple
Division of labor	Week 11	Jobs divided by gender and by generation
Ritual	Week 13	The 8:00 a.m. bell as a small calendrical ritual
Healing	Week 14	The first-aid kit beside the ginger tea: more than one way of healing
Global ties	Week 15	Two vendors who send money to relatives in another country every month

Two weeks are not rows. Week 2's symbol and norm live inside the bell row, and Week 8's lenses are the reason you can hold ten readings at once. Week 12's census categories were never used on the market: the field notes record roles, not anyone's race or ethnicity, and the course kept it that way.

Worked example — the ten lenses on one site (Dataset A, illustrative). Call back the counts, then add the global tie.

The exchanges. Of the 50 coded exchanges on Visit 1, 33 were market exchange, so 33 ÷ 50 × 100 = 66 percent.
All reciprocity. Reciprocity of all kinds was 8 + 5 + 0 = 13 exchanges, so 13 ÷ 50 × 100 = 26 percent.
Redistribution. Redistribution was 4 exchanges, so 4 ÷ 50 × 100 = 8 percent.
The money the tally did not count. Two vendors mention sending money to relatives in another country every month. Those remittances happen outside the market's two-hour visit, so none of the 50 coded exchanges records them, and the tally shows only the local part of the vendors' exchanges.
The lens count. Count the rows of the table: field notes, language, subsistence, exchange, authority, kinship and residence, division of labor, ritual, healing, and global ties. That makes 10 lenses on 1 market.

Here is the reading in plain words: the running site is a small local way of life and a knot in a global web at once, since its 24 stalls run on local rules, kin ties, and rituals while two of its vendors send money across a border every month.

An honesty note on this synthesis: almost everything you know about the market comes from one illustrative visit and one illustrative interview. A real fieldworker would return for many visits, check each reading with the vendors, and expect some readings to change.

That is also the course's last lesson about method. You observe and record a practice fairly, you read it in the terms of the people who do it and in the discipline's terms, and you compare it with documented cases elsewhere. You can now do all three.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Which of the ten lenses changed your view of the market the most, and what did it let you see that a first-time visitor would miss?
(b) Pick a place in your own life, such as a workplace, a team, or a family kitchen. Which three lenses from the table would you use first, and why?

Misconception check. Students often read a synthesis as a list: ten separate facts about the market, one per week. That is tempting, because the course taught the lenses one at a time. But a synthesis sets the readings side by side so they explain each other, as the family-run stall's kinship, labor, and land all describe one family's work. The cure: after any list of readings, write one sentence that ties them together.

Key terms

Globalization — The intensifying flow of goods, people, money, and ideas across the world; it has a long history, much of it colonial, and it does not make every culture the same. (first used: 1. Trace a coffee: globalization and its long history)
Colonialism — One society's rule over another and the use of its land, labor, and resources; its legacies include borders, languages, economies, and inequalities that continue in the present. (first used: 2. State colonialism plainly: rule, land, labor, and legacies)
World-system — Wallerstein's model of a world economy in which core regions draw on peripheral regions through unequal exchange; it is a classroom tool for comparison, not a verdict on any real place. (first used: 3. Use the world-system as a model: core, periphery, and unequal exchange)
Core — In the world-system model, a region that draws wealth from other regions through unequal exchange. (first used: 3. Use the world-system as a model: core, periphery, and unequal exchange)
Periphery — In the world-system model, a region whose land, labor, and goods are drawn on by core regions through unequal exchange. (first used: 3. Use the world-system as a model: core, periphery, and unequal exchange)
Unequal exchange — Trade between regions in which one side steadily gains more than it gives, the link that joins core and periphery in the world-system model. (first used: 3. Use the world-system as a model: core, periphery, and unequal exchange)
Migration — The movement of people from one place to live in another, including across national borders. (first used: 4. Follow people and money: migration, transnational ties, and remittances)
Transnational ties — The family, economic, and cultural links that migrants keep across borders, such as remittances, regular calls, and return visits. (first used: 4. Follow people and money: migration, transnational ties, and remittances)
Remittances — Money that migrants send to family and communities at home. (first used: 4. Follow people and money: migration, transnational ties, and remittances)
Cultural heritage — The practices, places, objects, and knowledge that a community recognizes as its own and hands on to later generations. (first used: 5. Protect and return: cultural heritage and repatriation)
Intangible cultural heritage — Practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and skills that communities recognize as their heritage, such as oral traditions, performing arts, rituals and festive events, and traditional craftsmanship, as UNESCO's 2003 convention describes them. (first used: 5. Protect and return: cultural heritage and repatriation)
Repatriation — The return of human remains and cultural objects to the communities they came from; for covered institutions in the United States, it is required by law rather than offered as goodwill. (first used: 5. Protect and return: cultural heritage and repatriation)
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — A United States law, signed in 1990, that requires federal agencies and federally funded institutions to return Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. (first used: 5. Protect and return: cultural heritage and repatriation)
Public anthropology — Anthropological work brought to wide audiences and public debates. (first used: 6. Put anthropology to work: applied and public anthropology, and why globalization is not homogenization)
Homogenization — The idea that global flows make every culture the same; anthropologists find instead that global goods and media are taken up and remade locally. (first used: 6. Put anthropology to work: applied and public anthropology, and why globalization is not homogenization)
Course synthesis — A reading of one fieldwork site through every concept the course has taught, set side by side so the parts of a way of life can be seen together. (first used: 7. Read the running site through every lens: the course synthesis)

Summary

Globalization is an old, intensifying flow, much of it colonial.
Colonialism is rule over another society's land, labor, and resources; its harms are documented.
The world-system is a model: core and periphery joined by unequal exchange.
About 304 million international migrants lived abroad in 2024, 3.7 percent of the world.
Remittances and calls are transnational ties; the remittance estimate is taught in words.
Repatriation is law for covered institutions in the United States, not goodwill.
Globalization is not homogenization; people remake what arrives.
The synthesis reads one site through every lens, side by side.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

An illustrative town counted 400 residents born in another country in an earlier survey and 700 in a later one. How many more is that, and how far short of double the earlier count is the later count?
In the same illustrative town, residents born abroad were 4.5 percent of the population in the earlier survey and 6.0 percent in the later one. State the change with the right unit.
An illustrative museum that receives federal funds says it will "think about" returning a Native American funerary object a tribe has asked for, "as a gesture of goodwill". Name the wrong turn and correct it.
An illustrative classmate writes, "Now that every city has the same coffee chains, local culture is gone." Name the wrong turn and give one question that would test the claim.

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

The later count minus the earlier count is 700 − 400 = 300 more residents. Double the earlier count is 2 × 400 = 800, and 800 − 700 = 100, so the later count is 100 short of double.
The change is 6.0 − 4.5 = 1.5 percentage points. Each figure is a share of the town's population, so the gap between them is in percentage points, not percent.
The statement reads repatriation as optional goodwill. Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, institutions that receive federal funds are required to return Native American funerary objects to the parties the law names, through consultation, so the return is a legal duty, not a gesture.
The claim reads globalization as homogenization. A testing question: how do people in each city use the same coffee, and what do they add, change, or refuse? If they remake it locally, the claim fails.

Next up in this module: the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz — and next week, Week 16, brings no new chapter, only the cumulative final, where the course's method of observing, interpreting, and comparing returns.

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