Lecture: Globalization, Colonialism, and Applied Anthropology, and the Course Synthesis
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 15
Opening
Picture a cup of coffee, in an illustrative scene made up for this lecture. You buy it on your way to class. The beans were grown on a farm in one region of the world, shipped across an ocean, roasted in another country, and poured by a worker near you. You never met the grower, the shipper, or the roaster. Yet your morning depends on all of them.
You'll meet these ties well beyond this course. A business student may trace a supply chain. A nursing student may care for a family whose relatives live in another country. A history student may work in a museum that holds objects from far away. In each case it helps to know how one local place is tied to the wider world.
Here's where we are. Week 1 gave you holism, the habit of seeing how the parts of a way of life fit together. Week 2 gave you acculturation. Week 6 gave you the forms of exchange and the potlatch. And week after week, you've returned to the same illustrative farmers' market. This is the last module of new material, and it does two jobs.
Here's the plan. First, globalization and colonialism. Then a model of the world economy. Then migration and the money migrants send home. Then heritage and repatriation, and the work anthropologists do outside the classroom. And last, we'll read the market one more time, through every lens you've learned.
1. Globalization: one cup, many places
Go back to the 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 questions point at one 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 aren't new. What the word stresses is that they keep growing, and that their history runs back through empires.
Walk the coffee the way this 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 near you. What it might mean to the people involved: to the grower, perhaps a family's main income; to the roaster, a product; to you, 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 from the market's bread stall travels a few miles, while the coffee crosses an ocean.
Pause and try this. Someone says globalization began with the internet. Using the definition, what's wrong with that?
Think about the word "intensifying".
Here's the answer. The flows are old and only intensifying; much of their history is colonial, so the internet sped up something that was already there.
That history is where we go next.
2. Colonialism, stated plainly
Think about a building where one group wrote the rules for everyone else and kept the best rooms. The others still lived and worked there and kept their own ways as best they could. Over time, the house rules shaped who owned what and which language people used at the front desk.
That picture is a small version of a large, 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.
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.
You've already met one colonial law in this course. 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. The potlatch validated names, rank, and rights before witnesses, so the ban reached into how those rights were recognized.
I want to be direct about one thing. This course presents real scholarly debates with each side at full strength. But a law that banned a people's ceremonies for decades isn't a debate. It's documented history, and we state it plainly.
Pause and try this. A classmate wants to give "both sides" of whether the potlatch ban caused harm. Is that the right move here?
Think about the difference between a debate and a documented fact.
Here's the answer. No. The ban is a documented colonial law, so you state it plainly; you save "both sides" for questions scholars still argue about.
3. The world-system as a model
Picture a shopping mall where one big store sets the rents and the hours for every small shop around it. The small shops do the selling, but the big store takes a share of every sale. Each side needs the other, yet the gains don't flow evenly.
Scholars built a model for that shape at the scale of the world. Wallerstein's idea, from The Modern World-System, in 1974, describes a world economy in which the core draws on the periphery through unequal exchange. The world-system is that model. The core is a region that draws wealth from other regions. The periphery is a region whose land, labor, and goods are drawn on. And unequal exchange is trade in which one side steadily gains more than it gives.
Two anthropologists carried this thinking into the discipline's own cases. Wolf's Europe and the People Without History, from 1982, argued that the peoples anthropologists studied were never outside history. Mintz's Sweetness and Power, from 1985, traced how sugar linked plantation labor to European diets.
Now read the coffee through the model. The growing region sits in the periphery: its land and labor supply the beans. The roasting country sits in the core: it turns beans into a branded product. If most of the price stays with the roaster and the café, the exchange is unequal in the model's sense. And here's the limit. The model sorts a route into roles. It doesn't describe any real country, and real places can mix roles.
Pause and try this. Week 6 said reciprocity is exchange between social equals. Is unequal exchange a kind of reciprocity?
Look at who stands as an equal.
Here's the answer. No. Unequal exchange links parties who don't stand as equals, with one side steadily gaining more, so it's the opposite of reciprocity between equals.
4. Migration, ties, and money sent home
Picture a family group chat that spans three countries, in another illustrative scene. A grandmother posts a photo of her garden. Two cousins reply from a second country. A teenager answers from a third, switching between two languages in one message. Then someone asks whether this month's money has arrived.
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 304,000,000 international migrants in 2024. That was 3.7 percent of the world's population. It was nearly double the estimated count for 1990, which was 154, counted in millions. Here's how the share moved. It was 2.9 percent in 1990 and 3.7 percent in 2024, a change of 0.8 percentage points. A share is a percentage, and the gap between two shares is in percentage points.
Migrants rarely cut their ties. 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 published an estimate of how much went to low- and middle-income countries in 2024. The course teaches that estimate in words and never tests it.
Week 6's tools help here. Money sent to a parent with no count kept looks like generalized reciprocity. Money cousins expect back looks more like balanced reciprocity. But any real family's meaning is a question for fieldwork, not a model. And the teenager switching languages is a small, illustrative case of acculturation, the cultural change that follows sustained contact between groups. One more thing: this course argues no current immigration policy.
Pause and try this. The migrant share went from 2.9 percent to 3.7 percent. Should you call that a rise of 0.8 percent?
Think about what kind of number a gap between two shares is.
Here's the answer. No. It's a rise of 0.8 percentage points, because it's the difference between two percentages.
5. Heritage and repatriation
Think about a family recipe card, worn soft, written out by a grandparent. Now picture a stranger borrowing it, never returning it, and putting it in a glass case in another city. The card still exists. But the family has lost something that was theirs to keep and use.
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 way of doing things. UNESCO's Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was adopted in Paris in 2003. Intangible cultural heritage covers practices, expressions, knowledge, and skills that communities recognize as their heritage, such as oral traditions, performing arts, rituals, and traditional craftsmanship.
Repatriation is the return of human remains and cultural objects to the communities they came from. In the United States, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was signed in 1990. It requires federal agencies and federally funded institutions to return Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. So for covered institutions, repatriation isn't goodwill. It's the law.
The potlatch story has a second chapter here. 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. The first opened 58 years after the seizure. Put the gradable years on one line: the ban dropped in 1951, the American law in 1990, and the UNESCO convention in 2003. That's 39 years, then 13 more, 52 in all. They're separate cases, though, and none caused the next.
Pause and try this. A federally funded museum calls returning a requested funerary object "a gesture of goodwill". What's the wrong turn?
Ask what the 1990 law requires.
Here's the answer. It treats repatriation as optional; under that law, a covered institution is required to return it.
6. Anthropology at work, and why the world isn't one culture
Picture a museum that plans to rewrite the labels in one gallery, in an illustrative case. The staff invite members of the community whose objects are on display. Together they choose the words, the stories, and which objects stay off display entirely.
That's anthropology outside the classroom. You met applied anthropology in Week 1: it uses anthropology's methods to address practical problems. Public anthropology is anthropological work brought to wide audiences and public debates. The label project is both. It's also Week 3's emic and etic at work: the old labels gave an outsider's account, and the new ones add the insiders' terms.
Now a common fear. 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. Picture a neighborhood restaurant, in one last illustrative case, that serves a dish from far away. The cooks top it with the herbs their own families grew up with. The dish traveled, but the meal belongs to the neighborhood.
Pause and try this. Someone says applied work in a museum isn't "real" anthropology. What would you say?
Think about what the label project used.
Here's the answer. It uses the discipline's own methods, ethics, and comparisons, so it's real anthropology done outside a field site.
7. The course synthesis: one market, every lens
Walk back into the running fieldwork site one last time: the illustrative, unnamed weekly farmers' market of 24 stalls. In Week 1 you looked at it as a first-time visitor. Now you can read it the way an anthropologist would. A course synthesis is a reading of one fieldwork site through every concept the course has taught, set side by side.
Here are the ten lenses, in order. The 10 field notes from Visit 1, which kept observation apart from interpretation. The 4 emic terms: "regulars", "seconds", "the swap", and "the bell". The family-run stall's farm meeting buyers who live by wages. The coded tally of 50 exchanges, with market exchange at 66 percent and reciprocity of all kinds at 26 percent. The manager's authority and the vendors' association. The stall's three-generation family, with one couple on the farm and one in town. Its jobs, divided by gender and by generation. The 8:00 a.m. bell, a small calendrical ritual. The first-aid kit beside the ginger tea. And two vendors who send money to relatives in another country every month.
Notice what the tally missed. 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.
Pause and try this. The tally counted 50 exchanges. Does it include the two vendors' monthly transfers?
Think about when and where the tally was made.
Here's the answer. No. The transfers happen outside the two-hour visit, so the tally holds only the local part of the vendors' exchanges.
Here's the reading in plain words. The running site is a small local way of life and a knot in a global web at once. Its 24 stalls run on local rules, kin ties, and rituals, while two of its vendors send money across a border every month.
Closing
Let me pull it together. Globalization is an old, intensifying flow, and much of its history is colonial. Colonialism is one society's rule over another's land, labor, and resources, and its harms are documented, as Canada's potlatch ban shows. The world-system is a model of core and periphery joined by unequal exchange.
About 304,000,000 people were international migrants in 2024, and the ties they keep, from calls to remittances, cross borders every day. Heritage belongs to the communities who hold it, and for covered institutions in the United States, repatriation is law. Applied and public anthropology put the discipline to work, and people remake what globalization brings. And the market, read through every lens, is one small place with many long ties.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Then the discussion, the assignment, and the Ethnography Workshop give you room to try the synthesis yourself. You can now observe a practice fairly, read it in its own terms and in the discipline's terms, and compare it with documented cases elsewhere.
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