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Globalization means a profound set of changes, economic, social, cultural, and political, transforming the experience of time and space, nationhood, and identities. The feeling or sense of being part of a global reality, even if this is experienced in different ways in different places, is of profound significance. In the book, Victims of Progress John Bodley analyzes, discusses, and evaluates the impact of globalization on the indigenous population and changes caused by global transformations and nation-states. The author discusses such problems as the impact of totalitarian culture, the commercial explosion, global tourism, and militarization of the world.
The main problems caused by economic globalization are forced labor and global tourism. The great expansion beginning in the late fifteenth century fundamentally reshaped the world. It has involved the massive shifting of products and people around the globe, the transformation of ancient societies and civilizations, and the setting up of new settler societies in the Americas, Southern Africa, and Australasia. On the one hand, economic globalization creates progressive consumers educating people about new products and technologies, brings new forms of agriculture and land use, improves the quality of life, and educates people about their rights and freedoms. On the other hand, global tourism causes degradation of the environment and depletes ecosystems. For instance, exploitation of lands causes deforestation of Rondonia (Bodley 143), depopulation of African countries (Bodley 44), resource depletion (Bodley 141). Global tourism brings additional sources of income to indigenous populations but ruins the natural beauty of the lands, ruins ecosystems, and brings new disease and alien cultural traditions to autonomous societies. In societies like South Africa and America (hybrids of the plantation and mixed settlement types), the Latin American countries (mixed settlement), the sugar islands of the West Indies (plantation), and Australia (pure settlement), the attempt was to set up European style societies in new lands, under the assumption that this represented the spread of civilization (Bodley 77).
Globalization brings vastly different peoples and their cultures together and results in ongoing interactions between those peoples and cultures. Today, more and more nation-states are confronting the dilemmas of multiculturalism, ethnic diversity, and cosmopolitan identity. Population flows have been a major contributing factor, although the relative impact has been contested, with some people arguing that the flows were greater during the nineteenth century. In this case, Bodley states that “indigenous people are unique in the contemporary world because they share a small-scale way of life that is organizationally and technologically less complex than that of urban-based societies” (Bodley 2). Large-scale cultures have changed the world. Bodley underlines that this impact is not always a negative one allowing a cultural exchange of values and traditions. Thus, the indigenous peoples are, in a sense, almost completely peripheral to the large-scale cultures. Bodley uses such a concept as sapienization to describe the relations and environment of small-scale cultures. He states that: “small-scale cultures are concerned with … the biological production and maintenance of human beings and with cultural production” (Bodley 4). Most indigenous people sustained and (sustain themselves) by hunting and gathering activities, although practices and lifestyles, and degrees of mobility varied considerably in different geographical areas, from the coast to the inland deserts. It is now well-known that indigenous peoples worked extensively to transform the environment to suit their needs, rather than simply roamed over it.
Bodley discusses that globalization is for indigenous people a largely destructive force, bringing disease, dispossession, dislocation, murder, the decimation of the population, and cultural devastation. In the chapter “We Fights with Spears” Bodley vividly portrays that indigenous people have been unable to resist firearms and ‘innovative’ military devices protecting their lands and populations with primitive spears only. As in other contexts, although the claims of indigenous peoples pose challenges for the settler-nation, the explicit demands are not necessarily, or even typically, for complete separation and the creation of an indigenous state or states, but for forms of autonomy, self-government, and land rights within the already existing nation-states, and for forms of symbolic and economic redress for past and ongoing injustice (Bodley 170-171). While indigenous peoples have made use of intensified globalization to further their political aims, globalization also presents them with threats to their ongoing existence, to their forms of life, identities, and to the things that they hold most dear.
In sum, Bodley comes to the conclusion that globalization reshapes indigenous societies bringing mass culture and new forms of production. It has had both a positive and negative impact on autonomous communities and their cultures. Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Southern Africa, and Australasia have engaged with globalizing processes in order to assert their “traditional” claims. The effective resistance of indigenous peoples since the latter half of the twentieth century has been caused by transnational collaboration. It is possible to say that indigenous populations become helpless victims of progress marked by economic, cultural, and technological expansion. The only possible solution to indigenous populations is to change and adapt to new conditions and new environments.
Works Cited
Bodley, J. Victims of Progress. McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages, 1999.
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