In Golden Arches East, James L. Watson reports that, as older residents of Hong Kong revel in the quality of Cantonese cuisine, their offspring avidly consume Big Macs, pizza, and Coca‐Cola. Not long ago, travelers on British Rail’s first‐class Pullman service could enjoy dishes from India, the Middle East, China, Greece, and so on, as Allison James reports in a volume on Cross‐Cultural Consumption. From personal experience, we can attest that, in urban areas of the American South, Thai cuisine successfully competes with traditional fare and supermarkets abound with produce from most continents. To be sure, these examples refer to privileged areas of the world. They are not unprecedented, as the earlier European adoption of New World potatoes and sugar demonstrates. Yet they illustrate one way in which globalization affects people concretely, namely, through changes in diet and taste. Such changes express new linkages, new transnational structures, and a new global culture. More and more people can literally get a taste of what it means to be part of world society.
No one experiences globalization in all its complexity, but globalization is significant insofar as it reshapes the daily lives of billions of people. Increasingly, the larger world is present locally. This obviously applies to António Guterres (the UN secretary‐general) or Bill Gates (founding chairman of Microsoft), conscious contributors to globalization, but it is also true for the Thai prostitutes, minions in a global industry, who are now suffering from AIDS. American textile workers sense the global in the local through the impact of intense foreign competition and outsourcing to overseas companies. Soccer fans regard as routine the fact that a large portion of the world’s population directs its attention to the World Cup every four years. Business people traveling internationally witness globalization daily in the media offerings in their hotel rooms. Migrants who call home, send money back, or make return visits bring a bit of that wider world to the villages they left.
These people, and many more, experience globalization. Experiencing globalization, as the examples indicate, does not mean that some abstract, impersonal force overwhelms individuals. People participate and respond in different ways. They can shape, resist, absorb, or try to avoid globalization. They can seek opportunity in it, feel the harm of it, or lament the power of it. For some, globalization is a central reality; for others, it is still on the margins of their lives. In short, there is no one experience of globalization. That, in itself, is an important aspect of the process. The formation of a new world society does not involve all people in the same way, and it does not create the same texture in everyone’s everyday life. But there are some commonalities in the global experience of globalization. To one degree or another, globalization is real to almost everyone. It transforms the prevailing sense of time and space, now globally standardized. It envelops everyone in new institutions. It poses a challenge, in the sense that even marginally affected groups must take a stance toward the world. Globalization raises identity problems for societies and individuals alike.
The selections in this part illuminate the experience of globalization from different vantage points. We begin with a historical perspective in Dutch‐American sociologist Frank J. Lechner’s discussion of early and later “waves of globalization.” Tracing the development of the colonial sugar industry in Jamaica beginning in the 1670s, on the one hand, and the development of capital‐intensive agriculture in North Dakota in the 1870s, on the other, Lechner shows how the early phase brought far‐flung regions of the world into the European economy while the later phase entailed deeper penetration of globalizing forces that both expanded national markets and integrated local farmers into the world economy.
The contemporary experience of globalization involves creative adaptation to global processes, new mixtures of cultural frameworks, and the growth of a variable global consciousness. James L. Watson, an American anthropologist, describes McDonald’s customers in Hong Kong, including children, as critical consumers to whose expectations about food and service the multinational corporation must adapt. Far from imposing a new dietary standard, McDonald’s blended into an already heterogeneous urban landscape. Watson concludes that in places like Hong Kong, the transnational is the local.
Even more “transnational” is the experience of immigrants like the Dominicans studied closely by Peggy Levitt, an American sociologist. Moving from the town of Miraflores in the Dominican Republic to cities like Boston, they keep close ties with their community of origin. While growing new roots, they also do much to improve life in Miraflores, for example through a development committee that sponsors civic projects. By virtue of their many ties across the sea, places like Miraflores are not what they used to be either: Levitt calls them “transnational villages.”
Another form of transnational experience is that of Indian technology workers engaged in “virtual migration,” as Indian‐American scholar Aneesh Aneesh calls it. Many of them live not on Indian time but on American or European time, providing telephone support through the night in Bangalore. Others take care of “back‐end” tasks that must be completed by the time programmers and data analysts in the USA get to work in the morning. Life for these virtual migrants is often disjointed; their everyday routines are out of sync with their own society, though they are compensated by salaries far higher than those of most of their compatriots.
The next selection presents a glimpse of the extremes of wealth and poverty characterizing world society. American journalist and essayist Mike Davis takes us on a tour of Dubai, the largest city in the oil‐rich United Arab Emirates. Dubai has become a global business and shopping mecca packed with spectacular high‐rise buildings and ultra‐luxurious hotels and resorts. However, the lavish lifestyle it encourages is well out of the reach of the host of migrant workers from Asia whose labor is essential to Dubai’s futuristic development. Even in a small city‐state like Dubai, globalization is experienced in very different ways by residents at different ends of the social scale.
“Patients with passports” are the subject of the selection by Sasha Issenberg, an American journalist, from his book on medical tourism. He documents the operations of hospitals and clinics in Thailand, Bulgaria, Japan, Turkey, and elsewhere that have expanded greatly by catering to people in the richer countries of the world, offering high‐quality surgery and treatment at greatly reduced prices. Issenberg’s chapter on dentistry in Hungary depicts a successful medical tourism enterprise driven primarily by an oral surgeon whose most notable patient happened to be Viktor Orbán, the country’s prime minister from 1998 to 2002 who came back to power in 2010 and was re‐elected for another five‐year term in 2018.
In sharp contrast to the lavish wealth of Dubai and the relative affluence of medical tourists, Haiti is a locus of grinding poverty and illness, an enduring “skein of tragedies,” as Paul Farmer, an American anthropologist and physician, puts it. Farmer’s focus is the high prevalence of AIDS and tuberculosis in a country with woefully inadequate health care. He argues that AIDS came to Haiti mainly as a result of American sex tourists visiting the island, and he characterizes the Haitian situation as an instance of “structural violence.” This term is used to capture the death, illness, and stigmatization that result from structural inequalities and marginalizing ideologies that subjugated peoples face in their everyday lives.
In the last selection, American journalist Ethan Watters explores the spread of Western (largely American) conceptions of mental health and illness to a society with a quite different understanding of the human psyche. Before the 1990s, the category of “depression” had no place in Japanese culture. But, as Watters sketches in intriguing detail, vigorous and imaginative “mega‐marketing” methods by global pharmaceutical companies achieved remarkable success in redefining common Japanese states of mind as depression – and in inducing a sizeable proportion of the population to turn to Zoloft, Prozac, and Paxil for help with their newly redefined woes.