Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 204

The main focus of sociology has conventionally been on the industrialized societies, with all other types of society being the province of anthropology. However, this academic division of labour has become less tenable as globalization proceeds. The Global South and Global North have long been interconnected, as the history of colonial expansion and empirebuilding demonstrates. People in the developed world depend on raw materials and manufactured products from developing countries, while the economic advancement of developing countries is enhanced by trading with the developed world. Globalization means the minority and majority ‘worlds’ are increasingly acknowledged as parts of one global human world.

As a result, the cultural map of the world also changes: networks of people span national borders and even continents, providing cultural connections between their birthplaces and adoptive countries (Appadurai 1986). Although there are between 5,000 and 6,000 languages spoken on the planet, around 98 per cent of these are used by just 10 per cent of the global population. A mere dozen languages have come to dominate the global language system, with more than 100 million speakers each: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili. And just one language – English – has become ‘hypercentral’, as first choice for most second-language speakers. It is these ‘bilinguals’ who bind together the whole global language system that exists today (de Swaan 2001).

It is increasingly impossible for any society to exist in isolation from the rest of the human world, and there are few, if any, places left on Earth that are so remote as to escape radio, television, mobile phones, computers, air travel and the masses of tourists they bring. Today, people on every continent use tools made in China and other manufacturing centres, wear T-shirts and shorts manufactured in garment factories in the Dominican Republic or Guatemala, and take medicines manufactured in Germany or Switzerland to combat diseases contracted through contact with ‘outsiders’. Yet we are also able to broadcast our individual stories around the globe via social media and to view cultural products from around the world through satellite television. But does globalization favour the major producers, especially the USA, and thus lead inexorably to a uniform global culture?