Anthropology of Globalization

Course Description

Anthropology of Globalization critically analyzes globalization and the global processes and connections operating in the world today, examining the complex interactions of people, ideas, economic systems, technologies, commodities, media and other forms that encompass globalization in the post-Cold War era. It is offered concurrently with ANG5472, with graduate students assigned additional work.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, ANT is the Anthropology prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 3 semester hours through the Department of Anthropology, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. It is offered at approximately 3 Florida institutions.

⚠ The SCNS title for this number is "Culture and Globalization"; UWF publishes it as "Anthropology of Globalization." The local title places the analytic frame first, which matches the description's emphasis on critical analysis of processes rather than on cultural effects alone. Students transferring credit should carry a syllabus.

Anthropology's contribution to the globalization literature is specific and worth naming: it is the discipline that goes and looks. Economics can measure trade flows and political science can model institutions, but the question of what a global process actually does in a particular place — to a fishing town, a factory floor, a migrant's household budget — requires someone to be there. The recurring finding, and the course's central claim, is that global forces do not arrive uniformly. They are refracted through local structures, and the outcome is neither homogenisation nor resistance but something more specific and more interesting than either.

The "post-Cold War era" framing in the description dates the course's object deliberately. It is a claim that something changed around 1990 — in capital mobility, in communications, in the absence of a bipolar order — and that the change is the thing to be explained. A good version of the course also asks whether that periodisation holds, since long-distance trade, empire, and migration are old, and the argument that globalization is genuinely new is contested.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, prerequisites where they exist, and a description. It does not publish contact hours, a lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course. It does publish a material and supply fee notice on the minority of courses that carry one — and maintains a separate Material & Supply and Equipment Fees section of the catalog — so the absence of a fee notice on this entry is meaningful, while the fee amount is not published here. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is therefore derived. The figure here applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, corroborated inside this prefix by the live ANT2000 at 3 credits and 45 hours. Confirm the meeting schedule with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Define globalization and describe the competing definitions in use.
• Evaluate the claim that globalization is historically novel.
• Describe world-systems and dependency approaches and their contribution.
• Describe neoliberalism as an economic programme and as an object of anthropological study.
• Describe structural adjustment and its documented effects.
• Describe global commodity chains and trace one from production to consumption.
• Describe global labour regimes, export processing, and informal work.
• Describe migration systems, remittances, and transnational households.
• Describe care chains and the globalisation of domestic and care labour.
• Describe media flows and their uneven directions.
• Analyse cultural homogenisation, hybridity, and localisation claims against evidence.
• Describe how consumption practices localise global commodities.
• Describe deterritorialisation and the anthropology of place under global conditions.
• Describe global governance institutions and their reach and limits.
• Describe anti-globalization and alter-globalization movements.
• Describe the global circulation of disease and the response systems built for it.
• Apply multi-sited ethnographic method to a global process.
• Write an ethnographically grounded analysis of a global connection.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe global environmental change and its uneven distribution of harm.
• Describe tourism as a global industry and its local effects.
• Describe digital platforms, gig work, and algorithmic management.
• Describe global religious movements and their circulation.
• Describe financialisation and its ethnographic study.
• Describe supply chain disruption and resilience.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Defining globalization; the novelty debate
• World systems and dependency theory
• Neoliberalism as programme and as object of study
• Structural adjustment and its effects
• Global commodity chains
• Global labour regimes and export processing
• Informal economies
• Migration, remittances, transnational households
• Global care chains
• Media flows and their unevenness
• Homogenisation, hybridity, localisation
• Consumption and the localisation of commodities
• Deterritorialisation and the anthropology of place
• Global governance: IMF, World Bank, WTO
• Anti- and alter-globalization movements
• Global disease circulation and response
• Multi-sited ethnography as method

Optional Topics

• Global environmental change and climate justice
• Tourism as a global industry
• Digital platforms and gig labour
• Global religious movements
• Financialisation
• Supply chains and disruption

Resources & Tools

• Full ethnographies of globalised sites — factories, migrant corridors, call centres, markets, plantations. The specificity is the point; a course taught only from theory misses what anthropology adds.
• Society for Economic Anthropology and the Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology (AAA sections) — free resources.
• World Bank Open Data (data.worldbank.org) — free; trade, migration, and remittance data at country level.
• UNCTAD and ILO statistics — free; investment flows and labour conditions.
• Observatory of Economic Complexity (oec.world) — free; visualised trade flows, and a fast way to build a commodity chain assignment.
• KOF Globalisation Index — free; useful and worth criticising, since what an index counts as globalization is itself a course question.
• Migration Policy Institute (migrationpolicy.org) — free; includes state-level United States data.
• Florida material — PortMiami, Port Everglades, and JAXPORT publish trade statistics; Florida's agricultural labour, cruise industry, and tourism sector are globalised systems available for local fieldwork.
• UWF John C. Pace Library — database access and interlibrary loan.

Career Pathways

• International business, trade, and market entry roles — Florida's ports and its position in Latin American trade make this a real regional sector rather than an abstract one.
• Supply chain and sourcing analysis — SOC 13-1081; ethical sourcing and supply chain due diligence are compliance obligations now, and they require exactly this analysis.
• International development and NGO programme work.
• Migration and refugee services — policy, resettlement, and legal support.
• User and market research for international products — SOC 13-1161; localisation work is applied anthropology under another name.
• Policy analysis — trade, labour, and immigration policy roles at state and federal level.
• Global health programme management — disease circulation and health system capacity are course topics.
• Tourism and hospitality management — SOC 11-9081; one of Florida's largest employment sectors, and the anthropology of tourism speaks directly to it.
• Journalism and documentary work covering international affairs.
• Anthropologists and archaeologists — SOC 19-3091; requires graduate study.

Special Information

⚠ Offered concurrently with the graduate ANG5472

• UWF states that this course is taught alongside ANG5472, with graduate students assigned additional work. This is routine at UWF and appears throughout the ANT prefix.
• The practical effect on an undergraduate is a seminar with graduate students in the room, and reading selected to work at both levels. The discussion runs at a higher level than a pure undergraduate section, which most students find worthwhile and some find steep.
• The undergraduate requirements are lower than the graduate ones by design — the differential is in the additional work assigned to graduate students, not in the shared material.
• For a student considering graduate study this is a useful preview, and the instructor sees the student working next to the standard they would be held to.

⚠⚠ Neither homogenisation nor resistance — and the course exists to break both habits

• The homogenisation thesis — that global culture is converging on a single commercial model — is the intuition most students arrive with, and the ethnographic record does not support it.
• ⚠ Global commodities are localised in use. The same product carries different meanings, occupies different social positions, and is consumed differently in different places — and the anthropological literature on this is large and specific.
• ⚠⚠ The opposite error is romanticising the local as a site of pure resistance. Local actors are not simply defending tradition; they participate, adapt, profit, and are harmed, often simultaneously.
• Flows are uneven and directional. Capital, media, and people move, but not symmetrically, and the asymmetries are the analysis. Who can move freely and who cannot is a structural question with a legible answer.
• Connection is not the same as integration. Places can be deeply connected to global processes and structurally excluded from their benefits at the same time.

⚠ Multi-sited ethnography is the method, and it has real costs

• A global process cannot be studied from one village, which is why the field developed multi-sited work — following a commodity, a person, a story, or a conflict across the places it touches.
• ⚠ The trade-off is depth. Classic single-site fieldwork buys the kind of understanding that comes from a year in one place, and a multi-sited project spends that budget across several. The literature is candid that this is a loss, not a free upgrade.
• Access is uneven across sites. Studying a factory floor and studying the corporate office that governs it require different permissions, and the powerful end of a chain is systematically harder to research, which biases the resulting picture.
• Student projects should scope accordingly. A well-executed two-site project beats an unfocused five-site one.

⚠ Analytic honesty about winners and losers

• Aggregate gains and distributional harms are both real, and an account that reports only one is incomplete. Global poverty rates fell substantially over the period this course studies; within-country inequality rose in many places over the same period.
• ⚠⚠ "Globalization" names a bundle, not a single thing. Trade liberalisation, capital mobility, migration policy, and communications technology have different effects and different beneficiaries, and arguments that treat them as one package generate confusion in both directions.
• Watch for the passive voice. Global processes are made by identifiable actors making decisions, and writing that says "globalization caused" without naming anyone has stopped analysing.
• Students may hold strong political commitments about this material. The course standard is evidence, and the ethnographic record frequently complicates positions on every side.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Seminar discussion with substantial reading; assessment is normally a research paper, often built around tracing a commodity or a migration corridor.
• A 4000-level course with no published prerequisite at UWF; ANT2000 is the practical preparation, and economic or political anthropology helps.
• Taught with graduate students in the room; expect the discussion level to reflect that.
• UWF publishes no contact hours, lecture and laboratory split, terms of offering, or fees for this or any course. Confirm the offering pattern with the department.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

ANT4473 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida, offered concurrently with the graduate ANG5472. Because the SCNS title ("Culture and Globalization") and the local title differ, students transferring credit should carry a syllabus.