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The Problematic Nature of Culture (October 10, 2019) In Susan Wright’s article “The politicization of ‘culture’” (1998), she argues that t the prominence (or distribution) of culture in the 1990’s as itself a cultural phenomenon (7). She does so by dividing her argument into two phases: firstly, to briefly discuss and differentiate the so called ‘old’ and ‘new’ anthropological approaches to culture; and secondly, to use these approaches in examining the resulting interaction and effects undertaken by decision-makers (such as politicians, the media, the academia, etc.) to use culture in three areas: namely, in the case of culture as a means to promote nationalism; culture, through an anthropological lens and method to create new forms of organizations and organization cultures; and lastly, concerning international developments regarding culture as it (at around the time of her writing) was vastly entering the International discourse as a result of the UNESCO report “Our ...

In his 1993 article, “The Birth of Godzilla: Nuclear Fear and the Ideology of Japan as Victim”, Morris Low looks into the ideology associated with the atomic bomb and focuses on the Godzilla monster movies of the 1950s and their meaning for Japanese and Americans. His discussions can focuses on the following themes, 'fear of the nuclear and involvement of science’; 'monster mania' (particularly in cinema); 'birth of Godzilla' (social climate and involvement of science and technology); ‘Japan and USA’s perception of monster movies, particularly of Godzilla, which includes narrative editing’; ‘transformation of Godzilla into a good monster’; and ‘Godzilla as either symbol or allegory of Japanese society.’ In doing so, Low gives a detailed analysis of the various factors that brought upon, not only the popularity of Godzilla in Japan and abroad, but also of the possible social commentaries that these movies would actually represent – which is to reflect the Japanese pe...

Jame Watson’s 1997 article “Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia" examines the image of McDonald’s in the minds of ordinary Chinese people, particularly on how it fit into the Chinese market, as well as the ways in which Beijing consumers have appropriated McDonald’s for their own use. Through his research, Watson portrays how McDonald’s is seen as the symbol of America, however it needed to cater to local taste. As such, the success of McDonald’s in China is not so much because of its Americanized cultural taste that was imported, rather, that it had to be repackaged into the Chinese culture through appropriation and localization while retaining its Americanized food service culture and corporate philosophy. As such, the attraction was not so much about the food but the atmosphere and the fulfilling experience which brought about new behaviors such as good manners, soft spoken public, good hygiene and cleanliness. Overall, this article is helpful to the general reading pub...

In the 1995 article, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571” by Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, they claim that global trade emerged when all important populated continents began to exchange products continuously – both with each other directly and indirectly via other continents– and in values sufficient to generate crucial impacts on all the trading partners. For this purpose, they situate Manila as a central point of global trading when Spaniards founded the city’s trading ports in 1571. They continued their argument by explaining how the new opening of a trading route has allowed the movement of silver to cross continents (from the Americas, Europe, and Asia) and how it eventually accumulated in China. What I would like to criticize in this article is its glorifying tone of how Spain managed to create a global trading route and its omission of already established tradings routes within the region. For example, Manila was not necessarily discovered by the S...

In Khodadad Rezakhani’s article, “The Road That Never Was: The Silk Road and Trans-Eurasian Exchange” (2010), he argues that while the regional studies on the Silk Road has attracted many scholarships, the concept of the Silk Road as a whole tends to ignore realities such as geography and ecology, as well as political units, facts that become lost among the more potent romantic notions. He continues by saying that what is amazing about the Silk Road is its pervasive influence and the continuous use of its manufactured boundaries and cultural markers in defining modern geographical and ethnopoliticao concepts, although there is less scholarship that tackles about those that reside along the route of the Silk Road. Furthermore, the Silk Road has become a grand narrative that serves mostly to obscure important details, to which Rezakhani suggests is counter-productive and has no basis in historical reality or records, thus a need to rethink the artificial and nostalgic concept of the Silk...

In Tonio Andrade’s 2012 article, “Koxinga’s Conquest of Taiwan in Global History: Reflections on the Occasion of the 350th Anniversary”, one important argument to be made was quoted from Timothy Brook, 'The 17th century was a time of unprecedented intercultural communication: more people were in motion over longer distances and sojourning away from home for longer periods of time than at any other time in human history.’ This was an ‘Age of Partnership’ as Europeans sailed through Asia with Asian guides, and Asia, in turn, exchanged knowledge and technology with Europeans. This contact and movement between various people was the norm of this era. To this idea, Andrade establishes how nationalist views of Koxinga fail to realize that Koxinga was an embodiment of the fascinating globalizing world of the seventeenth century and that he won the war primarily because he was better at listening to people from the other side than were the Dutch. He supports this argument by giving a deta...

In Kären Wigen’s “Cartographies of Connection: Ocean Maps as Metaphors for Inter-Area History” (2005), she contests that each of the four ocean schemes (national seas, maritime arcs, bounded basins, and a single global ocean – as experimented by previous Western cartographers) constitutes a useful metaphor for a specific paradigm in the emerging field of inter-area history, specifically as part of the inter-area studies must be a critical analysis of location from many different perspectives. She does this by discussing in detail about National Seas as means of depicting transnational entanglements framed in national terms, thus a useful metaphor for diplomatic and imperial history; Ocean Arcs as means to mark pathways of interactions, thus metaphorical to the study of transnational networks and diaspora; Ocean Basins as being concretely defined as a bounded body of water that extends right up to the shoreline, thus a metaphor for the study of contact zones, frontiers, and borderlands...