Globalization or Colonization?

As the world continues to become more connected through technology, increased travel, and immigration, we walk a fine line between what is “ours” and “theirs.” Don’t get me wrong, I believe there is a lot of merit in sharing culture, and enormous good has come from it such as the Peace Corp or Doctors Without Borders. However, there has also been a lot of bad (cough cough Spanish Influenza). My worry, though, is that we have not learned enough from the past to move forward so heavily with globalization. History has shown us entire cultures and groups of people being displaced and American/Europeanized, and they continue to live in turmoil today. Native Americans, Australian Aboriginals, and Africans have all suffered at the hands of bigger, stronger groups of people. I would argue that globalization is really just a nicer word for colonization. Certainly we’re no longer stealing people’s lands, but in a way we are colonizing people’s minds and cultures.

This form of new wave colonization manifests in new ways, but it’s definitely still fundamentally the same. One way is taking elements of cultures that we can “get behind.” We see this in Tupper’s piece on Ayahuasca use. Even though it may threaten the meaning and value of Ayahuasca use, we take on the practice under the guise of “sharing.” Historically, colonizers traveled looking for things they could accept and use like spices from India and sugar cane from Southeast Asia. However, this doesn’t mean the colonizer accepts everything.

This is where the colonization of the mind comes in. Instead of using force like they did in the history books to get people to look, think, act, and speak like Europeans, they use their scientific and media influence. The United States uses their affinity for science to influence the rest of the world. Because medicalization is based in objective science, it must be the only way. Take Watters’ piece on the Americanization of Mental illness, for example. Watter’s explains how historically, nations and cultures have their own repertoire of symptoms that they use to understand and shape illness experiences. This is very similar to Inuit cultures having 16 words for “snow” and one word for the color green. This created different understandings of experiences. This article shows us that, with globalization, definitions and experiences of mental illness are defined by different terms, depending on the influence being imposed. But let’s not forget where the influence is coming from-The West. It is not a coincidence that the beliefs that are being more widely spread are those of the nations with power. There is a reason why we are not switching to Ayurvedic beliefs of illness, because India is not a world power like the United States. In this way, we are not colonizing the land, but we are colonizing the mind.

Lastly, the colonization manifests in what we force onto others. The last example of changing understanding is more subtle, and there may not be a clear enforcer of knowledge, but there is also a more intense “sharing” of elements of U.S. culture that benefit Americans. This is what we see in Big Food companies’ moving in to influence other nations’ eating habits. Clearly, this new orientation towards overprocessed foods has not been beneficial for Brazilians, as Monteiro shows, but the important part is that the U.S. benefits from Brazil’s consumption of these foods. World powers like the U.S. are only willing to share what benefits them. We don’t see the U.S. forcing things like Medicare, human rights, or welfare, because this would be too expensive for too little gain.

With the new wave colonization, the only things that are shared are things that benefit those in power. As we have seen, these are things like getting the world to think like the West as we see with conceptions of mental illness, forcing our capitalism and junk food on Brazil, or taking sacred, historical practices like drinking Ayahuasca. And, like colonization, there are a multitude of possible disasters that can take place. Again, we are forcing our way into other cultures thinking we are doing good by sharing “good,” but instead we are blindly imposing ourselves on other cultures. Just like Christians thought they were saving the “savages” during with the Crusades, we think we are helping the Chinese get rid of mental stigma, when really we are just making things worse. It is time we start thinking critically about how we are affecting the cultures we are trying to help. This issue will become more and more urgent as we continue to borrow from other cultures and they continue to “borrow” (more just accept than willingly borrow) from us.