Role-Play Debate for course EngC 1015

For my research paper I found this essay for the Ecologist that I thought gave an excellent example of specifically why Globalization is a bad thing and what it does to foreign cultures by exploring the effects it's had on a small region in the Kashmir known as Ladakh. The article also connects globalization explicitly to fundamentalism, terrorism, and violence, just as the "Clash of Civilizations" and "Jihad vs McWorld" articles did. "Experts" can tell you about how many oppurtunities it gives people, with the internet, connection, new potential for wealth, travel, but tell that to a person who has become poor now that they've been swallowed up by the world economy.

The article also addresses an extremely-overlooked and not-emphasised-enough point on Western advertising and how it produces shame for one's culture in these foreign cultures and oneself. I could go on and on about how completely negative a thing advertising is and how it effects people on such a subconcious level, but that might make people uncomfortable because they'd have to change the shirt they're wearing with the big "American Eagle" logo across their chest.

Ze article:
http://content.epnet.com/ContentServer.asp?T=P& P=AN& K=6421880& EbscoContent=dGJyMNHX8kSeqK84zdnyOLCmrk6ep7dSsa64TbGWxWXS& ContentCustomer=dGJyMPGrsEyuqbRJuePfgeyx%2BEu3q64A& D=aph

and a few little bits i thought were applicable and important:

"Development in Ladakh, as elsewhere in the world, meant that external investments were used to build up an energy and transport infrastructure that shifted economic and political life from a multitude of villages into one urban center. Suddenly, villages that had previously provided food, energy, medicine and skills born of generations of local knowledge were threatened with extinction. They were no longer able to compete with the city, where subsidised imported food, petroleum, pharmaceuticals and designer clothes were available for the lucky few. The destruction of the local economy and culture by the global economy also created what can best be described as a cultural inferiority complex. "

"In one of my first years in Ladakh, I was shown around a remote village by a young Ladakhi named Tsewang. Since all the houses I saw seemed especially large and beautiful, I asked Tsewang to show me the houses where the poor lived. He looked perplexed for a moment, then replied: 'We don't have any poor people here.' "

"Within a few years Ladakhis were exposed to television, western movies, advertising and a seasonal flood of foreign tourists. "

"Ladakh's local economy was being swallowed up by the global economy, and its traditional culture displaced by the consumer monoculture.
A new form of competition began to separate the Ladakhis from one another. As the 'cheap' subsidised goods from outside destroyed the local economy, Ladakhis were forced to fight for the scarce jobs of the new money economy. "

"Now Ladakhis were absorbed into a national economy of 800 million, and a global economy of six billion. Their influence and power were reduced almost to zero. The little political power that remained was funnelled through highly centralised institutions and bureaucracies, dominated by the Muslims in Kashmir. "

"The result was artificial scarcity: people who had managed well for centuries on local materials were now, in effect, in fierce competition with everyone else on the planet. "

"In Ladakh and elsewhere in the South, these economic pressures are reinforced by the media and advertising, whose images consistently portray the rich and the beautiful living an exciting and glamorous version of the American Dream. ...Young people in particular are made to feel ashamed of their own culture. The pyschological impact on Ladakh was sudden and stark: eight years after telling me his village had no poor people, I overheard Tsewang saying to some tourists: 'If you could only help us Ladakhis, we're so poor.' This undermining of self-esteem is actually a stated goal of advertisers, who promote their own brands by imparting a sense of shame about local products. A US advertising executive in Beijing admitted that the message being drummed into Third World populations today is: 'Imported equals good, local equals crap.' "

"In Ladakh and around the world, the one-dimensional media stereotypes are invariably based on an urban, Western consumer model: blonde, blue-eyed and clean. If you are a farmer or are dark-skinned, you are made to feel primitive, backward, inferior. Thus, advertisements in Thailand and South America urge people to 'correct' their dark eye color with blue contact lenses: 'Have the color of eyes you wish you were born with!' For the same reason, women in the South use dangerous chemicals to lighten their skin and hair, and some Asian women even have operations to make their eyes look 'Western'. These are profound statements of self-rejection -- of shame at being who you are. "
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Thank you, Globalization, for giving the poor, backwards people of this world so many oppurtunities!