Chinese Society

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Alternative visions of cultural diversity and biodiversity now challenge global attempts to establish a uniform market culture. At the same time recovery and reform from the financial crisis of 1997 have forced radical change in the developing economies towards uniform IMF standards. This course tracks those changes in East Asia and Latin America to provide a window on contested visions of development. Problems of growth versus equity, democracy versus repression, tradition versus modernity takes us to the core experience of bridging the local with the global. A review of political economy, culture, and the lived experience of development alerts us to both the intellectual and human dimensions of this critical human project. Questions of modernity and postmodernity in society and culture, at home and abroad, in Latin America and Asia give direction to the study. Fall. SOCI-167. Globalization and Social Change in Developing Countries (3) Professor Mashayekhi The general purpose of this course is to provide students with a historical, theoretical, and empirical discussion of the globalization process in developing countries ("Third World"). In particular, there will be a focus on the political and cultural dimensions of globalism since World War II. By "globalization" we refer to a significant intensification of economic, political, and cultural linkages between nations and regions of the world, and a corresponding consciousness about this process. Globalization, during the last several decades, has had two contradictory effects on non-Western cultures: homogenization, leading to cultural integration and increased similarities; and differentiation, promoting cultural resistance and the formation of nationalistic/nativistic identities. If pro-democracy movements in many contemporary developing countries represent the former, the cases of national liberation movements, Islamic revivalism, and newer ethnic-nationalism represent the latter. In other words, how people in these societies have come to define their national identities in reference to the "other," i.e., the West, after World War II. While the general concept in this course will be globalization, a range of relevant concepts such as national identity, Third Worldism, dependency, modernization/modernism, democratization and civil society, human rights and feminism will also be discussed.