View
221
Download
0
Category
Preview:
Citation preview
7/27/2019 Consuming Book Review
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/consuming-book-review 1/3
Neha Maan
S133F0013
BOOK REVIEW
Consuming Cultures: Globalization and Local Lives
Author: Jeremy Seabrook
“Globalizaon threatens to exnguish much that is essenal to human survival”.
Cultural commentator Jeremy Seabrook, through this book looks at the threat to
cultural diversity and integrity all around the globe, including in Western societies. Seabrook
had thought deeply and reported sharply on globalised culture and its heavy costs. This wide-
ranging package of essays slips between ground-level enquiries into tourism and trade in
Africa and Asia, childhood memories and political meditations. It isn't about Western guilt-
tripping but respect and responsibility - the virtues that work practises as much as it preaches.
Myths, languages, rituals and local cultures are all expressions of cultural identity.
According to Seabrook, these cultural identities have an economic root: they grew out of a
need to ensure the success of the harvest and to provide security for a community. But what
happens when local cultures collide with the wave of economic globalization? Attaching
moving personal testimonies of cultural loss and resistance, Seabrook embarks upon a wide-
ranging and sensitive exploration of the battleground between local and global.
7/27/2019 Consuming Book Review
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/consuming-book-review 2/3
The book gives us the history, the background and the results of globalization which
defines it as the emergence of a single worldwide economy has declared war on all other
cultures. Globalization in the process affects more than economies and consumes other
cultures. By definition globalization makes all other cultures local. It radically transforms the
lives of millions of people. In the process it destroys their traditions, impoverishes their lives
and destroys dreams and wisdom. Seabrook in this book proficiently describes the lives of
people forced from their land into urban squalor, paralleling the history of his family only
three generations back, he understands and empathizes with globalization‟s flotsam and
jetsam. When he details lives shattered by a force which is far greater than economic he
explains, “Economic globalization violates many deeply held moral and spiritual values.” It
is soul-destroying and witnesses the obscene consuming culture of the minority world that
destroys global resources while it destroys the soul of the consumer. Seabrook has been able
to documents these processes in vivid heart-wrenching stories that form the substance of the
dry statistics.
The hurtling speed of the global market knows no cultural boundaries. Languages,
customs, rituals and myths - the building-blocks of local culture and identity - are swept aside
with the global market‟s promise of security and prosperity. The book made us think: Is this
promise false? Is the survival of pockets of local culture true resistance, or does it mean that
identity has been commoditized to the point that it is reduced to a backdrop of „picturesque‟
colour? Can communities reclaim the value of local cultural identity?
There are few experiences more disruptive and traumatic to human beings than to lose
faith in the values and beliefs by which they have interpreted the world, and which gave them
meaning. In Consuming Cultures, Jeremy Seabrook shows how the global market has spread
consumerism instead of prosperity; a spiralling of demands rather than satisfaction of needs;
an unquiet dependency in place of security; and a relentless competitiveness instead of peace.
The truth is: 'the global march of wealth', is fuelled by its inherent drive for ceaseless
expansion. Premised on the insatiable desires of 'human nature', the unleashing of rampant
7/27/2019 Consuming Book Review
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/consuming-book-review 3/3
consumerism diminishes and marginalizes at a stroke, all other ways of life. The writer
provides many stark examples worldwide, including his own personal testimony of cultural
loss. But as local languages and cultures are swept away by the monoculture of the market,
Seabrook finds that resistance is breaking out among people who are rediscovering the
importance of the local and the value of community. While cultures do die, their animating
principles, rooted in old wisdom, are not so easily banished. They live on, biding their time,
mutating and taking on new shapes.
The book is amazingly powerful in sense that Jeremy Seabrook draws examples of his
childhood village life in England which has been consigned to the dustbin of waste by the
invading culture that is now called Globalisation and is proudly recognised as one of the
achievements of the western world. As the age-old traditions and values cultivated by the
Christian faith are washed away from him as he grows into adulthood. Seabrook has found
parallels in other cultures of the world which are being ruthlessly subjugated to the same
principles and 'market forces' of globalisation.
As his repertoire comes from his own life and he finds this 'drama' being played in
different parts of the world, Seabrook‟s heart aches and he gets personally involved in the
protest on the annihilation of local cultures. The book is very forceful as the forces of
globalisation consume land after land and culture after culture to create market economies.
ABOUT AUTHOR:
Jeremy Seabrook has written more than 30 books (including Travels in the Skin Trade, and
Children of Other Worlds), and has worked as a teacher, social worker, journalist, lecturer
and playwright. He has contributed to many journals, including the New Statesman and the
Ecologist.
Recommended