Consuming Book Review

7/27/2019 Consuming Book Review

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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.



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



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.

Documents

Consuming Book Review