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Customization is the process in which an individual or a group appropriates a product or practice of another culture and makes it their own.
In the introduction to their book The Anthropology of Globalization: a Reader, Inda and Rosaldo examine the dynamics of cultural customization in the face of globalization. They argue that as more people and cultures "are being cast into intense and immediate contact with each other" (2 Inda and Rosaldo), culture begins to lose its geographic associations, and becomes re-attached to another location. The authors refer to this as reterritorialization, the "process of reinscribing culture in new time-space contexts, of relocalizing it in specific cultural environments” (12 Inda and Rosaldo).
Within this argument, they make clear that in being reterritorialized, cultural materials are often changed and customized according to the receiving culture, that “they are interpreted, translated, and appropriated according to local conditions of reception" (16 Inda and Rosaldo). This is important because it challenges the image of the viewer as passive, someone who simply consumes culture without engaging with it. The concept of customization acknowledges the viewer's role in reconstructing cultural objects and practices and forming them to fit their new location. These interpretations are often drastically different from the intentions of the original producer. Even as customization recycles culture, it also allows for its re-creation.
When examining customization within consumerism, the consumer as an individual is seen[ by whom? ] as self-consciously manipulating the symbolic meanings of given products. According to Campbell in his piece “The Craft Consumer”, this is done by selecting goods with specific intentions in mind to alter them. Campbell argues that consumers do this in an attempt to create or maintain their lifestyle or to construct their identity. Instead of accepting a foreign object for what it is, the foreign object is incorporated and changed to fit one's lifestyle and choices.
Take for example, the baseball cap. The producer of the baseball cap designed it to be worn with the bill facing forward, while the ‘customizer’ might have a different intended purpose. The 'customizer' might choose to change the orientation of the bill to meet a particular cultural aesthetic. Within this example, one sees that even products can be manipulated to serve individuals within the culture that the product is sold. Campbell argues that this is in an attempt to reinforce belonging within their culture.
In the face of globalization, cultural practices are increasingly becoming more accessible and more people are being exposed to them. In this multicultural space, customization is helpful in maintaining one's culture from afar. In his piece the “German Dual System”, Theodor Lewis argues that during this process a ‘decommodification’ occurs, where a commodity changes from being the “norm” to holding a personal value, often cultural.
Lewis provides an example of customization. He examines the adaptation of human resource development models within the educational sector of less developed countries, documenting the various ways in which these countries adapt these models, whether they be imposed or taken on voluntarily. The goal behind their implementation is to stimulate “new growth and competitiveness in newly industrialized countries” (469 Lewis). Within his paper, he notes that the following methods of cultural exchange are used:
However, within the review, customization is found to be most effective. Lewis argues that customization allows each country to take their own needs into account while allowing for cultural flows. This is important because cultural flows are often inevitable. Instead of working against them, customization accommodates and incorporates them. Reporter Jeong explains within the article that due to the borrowing of this system, South Korea was able to modernize rapidly. Taking a customization approach is a “quick study of the experiences of older industrialized countries (468 Lewis).
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. The term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions.
A tradition is a system of beliefs or behaviors passed down within a group of people or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes, but the idea has also been applied to social norms and behaviors such as greetings etc. Traditions can persist and evolve for thousands of years— the word tradition itself derives from the Latin word tradere literally meaning to transmit, to hand over, to give for safekeeping. While it is reportedly assumed that traditions have an ancient history, many traditions have been invented on purpose, whether it be political or cultural, over short periods of time. Various academic disciplines also use the word in a variety of ways.
The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a category of human social group. The predominant worldwide usage of the term in English is in the discipline of anthropology. Its definition is contested, in part due to conflicting theoretical understandings of social and kinship structures, and also reflecting the problematic application of this concept to extremely diverse human societies. The concept is often contrasted by anthropologists with other social and kinship groups, being hierarchically larger than a lineage or clan, but smaller than a chiefdom, ethnicity, nation or state. These terms are similarly disputed. In some cases tribes have legal recognition and some degree of political autonomy from national or federal government, but this legalistic usage of the term may conflict with anthropological definitions.
A subculture is a group of people within a cultural society that differentiates itself from the conservative and standard values to which it belongs, often maintaining some of its founding principles. Subcultures develop their own norms and values regarding cultural, political, and sexual matters. Subcultures are part of society while keeping their specific characteristics intact. Examples of subcultures include BDSM, hippies, hipsters, goths, steampunks, bikers, punks, skinheads, gopnik, hip-hoppers, metalheads, cosplayers, otaku, otherkin, furries, hackers and more. The concept of subcultures was developed in sociology and cultural studies. Subcultures differ from countercultures.
Consumerism is a social and economic order in which the aspirations of many individuals include the acquisition of goods and services beyond those necessary for survival or traditional displays of status. It emerged in Western Europe before the Industrial Revolution and became widespread around 1900. In economics, consumerism refers to policies that emphasize consumption. It is the consideration that the free choice of consumers should strongly orient the choice by manufacturers of what is produced and how, and therefore orient the economic organization of a society. Consumerism has been criticized by both individuals who choose other ways of participating in the economy and environmentalists concerned about its impact on the planet. Experts often assert that consumerism has physical limits, such as growth imperative and overconsumption, which have larger impacts on the environment. This includes direct effects like overexploitation of natural resources or large amounts of waste from disposable goods and significant effects like climate change. Similarly, some research and criticism focuses on the sociological effects of consumerism, such as reinforcement of class barriers and creation of inequalities.
Medical anthropology studies "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation". It views humans from multidimensional and ecological perspectives. It is one of the most highly developed areas of anthropology and applied anthropology, and is a subfield of social and cultural anthropology that examines the ways in which culture and society are organized around or influenced by issues of health, health care and related issues.
Economic anthropology is a field that attempts to explain human economic behavior in its widest historic, geographic and cultural scope. It is an amalgamation of economics and anthropology. It is practiced by anthropologists and has a complex relationship with the discipline of economics, of which it is highly critical. Its origins as a sub-field of anthropology began with work by the Polish founder of anthropology Bronislaw Malinowski and the French Marcel Mauss on the nature of reciprocity as an alternative to market exchange. For the most part, studies in economic anthropology focus on exchange.
Development anthropology refers to the application of anthropological perspectives to the multidisciplinary branch of development studies. It takes international development and international aid as primary objects. In this branch of anthropology, the term development refers to the social action made by different agents who are trying to modify the economic, technical, political, or/and social life of a given place in the world, especially in impoverished, formerly colonized regions.
Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
Legal anthropology, also known as the anthropology of laws, is a sub-discipline of anthropology that uses an interdisciplinary approach to "the cross-cultural study of social ordering". The questions that Legal Anthropologists seek to answer concern how is law present in cultures? How does it manifest? How may anthropologists contribute to understandings of law?
Néstor García Canclini is an Argentinian academic and anthropologist known for his theorization of the concept of "hybridity."
Culture change is a term used in public policy making that emphasizes the influence of cultural capital on individual and community behavior. It has been sometimes called repositioning of culture, which means the reconstruction of the cultural concept of a society. It places stress on the social and cultural capital determinants of decision making and the manner in which these interact with other factors like the availability of information or the financial incentives facing individuals to drive behavior.
Popular culture is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, artistic output and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a society at a given point in time. Popular culture also encompasses the activities and feelings produced as a result of interaction with these dominant objects. The primary driving forces behind popular culture, especially when speaking of Western popular cultures, are the media, mass appeal, marketing and capitalism; and it is produced by what philosopher Theodor Adorno refers to as the "culture industry".
Culture is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups. Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location.
Hayandose is a cultural category used to express membership and belonging among Zapotec migrants, described by cultural anthropologist Lourdes Gutiérrez-Nájera. Hayandose entails a process of creating ethnically-marked spaces among migrants in an effort to combat feelings of marginalization and displacement in a host country. This concept may be compared to the notion of Native Hubs developed by anthropologist Renya Ramirez to describe how urban Native Americans negotiate a transnational existence.
Cultural globalization refers to the transmission of ideas, meanings and values around the world in such a way as to extend and intensify social relations. This process is marked by the common consumption of cultures that have been diffused by the Internet, popular culture media, and international travel. This has added to processes of commodity exchange and colonization which have a longer history of carrying cultural meaning around the globe. The circulation of cultures enables individuals to partake in extended social relations that cross national and regional borders. The creation and expansion of such social relations is not merely observed on a material level. Cultural globalization involves the formation of shared norms and knowledge with which people associate their individual and collective cultural identities. It brings increasing interconnectedness among different populations and cultures. The idea of cultural globalization emerged in the late 1980s, but was diffused widely by Western academics throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. For some researchers, the idea of cultural globalization is reaction to the claims made by critics of cultural imperialism in the 1970s and 1980s.
The anthropology of development is a term applied to a body of anthropological work which views development from a critical perspective. The kind of issues addressed, and implications for the approach typically adopted can be gleaned from a list questions posed by Gow (1996). These questions involve anthropologists asking why, if a key development goal is to alleviate poverty, is poverty increasing? Why is there such a gap between plans and outcomes? Why are those working in development so willing to disregard history and the lessons it might offer? Why is development so externally driven rather than having an internal basis? In short, why is there such a lack of planned development?
Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology.
Theories of consumption have been a part of the field of sociology since its earliest days, dating back, at least implicitly, to the work of Karl Marx in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Sociologists view consumption as central to everyday life, identity and social order. Many sociologists associate it with social class, identity, group membership, age and stratification as it plays a huge part in modernity. Thorstein Veblen's (1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class is generally seen as the first major theoretical work to take consumption as its primary focus. Despite these early roots, research on consumption began in earnest in the second half of the twentieth century in Europe, especially Great Britain. Interest in the topic among mainstream US sociologists was much slower to develop and it is still not a focal concern of many American sociologists. Efforts are currently underway to form a section in the American Sociological Association devoted to the study of consumption.