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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. He or she might choose to change the orientation of the bill in order to better assimilate within his or /her 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 humans, human behavior and societies in the past and present. Social anthropology studies patterns of behaviour and cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans. Visual anthropology, which is usually considered to be a part of social anthropology, can mean both ethnographic film as well as the study of "visuals", including art, visual images, cinema etc. Oxford Bibliographies describes visual anthropology as "the anthropological study of the visual and the visual study of the anthropological".
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 umbrella term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions.
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. In contrast, the Marxian school known as "political economy" focuses on production.
The decorative arts are arts or crafts whose object is the design and manufacture of objects that are both beautiful and functional. It includes interior design, but not usually architecture. The decorative arts are often categorized in distinction to the "fine arts", namely painting, drawing, photography, and large-scale sculpture, which generally produce objects solely for their aesthetic quality and capacity to stimulate the intellect.
Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or cultural evolution are theories of cultural and social evolution that describe how cultures and societies change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend to increase the complexity of a society or culture, sociocultural evolution also considers process that can lead to decreases in complexity (degeneration) or that can produce variation or proliferation without any seemingly significant changes in complexity (cladogenesis). Sociocultural evolution is "the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure which is qualitatively different from the ancestral form".
History of anthropology in this article refers primarily to the 18th- and 19th-century precursors of modern anthropology. The term anthropology itself, innovated as a New Latin scientific word during the Renaissance, has always meant "the study of man". The topics to be included and the terminology have varied historically. At present they are more elaborate than they were during the development of anthropology. For a presentation of modern social and cultural anthropology as they have developed in Britain, France, and North America since approximately 1900, see the relevant sections under Anthropology.
In anthropology, deterritorialization is the separation of social, cultural and political practices from a location.
Reterritorialization is the restructuring of a place or territory that has experienced deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is a term created by Deleuze and Guattari in their philosophical project Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972–1980). They distinguished that relative deterritorialization is always accompanied by reterritorialization. It is the design of the new power. For example, when the Spanish conquered the Aztecs, and after the Spanish deterritorialized by eliminating the symbols of the Aztecs' beliefs and rituals, the Spanish then reterritorialized by putting up their own beliefs and rituals. This form of propaganda established their takeover of the land. Propaganda is an attempt to reterritorialize by influencing people's ideas through information distributed on a large scale. For example, during World War I, the U.S. put up posters everywhere to encourage young men to join the military and fight.
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 which specializes in "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 Argentine-born academic and anthropologist known for his theorization of the concept of "hybridity."
Coolness is an aesthetic of attitude, behavior, comportment, appearance and style which is generally admired. Because of the varied and changing connotations of cool, as well as its subjective nature, the word has no single meaning. It has associations of composure and self-control and often is used as an expression of admiration or approval. Although commonly regarded as slang, it is widely used among disparate social groups and has endured in usage for generations.
Culture is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior 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 jamming is a protest used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It attempts to "expose the methods of domination" of a mass society to foster progressive change.
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 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 does so much planned development fail?
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 Commonwealth 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.
The archaeology of trade and exchange is a sub-discipline of archaeology that identifies how material goods and ideas moved across human populations. The terms “trade” and “exchange” have slightly different connotations: trade focuses on the long-distance circulation of material goods; exchange considers the transfer of persons and ideas.