Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization

Introduction to Part III

Introduction to Part III A word with an impersonal and clumsy sound, “globalization ,” has often been invoked as a symbol of contemporary social change and a harbinger of a bleak future. As the following essays try to suggest, however, historians have been familiar with this phenomenon, if not with the word itself, for some time. The United States, one could argue, resulted from an earlier incarnation of the thrust beyond familiar boundaries as it occupied a new world and created an unfamiliar hybrid society with global resonances. But, globalization as it is understood today usually refers to changes that have taken place since World War II and have accelerated in the 1990s, as worldwide communications, free markets, and the massive migrations of peoples are remaking personal identities and cultural boundaries. In this section, I try to use America’s peculiar history as a means to better understand globalization today and specifically to evaluate the experiences of children in that world. This is especially the case in the first of these essays, Chapter 7, originally written for a conference on globalization in L – ódź, Poland, in November 2001 and subsequently published in the Journal of Social History. In this, my first attempt to use the concept, I try to put what I knew about American experience to use in order to suggest what might be happening to children elsewhere when the conditions begin to approximate those in the United States in the past. I am proposing that American experience can even provide us with a way to anticipate changes elsewhere in the world today. To do this, I attempt to define the elements (such as work, consumption, schooling, and gender) that will likely be affected as the pressures of economic change, media saturation, and the exposure to diverse cultures spread. In this first foray in thinking about globalization and children, I assumed that the United States was both a force for globalization and a model of how it operated. By the time I wrote the essay published here as Chapter 8, which looks at the effect of contemporary migrations on children, my sense of globalization had become far more dynamic. I now considered how the United 199 States as a participant in contemporary globalization was itself being redefined through the many pressures that the global world was creating. In this essay, I ask about the future of the United States and the different possibilities that the current new migration was creating. The United States is only one of the many societies in which migration is re-creating social life and social relations. The United States in this essay is no longer just a product of an earlier globalization and producer of the capital remaking the world today, but itself caught up in its strong currents. At the same time, this dynamic experience still needs to be understood within the historical context of previous American experience with many of these factors and issues. By looking at American society in this wider context, I began to reflect on the nature of childhood in a global future. This forced me to think about our commitments to a certain kind of childhood, how potentially fragile those commitments really are, and to assess their vulnerability to economic pressures generally. The question of our commitments to children, how they came about, and their future in a new global world underlies the last of the essays in this section, Chapter 9. The paper published here is a revised version of an earlier essay written for a conference on children and youth in globalization organized at the School of American Research in Sante Fe, New Mexico , in April 2004. It was my goal to provide a framework for anthropologists and other social scientists working in this area. I am grateful to the SAR Press for allowing me to publish this essay here. It will be published in its original form in an SAR book, Figuring the Future: Children, Youth, and Globalization in 2007. This final essay tries to grapple with two related matters: the historical circumstances and beliefs that permitted childhood to be imagined in noneconomic terms in a capitalist society, and what this offers us today in a very different world, where economic imperatives appear to drive a globalization that has the potential to threaten the kind of childhood that we have come to value. As will be clear to the reader, my views of globalization have become somewhat less sanguine and more complex...