A Border Town Built for Vice. At the countryside bus terminal in Daluo, China, the bikers have tan faces weathered by the elements and eyes wide with hope that someone will hire them for the twenty-minute journey across the border. Amid shouts of Tou du! Tou du! — “Smuggling! Smuggling!” — Kang is quiet. I ask Kang how much he charges for the ride. Kang’s bike is a Honlei, just another cheap two-wheeled death trap made in China. The ride is not kind. “How do you know that the border police aren’t around?” “I went over the hills right before you arrived," he answers. Those hills are Kang’s home. I first became interested in Mong La last year, after I spent some time with a few Chinese men who buy, sell, collect and drink tiger bone wine.
Away from the wet market is one small shop that sells tiger bone wine. “Wait,” she says. She disappears behind a wall at the back of the shop, then emerges with a teacup—her single teacup, for her own use, which holds less than a shot. Eight million renminbi? He laughs, eyes red. Language diversity threatened in areas with high economic growth, study. High rates of economic growth are a driving factor behind global language extinction, with one-quarter of all native tongues classified as ‘threatened,’ a new report has said, “As economies develop, one language often comes to dominate a nation’s political and economic spheres,” Tatsuya Amato, from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.
“People are forced to adopt the dominant language or risk being left out in the cold — economically and politically.” Out of around 6,000 languages around the globe, 1,705 fit the criteria for ‘threatened’ status. When languages disappear, especially those of indigenous peoples, it represents a significant cultural loss for future generations. Efforts to prevent the disappearance of these languages are thwarted by a lack of understanding of the threats to indigenous languages, according to scientists behind the report, published in the journal Proceedings of Royal Society B on Wednesday.
Foreign Couples Heading to America for Surrogate Pregnancies. Photo At home in Lisbon, a gay couple invited friends over to a birthday celebration, and at the end of the evening shared a surprise — an ultrasound image of their baby, moving around in the belly of a woman in Pennsylvania being paid to carry their child. “Everyone was shocked, and asked everything about how we do this,” said Paulo, who spoke on the condition that neither his last name nor that of his husband, João, be used since what they were doing is a crime in Portugal. While babies through surrogacy have become increasingly common in the United States, with celebrities like Elton John, Sarah Jessica Parker and Jimmy Fallon openly discussing how they started a family, the situation is quite different in Portugal — as it is in most of the world where the hiring of a woman to carry a child is forbidden.
And as Paulo and João have discovered, even bringing home a baby born abroad through surrogacy can be complicated. Continue reading the main story Pregnancy for Pay Over the decades, Mr. As World Cup Nears, American ‘Football’ Fans Adapt Foreign Traditions. What Happened When One Woman Had Her Picture Photoshopped In 25 Different Countries. “Make me look beautiful.” That’s what Esther Honig asked 40 photo editors to do — in over 25 countries. Using the service-sharing site Fiverr, Honig, a human interest reporter, sent a picture of herself to be photoshopped around the world to see just how much cultural values are applied to standards of beauty.
The results throw the idea of “the perfect woman” into sharp relief. Honig found that individuals from every country applied a distinct perspective on beauty to her image. She was surprised by the degree to which a country’s cultural values could show up as aesthetic preferences. Specifically, an image she received back from Morocco was “a bit of a shock initially.” Seeing her image manipulated in so many dimensions had a profound impact on Honig’s own self-perception. Honig is reluctant to draw a “moral of the story” from the project, which is ongoing. Still, the project dispels the myth of a singular beauty norm. Check out the rest of the incredible images below. India Ukraine Italy. Hide and seek: a rare glimpse into one of Russia’s last closed cities. Pepsi Marketing. Figure 3. Limited Edition can for Pepsi “Live for Now” campaign, Pepsi Corporation These three aspects of Pepsi’s “Live for Now” campaign attempt to brand Pepsi as youthful, exciting, and synonymous with entertainment and music icons.
This style choice is made in order to create a focused global image for Pepsi products. Cultural imperialism of Pepsi advertising Cultural imperialism refers to the exportation of the culture of one country to others. Technology has allowed the spread of information and has “invaded the cultural and ideological space of a country with images and messages in place of an all-out military invasion” (Struken and Cartwright 397). Cultural imperialism is proposed as a one-way flow of information; the dominant, usually western countries disseminate information to receiving countries.
However, recent changes in technology have prompted a re-evaluation of the concept. Pepsi was recently “selected by U.S. Works Cited Struken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. PepsiCo. " Global Sociology / Globalizing Cultures: The Question of Cultural Diversity. The key sociological issue that arises regarding the connections between culture and globalization relates to the fate of cultural diversity, that is the existence of many different cultures around the world.
Is cultural diversity threatened by globalization? Are we going to end up with a single global culture? Here, the different sociological perspectives provide different answers depending on whether they examine cultural globalization from a macrosociological or microsociological perspective. Both functionalism and conflict perspectives deplore the decline of cultural diversity whereas symbolic interactionism reveals that the dynamics of culture and globalization are more complex and can accommodate both increase and decrease in cultural diversity. Cultural Differentialism On the functionalist side, cultural diversity is understood as cultural differentialism. What matters for the cultural differentialist perspective is that culture is clearly territorially bound. Cultural Imperialism. The-Gods-Must-Be-Crazy - Trailer - Cast - Showtimes. National Geographic Concludes What Americans Will Look Like in 2050, and It's Beautiful. It's no secret that interracial relationships are trending upward, and in a matter of years we'll have Tindered, OKCupid-ed and otherwise sexed ourselves into one giant amalgamated mega-race.
But what will we look like? National Geographic built its 125th anniversary issue around this very question last October, calling on writer Lise Funderburg and Martin Schoeller, a renowned photographer and portrait artist, to capture the lovely faces of our nation's multiracial future. Here's how the "average American" will look by the year 2050: Image Credit: National Geographic And like this: Image Credit: National Geographic And this: Image Credit: National Geographic Wow. Their numbers will only grow. This is certainly encouraging, but there are obvious flaws with tracking racial population growth through a survey that lets people self-identify, especially since so many familial, cultural and even geographical factors influence your decision to claim one or multiple races.
So is an end approaching? Jihad vs. McWorld. The two axial principles of our age—tribalism and globalism—clash at every point except one: they may both be threatening to democracy Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures—both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe—a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The tendencies of what I am here calling the forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from without.
THE MARKET IMPERATIVE. Global Sociology / Globalizing Cultures: The Question of Cultural Diversity. Cent_Asia_MidEast_and_Vicinity_Languages_lg-smaller.jpg (1500×1246) Linguistic imperialism: The world according to Putin. Cent_Asia_MidEast_and_Vicinity_Languages_lg-smaller.jpg (1500×1246) Linguistic imperialism: The world according to Putin. Italy’s ‘Slow City’ goes global with mellow, human-sized message. By Agence France-PresseThursday, January 23, 2014 7:22 EDT Even as city living booms around the world, the Slow City movement directed by an intrepid Italian is gaining a global following with a back to basics campaign to make small towns the new place to be. From his hometown of Orvieto — a hilltop medieval gem surrounded by castles and vineyards in central Umbria — Pier Giorgio Oliveti has helped expand Cittaslow to 28 countries including South Korea, Turkey and the United States.
“Cittaslow is about appreciating what we are and what we have, without being self-destructive and depleting values, money and resources,” Oliveti told AFP. “It is an antidote against negative globalisation,” the bushy-bearded former journalist said. Founded in 1999 by a Tuscan mayor eager to extend the healthy living philosophy of Italy’s Slow Food movement to urban life, Cittaslow currently boasts 183 members, with another dozen applications for membership pending. ‘Neither difficult nor odd’ Agence France-Presse.