Promise and Peril in the Provinces

If locals in rural frontiers are in the thrall of powerful globals based in a network of world cities, they are not without power themselves. In the global core as well as the periphery, countrysides are the sources and scenes of resistance to decisions and actions taken in capitals and corporate boardrooms. French farmers seeing their privileges endangered by economic reforms demonstrate, and occasionally riot, in the streets of Paris. Often their banners proclaim their causes, but sometimes they show the name of a French region or even the flag of a département, reminding the authorities that they are dealing with an entity that has emotional resonance as well as economic interests. Chinese villagers organize to protest grievances ranging from the summary expropriation of land for factory building by industrialists empowered by the Beijing government, to oppressive rule by bosses whose loyalties are to the Communist Party rather than to the locals they are supposed to serve. They decry a new two-China policy—not involving Beijing and Taipei, but dividing their country into eastern “haves” and western “have-nots.” South Africans in rural KwaZulu-Natal stage rallies in support of their embattled deputy president facing charges in urban courtrooms including rape and corruption, certain that his trials constitute a political assault on the Zulu nation he represents and shouting not only for justice but also for secession. Ours may be an era of globalization and worldly flattening, but we also witness the resurgence of another of humanity’s ancient predispositions: the territorial imperative. The very Internet-enabled dissemination of information driving the breakdown of barriers among globals also spreads ideas about power and autonomy among locals that arouse the kinds of nationalisms and ethnic aspirations economic globalization is supposed to mitigate. On a planet fractured into nearly 200 countries, the European Union (EU) has taken a lead by enmeshing 27 of them in a multinational entity designed to integrate economies and coordinate laws, but the European paradox is that a widespread revival of chauvinism seeks to reverse this unifying, globalizing process. In several areas of Europe, there are provinces, regions, and other entities that press for more self-determination as opposed to international integration.

Power and the City

The city is humanity’s most enduring symbol of power. States and empires rise and fall, armies conquer and collapse, ideologies come and go, but the world’s great cities endure. If there is a force that can vanquish a city, it is natural, not artificial. Ancient cities that anchored early states in Southwest, South, and East Asia fell victim to climate change as deserts encroached on their hinterlands. Modern cities on low ground at the water’s edge would not survive the sea-level rise that could accompany sustained global warming. But no political upheaval or economic breakdown would end the life of a major city—not even destruction by atomic bombs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt because the advantages and opportunities offered by their sites and situations were unaltered by the catastrophes that struck them. Silk route terminal Chang’an morphed into Xian and Tenochtitlan became Mexico City because their locational benefits, sites, and regional networks outlasted their violent transitions. Not for nothing is Rome known as the Eternal City. With the maturation of the modern state came the notion of the “capital” city, focus of its administrative system and emblematic of its power. Cities had always dominated their hinterlands, but now their power radiated far afield. From Athens to Amsterdam and from Madrid to Moscow, these national capitals became imperial headquarters that launched colonial campaigns near and far. London was synonymous with this early wave of globalization, but Paris also lay at the heart of a global network of power and influence. In these capitals, cityscapes substantiated national achievements through elaborate palaces, columned government buildings, decorative triumphal arches, spacious parade routes, and commemorative statuary. Museums bulging with treasure attested further to the primacy of the culture, leading one observer, long ago but memorably, to designate such centers as “primate” cities (Jefferson, 1939). The trappings of this primacy reappeared in the architecture of colonial headquarters from Dakar to Delhi and from Luanda to Lima, incongruous Greco- Roman-Victorian-Iberian imprints on administrative offices, railroad stations, post offices, even prisons half a world away from Europe. More than ever before, the city in the global periphery was the locus of authority and transculturation.

Lowering the Barriers

Becoming conscious of one’s cultural and physical environments early in life involves fast-developing recognition of circumstances malleable and immutable. By the time we are about six years old, our brain is about as big as it will be for the duration, but its maturation goes on for many years more. The language-learning ability of young children, the subject of numerous studies and much speculation, undoubtedly connects this process; youngsters are able to recollect facts and vocabularies but cannot match adults or even adolescents in conceptualizing context or relationships. While we quickly learn to use words to gain immediate objectives such as nourishment or affection, it takes much longer to begin forming an understanding of our place and its (apparently) fixed attributes. Thus our perception of place changes over time, as do the opportunities to counter its formative impress. Bilingualism and multilingualism already are a key to upward mobility and will be more so in the future; exposing children in their earliest years of learning to a language other than the mother tongue will endow them with potentially immense advantages. Religious fanaticism is intensifying in many parts of the world; protecting children against it in their early years gives them the chance to develop their contextual abilities before being exposed to it. Religious leaders of all faiths would do well to consider the divine potential of pronouncements that assert the superiority of their particular beliefs and rituals over others. Pope Benedict in the spring of 2007 declared that Roman Catholicism afforded the only true route to salvation and that all other (Christian) approaches are “defective,” a proclamation Christianity and the world could have done without. Drilling into children that “there is no god but Allah” closes young minds to the religious convergence that should be the hope of all believers. It may not be absolutely true that “religion poisons everything,” the subtitle of an angry book on the topic, but religious males in medieval outfits do misuse their powers to erect barriers that last lifetimes. The power of place defines an aggregate of circumstances and conditions ranging from cultural traditions to natural phenomena, into which we are born, with which we cope, and from which we derive our own multiple identities.

Same Place, Divergent Destinies

Dramatic media pictures of desperate would-be mobals clinging to overcrowded boats, climbing over border fences, or running across unguarded wasteland confirm statistical data: males are in the vanguard of unregulated as well as legal transnational migration. Less graphic photography of the average business-class section of a 747 flying from Los Angeles to Hong Kong would reveal that most of the comfortable globals en route are male as well. But scrutinize a daytime picture of an African or Asian village, and you are likely to notice that among the locals, women outnumber men, whether working in the fields, carrying water or firewood, preparing food, or tending children. If the Earth seems flat, this is far more so for males than for females. Even in the same village, in the same house, the destinies of boys and girls diverge startlingly, and not only in rural villages in the global periphery. Equality of the sexes in employment, income, political influence, and other circumstances is an elusive goal even in the richest countries of the global core. Northern European countries are often cited as having progressed furthest in this respect, but even there, the playing field (for example, in religious hierarchies) is not completely level. Nor does growing wealth guarantee progress in closing the gender gap. Male dominance is a deeply embedded tradition that has a way of trumping fairness: in modern Japan, where women have made significant strides by many measures, the Minister of Health and Welfare in July 2007 publicly referred to the role of women as being “birth-giving machines” (Economist, 2007d). When China in the late 1970s embarked on its economic reforms, one key to success was deemed to lie in bringing its population spiral under control. China’s “one child only” policy had the desired result, but in effect it frequently meant one male child only as tens of millions of pregnancies were aborted to ensure a male heir. Millions more female infants were and are abandoned, giving rise to an international adoption industry that is almost exclusively female. Today, economically booming China has a demographic surplus of some 20 million males, with troubling implications for the future.

Places Open and Shut

The power of place manifests itself in continua of opportunity and risk, advantage and privation. On the global map it is revealed in patterns of health and sickness, wealth and poverty. On the ground it is demarcated by barriers and barricades, patrols and controls. Reflecting on the impress of place on the fortunes and misfortunes of the planet’s nearly seven billion human inhabitants, it is worth noting that, for all their vaunted mobility, only about 200 million live outside the country of their birth, or less than 3 percent of the total. Some academics (as well as politicians) refer to the present as the “age of migration.” The figures indicate otherwise. The overwhelming majority of us die under the governmental, linguistic, religious, medical, environmental, and other circumstances into which we were born. The constraints on transnational and intercultural migration remain powerful and, in some respects, are increasing rather than softening, roughening rather than flattening the global playing field. Place, most emphatically place of birth but also the constricted space in which the majority of lives are lived, remains the most potent factor shaping the destinies of billions. As a result, those destinies are closely tied to the fortunes and misfortunes of the state that imparts “nationality” on citizens born within its borders. One of these involves relative location. There are numerous reasons why approximately 70 percent of the poorest-of-the-poor are citizens of African states, but one of these reasons may not be immediately obvious—until one takes a close look at the continent’s regional geography. Africa has more landlocked countries than any other continent or geographic realm in the world, and almost as many (14) as the rest of the world put together (and still another one may join this group if voters in a future referendum in Southern Sudan opt for independence). Unless a landlocked country has a combination of good management and a relatively rich resource base, as Botswana does but Zimbabwe does not, it is far more susceptible to any regional malaise than a coastal state. As economic geographers have long pointed out, a coastal state trades with the world; a landlocked state trades with, or through, its neighbors.

Geography of Jeopardy

Everyone lives with risk, every day. In the United States, more than 100,000 persons die from accidents every year, nearly half of them on the country’s roads. Worldwide, an average of more than 5000 coal miners perish underground annually, a toll often forgotten by those who oppose nuclear power generation on grounds of safety. From insect bites to poisoned foods and from smoking to travel, risk is unavoidable. Certain risks can be mitigated through behavior (not smoking, wearing seatbelts), but others are routinely accepted as inescapable. A half century ago, long before hijackings and airport security programs, the number of airline travelers continued to increase robustly even as airplanes crashed with considerable frequency. Today, few drivers or passengers are deterred by the carnage on the world’s roads, aware of it though they may be. Risk is part of life. Risk, however, also is a matter of abode, of location. Who, after experiencing or witnessing on television the impact of a hurricane, a tornado, an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a flood, a blizzard, or some other extreme natural event, has not asked the question: “Where in the world might be a relatively safe place to live?” Geographers, some of whom have made the study of natural hazards and their uneven distribution a research priority, don’t have a simple answer. But on one point they leave no doubt: people, whether individually or in aggregate, subject themselves to known environmental dangers even if they have the wherewithal to avoid them. Many Americans build their retirement or second homes on flood-prone barrier islands along coastlines vulnerable to hurricanes. The Dutch, who have for many years been emigrating from the Netherlands in substantial numbers, are leaving for reasons other than the fact that two-thirds of their country lies below sea level. From Indonesia to Mexico, farmers living on the fertile slopes of active volcanoes not only stay where they are, but often resist even temporary relocation when volcanic activity resumes. From Tokyo to Tehran, people continue to cluster in cities with histories of devastating earthquakes and known to be situated in perilous fault zones. Fatalism is a cross-cultural human trait.

Globals, Locals, and Mobals

Earth may be a planet of shrinking functional distances, but it remains a world of staggering situational differences. From the uneven distribution of natural resources to the unequal availability of opportunity, place remains a powerful arbitrator. Many hundreds of millions of farmers in river basins of Asia and Africa live their lives much as their distant ancestors did, still remote from the forces of globalization, children as well as adults still at high personal risk and great material disadvantage. Tens of millions of habitants of isolated mountain valleys from the Andes to the Balkans and from the Caucasus to Kashmir are as bound to their isolated abodes as their forebears were. Of the seven billion current passengers on Cruiseship Earth, the overwhelming majority (the myth of mass migration notwithstanding) will die very near the cabin in which they were born. In their lifetimes, this vast majority will have worn the garb, spoken the language, professed the faith, shared the health conditions, absorbed the education, acquired the attitudes, and inherited the legacy that constitutes the power of place: the accumulated geography whose formative imprint still dominates the planet. The regional impress of poverty continues to trap countless millions who are and will be born into it and who, globalization notwithstanding, cannot escape it. The “wealth gap” between the fortunate and the less fortunate, still largely a matter of chance and destiny, evinces a widening range resulting from the perpetuation of privilege and power in the so-called global “core” and its international tentacles. Those disparities, represented at all levels of scale, will entail increasing risk in a world of rising anger and weapons of growing destructive efficiency. At the same time, the notion that the world, if not “flat,” is flattening under the impress of globalization is gaining traction. As noted in the preface, the idea that diversities of place continue to play a key role in shaping humanity’s variegated mosaic tends to be dismissed by globalizers who see an increasingly homogenized and borderless world. “Flatness” is becoming an assumption, not merely a prospect, as implied by the titles of numerous books and articles of recent vintage (Fung et al., 2008).

The Imperial Legacy of Language

Language is the essence of culture, and culture is the epoxy of society. Individually and collectively, people tend to feel passionately about their mother tongue, especially when they have reason to believe that it is threatened in some way. Ever since the use of language evolved in early human communities, some confined in isolated abodes and others on the march into Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas, languages have arisen, flourished, and failed with the fortunes of their speakers. Linguists estimate that tens of thousands of such languages may have been born and lost, leaving no trace. Some major ones, including Sumerian and Etruscan, survive fragmentarily in their written record. A few, such as Sanskrit and Latin, live on in their modern successors. But the historical geography of language is the story of a loss of linguistic diversity that continues unabated. At present, about 7,000 languages remain, half of them classified by linguists as endangered. In the year from the day you read this, about 25 more languages will go extinct. By the end of this century, the Earth may be left with just a few hundred languages, so billions of its inhabitants will no longer be speaking their ancestral mother tongues (Diamond, 2001). If this projection turns out to be accurate, the language loss will not be confined to those spoken by comparatively few people in remote locales. One dimension of the “flattening” of the world in the age of globalization is the cultural convergence of which linguistic homogenization is a key component. Some of my colleagues view this as an inevitable and not altogether undesirable process of integration, but if I may be candid, most of those colleagues speak one language only: English. Having spoken six languages during my lifetime (I can still manage in four), I tend to share the linguists’ concern over the trend. English has the great merit of comparative simplicity and adaptable modernity, but as it reflects historic natural and social environments it is sparse indeed and no match for the riches of French or even Dutch. If such contrasts can arise and persist among closely related languages in Europe, imagine the legacies of major languages such as Yoruba, Urdu, Thai, and others potentially endangered as language convergence proceeds.

The Rough Topography of Human Health

If we made a map of the world showing locales with prevailing good public health as mountains and areas with poor health as valleys, the resulting global topography would look rough indeed. The unequal distribution of health and well-being across the world is matched by inequities of health within individual countries, even inside regions and provinces. Whatever the index, from nutrition to life expectancy, from infectious disease to infant mortality, the geography of health displays regional variations that add a crucial criterion to the composite power of place. If it is obvious that the medical world is not flat, the question is whether the landscape of human health is flattening out. Certainly health is a matter of natural environment, cultural tradition, genetic predisposition, and other factors, but power has a lot to do with it as well. In general, the poorest and weakest on the planet are also the sickest. The fact that, in the twenty-first century, 300 million people suffer from malaria and more than one million (mostly children) die every year has as much to do with figure 1.1 as it does with tropical environments and adapting vectors. The rich and medically capable countries of the core never sustained a coordinated campaign to defeat (or at least contain) malaria, a disease of the periphery of much lower priority than maladies of the mid-latitudes. Medical research in the United States and elsewhere did produce treatments for victims of the deadly HIV/AIDS pandemic that has taken more than 25 million lives over the past three decades, most of them in Subsaharan Africa, but those costly remedies are reaching far too few sufferers outside the global core. The obvious link between persistent poverty and endemic disease, so evident from virtually any medical-geographic map of the global periphery, was one of the key factors that spurred all 191 members of the United Nations in 2002 to sign the UN Millennium Declaration, among whose eight Development Goals are the reduction of child mortality, the eradication of extreme poverty and associated hunger, and the defeat of major diseases, including malaria and HIV/AIDS.

The Fateful Geography of Religion

If language is the mucilage of culture, religion is its manifesto. Any revelation of identity through language happens only when the speaker begins talking, and even then that identity remains in doubt except perhaps to the most experienced ear. Is that skilled KiSwahili speaker a Mijikenda from the Kenya coast or a Kamba from the interior? Is that cultivated French speaker a citizen of Senegal or a resident of Paris? Did those fellows at the bar in São Paulo mix some Brazilian terms with their Japanese, and are they mobals rather than visitors? Religious affiliation is another matter. Hundreds of millions of people routinely proclaim their religion through modes of dress, hairstyles, symbols, gestures, and other visible means. To those who share a faith, such customs create a sense of confidence and solidarity. To those who do not profess that faith, they can amount to provocation. For the faithful, religion is the key to identity. And such identity is part of the impress of place. Religion and place are strongly coupled, not only through the visible and prominent architecture of places of worship but also because certain orthodox believers still proclaim that their god “gave” them pieces of real estate whose ownership cannot therefore be a matter of Earthly political debate. To some, the Holy Land is a place where Jesus walked. To others, it is a gift from God. To the latter, it is worth dying for. Countless millions have perished for their faith, but comparatively few for their language. Dutch schoolchildren of a former generation used to learn the story of a captured boatload of medieval mercenaries plying the Zuider Zee. To a man, the captives claimed to be Dutch. The captain of the boarding party had a simple solution: any real Dutchman would be able to pronounce the word Scheveningen, a fishing port on the North Sea coast. Those who got it right were given amnesty. Those who failed were thrown overboard and drowned. It is an unusual tale. Language, dialect, accent, and syntax can confer advantage, open (or close) doors to opportunity, and engender social judgments. But they are not historically linked to mass annihilation.