1.10: So What?

The Global Autopsy

You began this chapter by looking at an ordinary object. Now we are going to take that exercise further.

Choose one thing you actually used today.

It might be:

• a phone
• a coffee
• a pair of sneakers
• a T-shirt
• a chocolate bar
• a lipstick
• a medication
• a video game
• a burrito
• a song
• a social-media platform
• or something else entirely

Your task is to conduct a Global Autopsy. Don't worry. Nothing has to die. The point is to take something familiar apart conceptually until the economic, political, cultural, historical, social, and environmental relationships inside it become visible. Also, this is a thinking exersize. You won't be turning anything in unless your professor asks you to. 

Step 1: Follow the Thing

Where did it originate? Where were its materials, ingredients, or components produced? Where was it grown, coded, recorded, designed, assembled, or manufactured? How many places may have been involved before it reached you? A product that appears to come from one country may contain a much more complicated geography. Find it.

Step 2: Follow the Money

Who owns the company, brand, platform, patent, or intellectual property? Where does the highest-value work occur? Who receives the largest share of the final price? Who receives the smallest? Where does profit accumulate? The place where something is produced is not necessarily the place where most of its value is captured.

Step 3: Follow the People

Whose labor is involved? Whose knowledge? Whose culture? Who transports it? Who sells it? Who consumes it? Who may be invisible by the time the product reaches you? Global supply chains are full of people who disappear from the final story. Bring some of them back.

Step 4: Follow the Rules

Which governments, laws, trade agreements, institutions, standards, or digital platforms shape how your object is created and moved? What happens at borders? What rules govern labor? Who protects intellectual property? Who decides what may be sold? What would happen if one important rule changed?

Step 5: Follow the Footprint

What land, water, energy, minerals, transportation, packaging, emissions, or waste are involved? Where do those environmental costs appear? Are the people consuming the final product living in the same places as the people experiencing pollution, extraction, water stress, or waste? Often they are not. That distance matters.

Step 6: Change the Lens

Analyze your object through at least three Global Studies lenses. Historical. Economic. Political. Cultural. Social. Environmental. What becomes visible through one lens that another leaves out? Which two lenses seem to interact most strongly?

Step 7: Test Drive a Theory

Choose one theory from the Global Studies Toolkit. What does it help you see? What does it fail to explain? Now choose a second theory. Does the story change? Which gives you the stronger explanation? Would combining them work better?

Step 8: Find the Missing Person

Every global story leaves someone out. Whose perspective is easiest to overlook? The farmer? The miner? The factory worker? The migrant? The truck driver? The warehouse employee? The community living near a waste site? The Indigenous nation whose land contains the resource? The person who cannot afford the final product? The person whose data made the platform profitable? Finding the missing person often changes the story. Sometimes it changes the question.

Step 9: Zoom Out

What larger global system is your object part of? Trade? Migration? Digital technology? Global finance? Climate change? Food systems? Culture? Energy?

Step 10: Zoom Back In

Return to yourself. Why did you buy, use, listen to, eat, wear, or download this particular thing? Did convenience matter? Price? Identity? Habit? Advertising? Culture? Need? Global systems may be enormous, but they eventually arrive somewhere very small: a shopping cart; a screen; a closet; a meal; a hand. That is where systems become lived experience.

The Point

Your object is not really the assignment. The connections are. The goal is to move from seeing an isolated thing to seeing a network of relationships and then to ask how history, power, culture, economics, politics, society, and the environment shape that network. For the rest of this book, we are going to keep doing versions of this exercise. Only the objects are going to get bigger.

From Things to Culture

We began with objects, systems, and the question of connection. But some of globalization's most powerful movements cannot be packed inside a shipping container. Languages travel. Religions travel. Recipes travel. Music travels. Fashion travels. Stories travel. People travel. And when culture moves, it rarely arrives unchanged. People reinterpret what they encounter, adapting it to new places, combining it with existing traditions, commercializing it, resisting it, celebrating it, protecting it, or arguing over who has the right to claim it. That leaves us with the next question: What happens when culture crosses borders? That is where Chapter 2 begins.