The economic and political consistencies between the colonial and postcolonial periods have been highlighted in the form of the state and the organization of state power. At issue was the question whether what was described as a process of cultural globalization would lead to cultural homogenization (coca-colonization) or if, on the contrary, and in the spirit of the just mentioned concern with local responses to colonialism and global capitalism, globalization actually created new forms of cultural diversity (see, e.g., Hannerz, 1987).Īmber Murrey, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition), 2020 Neocolonialism Syncretism, hybridity, and creolization were key concepts in this anthropological genre.īeginning in the 1980s, a number of anthropologists turned their attention to the global aspects of cultural diffusion. Classic examples include Eric Wolf’s (1958) research of syncretism (i.e., the synthesis of indigenous and diffused cultural elements) in the case of the Virgin of Guadalupe the ethnographic documentary film, Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response to Colonialism (1973) by Gary Kildea and Jerry Leach and Michael Taussig’s ethnography, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980). Ethnographers had for some time provided examples of culturally creative responses to capitalism’s local encroachments in different parts of the world (see Nash, 1981 for a review of this rich ethnographic genre). In response to models of cultural imperialism that treated the so-called periphery as susceptible to anything arriving from the global centers, anthropologists began describing local responses to colonial and capitalist diffusion. Marshall Sahlins (1985: viii) called this ‘a confusion between an open system and a lack of system.’

It did not grant an independent cultural logic to the global periphery, holding the periphery to be open to radical change initiated by the center. This type of anthropology tended to treat cultural diffusion as a secondary effect of worldwide economic structures and relations. Since the late 1960s, a critical anthropology of neo-colonialism and global capitalism developed under the influence of Andre Gunder Frank’s (1969) thesis that underdevelopment was not a result of traditionalism, but of colonial exploitation (the development of underdevelopment), and of Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1974) synthetic work about the dynamics of European expansion and the center–periphery structure of the capitalist world-system. Not simply because their authors promoted the preservation of indigenous cultures, as generations of anthropologists had done before, but because they placed colonial relationships in a wider, global system of capitalism. Subsequently, mainstream studies of culture change were less modernization friendly. Ronald Stade, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015 Critical Studies in Diffusion

Neo colonialism