Today’s Class

• Case Study on Colonialism: Yakut of Siberia (cont’d)

• Modern World System

• Course/Instructor Evaluations

All houses heated with wood

8-month winter (January Avg. Temp: -49F)

• Gendered Division of Labor

– Men: Herding & Haycutting

• Family Activities in Past

– Female Obesity & Health Problems

Cultural Imperialism

• Russian/Soviet

– Language

– Social

– Economic

– Religious

– Historical (Soviet History Books)

Ethnocide

• Attempt by one culture to destroy the culture of another group

– Group survives, culture lost or modified

– Forced assimilation

Mass Media

• Agent of cultural imperialism

– Russian

– Western (mostly American)

Cultural Revival Movement

“Almost everything the Soviet leadership tried to do in the area of nationality relations led to heightened, not repressed, ethnic consciousness.”

-Marjorie Balzer, 1996

• Yakut Cultural Revival Movement

– Museums

– Festivals

– Language

• Periphery

– Diamonds, gold, oil, coal, tin, natural gas

Summary

• Changes to Yakut Lifeways as Result of Russian/Soviet Colonialism

– Initial Contact, Yasak, Settlers

– Soviet Collectivization

– Post-Soviet Period

The Modern World System

“By endowing nations, societies, or cultures with the qualities of internally homogenous and externally distinctive and bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls.”

Eric Wolf, 1982

Modern World System

• Nations economically and politically interdependent

– World capitalist economy

• Fernand Braudel & Immanuel Wallerstein

• Even isolated groups today still have contact

• Modern World System Emerges by 16^th Century

• Social system based on power and wealth differences that extend beyond individual nations

• Three positions:

– Core, Semi-Periphery, Periphery

• Core:

– Most dominant; controls world finance

– Technology; Mechanized

– Produces capital-intensive, high tech goods

• Mostly to other core areas

– US, UK, France

• Semi-Periphery:

– Industrialized

– Industrial Goods and Commodities

– Lacks Power and Dominance of Core

– Brazil (& most of Latin America), Saudi Arabia, Russia

• Periphery

– Least power, wealth, and influence

– Less mechanized—mostly rely on human labor

– Produce raw materials and agricultural commodities

– Export to core & semi-periphery

– Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, SE Asia, Siberia

• Peripheral regions may occur within a core nation

– e.g., parts of Tennessee