Globalization + Local = "Glocalization"

"The two basic kinds of social interaction among people"
First: face-to-face contact
Second: more "remote... made possible through transport and communications systems"

The first is found in "premodern societies" where "spatial dimensions of social life are, for most of the population, and in most respects, dominated by 'presence'- by localized activities"
The second, arising from "modernity," "tears the spatial orbit of social life away from the confines of locality, 'fostering relations betwen 'absent' others, locationally distant from any given situation of face-to-face interaction."
"It disembeds or lifts out social relations from local contexts of interaction and rearranges them across extensive spans of time-space. One important effect of this disembedding is to make place, 'which refers to the physical settings of social activity as situated geographically,' increasingly phantasmagoric." (introduction, p.8)

(from Anthony Giddens, 1990, quoted in Inda and rosaldo's The Anthropology of Globalization, 2002)

history I

Everything I might write feels loaded...
Germany was carved up- a border was drawn and, within that border, the West was carved up.
I’ve read the American’s gave the best food rations. But, they were the most blatantly apathetic -the psyche of people who have been through extensive warring on their home turf. I don’t have to be a war veteran to understand that having a war on one’s own land, aggressive attack upon one’s home area (London, Paris, Warsaw, Russian borderlands, and then back to Germany with air raids). I do not mean to downplay the tragedy of Pearl Harbor, but, luckily, we in the US are surrounded so well by oceans and strategically it was more difficult for Japanese to bomb the west coast.

some new thoughts about people in the world

China was a “border” for me...in mind, in body, in conception, assumption, mental strength, endurance.
I can remember so much about my feelings there, just as well as any landmarks.
I had experienced confusion between myself and someone of another race/culture, but not so persistently...
I have seen up close the global inequality that I have been studying...in fact, much of what we have discussed in my classes I have seen already firsthand or surmised it from empirical experience:
uncontrolled markets, the crush of modernity, the pressure in everyone’s life
WHAT is this force that has everyone, from the US to Germany, to China and the Middle East. The inter-connectedness is causing a shared anxiety among peoples about their future, their stakes in their land and government, security (when all is relative and political systems change overnight in Ukraine; new ideologies are popular in South America, ?, and Russia. And China persists with the Communist Party, but very little left of the highly-controlled cultural output. The policing of people’s lives still exists, but people can own property, but they cannot afford to. I cannot write about this. It’s too complicated.
Maybe I always revert to my own feelings because those I can pinpoint with SOME accuracy; they can be triggered and analyzed.
And my interpretation is the only one.

Where are people the happiest? Where are they the most miserable?