All Cultures Are Not Equal

Let’s say you are an 18-year-old with a really big brain and you want to understand the forces that will be shaping history for decades to come. Go into the field that barely exists: cultural geography. Study why and how people cluster, why certain national traits endure over centuries, why certain cultures embrace technology and economic growth and others resist them.

The economists and scientists fail to explain a crucial feature of our time: while global economies are converging, cultures are diverging, and the widening cultural differences are leading us into a period of conflict, inequality and segmentation.

Not long ago, people said that globalization and the revolution in communications technology would bring us together. But the opposite is true. While people are taking advantage of freedom and technology to create new groups and cultural zones, old national identities and behaviour patterns are proving durable. If you look just around the United States you find amazing cultural segmentation. Americans have been “globalized” for centuries (meaning economically integrated), and yet far from converging into some homogeneous culture. The music, news, magazine and television markets have all segmented, so there are fewer cultural unifiers like Life magazines or nightly news anchors.

If you look around the world you see how often events are driven by groups that reject the globalized culture. From Africa to Seattle, religiously orthodox students reject what they see as the amoral mainstream culture and carve out defiant revival movements: antiglobalization types create subcultures. While Islamic extremists reject the modern cultures of Europe, some American Jews have gone to Hebron and become hyper-Zionists.

Global inequality widens as some nations with certain cultural traits prosper and others with other traits don’t.

If you are 18 and you’ve got that big brain, the whole field of cultural geography is waiting for you.

(After David Brooks, The New York Times, August 2005.)

B) Sum up the text in three sentences.

C) Scan the text for details.

d) Answer the teacher’s questions.

3. a) Open the brackets using the correct forms of the verbs.

nuance [‘njuOns]