Instructions

1. Review the reading “Locating Society Reading, Part I” and have your completed “Assignment: Locating Societies” available to answer questions below.
2. Review the article, “Locating Society Reading, Part II”
3. Review the audio (“World Auto Industry”) and two videos (“The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes,” and “Conflict Minerals”) in the Required Reading / Viewing section.

For the audio and two videos in general think about how it shows that people in different countries are not in separate societies / economies:

Consider how people in one country are interdependent with people in other countries through a division of labor — how the interdependent production activities make people part of the same society.

For example, in the Gap sweat shirt commodity chain, women in Uzbekistan picked cotton that flowed regularly to factories in S. Korea where workers made the raw cotton into cotton fabric. That part of the production process in Korea depended on the prior production process in Uzbekistan. At the same time, some Korean owner paid for the raw cotton, and a portion that money was used to pay the wages of the women cotton pickers in Uzbekistan, which they used to by food, clothing, and shelter. So the Koreans depended on the cotton from Uzbekistan, and the Uzbekistan workers and capitalists depended on the Koreans for money. This shows that Uzbekistan and S. Korea are not separate economies but parts of a larger globe-spanning economy.

1. Explain why the cultural approach to finding a society didn’t work based on the concepts and your particular research in “Individual Assignment: Locating Societies, Part I.”

2. Briefly summarize the logic of the interaction approach to finding society. Include the concepts of significance, frequency, and scale, interdependence and mutual causality.

3. Listen to the “World Auto Industry” audio, and describe how the content indicates that people may be living in different countries but are interacting indirectly in ways that make them interdependent. Also, quote from the audio.

4. The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes:

A. Explain how it shows that people in Western Africa and Americas (Caribbean, Brazil, South US) became via European merchants, parts of a single larger society and division of labor.

B. Stop the video between 1750-1791 and select one dot / ship. Provide its name and quote the entire explanation about it.
Example: The Andromaque (France)- “This 250-ton ship left Cabinda, in present-day Angola, with 460 enslaved people and arrived in Saint-Domingue with 418. It made two journeys between 1751 and 1753 and transported a total of 884 Africans.”

5. Conflict Minerals: Describe the products that are flowing out of the Congo, and the products flowing into the Congo. Describe how people are interdependent (how some get money for food, some get weapons to control others, some get products they dependend on to communicate, etc.), that is, how the flows make people in different parts of the planet interdependent, and therefore part of one society.

6. In light of the evidence in the examples above of where people are interacting today, where would the boundaries of society be drawn in the interaction approach?