What Culture Do You Belong To........

I recently had a truly wonderful experience. Never before this had I given much thought to what I was wearing or where it was coming from. For me it is always just the brand name or the logo that I see/buy.

A few days ago while looking at the clothes labels for washing instructions; I stumbled upon something really fascinating. The first few articles of clothing I saw were made in different countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Jordan etc. I dug more and found a few more that were made in China. Extremely motivated I decided to search more and looked at several other clothes in my closet OK, the first four items—all shirts were made in Bangladesh. Hmm….then I noticed a few more—pants, scarfs, sweaters—made in China.  You must be wondering, what was going on and why was it so interesting. Well the interesting part was that all the clothing items older than 2 or more years were pretty much made in China, while those bought in past one year or so were made in different countries like Jordan, Vietnam, Chile etc. Could it be that cheap labor is no longer available in China or that people living in that country have come to realize their true potential and drifting more towards performing intellectual jobs such as research & development? Not too many would know that a lot of new research in the field of biology, microbiology, genetics or medicine is taking place in South Asian countries as opposed to Europe. Yes that's true, recently while working on my microbiology project, I was amazed to find out that many new bacterial species discovered in the past few years were all extensively researched or discovered by Chinese scientists. But coming back to the everyday consumer items, the shift is intriguing. And how this World wide integrated culture we call globalization, is impacting our lives and in true sense representative of who we are or what culture we belong to. For most part we don’t care where our clothes, shoes or other material goods are coming from. We as consumers just buy the stuff we like as they are mere reflection of our lifestyles—be it urban or traditional, than our cultural norms and/ or practices. The changing pace of technology and globalization has not only eliminated the distances between the countries but also the cultural diversity.

It is astonishing that while most of us may have never had crossed the U.S. border, the products we use/consume everyday are created, assembled and produced by different people in different countries. To us it is just the finished product that is being sold or marketed— be it clothes, shoes, toys, books, gadgets, cars or anything else. 

So What Culture do we actually belong to?!?!