Global South

It's hard when traveling through those parts of the world loosely described by optimists as developing, by less-than-optimists as underdeveloped, by cold-warriors as the Third World, by the vaguely left academy as the Global South, not to feel as if one is in the human zoo. Sure, people, travel to learn, but it's really not that different than an updated version of Victorian slum tourism as was practiced in the East End of London and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And I mean that on multiple levels. Not only were those well-heeled inhabitants of Belgravia and Central Park East interested in seeing how the other half lived – the poor dears! – there was also a libidinal aspect to it. Given the staid, conformist restrictions of late Victorian mores (notwithstanding the spiritualist-rituals and erotic-spanking underbelly), they wanted an antidote to bourgeois dullness, an environment of real risk and sexual frankness, some kind of transcendental link to a supposed core of human experience and earthy humanity that had been obscured by arguments over the proper way to instruct one's maids to fold the napkins.

So it is with backpackers today, and I regrettably have to include myself in their ranks, despite my protestations to the contrary at the time. It was what I was doing. When I first went to Cambodia, for example, it was largely because it was about as dissimilar a place from my middle-class, middlebrow, Middle-American hometown as I could imagine. I wanted to go someplace where the veil would be lifted.

I was in Satun Province, in the far south of Thailand, where I was to spend time with the Sakai, the indigenous forest pygmies of the Malayan Peninsula. Looking nothing like the surrounding peoples – ebony-skinned, with tightly curled hair, closer in appearance to New Guineans than East Asians, they lived in a somewhat fugitive state, trying, with limited success, to preserve the lifeways of their ancestors.

Giggling Thai schoolchildren whispered and took photos. Which was gross, but not nearly as gross as the fact that the village was filled with our shit. Plastic 7-Eleven bags, the butts of cheap Thai Tobacco Monopoly-branded cigarettes, crumpled toilet paper.

Repeat for Myanmar, Cambodia, the Philippines, Mexico.

This is the pattern of the Global South, as seen time and time again. Despite the vast differences in geography and religion, a certain typology emerges.

Barking dogs and roosters pecking at the ground, young men squatting close to the dirt, pausing in the day's work, tossed-aside cups of instant noodles, adorable children with dark eyes and skinny legs laughing and playing and running around in broken rubber sandals, flickering TVs playing the sort of broad-stroke entertainment beloved throughout the less irony-damaged parts of the world (the soap operas and variety shows that Americans have long-since eschewed in favor of pre-hated reality shows), men with bruised faces wearing t-shirts advertising Harley-Davidson dealerships in San Antonio, old women chewing something mysterious, plastic bottles filled with local hooch, the cinder-block homes of wealthier residents, and the universal smell of burning waste on a hot day, bamboo and coconut shells and firewood mingled with polystyrene.

Critics of globalization like to claim that late capitalism engenders a monoculture, a Shake Shack on every continent, what the French like to call “coca-colonization.” I've always been rather skeptical of that argument – while every local pattern of life is going to be inevitably altered, it's not necessarily going to mean that everything is going to look like a third-ring suburb of Chicago. Rather, if there is a monoculture resulting from globalization, this is what it looks like.

As rates of profit tend to fall, the forces of capital inevitably need to seek markets deeper and deeper into the Global South, and ideally add a few hundred million to the reserve army of labor. This isn't development along the Japanese or Korean model, where rural regions were developed with intelligent, long-term planning. This is the vulgarity of rent-seeking, regulatory capture, predatory lending from both institutions in the Western world as well as local loan sharks, the hand-greasing and wholesale buyout of local politicians, hell, whole states. Of ceaseless exploitation of natural and human resources with absolutely no consideration given as to who that affects and in what way.

If birthrates and economic patterns are anything to go by, then this will be a truer representation of our planetary future, by and large, than anything else: an empty sachet of Nescafe on a burning fire in the steamy tropical dawn.