SD373 Cultural Identity 27 April 2007

Global and Local

(References- Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis & London: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996; David Harvey, The condition of postmodernity : an enquiry into the origins of cultural change, Oxford, England : Blackwell, 1989)


1. Globalization – One World or Many Worlds? :
-During the 1990’s, dominant understandings of globalization were framed in economic terms. This reflected the importance of global corporations, the role of the finance industries, and the new forms of communication and IT integrating them. This dominant view regarded the increasing integration of the world economy as leading to a convergence of societies. This view implied that the emergence and triumph of globalization involved a universal, western model of social and economic organization.

-Such perspective perpetuates a view of the global as constituted by an active, dominant centre, and defensive or subordinate reactions (fundamentalist groups or countries) forced to defend themselves against a process originated from outside. From this understanding of globalization, there is only one model for globalization, “the west” or “capitalism”, which remains within the old paradigm of modernization, understood as the universalization of a dominant social model. According this view, there is not only one sources of globalization, there is also only one process of globalization, and it travels in uni-direction (Westother regions)

-At the same time, globalization also involves cultural processes. And one of these processes involves the view that understanding globalization as an extension of abstract space and homogenous time to the globe as a whole, where space is understood as continuous in all directions (regarded the globe as a functional whole), and society/globe is understood as “a whole consisting of the simultaneous happening of all the myriad events that marks the lives of its members at that moment” (Charles Taylor). In short, according to this view, the globe is regarded as “one world”. (homogenous identity?)

-Question: but does this account of “one world” able to make sense of the increasingly complex reality?

2. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy :

-But as what the prominent Indian American anthropologist Appadurai argues: “the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centre- periphery model.” And “the central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization.”

-“Most often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization or an argument about commoditization, and very often, the two arguments are closely related.” (Douglas Kellner, ‘Theorizing/Resisting McDonaldization: A Multiperspectivist Approach,’ http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell30.htm
) “What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or other way: this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spectacle and constitutions.” (examples: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS_XmtSFQoU&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Et7GRWqAkY&mode=related&search=) At the same time, “it is worth noticing that for the people of Irian Jaya,… and Russianization for the people of Soviet Armenia and the Baltic republics.”

-Remark: beside of the economic and institutional, there is “something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice.” “…the imagination become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labour and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility.” “The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order.”

-“The complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture and politics.” And Appadurai “proposes that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship among five dimensions of global cultural flows that can be termed (a) ethnoscapes, (b) technoscapes, (c) mediascapes, (d) fiancescapes, (e) ideoscapes.” ( the suffix “-scape” points to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterize international capital as well as they do international clothing style. These terms also indicate that these are not objectively given relations, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sort of actors: nation-state, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as subnational groupings and movements, and even intimate face-to-face groups)

-These landscapes are the building blocks of what Appadurai would like to call “imagined worlds”, “that is, the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe. An important fact of the world we live in today is that many persons on the globe live in such imagined worlds…and thus are to contest and sometimes even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them.”

(a) Ethnoscapes: “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to hitherto unprecedented degree.” The warp of stabilities of communities and networks of kinship, friendship, work, birth, residence and etc “is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion , as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting to move”(that now function on larger scales)
e.g.《人民公廁》

(b) Technoscapes: “the global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology and the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries.” “The odd distribution of technologies, and thus the peculiarities of these technoscapes, are increasingly driven not by any obvious economies of scale, of political control, or of market rationality but by increasingly complex relationships among money flows, political possibilities, and the availability of un- and highly skilled labour.”

(c) Fiancescapes: “the disposition of global capital is now a more mysterious, rapid, and difficult landscape to follow than ever before, as currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move megamonies through national turnstiles at blinding speed”, “but the critical point is that the global relationship among ethnoscapes, technoscapes, and fiancescapes is deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable because each of theselandscapes is subject to its own constraints and incentives…at the same time as each acts as a constraint and a parameter for movements in the others.”
e.g.《斷背山》、《英雄》、《無間道》+《無間道風雲》



(Mediascapes and ideoscapes: closely related landscapes of image)

(d) Mediascapes: “refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, and film-production), which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the images of the world created by theses media.” ”What is most important about these mediascapes is that they provide…large and complex repertoires of images, narratives, and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of news and politics are profoundly mixed.” “The lines between the realistic and the fictional landscapes they see are blurred, so that the farther away these audiences are from the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct imagined worlds…”

(e) Ideoscapes: they are also concatenation of images, “but they are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or piece of it. These ideoscapes are composed of elements of the Enlightenment worldview, which consists of a chain of ideas, terms, and images, including freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, abd the master term democracy…the diaspora of these terms and images across the world…has loosened the internal coherence that held them together in a Euro-American master narrative and provided instead a loosely structured synopticon of politics, in which different nation-states…have organized their political cultures around different keywords”

-The above is a tentative formulation about the conditions under which current global flows occurs: they occur in and through the growing disjunctures among ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, fiancescapes, and ideoscapes. Several points to be noted:

-“people, machinery, money, images, and ideas now follow increasingly non-isomorphic paths…but the sheer speed, scale, and volumes of each of these flows are now so great that the disjunctures have become central to the politics of global culture.” (e.g. Japanese’s hospitality to idea vs. closed to immigration)

-“Deterritorialization, in general, is one of the central forces of modern world because of brings labouring populations into the lower-class sectors and spaces of relatively wealthy societies, while sometimes creating exaggerated and intensified senses of criticism or attachment to politics in the home state.”( e.g. Islamic and Hindu global fundamentalism )

-“At the same time, deterritorialization creates new markets for film companies, art impresarios, and travel agencies, which thrive on the need of the deterritorialized population for contact with its homeland…these invented domelands, which constitute the mediascapes of deterritorialized groups, can often become sufficiently fantastic and one-sided that they provided the material for new ideoscapes in which ethnic conflicts can begin to erupt.” (e.g. 海外保釣運動)

-Nation-state: “States find themselves pressed to stay open by the forces of media, technology, and travel that have fuelled consumerism throughout the world and have increased the craving, even in the non-Western world, for new commodities and spectacles.” (e.g. 中國入世、03SARS事件、08奥運) “On the other hand, these very craving can become caught up in new ethniscapes, mediascape, and, eventually, ideoscapes, such as democracy in China, that the state cannot tolerate as threats to its own control over ideas of nationhood and peoplehood.”(e.g. 64事件、河南愛滋村)



-“the central paradox of ethnic politics in today’s world is that primordia (whether of language or skin colour or neighbourhood or kinship) is globalized. ” These sentiments “have become spread over vast and irregular spaces as groups move yet stay linked to one another through sophisticated media capabilities.” “the disjunctive and unstable interplay of commerce, media, national policies, and consumer fantasies, ethnicity, once a genie contained in the bottle of some sort of locality…has now become a global force, forever slipping in and through the cracks between states and borders.”

-“The globalization of culture is not the same as its homogenization, but globalization involves the use of a variety of instruments of homogenization (armaments, advertising techniques, language hegemonies, and clothing styles) that are absorbed into local political and cultural economies, only to be repatriated as heterogeneous dialogues of national sovereignty, free enterprise, and fundamentalism in which the state plays an increasingly delicate role: too much openness to global flows, and the nation-state is threaten by revolt…too little, and the state exits the international stage…”(e.g. PRC 廣告) “the state become the arbitrageur of this form of repatriation of difference (in the form of goods, signs, slogans, and styles). But this repatriation or export of designs and commodities of difference continuously exacerbates the internal politics of majoritarianism and homogenization…” (e.g. Nationalism in PRC )


《中國可以說不》(1996年): 宋強、張藏藏、喬邊、古清生、湯正宇

-“Thus the central feature of global culture today is the politics of the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another.”

-“How do small groups, especially families, the classical loci of scialization, deal these new global realities as they seek to reproduce themselves?” (cultural and identity reproduction)

-“the sort of trangenerational stability of knowledge that was presupposed in most theories of enculturation can no longer be assumed.” “As families move to new locations, or as children move before older generations, or s grown sons and daughters return from time spent in strange parts of the world, family relationships can become volatile.”

-“What is new is that this is a world in which both points of departure and points of arrival are in cultural flux, and thus the search for steady points of reference, as critical life choices are made, can be very difficult.”

-“culture becomes less what Pierre Bourdieu would have called a habitus ( a tacit realm of reproducible practices and disposition) and more an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation, the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences.”

-“At larger levels of organization, there can be many forms of cultural politics within displaced population…., all which are inflected in important ways by media (and the mediscapes and ideoscapes they offer).”

-“In short, deterritorialized communities and displaced populations, however much they may enjoy the fruits of new kinds of earning and new dispositions of capital and technology, have to play out the desires and fantasies of these new ethnoscapes, while striving to reproduce the family-as-microcosm of culture.”

3. The Cultural Production of Locality:

-“Put simply, the task of producing locality (as a structure of feeling, a property of social life, and an ideology of situated community) is increasingly a struggle.”

-“The three factors that most directly affect the production of locality in the world of the present – the nation-state, diasporic flows, and electronic and virtual communities- are themselves articulated in variable, puzzling, sometimes contradictory ways that depend on the cultural, class, historical and ecological setting within which they come together. In part, this variability is itself a product of the way that todays’ ethnoscapes interact irregularly with finance, media, and technological imaginaries.”

“The problems of cultural reproduction in a globalized world are only partly describable in terms of problems of race and class, gender and power, although they are surely crucially involved. An even more fundamental fact is that the production of locality- always, as I have argued, a fragile and difficult achievement-is more than ever shot through with contradictions, destabilized by human motion, and displaced by the formation of new kinds of virtual neighbourhoods.”