Cultural Anthropology 4 Summary
Globalization – Eriksen
Introduction: A Shrinking Planet
Globalization refers to transnational connectedness and encompasses important economic, political,
cultural, and environmental dimensions.
These three dimensions of globalization-increased trade and transnational economic activity; faster and
denser communication networks; and increased tensions between (and within) cultural groups due to
intensified mutual exposure-do not suggest that the world has been fundamentally transformed after
the late 1980s, but that the driving forces of both economic, political, and cultural dynamics are
transnational and that this is now widely acknowledged:
The end of the Cold War itself entailed a broadening and deepening of global integration. The
global two-bloc system had made it difficult to think of geopolitics, transnational communication,
and international trade in terms not dictated by the opposition between the United States and
the Soviet Union and their respective allies. With the dissolution of this conflict, the world
seemed to have been left with a one-bloc system.
The lnternet, which had existed in embryonic form since the late '1960s, began to grow
exponentially around 1990.
ldentity politics-nationalist, ethnic, religious, territorial-were at the forefront of the international
agenda, both from above (states demanding homogeneity or engaging in ethnic cleansing) and
from below (minorities demanding equal rights or secession).
Few notions often associated with globalization, either simplistically or wrongly:
Globalization is really very recent and began only in the 1980s. This view betrays the beholder's
poor knowledge of history. World-systems have existed earlier in the sense that people all over
the world have participated, often involuntarily, in political and economic systems of a huge,
often intercontinental scale.
Globalization is just a new word for economic imperialism or cultural Westernization. This view
reduces the vast range of transnational processes to certain economic ones. Although it is
tautologically true that rich countries are dominant, the situation is not static.
Globalization means homogenizatlon. This view is always simplistic and usually misleading. First,
the participation in global, or transnational, processes often entails a vitalization of local cultural
expressions. Second, large segments of our everyday lives are hardly touched by globalization.
Globalization is opposed to human righb. an the contrary, the global spread of human rights is
one of the most spectacularly successful forms of globalization witnessed in the world.
Globalization is a threat to local identities. At the very best, this is a truth with serious
modifications.
Overheating is a way of talking about accelerated change.
Dimensions of Globilzation
Disembedding, including delocalization.
Speed
, Standardization
Connections
Mobilty
Mixing
Risk
Identity politics
Alterglobalization
Globalization can take place, and can be studied, lrom above or from below. A problematic but necessary
distinction, this dichotomy refers to the state, to major international organizations, and to powerful
business enterprises on the one hand and to interpersonal relationships on the other hand.
A distinction between objectiveand subjectiveglobalization, also not unproblematic, must also be made
initially. Objective globalization means that something is being incorporated into a global, or wide-
ranging, transnational system without necessarily being aware of it, whereas subjective globalization
amounts to the acknowledgement of such processes taking place (which they may or may not; citizens
often blame globalization for changes wrought locally).
Globalization does not entail the production of global uniformity, or homogeneity. Rather, it can be seen
as a way of organizing heterogeneity.
Seven Key Debates about Globalization
ls globalization new or old?
The concerns of academic and nonacademic, that the relationship of globalization to neoliberal
economics-that is, the view that free trade will eventually lead to prosperity everywhere and
that states should encumber the economy as little as possible.
Concerns about the relationship between globalization and democracy.
Deals with the relationship between poor and rich countries.
Does globalization lead to homogenization or to heterogenization-do we become more similar or
more different due to the increased transnational movement and communication?
Does globalization, through increasingly exposing us to each other's lives, lead to enhanced
solidarity, tolerance, and sympathy with people elsewhere, or, rather, does it lead to ferocious
counterreactions in the form of stubborn identity politics-nationalism, religious fundamentalism,
racism, and so on?
Concerns how European (or Western, or North Atlantic) globalization is.
Summary:
Globalization entails both the intensification of transnational connectedness and the awareness
of such intensification.
Globalization is largely driven by technological and economic processes, but it is
multidimensional and not unidirectional.
Globalization entails both processes of homogenization and processes of heterogenization: it
makes us more similar and more different at the same time.
Globalization is a wider concept than Westernization or neoimperialism and includes processes
that move from south to north as well as the opposite.
, Although globalization is old in the sense that transnational or even global systems have existed
for centuries-indeed for millennia-contemporary globalization has distinctive traits due to
enhanced communication technology and the global spread of capitalism.
Appadurai: Disjucture and Difference in the Global
Cultural Economy
Two main forces for sustained cultural interaction before this century:
1. Warfare (and the large-scale political systems sometimes generated by it)
2. Religions of conversion
The nature of the cultural gravitational field has changed. Different causes:
- The spirit of the expansion of Western maritime interests after 1500
- The relatively autonomous developments of large and aggressive social formations in the Americas
(such as the Aztecs and the Incas), in Eurasia (such as the Mongols and their descendants, the Mughals
and Ottomans), in island Southeast Asia (such as the Buginese), and in the kingdoms of pre-colonial
Africa (such as Dahomey), an overlapping set of ecumenes began to emerge, in which congeries of
money, commerce, conquest, and migration began to create durable cross-societal bonds.
This process was accelerated by the technology transfers and innovations of the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries technological explosion, largely in the domain of transportation and
information, that makes the interactions of a print-dominated world seem as hard-won and as easily
erased as the print revolution made earlier forms of cultural traffic appear.
Benedict Anderson
Print capitalism: the power of mass literacy and its attendant large-scale production of projects of ethnic
affinity that were remarkably free of the need for face-to-face communication or even of indirect
communication between persons and groups
The paradox of constructed primordialism: The act of reading things together set the stage for
movements based on a paradox
Marshall McLuhan
Global village: the world is considered as a single community linked by telecommunications, media
create communities with "no sense of place"
Fredic Jameson
Nostalgia for the present: looking back at a world that was never lost, nostalgia without memory.
The imagination as a social practice: No longer mere fantasy, no longer simple escape, no longer elite
pastime, and no longer mere contemplation, the imagination has become an organized field of social
practices, a form of work, 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 central problem of today's global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and
cultural heterogenization.
, 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) mediascapes, (c)
technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes these landscapes thus are the building blocks of
what I 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.
Ethnoscape: 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 a hitherto
unprecedented degree.
Technoscape: 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.
Financescapes: currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move
megamonies through national turnstiles at blinding speed, with vast, absolute implications for small
differences in percentage points and time units.
Mediascapes: refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate
information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, and film-production studios), 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 these media.
Ideoscapes: Ideoscapes are also concatenations of images, but they are often directly political and
frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counterideologies of movements explicitly
oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it. These ideoscapes are composed of elements of the
Enlightenment worldview, which consists of a chain of ideas, terms, and images, including/redom,
welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, and the master term democracy.
The global relationship among ethnoscapes, technoscapes, and financescapes is deeply disjunctive and
profoundly unpredictable because each of these landscapes is subject to its own constraints and
incentives (some political, some informational, and some technoenvironmental), at the same time as
each acts as a constraint and a parameter for movements in the others.
Deterritorialization, in general, is one of the central forces of the modern world because it brings
laboring 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 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.
It is in the fertile ground of deterritorialization, in which money, commodities, and persons are involved
in ceaselessly chasing each other around the world, that the mediascapes and ideoscapes of the modern
world find their fractured and fragmented counterpart.
