GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURE

1. GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURE

2. Impact of globalization (de-territorialisation, integration, inter-dependence on culture and the issue of difference? Are movements of money, goods, people, cultural signs, creating a global culture? • Is ‘global culture’ homogeneous?

3. Context of question • Earlier problematic view • Hidden assumption – ‘pre-globalization’ cultures contained in territorially contained units (silos) • Cultural monads • Huntington • Said – essentialized, simplified

4. False view • Cross cultural and civilization contact and encounters • Cultures co=constructed • All cultures distillations of cultural/civilizational encounters • Arab; Indian, Chinese

5. Global culture – homogeneous? • Richard Falk – Glob. From Above – elite • Language, travel, thinking, life-style • Standardization, massification –products, • Consumption? • Ignores – reception/agency differentiation (marketing), culturally shaped taste

6. I product differentiation – localization -commodities tailor made to local tastes 2 cultural imperialism? (reception theory, non-agentic) – something is changed, filtered through local understanding 3 Domestication (taming, making safe, reducing otherness of other) foreign meanings associated with cultural products re-contextualized to be given local meanings, tastes and values) examples?

7. Cosmopolitans and Locals • Earlier defined by Urban national, local village Distinctions, consumption – urbanity Globalization – Cosmopolitans not simply travel, or trans-national, Includes several categories of people: exiles, refugees, expatriates, immigrants closed or open

8. Cosmopolitans: openness to others, those who can become ‘infected’ by other, i.e. changed, impacted by other. different ways to ‘travel’ passage made ‘safe’ no contact with others, competence in culture? Capacity to be hospitable to ‘other’

9. Stuart Hall • Circuits of late capitalism move through circuits of differentiation • English or American imperium – extension of English or American culture on world scale, • Late capitalism- world market – production and consumption sustained only by production of difference • Diversity /capitalism

10. Glocalization • Globality and locality not opposed but mutually constituted • Globality works through production of difference • Globalization and heterogeneity simultaneously produced

11. Jihad (traditional) vs. McWorld (global) • (Reference is to Benjamin Barber’s book Jihad vs McWorld) • Flawed reasoning • Denies local any element of universal • Locality produced by global • Pan-Africanism, (Jihad)

12. Hybridity • ‘ways in which forms become separated from existing practices and recombined with new forms in practice’ • Creolization, mixing up, melange • New creations, meanings context specific are re-situated • Mimicry, ambivalence