Transnational Connections

Culture, People, Places

Ulf Hannerz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134764150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popular en el arte

This work provides an account of culture in an age of globalization. Ulf Hannerz argues that, in an ever-more interconnected world, national understandings of culture have become insufficient. He explores the implications of boundary-crossings and long-distance cultural flows for established notions of "the local", "community", "nation" and "modernity" Hannerz not only engages with theoretical debates about culture and globalization but raises issues of how we think and live today. His account of the experience of global culture encompasses a shouting match in a New York street about Salman Rushdie, a papal visit to the Maya Indians; kung-fu dancers in Nigeria and Rastafarians in Amsterdam; the nostalgia of foreign correspondents; and the surprising experiences of tourists in a world city or on a Borneo photo safari.

1
INTRODUCTION
Nigerian Kung Fu, Manhattan fatwa

The Chapters in this book have grown in a certain biographical terrain. This will become apparent off and on, but let me sketch a few landmarks immediately: a modest hotel in one continent, a street scene in another, and a small village in a third.

Rosy Guest Inn, when I stayed there during several periods in the 1970s and 1980s, was a simple one-storey building, with bright yellow walls and blue shutters (and iron bars rather than glass in the windows), under a corrugated zinc roof. In the inside courtyard toward which rooms opened, there was a central water tap. The kitchen staff would slaughter a chicken or two under it in the morning, while otherwise it was available to the guests. Probably never more than half a dozen at any one time, these included ginger traders, itinerant magicians, and soldiers on a weekend spending spree.

I was in Kafanchan, the central Nigerian town where Rosy Guest Inn was located, to do anthropological field research, and became the only long-term guest in the establishment when I was confronted with a housing shortage in the town after a unit of the Nigerian army had based itself there, and the officers had spread themselves over much of whatever accommodation was available.¹ By staying at Rosy Guest Inn, I avoided the distractions of establishing a household of my own. (After a tiring day, I could come into the dining room and ask for a pot of tea, and the young woman in charge would bend over the table and ask, for clarification, “coffee or Tetley’s?” As I had the only typewriter in the house, I could also help out retyping the menu.) But staying there also helped me gain a sense of both the physical and the mental mobility of contemporary Nigerian urban life, of the horizons of townspeople who came there for meals and boisterous arguments, and of the standards by which visitors judged Kafanchan. A trader from a bigger city found no local taxis plying Kafanchan’s alternately muddy or dusty streets, and asked me what I would propose for local transportation. In jest I suggested he might check if one of the truck-pushers resting under the big tree in Danhaya Street would be willing to push him around. He looked at me in horror before he broke into laughter.

The proprietor of Rosy Guest Inn, a migrant from the south, did not live in Kafanchan, but he visited every week, coming in on his puffing motorcycle from the bigger city some distance away. There was another Rosy Guest Inn there, and a third in the university town a little further north; he also ran two book and stationery shops, one of them in Kafanchan, where I would go for newspapers. He preferred to staff his businesses with his relatives, although in Kafanchan an exception was made in the kitchen, where he preferred to have a man from Calabar, on the southeast coast of Nigeria. Since early colonial times, Calabar cooks have had a reputation as the best professional cooks in Nigeria (although perhaps the one in Kafanchan did not do much to uphold it).

I still have the studio photograph which Rosy Guest Inn’s proprietor had taken of him and me on the eve of one of my departures, as well as his elegant name-card, in a sort of wooden finish, with his several business addresses, and the home address which he shared with wife and twelve children. At Rosy Guest Inn in Kafanchan I also first encountered Ben, a young electrician who was working there at the time when electricity was being introduced, in a period of Nigerian petroleum-based affluence, in Kafanchan as well as many other small towns.

Ben (whose father had been the first in his village to more or less give up tilling the soil and become a petty trader) turned out to be a person of many talents and interests, and so when the work of electrification was in large part done, he started working with me instead, in the varied roles of a field anthropologist’s assistant – guide, advisor, interpreter, go-between. He would enjoy conversing and dancing the Kung Fu in Kafanchan’s beer bars, would complain about having to kneel on the coarse cement floor in one of the small breakaway churches we visited, would sometimes ask leading local businessmen rather more pointed questions than I had dared do myself, and would also have endless questions for me about other cities, other countries. I was not surprised when he asked me if he could have my newspapers after I had read them, although perhaps a little disappointed when it turned out he would take them straight to the market place to sell them to traders who used them to wrap dried fish.

Again, this was in the 1970s. One of Ben’s older brothers who was an army officer had named his first-born son Gagarin, after the Soviet cosmonaut. When Ben had his first son, he wanted to go one better, and named him Lenin. Some time later, when I was there, Ben discovered that the students at a teachers’ college on the outskirts of Kafanchan (where he also did occasional electrical work) lacked a convenient shopping facility for soap, snacks, matches and other small items. So he thought of establishing a small shop there, which as a proud father he would operate in his young son’s name – “Lenin’s Supermarket.” More than a decade before the demise of state socialism in the Soviet Union, this now seems remarkably foresightful.

A decade or so later, another urban scene: it is a winter morning in New York, and I stand in line on a lower Broadway sidewalk, hoping like a great many others to get into a public meeting where a number of leading American writers are to appear, to show their support for Salman Rushdie. The Satanic Verses has just appeared, and Ayatollah Khomeini has issued his fatwa.

Far too many people were out there under the umbrellas, so most of us (myself included) did not get into the small hall. Instead we witnessed, or took part in, the goings-on outside. On one side of Broadway, then, were the people who had wanted to get into the meeting, members of a well-educated American middle class, shouting “Free Speech! Free Speech!” or even “Hey hey, ho ho, Hizbollah has got to go.” (One woman passed by and commented that this was like in ‘68.) On the sidewalk across the street was a gathering of Muslim immigrants, with their own speech choirs, and their own posters. One of the latter argued that “Islam promotes dialogue.” And so there they were, east and west, or north and south if one so prefers, on opposing sides of lower Broadway, shouting at each other.

The third place is a village in southern Sweden, where I spend most summers. My greatgrandfather bought a small house there after he realized that none of his sons was about to take over the family farm, a few miles away. My grandfather became a sea captain, and two of his brothers emigrated to America. Their two unmarried sisters remained in the house after the elderly parents had died, reporting in letters to their city relatives about seasonal changes in the garden, the habits of hedgehogs, and the arrivals and departures of birds of passage.

Over the years, the village has changed. Most of the villagers used to be artisans and farm people. Now many of them (or rather their successors) commute to nearby towns. The house next door belonged for a while to a famous former bank-robber who had started a new life; not so entirely easy, as people would still tend to remember the time when he was internationally televised, holding a frightened group of bank employees to ransom. Since he left, a retired farming couple live in that house. The wife, speaking the local dialect with an almost undetectable accent, grew up between the world wars as the daughter of a prosperous landowner in East Prussia, and entered adulthood in a new country just as the old way of life had been destroyed forever.

A few houses further away, a star ice hockey player resided fairly briefly, brought there by a wealthy local entrepreneur (not a village resident, however) who wanted to advance the fortunes of a team in a nearby town. But the hockey player was soon bought by a major Canadian team, in the National Hockey League in North America, and has not been seen since. Villagers still speak of his hot temper. The old village grocery has been turned into an art gallery, and the woman who runs it also teaches courses in intercultural communication at an adult education center in the town. Apart from the lady from East Prussia, only a few people originating in other countries have yet made their way, somehow, to this village. (In the nearest town, a fair number of Vietnamese appear to lead quiet lives.) Yet as elections are coming up, they and their neighbors find in their mailboxes a leaflet from a right-wing group in the city some twenty miles to the south, proclaiming that Sweden has been turning, in a few decades, from a welfare state and a folkhem, “home of the people,” into a “multicultural inferno.”

A GLOBAL ECUMENE

Distances, and boundaries, are not what they used to be. The local magnate who brought the ice hockey celebrity to our village also took some special interest in long-distance travel – he erected a small monument in the forest at the place where he had once on a summer evening encountered a spaceship and its crew, from another planet. Unfortunately, as one crew member had become ill and they all had to return to where they came from, nobody else saw them.

Mostly, we are not yet into interplanetary connections. But this is a time when transnational connections are becoming increasingly varied and pervasive, with large or small implications for human life and culture. People move about across national boundary lines, for different reasons: in the Swedish village, because for someone an earlier way of life elsewhere has been destroyed, in a part of Germany no longer German, or because for someone else the pay in Canada is better. The technologies of mobility have changed, and a growing range of media reach across borders to make claims on our senses. Our imagination has no difficulty with what happens to be far away. On the contrary, it can often feed on distances, and on the many ways in which the distant can suddenly be close.

Anthropologists, it has been said, are “merchants of astonishment,” dealing in the wonders of strange cultures (Geertz 1984: 275). No doubt there is a great deal to that description, although one might worry that the market for this kind of merchandise will shrink when some of the more remarkable customs in the global cultural inventory fade away, and when in any case more people have seen too much to be easily astonishable. At present, it seems that some of the goods consist of the astonishment of displacement and juxtaposition: Kafanchan Kung Fu, Manhattan fatwa. Yet the sheer surprise value of such goods may soon enough also decline, as we accumulate more and more anecdotal evidence of this type.

At least for as long as I have been in it, anthropology has been in the process of being “rethought,” “reinvented,” “recaptured”. Some say this is because it is in a crisis, although it could just be a sign of vitality, and ongoing adaptation to changing circumstances (as well as of generational struggles, and the pressures of the academic marketplace). Anyhow, the desire to cultivate new understandings of how the world hangs together, of transnational connections, in the organization of meanings and actions – and move beyond mere astonishment over new mixtures and combinations – is clearly one increasingly important strand in changing anthropology now, as an intellectual enterprise and as a craft.

When I turned to anthropology in the early 1960s, this was the subject in the university which would allow you (or, perhaps more precisely, force you) to engage with exotic continents like Africa, and where the assumption indeed was that if you stayed on your course long enough, you would end up in a distant village in another continent, trying to make sense of a slice of local life. The world, to anthropologists at least, seemed to be made up of a myriad of such more or less local, bounded entities; a sort of global mosaic.

Then anthropology went through a period of critical scrutiny, from inside and outside, as colonialism’s child. The idea of ha4ving a separate discipline for a study of “other cultures,” for the West looking at the rest, appeared increasingly dubious, on moral and intellectual grounds. (Consequently there is no particular emphasis on “the rest” in this book, apart from the fact that I may show some predilection for things African.) More researchers began doing “anthropology at home,” a rather stretchable notion. Yet even then, the assumption of the mosaic of small-scale, territorially anchored social and cultural units mostly remained in place.

By the time I came to Kafanchan, I expected to do a local study, an experiment in urban anthropology, a study of an internally complex and heterogeneous town as a whole. Surely this was already a step away from the traditions of anthropology. The people of the town, migrants from all over Nigeria, belonged to ethnic groups about which some of the discipline’s classic monographs were once written – Ibo, Hausa, Yoruba, Tiv, Nupe. And ethnicity, “tribalism,” was certainly one of the everyday principles of social organization in the life of the town. Yet it was not wholly uncontroversial. In the ledger at Rosy Guest Inn, where guests were requested to register their names, occupations, and addresses, and also their tribes, one guest wrote in an irritated paragraph of protest against the tribal column. This, he said, had no place in a united Nigeria. The practice was retrograde and should be abolished immediately. I suspect that the proprietor had really only copied the design from the guest ledger at the more prestigious staterun hotel on the outskirts of Kafanchan.

The tiff between the management and the enlightened guest at Rosy Guest Inn is a reminder that Nigeria is one of the many places where the national is understood to be threatened mostly from below, by sectional loyalties which are more local. All the same, the idea of the national was there, in a country which had not existed, either as an independent or as a dependent but coherent entity, at the last turn of a century. It was a conception imported from the outside, making Nigeria itself in significant part an organizational artifact of the integrative processes in the world.

As I was doing my urban study, I became increasingly preoccupied with the nature of contemporary Nigerian culture on this rather wider scale. How do you understand, and portray, a culture shaped by an intense, continuous, comprehensive interplay between the indigenous and the imported? What tools do we need to grasp the character of what may even be thought of as a new civilization? Beyond such questions, moreover, there was a larger one: in what kind of global interconnectedness does Kafanchan, a town built around a colonial-era railway junction, with inhabitants like Ben and his son Lenin, now have a place?

What follows is a series of partial attempts to approach an answer to that question; even as we will often seem far away from Kafanchan, for much the same question can accompany us to lower Broadway in Manhattan, or to the south Swedish village, or to any number of other settings.

In these introductory notes, I want to make some general points, and also say something about the organization of the Chapters. First, a few comments on vocabulary may be in order. After a fashion, this is obviously a book on “globalization” – a key word of the present, and as such, a contested term. One almost expects any mention of globalization now to be accompanied by either booing or cheering. To business consultants and journalists, this is apparently often a word with a pleasant ring – newsworthy, promising of opportunities. In the sense of “cultural imperialism,” on the other hand, it is understood to be bad, and listening to stories of “the global” versus “the local,” we are expected to know where our sympathies should lie.

It would seem to me that contemporary interconnectedness in the world is really too complicated and diverse to be either condemned or applauded as a whole. Different aspects of it may quite justifiably draw different responses – detached analysis sometimes, a sense of wonder over its intricacies at other times, not always a rush to moral judgment. This book is not intended as a paean to globalization, nor as its opposite.

I am also somewhat uncomfortable with the rather prodigious use of the term globalization to describe just about any process or relationship that somehow crosses state boundaries. In themselves, many such processes and relationships obviously do not at all extend across the world. The term “transnational” is in a way more humble, and often a more adequate label for phenomena which can be of quite variable scale and distribution, even when they do share the characteristic of not being contained within a state.²It also makes the point that many of the linkages in question are not “international,” in the strict sense of involving nations – actually, states – as corporate actors. In the transnational arena, the actors may now be individuals, groups, movements, business enterprises, and in no small part it is this diversity of organization that we need to consider.³ (At the same time, there is a certain irony in the tendency of the term “transnational” to draw attention to what it negates – that is, to the continued significance of the national.)

Some things may be more truly global in themselves, however, and in their crisscrossing aggregate, transnational connections contribute to overall interconnectedness. By what term can we capture this quality of the entity as a whole? While the notion of the world as a mosaic now looks questionable – too much boundedness and stability – other metaphors may come to mind. In the mid-1960s, Marshall McLuhan (e.g. 1964: 93), provocatively rewriting world cultural history (past, present, future) in terms of communication media properties, suggested that there was now a “global village.” The term has stuck in public consciousness, much more than most of McLuhan’s far-reaching claims. (The Queen of England, for example, recently used it in a Christmas address to the British people. One can hardly imagine it coming from the mouth of one of her royal predecessors, during that period when the sun never set in the Empire, and much of the world map was colored pink.) Yet the “global village” is in some ways a misleading notion. It suggests not only interconnectedness but, probably to many of us, a sense of greater togetherness, of immediacy and reciprocity in relationships, a very large- scale idyll. The world is not much like that.

I prefer another term, drawn from anthropology’s past. (Sometimes it is perhaps not so much “reinventing” that is needed, but – to begin with, at least – some mere “remembering,” or “retrieving,” in so far as previous generations have left certain unfinished, yet worthwhile business behind.) Around the mid-twentieth century, a handful of leading anthropologists, such as Alfred Kroeber and Robert Redfield, were engaged in different ways in shaping a ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1: INTRODUCTION: NIGERIAN KUNG FU, MANHATTAN FATWA
• PART I: CULTURE
• PART II: PEOPLE
• PART III: PLACES
• NOTES
• REFERENCES