Globalization and Urban Culture in Dhaka

Kazi Abusaleh, M. Rezaul Islam, Md. Nurul Islam

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000584882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines globalization and urban cultures in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, from a socio-cultural view. It focuses on the evolving nature of urbanity in the city due to globalization and the global flow of information, while framing the changing patterns of everyday cultures and practices.

The volume explores key linkages and factors in urban transformation; the history and heritage of Old Dhaka; globalization, diverse urban cultures and ethnic spaces; changes in food habits, clothing, health practices, and recreation; changing forms of festivals, marriages, and religious practices; the situation of indigenous people in Old Dhaka; and the roles that need to be played by NGOs, civil society, and the local government. With its rich ethnographic case studies and field-based evidence, it discusses the relations between technology-driven economic activities and increasing cultural homogenization. It traces developments induced by cultural globalization and includes contemporary debates along with comparisons of Asian and global perspectives.

This book will be a useful resource for scholars and researchers of urban studies, city studies, urban sociology, social anthropology, cultural anthropology, political sociology, development studies, South Asian studies and cultural studies, and to those interested in Bangladesh.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003096979-1

The notion of change is observed everywhere around the world, particularly in the urban cultural arena. Since the beginning of human civilization, changes have been consistently taking place. There is no society or country in the world where change is implicit. Over time, the notion of change has been presented to us in a wide variety of terms like Europeanization,¹ Americanization,² or Indianization,³ where globalization, modernization, and urbanization have been playing as the primary change processes. The different phases of the growth of these change processes affect various aspects of the community and, at large, the country. In this chapter, first we discuss the intertwined notion of urbanization, globalization, and culture, and then move to a broad range of conceptual issues of these three concepts, and how these concepts have been used throughout the book. In the later section, we will introduce a short historical and cultural background of Dhaka city, in the broader category of Bangladesh, and the structure of the book.

The world faced a surprising demographic milestone on the eve of 23 May 2007, on which date more people became urban than rural, meaning more people lived in cities rather than pastoral areas in human history (Short, 2013). The author mentioned that only 3 people out of 100 would live in urban spaces in 1800, but the figure grew to 50 over the last 200 years. The movement of people centring in urban areas has been becoming more common throughout the global world. Urbanization is often viewed as the movement of people from rural areas to urban areas where the changes have become more implicit. Cities that might be small but nurture socio-political changes and play a significant part in social development (Clark, 2004). Creative and destructive cultural collisions started to appear throughout the world when empires centred around cities emerged and began to make contact with others. Globalization, on the other hand, has been playing a crucial role through the urbanization process and leading to emerging informal global urban cities as well. Dhaka, for instance, has been emerging as Bangladesh’s global city. Thus globalization has been aiding de facto city-states to emerge and fragmenting among city-states on the ground which cities are more successful to attract global capital and which are not. This is how urbanization has been taking place throughout the city centres of the world in the name of globalization and leading to emerging informal global urban cities. And this is the process of how cities, urbanization, and globalization have been intertwined.

Short (2013) explained the three urban revolutions. The first urban revolution dependently took place in Africa, Asia, and the USA more than 6,000 years ago, centring more sophisticated irrigation and surplus production. The second phase of urban revolution began in the 18th century, that later led to massive industrialization⁴ throughout the world, and an unparalleled rate of urban growth. The third phase of revolution has been taking place since the middle of the 20th century and we are in the midst of the third urban revolution now. The third phase of urban revolutions is marked by the massive scale of change, increasing the size of individual cities, remarkable metropolitanization, urban change as a global phenomenon, and assembling of connections among global cities. This is how the globalization process has been aiding urban cities to emerge, as cited earlier, as global cities interlink with global processes. Short (2013) propelled about three phases of globalization. The very first phase, as the author marked, was the year 1492, when separate hemispheres were permanently linked to form a single unit and when colonial rulers would supply new language, customs, rules and regulations, and grab precious goods and wealth in reverse. The second wave of globalization took place at the very end of the 19th century, when the world has started to witness the creation of international organizations and institutions, the creation of colonial economies and industrialized nations and so on. The second wave came to end in the interwar period when the world observed a great economic depression, reduced global trade and business, and restrictions on people’s mobility. New regulations were established after World War II to stabilize the global economy, and this paved the third wave of globalization. The emergence of economic globalization, the third wave of globalization, can be traced back to the Breton Woods Conference of 1944, formally known as the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference on the gradual emergence of a new international economic order, held at Breton Woods of New Hampshire in the USA after World War II (Markwell, 2006; Ahmed, 2013). Headed by the US and Great Britain, commitment came from the participants to expand international trade, lowering the trade and movement of the capital and humans with set binding rules on international economic activities. The conference further eased a stable money exchange system through a fixed gold value of the US dollar. Three institutional foundations came to the limelight following the conference, namely International Monetary Fund (IMF), International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (presently known as World Bank), and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (presently known as World Trade Organization) (Steger, 2003). The Breton Woods system, however, collapsed in early 1971 due to massive political changes that advocated a ‘neoliberal’ approach linking the notion of globalization (Steger, 2003). As a result, the liberal economies stemmed around the world, increasing the power of international corporations, internationalization of trade and finance, and the enhanced role of international economic institutions.

The neoliberal⁵ approach tied the world together, eased trespassing throughout world borders, opened the floodgate of global open economies and businesses, and brought out homogenization as a model, eliminating the creation of alienation. This process has made everything open for all and made a clear demarcation between who can grab and who cannot. The neoliberal approach has eased the process of accessing cultural materials of other countries sitting at home, and this has been leading to homogenization. In the homogenized world, people have access to the same cultural products, such as music, films, theatre, movies, etc. exposed to Chinese, American, Italian fast-food restaurants; wear the same clothes brought from international store chains; listen to the same music (through MTV) (Appadurai, 1996; Zukin, 2004; Fleerakkers, 2012). Thus the individual cultural world has been shrouding and homogenising into a single one. This process has been eliminating cultural boundaries and swaying traditional cultures, which is a matter of concern; however, it has also given global nations the place to replace superstitions and absorb rich cultures. Considering this background, the notion of urbanization, the emergence of global urban cities through the wave of globalization, and the cultural boundaries have got a momentum of discussion. At this stage, we will move to the detailing of conceptual frameworks of globalization, culture, and urban culture, and then move on to a brief historical background before clarifying the need for writing this book.

The notion of globalization entitles the concept of the borderless global village and puts global human beings into a single community. Islam, Wahab, Burmester, and Chowdhury (2019) argue:

Globalization creates huge diversity that may have some positive impacts, but its negative consequence is large particularly in the developing economies. It is seen that the flow of diversity slowly diminished local culture and identity.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the notion of ‘modernization’ was widely used by world academicians and was a popular campaign all over the developing countries, where the West was presented as modern, symbolized as the standard possessor of culture, and a section of people around the world became fervent to imitate that style (Khan, 2013). The Western adventures thus made a sentient effort to undermine the cultural heritages of global people, imposing religious and cultural practices, while today the same is true on the march of globalization (Zahid, 2007). The majority of the global scholars anonymously agree that globalization has economic, political, cultural, and even religious impacts on individuals, nations, and the world at large, though their views differ in terms of its nature and extensity, its boons and detrimental impacts (Kwame, 2006). The impressive reflection of globalization, however, is largely observable at the cultural level in recent decades. Due to globalization, a single global culture is observed followed by the homogenization of urban lifestyle (Appadurai, 1996; Zukin, 1998; Fleerakkers, 2012). The concept of borderless boundaries and sharing the same idea throughout the cities of the world has resulted in visible homogenization throughout the globe, especially through the visible development of new cultural and commercial projects in city centres (Zukin, 2009; Mirgolami, 2011). Michel-Schertges (2019) expressed two assumptions regarding the contemporary influence of globalization on culture. The first one is the homogenization of global cultures under the logic of Western capitalistic cultural industry, and the latter one is the cultural hybridization, a blend of indigenous cultures with the Western one. Although the dimensions of globalization are interrelated and interconnected, this book’s main area of discussion is the ‘cultural globalization’ that has been affecting the global village, especially urban areas, in all respects. Hence, conceptual issues of globalization, culture, and urban culture are being placed at the following stage.

Globalization

While primarily there were national media in the past, in the 1990s, the global commercial media markets emerged in the name of cultural globalization, and media giants established networks for business purposes within and across the national boundaries (Hossin & Mohiuddin, 2015). With time, the dissemination of the invented satellite, internet, communication devices, and cable television throughout the world have faded the cultural boundaries away and shaped the perceptions of the people as ordinary global citizens. Consequently, local norms, values, and ideals have been transformed by global ideals or by the nearer neighbour country’s enriched culture. Globalization, however, talks about the borderless village, trade and transactions, capital and investments, dissemination of knowledge, migration, and movement of the people, and also takes into consideration the most pressing global issues, e.g., global warming and climate change, human rights and social justice, global public health, education, and sustainability, etc. Today’s NIKE, Wal-Mart, Toyota, Microsoft Corporations, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Bata, IBM, Sony Corporation, etc. have taken a dominating role in world business, and media plays a crucial role in advertising and showing the superiority of these products and services over local options. Consequently, though slowly and steadily, people begin to change the menu of food that they eat, the nature of clothes that they wear, and the lifestyles that they lead (Tomlinson, 1999). Through this process, cultural globalization has been taking away the traditional or local culture.

Definitions of globalization

Though the term ‘globalization’ has accelerated since the 18th century due to communication and transportation technology, and gained popularity since the very beginning of the 20th century, since 1970 the term has presented us with two distinct aspects, e.g., development of technology, and the development of economic power (Mathew, 2014). The synonyms of ‘globalization’, however, are proliferation, extension, growth, maturation, internationalization, economic process, global integration, etc. The dictionary meaning of globalization varies widely. The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (2006) defines globalization as the reorganization of time, space, people, and things in the 21st century. On the other hand, the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics (2015) defines globalization from a broader perspective, especially from an economic as well as a political perspective, starting with the swift increase of international trade and investment, the augmented consciousness of ecological interdependence, the gradual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Globalization and changing urban cultures: Contemporary debates and perspectives
• 3 Old Dhaka: History, tradition and culture
• 4 Everyday culture and changing practices
• 5 Changing patterns of ritual and festivals
• 6 Cultural transition and adaptation: Way forward
• Index