Global Culture

6 Key excerpts on "Global Culture"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Globalization

  A Basic Text

  • George Ritzer, Paul Dean(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 8 Global Culture AND CULTURAL FLOWS

  • Cultural Differentialism
    • Civilizations
    • Religion
  • Cultural Hybridization
    • Muslim Girl Scouts
    • Salsa
    • Appadurai’s “landscapes”
  • Cultural Convergence
    • Cultural imperialism
    • World culture
    • McDonaldization
    • The globalization of nothing
    • Sport: global, glocal, grobal
  • Chapter Summary

  Because much of it exists in the form of ideas, words, images, musical sounds, and so on, culture tends to flow comparatively easily throughout the world. In fact, that flow is increasingly easy because culture exists increasingly in digitized forms. Thus, the Internet permits global downloading and sharing of digitized cultural forms such as movies, videos, music, books, newspapers, photos, and so on. Further, those who see themselves as part of the same culture can maintain contact with one another through e-mail or via virtual face-to-face contact on Skype. They can also remain immersed within the culture in which they exist and/or from which they come by, for example, reading online newspapers from home. While the global flow of digital culture is increasingly easy, the fact is that there are still barriers to its flow, especially the lack of access by many (the “global digital divide”), mostly in the South, to the Internet.

  While culture does flow comparatively easily across the globe, not all cultures and forms of culture flow as easily or at the same rate. For one thing, the cultures of the world’s most powerful societies (most notably the US) flow around the world much more readily than the cultures of relatively weak and marginal societies. Similarly, some types of culture (pop music, for example) move quickly and easily around the globe, while others (innovative theories in the social sciences) move in slow motion and may never make it to many parts of the world.

  This chapter on culture permits the introduction of additional theories of globalization beyond the neoliberal and neo-Marxian theories discussed in Chapter 4

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  Environmentalism and Cultural Theory

  Exploring the Role of Anthropology in Environmental Discourse

  • Kay Milton(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This argument implies that culture (as knowledge) is one of the instruments through which the globalization of modernity has progressed, and that cultures, as distinct ways of understanding the world, have been among the victims of globalization. But this view is not universally held in social science.

  GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY

  Social scientists have already had quite a lot to say about what happens to cultural diversity under global conditions, whether those conditions are conceptualized as a world economic or political system, or as a worldwide network of intensified social relations. The question most often asked is whether globalization is eroding cultural differences and moving towards the formation of a single Global Culture (Smith 1990), or whether it is capable of accommodating or even generating cultural diversity. Not surprisingly, given their interest in cultural diversity, anthropologists have entered this debate. Hannerz identified in the literature two diametrically opposed views on what happens to culture under global conditions: the view that globalization generates cultural diversity and the view that it leads to increasing cultural homogeneity (Hannerz 1992: 223–5).

  Cultural diversity in a globalized world

  According to Wuthnow, ‘the expansion of core economic and political influence promotes cultural heterogeneity’ (1983: 66). This is not to say that the traditional cultures of peripheral regions necessarily survive incorporation into the global economic system; indeed, they are invariably and irreversibly altered by this process. Rather, the interface between the global economy and traditional cultures generates new cultural forms which differ both from the cultures of the core and from those of the periphery. This process has been described many times in the anthropological literature. The best-known instances are probably the ‘cargo cults’, which grew out of the contact between indigenous Melanesian societies and European and Australian colonists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Worsley 1957, Jarvie 1964). In some cases the most fleeting experience of industrial culture, in the form of an aircraft or steamship appearing where they had never been seen before, was enough to generate new religious ideas and practices. In other cases cults developed out of the Melanesians’ more prolonged experience of the colonists both as employers and as missionaries.

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  eBook - ePub

  Ethics for International Business

  Decision-Making in a Global Political Economy

  • John Kline(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CULTURE AND THE HUMAN ENVIRONMENT

  INTRODUCTION

  Culture reflects and helps sustain a society, manifesting the pattern and product of human interaction among a group of people. The growth of a global political economy facilitates but does not dictate the emergence of a global society and culture. Ethical analysis can assist in examining how globalization affects existing cultures and clarify potential choices regarding whether an evolving world community could or should develop a common Global Culture.

  Cultural relativism represents the antithesis of Global Culture. Under a relativistic ethical view, existing cultural beliefs and practices in various societies should not be judged or overridden by conflicting external standards. For instance, placed in the context of earlier chapters, cultural practices in particular societies would not be subject to broader notions such as the concept of universal individual human rights. Hence, one aspect of examining culture and the human environment relates to deciding whether core values exist that provide a basis for rejecting cultural relativism, perhaps defining common morality principles upon which a global society could develop.

  In examining the “W” questions, where relates to identifying the societal boundaries associated with a particular culture. Legal, political, ethnic, geographic and other characteristics help shape cultural patterns whose effective limits are often not coterminous with national borders. Questions of when raise issues concerning the impact of time on culture. From one perspective, any existing culture merits a certain respect as an evolved pattern of human values, a viewpoint that tends to emphasize preservation and protection. However, change occurs with the passage of time, even in isolated cultures. Time-related issues therefore concern primarily factors that influence the rate and direction of cultural change rather than attempts to maintain a cultural status quo, ad infinitum

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  The Sociology of Globalization

  • Luke Martell(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  3

  Technology, Economy and the Globalization of Culture

  In this chapter and the next, I will look at the extent to which globalization has changed culture and at how globalized culture has become. These are not necessarily the same because a culture that has been changed by globalization may not become globalized. There can be other responses. For instance, the effect of globalization on culture can be to turn it away from globalized forms to more fundamental or national responses.

  I will look at what shape culture takes if it is globalized. This too is not a straightforward question because a globalized culture can take different forms. It can become homogenized – globalization may lead to uniformity in culture worldwide. It could become hybridized, culture becoming mixed up with different global inputs. Or it could become heterogeneous, with cultures living side by side. It could be something else or a combination of these.

  I will come back to these questions on the effect of globalization on culture in the next chapter. To understand such changes it is necessary to look at what may be behind them. In this chapter I will look briefly at some historical forms of the globalization of culture, and then at technological and institutional changes behind contemporary cultural globalization. Wider themes of the book are reflected in these discussions – globalization as historical and modern; the economic bases of globalization; power, inequality and conflict; and the need to subject claims about globalization to open-minded but critical scrutiny.

  Some contributors argue that culture has been overlooked in globalization studies in favour of politics and economics, or is reduced too much to them (e.g., Rantanen 2005; Beck 2000). This is surprising because there is a large literature on cultural globalization, such as early books by Robertson (1992) and Tomlinson (1999), and later ones such as those by Waters (2001). This is not to mention general books on globalization that nearly always feature media and culture.

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  Human Geography

  A History for the Twenty-First Century

  • Georges Benko, Ulf Strohmayer, Georges Benko, Ulf Strohmayer(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Cultural geography: place and landscape between continuity and change Paul Claval and J. Nicholas Entrikin  

  Geography has a long history, but human geography was born only in the late nineteenth century, in Germany, with the publication in the 1880s of the first volume of Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie (1881–91). From the outset, culture was thought to be a significant aspect of human geography, but the cultural approach to the discipline was hampered by the dominant naturalist and positivist epistemologies.

  Geographers held different views of their field. For the majority of them, geography had to explain fundamentally the regional (and local) differentiation of the earth. With the growing influence of evolutionism, the relationship between man and milieu appeared as the most successful challenger of the earlier regional perspective. In order to avoid conflict between the two conceptions, the idea that geography was the science of landscapes began to flourish. It offered a major advantage: a specific field for geographic inquiry.

  These three conceptions were generally combined: geographers explored the diversity of the earth and prepared maps to show it; they had an interest in the diversity of landscapes, which introduced a large-scale, local component, to their approach; they often focused — either at the global, regional or local level — on man-milieu relationships. Their ambition was to present an objective description of the earth and develop a knowledge of the laws which explained its organization. Generally, they had no interest in the geographical views or interpretations developed by the people they studied. These conceptions evolved, but their epistemological basis remained remarkably stable until the mid-twentieth century.

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  Theories of Globalization

  • Barrie Axford(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  By 2006 Appadurai is more troubled by those ‘geographies of anger’ which were brought into being by economic and cultural globalization and crystallized post-9/11. Current expressions of ethnic and religious anger and hatred are in large measure a response to the pressures and uncertainties created by globalization and further exacerbate the tensions between the vertebrate and cellular models of world order. As national, local and tribal autonomies are challenged by globalization and familiar cultural structures and practices are eroded, the purchase of a politics driven by appeals to ‘blood and belonging’, or entailing a search for ontological security, becomes stronger. In this environment, different forms of fundamentalism are really attempts to refurbish certainties of identity, whether local, national or religious. Violence, including terrorist violence, genocide and ethnic wars, may be seen as a particular way of achieving that end. In such a milieu, hybrid identities too can be treated as a threat to the integrity of any authentic cultural space rather than a celebration of fluid global processes.

  Cultural and Communication Studies

  The work of Appadurai (2006) and Homi Bhabha (1989; 2005) fits well with the burgeoning interest in cultural globalization. It is also closely linked with similar shifts in cultural studies, especially where these are influenced by a post-colonial motif or problematic (Krishnaswamy and Hawley, 2008). As Jonathan Friedman notes, post-colonial world culture ‘flows, mixes, hybridizes and does things it didn't use to when it was more bounded in an imaginary past when the world was still a cultural “mosaic” ’ (2007, 114). The themes of cultural globalization and the idea of Global Culture(s) resonate throughout these debates, so that one might be forgiven for thinking that the analysis of culture now sits easily at the heart of globalization studies and that culture is recognized as a major force in economic, social and political transformations. But that would be premature (Held and Moore, 2008; Tomlinson, 1999; 2007).

  True, the study of culture now informs all but the most steadfastly realist and structuralist accounts of globalization. Issues of cultural identity, cultural production and consumption, and cultural convergence and hybridization are central to the ways in which the burgeoning field of culture and communication studies addresses globalization. As Jan Servaes notes ‘Viewing a television program or listening to the radio … cannot be seen as a simple act of consumption; these acts involve a rather complex process of decoding or appropriating cultural meanings’ (2008, 42). He argues that as a result the idea of globalization as cultural homogenization or a process of domination by Western and mainly American media is too simplistic. He prefers a model of production, dissemination and consumption of media outputs whose axis is ‘globalized diffusion and localized appropriation’ of cultural product (2008, 42). The ‘myth’ of media globalization as a form of straightforward cultural convergence or cultural imperialism is further challenged by the growing body of comparative empirical work on communication and cultural convergence and diversity (Inglehart and Norris,

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