2. Cultural Globalization

1. Summary
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURE

It may seem obvious point to begin with, but to understand the meaning of ‘cultural globalization’ we first have to understand some defining features of the two terms. At first, we need to begin with globalization.
 

Actually every serious scholar today would accept the broad general suggestion that globalization is a multidimensional process, taking place simultaneously within the spheres of the economy, of politics, of technological developments. One simple way of defining globalization, without giving precedence of these dimensions, is to say that it is a complex, accelerating, integrating process of global connectivity. Understood in this rather abstract, general way, globalization refers to the rapidly developing and compact network of interconnections and interdependencies that characterize material, social, economic and cultural life in the modern world.
 

This increasing connectivity is, in many ways, an obvious aspect of our lives. It is something we can recognize in everyday experiences at least if we live in the more developed parts of the world. Connectivity pretty much defines our use of communications technologies – mobile phones, computers, e-mail, the Internet – but it is also characteristic of the urban environments most of us inhabit and it increasingly influences the way we earn our living, the styles of food we eat, the music, cinema and television that forms our entertainment, and our experience of mobility and travel.

 

Second, we need to survey complicated and often hard to figuring out concept of culture. Culture is not a power, something to which social events can be causally attributed and this is surely right to the extent that we should think of cultural processes towards the construction of socially shared meanings. If we were to ask the stark functional question, ‘what is culture for?’, the most satisfying answer is that it is to generate meaning in life. Culture is thus not only a context in which events may be meaningfully interpreted, it is the old context in which human agency arises and takes place. Cultural signification and interpretation constantly motivate and orient people, individually and collectively, towards particular choices and actions. Actions which may seem to be fairly crucial ones, following a logic of practical or economic necessity, are nonetheless always undertaken within that set of self-understandings, plans, hopes or aspirations which we can think of as the constitutive elements of the individual’s cultural life. Even the most basic important actions of satisfying bodily needs are not in this sense outside of culture: in certain circumstances – slimming, eating ‘disorders’ such as anorexia nervosa, political hunger strikes.
 

One useful way to think about the conclusion of culture for globalization, then, is to grasp how culturally informed ‘local’ actions can have globalizing consequences. The ‘moment of culture’ in the shopping decisions of young people on Saturday afternoons – to buy this or that brand of jeans or training shoes or mobile phone: How do I want to be perceived? What cultural images do I want to conform to or contrast with? What do I value? What do I desire? These are not tiresome questions, even though we may judge consumerism incapable of providing satisfying answers. But neither are they questions that remain locked within the subjectivities of human beings.
 

Cultural globalization involves the increasing ‘reflexivity’ of modern life: the systemic integration of numerous small individual actions into the workings of the social institutions which appear independently to govern our lives. What I have emphasized here – because it is so fundamental to understanding the agenda of globalization from a cultural perspective – is that culture is a dimension in which globalization both has its effects and simultaneously is generated and shaped.

REAL MEANING OF GLOBAL CULTURE

One common assumption about the globalization process is that it will lead to a single global culture. Indeed, globalization in some of its aspects does have this general unifying character. However, increasing global connectivity by no means implies that the world is becoming either economically or politically ‘unified’.
 

Despite all this, there persists, at least amongst some Western critics, a tendency to imagine globalization pushing us towards an all-encompassing ‘global culture’. The most common way is that cultural globalization implies a form of cultural imperialism: the spread of Western capitalist, especially American culture. What is feared here is the total domination of world cultures through the unopposed advance of iconic brands such as Disney, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Google, McDonald’s, CNN, Nike and Starbuck. Eating McDonald’s hamburgers, smoking Marlboro cigarettes, drinking Coke and playing computer games may be bad for you in all sorts of ways. But they do not in themselves provide much solid evidence of a abandonment to deeper Western cultural values.
 

Indeed, one of the unavoidable implications of the current wave of anti-Western feeling in large parts of the Muslim world is precisely the demonstration of the recovery of cultural opposition to these values. Since the events of 11 September 2001 and then the invasion of Iraq, in self-conscious project of US cultural-political global hegemony, there has been apparent evidence of a rejection of this project. Without being drawn too deeply into these perplexing issues, we can at least see that the vision of Western liberal-capitalist consumer culture sweeping all before it is severely criticized by this cultural opposition. What the connectivity of globalization is doing is bringing quite disparate cultures into closer contact by no means inevitably as a ‘clash of civilizations’. What globalization is clearly not doing is effortlessly installing Western culture as global culture. A different way of approaching these issues is to view contemporary globalization in the context of a much longer historical context in which societies and cultures have imagined the world as a single place.
 

DETERRITORIALIZATION

There is another, more promising, way of approaching cultural globalization. This is not via the macro analysis of ‘globality’, but precisely in the opposite way, by understanding the effects of globalization as they are felt within particular localities. The vast majority of us live local lives, but globalization is rapidly changing our experience of this ‘locality’ and one way of grasping this change is in the idea of ‘deterritorialization’. The idea of deterritorialization implies ‘the loss of the “natural” relation of culture to geographical and social territories’. Deterritorialization, then, means that the importance of the geographical location of a culture – not only the physical, environmental and climatic location, but ethnic boundaries and unlimiting activities that have accrued around this.
 

In fact the idea of deterritorialization has fairly radical theoretical implications for traditional ways of understanding culture. Culture has long held connotations tying it to the idea of a fixed locality. The idea of ‘a culture’ implicitly connects meaning construction with particularity and location with ‘territory’.
 

If globalization is the spread of complex socialeconomic connections across distance, then deterritorialization refers to the reach of this connectivity into the localities in which everyday life is conducted and experienced.
 

Deterritorialization is not simply the loss of the experience of a local culture: it is not as though localities, and the particularities, differences they generate, suddenly and entirely disappear. Localities, on the contrary, thrive in. In less extreme terms, a swift thought about the places we live in reminds us that they all has a high degree of cultural characters. This applies not only to remote and ‘exotic’ corners and backwaters of the world, untouched by the flows of global modernity, but to capital cities and great metropolitan centers. London clearly has its own cultural ‘feel’ which is quite different from Madrid, New York, Tokyo or Beijing.
 

COSMOPOLITANISM AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

Considered formally, rather than psychologically, ‘identities’ are aspects of the differentiating and socially regulating nature of modern life. Modernity, indeed, might be considered, at a level of abstraction above that of a determining set of social institutions (capitalism, technology and industrialism, urbanism, the nation-state system) as the very tendency to form institutions and to generate regulators of social-economic-cultural behavior. Considered in this way, cultural identities are specifically modern entities – ways of categorizing, organizing and regulating the cultural practices, representations and imaginings by which we grasp our existential condition, our personal relations and our attachment to a place or a community.
 

This essentially modern, ‘regulatory’ category of cultural identity consists in self and communal definitions based around specific, usually politically inflected, differentiations: gender, sexuality, class, religion, race and ethnicity, nationality.
 

One rather interesting explanation of the impact of globalization to flow from this is that globalization has been perhaps the most significant force in creating and proliferating cultural identity. Those who regard globalization as a threat to cultural identity tend to imagine identity quite differently.
 

Rather than noticing its structural features, they tend to see identity as something like an existential ‘possession’, an inheritance, a benefit of tradition of continuity with the past. Identity, according to this common view, is more than just a description of the experience of cultural belonging, it is a sort of collective treasure of local communities.
 

However, the crucial mistake of those who regard globalization as a threat to cultural identity is to confuse this Western-modern form of cultural imagination with a universal of human experience. All cultures construct meaning via practices of collective symbolization: this is probably as close to a cultural universal as we can get. But by no means all historical cultures have ‘constructed’ identity in the regulated institutional forms that are now dominant in the modern West.
 

2. New interesting things I learned

I come to learn mening of Cultural globalization. We need to see globalization at first, in order to figure it out. Globalization means rapidly developing and compact network of interconnections and interdependencies that presents material, social, economic and cultural life in the modern world. Culture constantly motivate and orient people individually and collectively, towards particular choices and actions. So cultural globalization includes meaning of systemic integration of numerous small individual actions into the workings of the social institutions. If someone ask me about relation between Globalization and Culture, I can say that people's choices and actions can be shared at the same time and can be unified by compact network of globalization.
 

3. Discussion

Increasing global connectivity never implies that the world is becoming either economically or politically ‘unified’. The most common way is that cultural globalization implies a form of cultural imperialism especially American culture. What we need to worry about is the entire domination of world cultures through representative brands such as Nike, McDonald so on. Dissemination of dominant culture can threaten the local and minor culture in certain countries even though that doesn't mean dominant culture deprives of feel or uniqueness from local culture. These highly westernized modern society, we should consider effect of dominant western culture and survey the way to preserve each country's unique cultures.