Cultural Globalization

CASA (Cultural Analysis Summer Academy) provides a space for activists and academics to debate and act upon social, cultural and political issues. This year the meeting focuses on issues surrounding borders, markets, and movement/s.

Borders are key instruments of power and exclusion, but they can also contribute to the formation of new identities and social movements. While becoming less visible, borders retain their significance in people’s lives. For better understanding of the many and varied interactions with borders, we find it useful to raise questions such as:

- Can borders safeguard certain rights and liberties without necessarily entailing the exclusion and suppression of others?
- What are the “new” borders that are being created within the global community?
- Who controls the “new” borders and who transgresses them?

The book discusses the centrality of English in the globalized world, especially in the context of science, and the negative aspects or little problematised that the position of supremacy of English means for Social Sciences. For the author, the fact that sociological concepts are intrinsically linked to specific contexts, including the very language used, makes it impossible the idea that English can function as a lingua franca, or universal in the study of society. The belief in this possibility arises from an improper rapprochement between the notions of «universal» and «global».

In this essay, I highlight the danger of cultural hegemony through unchecked globalization and the need for voice from the non-Western world in South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Globalization must incorporate local context, and global policies must take an inclusive approach that constructs dialogue from a stance of hearing.

The essay is a product of one year or work of the Ethics Fellows For The Future of Carnegie Council For Ethics In International Affairs.

Culture Matters: Constructing Real Dialogues through Local Context. In Essays by Carnegie Council's Ethics Fellows for the Future 2015. P. 16-22

Masyarakat modern adalah masyarakat konsumtif. Masyarakat yang terus menerus berkonsumsi. Konsumsi telah menjadi budaya, yaitu budaya konsumsi.

Dewasa kini budaya konsumerisme bukanlah hal yang baru di era globalisasi. Dengan arus globalisasi yang begitu cepat memberikan dampak pada budaya dan gaya hidup masyarakat dunia. Tidak jarang masyarakat maupun kita sendiri kerap membeli barang yang sebenarnya tidak kita butuhkan. Akar dari konsumerisme adalah agar ekonomi bisa terus berjalan dengan baik. Anggota masyarakat harus terus membeli. “Membeli”, dalam konteks ini, merupakan suatu kewajiban dan suatu tindakan individual dan berangkat dari sebuah kebutuhan. Maka, orang membeli meskipun tiddak membutuhkan barang yang dibeli. Konsumerisme kemudian tidak menjadi sesuatu yang negative, melainkan menjadi sesuatu yang positif dan dipandang sebagai sesuatu yang bernilai sosial.

Cultured States is a vivid account of the intersections of postcolonial state power, the cultural politics of youth and gender, and global visions of modern style in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, during the 1960s and early 1970s. Andrew Ivaska describes a cosmopolitan East African capital rocked by debates over youth culture, national cultural policy, the rumored sexual escapades of the postcolonial elite, the content of university education, leftist activism, and the reform of colonial-era marriage laws. If young Tanzanians saw themselves as full-fledged participants in modern global culture, their understandings of the modern conflicted with that of a state launching “decency campaigns” banning cultural forms such as soul music, miniskirts, wigs, and bell-bottoms. Promoted by the political elite as a radical break from the colonial order, these campaigns nonetheless contained strong echoes of colonial assumptions about culture, tradition, and African engagements with the modern city. Exploring the ambivalence over the modern at the heart of these contests, Ivaska uses them as lenses through which to analyze struggles around gender relations and sexual politics, youth and masculinity, and the competition for material resources in a Dar es Salaam in rapid flux. Cultured States is a major contribution to understandings of urban cultural politics; national political culture; social struggles around gender, generation, and wealth; and the transnational dimensions of postcolonial histories too often conceived within national frames.

“Andrew Ivaska brings historical depth and nuance to an inherently fascinating subject: cultural politics in early postcolonial Africa. His original, conceptually sophisticated chronicle of the heated cultural debates that took place in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, during the 1960s demonstrates a masterful grasp of comparative scholarship on popular culture, modernity, and globalization.” — Lynn M. Thomas, author of Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya

“Cultured States is an enormous contribution to scholarship on the cultural politics of postcolonial East Africa. It is filled with rich and wonderful insights into youth, fashion, and the political culture of the 1960s.” — Luise White, author of Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa

In this paper, I examine imagination as a performative expression using an ethico-aesthetic paradigm (taken from Baruch Spinoza and Félix Guattari) that accounts for the ways, affects, as ethical orientations toward the world, participate in creative world-making amid conditions of social and political
entrapment. Using William James’ notion of “medical materialism” as a critical tool, I turn to the work and life of South Asian autistic poet Tito Mukhopadhyay to investigate the ways critical discourse understands ‘autism’. These are
namely as a signifier for particular reductive perceptuo-aesthetic relations
(an understanding I find in the work of Erin Manning), in order to re-conceive how disability politics might resist and restructure totalizing systems of global domination without referring to rights or identity claims.

Mit der Erkundung und Eroberung der Neuen Welt beginnt die Geschichte eines europäischen Bewusstseins von Globalisierung. Das Schlüsselthema unserer Zeit hat besonders in der Aufklärung Konjunktur. Die hierfür zentrale «Berliner Debatte» legt die entscheidenden Fragen zu den konkurrierenden Weltbildern zwischen Alter und Neuer Welt offen. Der hiermit vorliegende Text ist die Einleitung zu einer zweibändigen Publikatoin, die Forschungsgrundlage und Forschungsergebnisse zugleich bietet: Band 1 analysiert in zahlreichen Fachbeiträgen die kultur- und wissenschaftshistorischen Perspektiven der «Berliner Debatte». Band 2 bietet erstmals einen repräsentativen Querschnitt ihrer Texte und Kontexte: Acosta, Garcilaso de la Vega, Fontenelle, Voltaire, La Condamine, Friedrich II., Alfieri, Raynal, Clavijero, León y Gama, die Enzyklopädisten, Georg Forster, Teresa de Mier, Alexander von Humboldt und Victor Séjour.

PhD on the emergence of the anarchist movement during the First International analyzed by the watchmaking anarchist of the Saint-Imier valley Canton  Bern, Switzerland). The PhD handles the question of global class-consciousness and global actions during the 2nd half of the 19th century and their relation with the globalization of that time (early modern globalization). The combination of a global history approach with an micro historic analyze of the sources offers a new view on the early anarchists, their global publishing- and correspondence network, their cultural and political practices and their believe in an upcoming successful social revolution, that would lead into an anarchistic society. The PhD argues that there is a relation between the perceptions of time an space in the era of early modern globalization and the emergence of the first anarchist movement.

En créant les conditions propices à la circulation de lieux, de pratiques et d’imaginaires, la mondialisation touristique amène la confrontation de styles d’habiter différents. Le Việt Nam servira ici de terrain pour comprendre les différents degrés de cohabitation entre touristes domestiques et occidentaux, sous l’influence de processus d’appropriation et d’hybridation. Plus précisément, à l’aide d’une typologie élaborée à l’aide de méthodes qualitatives, cette étude se concentrera essentiellement sur le type de l’évitement spatial, prévalant dans des lieux du tourisme domestique volontairement évités par les touristes occidentaux, ce qui ne les empêche pas, non seulement de les critiquer de manière virulente, mais surtout d’y faire valoir des contre-modèles touristiques. Tam Đảo, Bà Nà, et Hòa Bình constitueront alors des terrains privilégiés pour observer ces affrontements de styles d’habiter, et la façon dont le droit au/du lieu se renégocient alors.

Depuis la politique de rénovation (Ðổi Mới), entreprise en 1986, le Việt Nam enregistre  un tourisme domestique de plus en plus important. Aujourd’hui quatre fois plus nombreux que les touristes étrangers en moyenne, les touristes vietnamiens y développent des pratiques, des lieux et des imaginaires originaux, que la présente thèse cherche à comprendre. Plus précisément, elle s’intéresse aux cadres et structures sur lesquels ces touristes s’appuient pour construire leur projet touristique. Il apparaît d’une part que l’Etat joue un rôle prépondérant dans l’organisation de la sphère touristique, au sein de laquelle il intervient de manière volontariste, et qu’il mobilise au service de la construction nationale. Par là même il encourage tout autant qu’il organise fortement le tourisme domestique. D’autre part, la mondialisation dans laquelle s’insèrent les Vietnamiens en faisant du tourisme constitue également un cadre fort d’apprentissage. A l’époque coloniale, elle avait consisté en l’imposition exogène de lieux, pratiques et imaginaires touristiques, que les Vietnamiens se sont depuis réappropriés dans une démarche inclusive et novatrice. Aujourd’hui, par la cohabitation qu’elle permet entre touristes domestiques et touristes étrangers, la mondialisation participe à la complexification de l’habiter touristique vietnamien.

Mui Ne est une station balnéaire vietnamienne qui accueille à la fois des touristes occidentaux et vietnamiens. L’été venu, elle constitue ainsi une excellente occasion pour le géographe de comparer le fonctionnement spatial de territoires que se sont construits des touristes de cultures différentes. Confronter ces plages, c’est aussi revisiter le cliché qui voudrait que, dans un pays pauvre comme le Vietnam, seuls de riches Occidentaux pourraient faire du tourisme. Non seulement les Vietnamiens font du tourisme à Mui Ne, mais ils y ont développé leur propre stratégie spatiale afin de satisfaire leur appétit de tourisme.