ABSTRACT
The French writer Charles Péguy remarked in 1913 that “the world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years”.1 Péguy’s comment referred to the rapid changes that had taken place in Western capitalist society in the nineteenth century: changes that had affected people’s sense of identity, of history, of beliefs, of technology, and of imagery and art. In the world of today even Péguy might have to grope for an analogy to describe how the local has been caught up in global events in recent decades. One leading commentator has described the globalization of our contemporary world as having brought about “the intensifi cation of social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa”.2 More than anything else globalization forces us to look to the local, to consider how identities are forged against processes of standardization (Flanagan 2004:xi).
