ABSTRACT
The widening scope of transnational capital, digital media, and mass immigration has quickly pushed many traditional cultures onto the road to post-industrial societies. The ‘new’ societies in hasty development are scrambling to emulate the metropolitan centers in the areas of consumption, lifestyle, mass media, and pop culture. While the globalizing process has improved the living standards of some while impoverishing many others, it is also exerting a leveling effect on unique traditions and histories underlying cultural identities and life-worlds of different peoples. For all its expansive force and widening sphere of influence, the global spread of capital is a process of abstraction. It brings complex historical trajectories of different cultures into a racetrack of capitalist development, breeds a renewed mythology of technological modernization, spawns new idols of lifestyle and values that everybody is exhorted to follow, and heralds the end of history as conscious activity of shaping human destiny.
