ABSTRACT
Globalization is arguably today’s favorite buzz-word, and as with all buzz-words, there is both substance and vacuity in the degree to which it signals everything from the purported homogenization of life-ways and “world culture” to the primacy of world markets and the transnational flow of finance capital, and the supposed decline of the nation-state. The vastness of globalization as both a concept and a set of contemporary processes makes it difficult to grasp in all of its complexity and its apparent embrace of virtually all domains of life and corners of the world. Indeed, globalization and neoliberalism, in many ways its economic synecdoche, have become, to use Henrietta Moore’s term, “concept-metaphors that float between and across popular and academic domains … as theoretical concepts and as descriptive referents to a seemingly endless range of contemporary processes and experiences” (2005: 25). Ironically, although because of its scope, globalization would seem to demand analy-
tical holism, in fact it has often been tackled from the primary perspectives of either economy or culture, and contained within debates about homogenization or hybridity (Hannerz 1991; Yudice 2003; etc.). To boot, academic discourse has largely accepted a division of labor between economic and cultural perspectives such that macro processes are explored in political-economic terms, while attention to culture more often appears in micro or “local” case studies. Economic systems of globalization are portrayed as causing a range of effects that take shape both economically and culturally on “local” or national ground. Concomitantly, it has been the realm of production that has constituted an early and dominant site of globalization analysis, while efforts to examine
the cultural dimensions of globalization have inclined toward the growing circulation and consumption of new media, commodities, and technologies, and the culture industries of film, television, and internet communications, etc. (Pieterse 2004; Featherstone 1990; Friedman 1994). The tendency to polarize macro, masculinized forces of the global capitalist economy against micro, feminized spheres of local culture has also subtly but powerfully privileged the former, macro scaled, analysis as bearing the weight of globalization theory, while treatments of the latter, local, and particular domains are generally ascribed the status of illustrative ethnographic case studies (see, for examples, the theoretical and historical works of Jameson 1991; Harvey 1989; Robertson 1992; and recent ethnographic works of Liechty 2003; Lan 2006; Pun 2005, to mention but a few). Efforts to examine the convergences, clashes, and knotty articulations of the scale,
dimensions, and expressions of globalization have been suggested in such various concepts as “glocalization” (Robertson 1992), “frictions” (Tsing 2005), and “global assemblages” (Ong and Collier 2004). However, retaining both dialectical complexity and a nuanced reading of the particulars of globalization-the gendered and racialized permutations of economy/culture, production/consumption amid what Harvey (1989) evocatively called the “time-space compression” of postmodernity-remains a challenge in the enterprise of globalization theory (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 305). Where Jameson (1991) and Harvey have arguably contributed the most weighty and enduring treatises on late capitalism as a distinctive phase of capitalist accumulation and commodification, it is not only in the provocative spheres of high art, literature, architecture, and “mass” or commercial culture that these complex processes are to be seen. Whereas for Jameson and Harvey the cultural logic of postmodernity is inextricable from its economic fragmentation and form, the questions of where culture is located and how it gets articulated and contested in people’s lived experience are harder, and yet essential, to address. Globalization is enacted in the particulars of social, cultural, and economic life, in the “otherness” or “difference” that Harvey himself concedes has been underrecognized. It is precisely to understanding such realms of particularity that much of the recent ethnography contributes, and in so doing, I would suggest, it contributes indispensably to our very capacity to theorize globalization. This essay promises neither definition nor conclusion as to globalization’s limits,
threats, or promises. Instead, my discussion takes as its focus the relationship between culture and “the global”—what is “cultural” about globalization and how does “the global” work in and through the stickiness and particularities of culture? What I propose at the outset is simply that we question the pervasively generic pretense of globalization. Globalization is always both imagined and manifested in and through cultural and historical particulars. My premise is not that globalization threatens and refashions culture, but that globalization itself is imbricated within various cultural forms and meanings that come into increasing and intensified contact with one another. This argument can be broken down into two very simple but critical parts. The first is a refusal to read globalization as a singular and monolithic force that operates outside the fabric of culture, in the US, India, China, or anywhere else in the world. The second is a purposeful engagement with culture/economy not as dual spheres-as they are often portrayedbut rather as mutually constitutive forces, and domains of practice and meaning. Economic relations themselves are understood as embedded in specific cultural understandings and constructs (e.g. what kinds of people do what kinds of work and why, how these people are situated within class and other hierarchies, and how they can move
within and outside these groupings). Cultural forms and meanings involve both structural economic, affective dimensions, and meanings. I highlight in this essay the dialectics of culture/economy across the domains of production/consumption in order not only to examine the political economy of global labor and commodification, but to provide a window into the changing contours of “selfhood” the project of identity-making. Exploring how globalization works in and through culture to foster new concepts of the self-and, specifically, how the notion that under neoliberal capitalism the person becomes an “entrepreneur” of the self-offers a particularly powerful lens on the simultaneity of cultural/economic forces and meanings.
