Globalisation, culture and place: Complete summary and class notes
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Module
Globalisation, culture and place (CC2053)
Institution
Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (EUR)
Detailed summary of all readings for Globalisation, Culture and Place for the year 23/24 as seen in the table of contents. This is a literature-focused and literature-intensive course, this summary will help you stay on top of the readings and get through the midterm and finals! Good luck with
the...
Globalisation, Culture and Place
Paul Hopper. (2007). Travelling cultures. 1
George Ritzer and Paul Dean (2015). Global culture and cultural flows. 7
Nestor Garcia Canclini. (2005). Hybrid Cultures in Globalised Times. 12
Jan Nederveen Pieterse. (2009). Globalisation as Hybridization. 14
Arjun Appadurai. (2015). Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. 16
Joe Straubhaar. (2014). Mapping "global" in global communication and media studies. 20
Cappeliez, Sarah, Johnston, Josée. (2013). From meat and potatoes to "real-deal" rotis:
Exploring everyday culinary cosmopolitanism. 28
DeSoucey, Michaela. (2010). Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the
European Union. 31
Olav Velthuis. (2013). Globalisation of markets for contemporary art: Why local ties remain
dominant in Amsterdam and Berlin. 35
Ciotti, Manuela. (2012). Post-colonial Renaissance: 'Indianness', contemporary art and the
market in the age of neoliberal capital. 36
Alan Watson, Jonathan V Beaverstock. (2016). Transnational freelancing: Ephemeral creative
projects and mobility in the music recording industry. 37
John Connel, Chris Gibson. (2004). World music: deterritorializing place and identity. 39
Giselinde Kuipers. (2015). How National Institutions Mediate the Global: Screen Translation,
Institutional Interdependencies, and the Production of National Difference in Four European
Countries. 43
Diana Crane. (2013). Cultural globalisation and the dominance of the American film industry:
cultural policies, national film industries, and transnational film. 47
,Paul Hopper. (2007). Travelling cultures.
Interpreting culture
- The idea of culture as a 'way of life' underplays the different types of culture - national,
regional, popular, elite, business, Western as well as subcultures.
- Other dimensions to culture: political, institutional, social, economic and historical.
- Habitus: a realm or system in which groups and individuals learn and develop over time
cultural attitudes and dispositions, which are not uniformly pursued but are instead
exercised uniquely in relation to particular contexts or fields. However, this system of
acquired dispositions.
- Does not take sufficient account of the ways in which cultures are permeated by
the flows and processes of globalisation.
- In fact, many would argue that the very notion of system is problematic under
contemporary conditions of circulation and mobility.
- Limitations when dealing with culture:
- More broadly, if, as hybridity theorists claim, globalising processes are generating
greater heterogeneity within cultures then this presents all disciplines with
obvious analytical challenges.
- For example, it is often maintained that a culture requires an 'other' in order to
define itself, but this becomes more problematic under conditions of hybridity.
- Such conditions can even unsettle the concepts that we employ, something that
is evident in the way in which the notion of the West', and implicitly the
non-Western world, is being undermined by contemporary patterns of global
migration, with the exchange of peoples ensuring that the two regions become
less culturally distinctive.
Culture as process
- Not useful to establish a precise definition of culture.
- Culture is a dynamic and protean concept, increasingly viewed as a process rather than
an entity.
- Cultures are informed by numerous internal pressures and influences, ensuring that they
are neither static nor stable. They are also shaped by external forces and hence are not
homogenous, discrete and bounded entities; rather, they overlap and draw from other
traditions.
- UK immigration example.
- Clifford contends that culture can no longer simply be understood in relation to location
or place, but should be seen as something that is mobile and travelling.
- Travellers, tourists and migrants are physically moving around the world, taking
their cultures with them and interacting with other cultures and peoples,
reproducing, negotiating and defining themselves as well as helping to ensure
that cultures transmogrify into new cultural forms.
- But even if we choose to stay at home, we still encounter travellers, these
strangers from distant lands.
- Indeed, for Clifford, places should be viewed as sites of both residence and travel
encounters. Moreover, the conception of culture as travel applies not only to
, people, but also to the flows of images, ideas, sounds, symbols and objects that
circulate the globe.
- For the individual, therefore, travel becomes a curious engagement with the
familiar and unfamiliar, and in effect it leads to the blurring of home and abroad.
- Implications of travelling culture for identity and identity-formation.
- We must not overstate the extent and the pace of the change taking place at any
one moment.
- If cultures were simply fluid and ever changing, it would make it very difficult for
people to identify with or inhabit them.
- There must be moments of stability: periods of time when networks or clusters of
people come to identify with ideas, values, symbols etc.
- Even in a world of motion, cultures are still being reproduced within a myriad of
social contexts, providing us with interpretive frameworks, value-systems and
sources of identity.
- ‘Webs of meaning’: Recognise the reality that the majority of people reside in their
county of birth, subjected to its socialisation processes.
- Also better able to account for the diversity or plurality that exists within cultures
because the numerous clusters and webs that go to make up a culture will often
be a particularist rather than a universal experience, reflecting regional, local and
other forms of distinctiveness.
- Within any culture there will be variations in degrees of commitment to it as well as
different perceptions of what it is or means.
- Clusters and networks are inherently dynamic and continuously evolving.
- This approach does not deny the possibility that the constitutive elements of
culture, such as customs, practices, institutions and traditions, can be
constructed or invented, and hence that power relations are often involved in the
shaping of cultures.
- Employing the idea of webs and networks in relation to culture expresses the way in
which culture stretches across distances, and in doing so overlaps and merges into other
cultural networks, ensuring that cultures are endlessly mixing, with different permeations
and new cultural forms emerging as part of an ongoing process.
- This helps to explain the commonalities that exist between different cultures and,
further, accounts for the complexity and differentiation that exists within them.
- Cultures are therefore cross-cultural, which implicitly implies movement and change
rather than stasis and stability.
- Transculturality: cultures increasingly exist across cultures.
- Cultural distinctiveness persists partly because of the particular histories of different
cultures, but also because of the myriad of outcomes that will arise from the mutual
interpenetration of cultures as a result of individuals and groups entering these
encounters with their own cultural predispositions and outlooks.
- Should in theory encourage us to take note of how cultures change when we travel.
- People can inhabit multiple cultures which in turn shape their identity.
, - At any moment, therefore, it is likely that numerous cultural influences will be informing
our behaviour, even though we will not always be consciously aware that we are being
shaped in this way.
- Culture with an intangible quality, only become aware of culture when we
encounter otherness or difference.
- We are also not passive or unknowing when it comes to culture.
- Retain the capacity to critique our own cultures, distance ourselves from
certain cultures etc.
Interpreting cultural flows
- Contemporary processes and technologies are resulting in the greater mobility and
fluidity of culture.
- Likely to be gathering cultural influences to a much greater extent - media,
information and people flows ensuring we do not have to move far in order to
undergo a range of cultural experiences.
- Consequence: enter a more negotiated and critical relationship with culture.
- Arjun Appadurai identifies five dimensions of global cultural flows:
- Ethnoscape: demographics of the world, movement of people and stable
communities.
- Technoscapes: (uneven) distribution of global technologies.
- Finanscapes: rapid flow of capital, currency and investment.
- Ideoscapes: flow of ideas, ideologies, counter-ideologies and images, such as
freedom and democracy, which are always modified by context.
- Mediascapes: mass media constructions formed from mechanical and electronic
mass hardware.
- Last two scapes are ideational. E.g. mediascapes viewers use these mass media
constructions or images to construct cultural narratives of the 'other'.
- For Appadurai, global cultural flows follow increasingly non-isomorphic paths. It is
through their disjunctures that the five scapes inform and influence culture, and establish
the conditions under which global flows occur.
- Is it possible to map cultural flows?
- Held et al. believe it possible with modern telecommunications.
- E.g. speed at which ideas are communicated.
- While such cultural mapping may be possible, focusing upon cultural flows does
not tell us how they are being interpreted and experienced by recipients nor the
motives of those who are generating them.
- E.g. Why do some forms of cultural forms engender forms of resistance
but others do not?
- Difficult for external observers to interpret accurately the nature of the interaction
process, and to determine the meaning that the respective parties attach to the
intercultural exchange.
- Different groups and individuals will interpret and experience other cultures in a
myriad of ways.
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