Doing a bit of reading this week for my self-study and found this very interesting book about cultural globalization. It's true that when we talk about culture, globalization plays a huge role, especially in today's age of technology where information moves very fast on an international scale.
"Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language"
Williams, R., 1983
With the turn of the nineteenth century, culture became a thing in and of itself. It was used to stand for the end result of the processes of cultivation. A person had culture if they had been appropriately trained and educated about said culture. But the term was also thought of more broadly to mean "the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole" (Williams, 1961).
Culture was then the embodiment of a tradition and history, the artistic record of a society. But tradition is selective; society decides what they want to be part of the tradition, consists of very specific items that serve a social ideal.
Every human society has its own shape, its own purpose, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these in institutions, and in arts and learning. The culture is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind. Culture gives meaning to traditions and creativity. Culture is dynamic, traditions will always change as time goes by, but we also need to recognize that there might be things to hang on to from a tradition while at the same time acknowledging that just because something is a tradition, doesn't mean it should continue.
After defining culture and its territory, we then go into cultural identity. Identity is part of one's own self-formation, but also the consequence of what groups and others impose on one. Then there is cultural power, it's the power that a peer group has on your own identity, or perhaps the influence of a charismatic or trendsetting peer. Cultural power is also found in the creation of cultural products or text that millions use to territorialize and shape who they are. For example, black popular culture is very strong today, especially in the US, but that does not translate into power for African Americans in general.
In the context of cultural globalization, we often struggle over cultural power and the ability and the inability of translating between one type of power and another to advocate for political or economic change. But we should never think of cultural power as a direct influence and we should not think that the individuals are completely passive in this process. One has the ability to choose what they want to relate to and what that means within their own individual context.
One other important chapter of this book, and one that I think is very relatable to my research topic, is about global youth. Global youth is more about young people whose territories are not limited to local connections, and this represents a rather large percentage of youth around the world compared to in the past where the internet is not a thing. Global tourism has become an important activity for affluent youth, but also immigration and other means of movement within the global ethnoscape. That means more and more youth are growing up outside their country of origin, and globalization increased diversity in terms of national origin as well as ethnicity, culture, and race, especially in urban areas, and urban countries such as Singapore.
The concepts of identity and heritage long antedate the conjoined usage of these terms today. In the past, identity referred not to self-consciousness but to likeness, and heritage was mainly a matter of family legacies. In the present, these terms lay in a self-congratulatory swap of collective memory.
The relationship between cultures, cultural changes, and globalization remain inadequately understood. Often reduced to the seemingly one-way impact of globalization process, is actually far more complicated than that. Cultures do shape globalization process and patterns, and vice versa. This book is broken down into a few chapters that tackle different topics of culture, heritage, and how globalization affects them.
Unsettling the National Heritage by Ien Ang
National identity, national memory, and national heritage should ideally mirror one another, fastened by a perfect mutual correspondence and a unitary homogeneity. A nation, in this regard, is a territorially bounded entity comprising one people, one culture, and one history. Globalization has disrupted this comfortable nationalist presumption as nation-states are increasingly subjected to the effects of border-crossing transnational flows, not least that of people.
As people from elsewhere come to reside inside the nation and retain connections with other parts of the world, what constitutes the national culture, who has the right to define it, becomes unsettled and contestable.
In this regard, what counts as national heritage serves the purpose of projecting a selectively favorable image of a nation's history and identity, one that is capable of instilling a sense of pride, loyalty, and common fate among its citizens.
Contemporary Creativity and Heritage by Lucina Jimenez Lopez
Globalization has broken down the borders that previously separated popular culture, crafts, and artistic creation. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, they continued to exist as different worlds, each supported by different public institutions. There was a clear distinction between artistic creation on the one hand and on the other support to crafts and/or the traditional cultures of the indigenous group.
Today, the borders between worlds have been dismantled and this has undermined the strategies utilized by public policies for culture. Policy-makers are confused because there are no pure cultural expressions anymore. These transformations have broken down the local or community perspective in which policies used to be developed, for they bring to the fore problematic connections between tradition, modernity, and contemporary artistic works.
Many contemporary artists incorporate histories, icons, symbols, processes, techniques, and knowledge derived from the indigenous world, but not in a nostalgic way. but rather as innovations from a global perspective.
The author gave an example of Francisco Toledo, a contemporary Mexican artist with a significant presence in the international art market. He incorporates millennia-old techniques from Zapotec mythology to gradually obtain colors long used in traditional dyes and materials. He doesn't just create and recreate live elements from Zapotec memory and identity, but also promotes bonds between artists and artisans through projects and cultural institutions, that he himself finances, where the blend of techniques, origins, cosmovisions, and nationalities are daily occurences.
He worked together with National Center for the Arts in Mexico City and the local government to create San Agustin Center for the Arts (CASA). The concept of CASA is to connect both visual artists and artisans working together with traditional and contemporary techniques, improving design and using both ancient bits of knowledge as well as digital technology. innovation in the arts is related as well to the welfare of the regional community. Artistic creation is an engine that emphasized community arts, biodiversity, and ecological education.
Contemporary art practice has been working in different directions, sometimes blurring the boundaries and definitions of local and global identities. It has been impacted by and at the same time influences globalization, opening up new opportunities for creativity and innovations, or the contrary, producing massification of certain ideas of heritage.
Cultural change requires cultural policies that break with a pure preservationist conception of heritage and develop a contemporary concept of identity. We need to recognize that diversity is not only related to ethnicity but is inherent in many contemporary processes of identity construction.
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References:
Wlliams, Raymond (1983). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Revised edn.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Williams, Raymond (1961). Culture and Society 1780-1950. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books.
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