Archive for the ‘Volume 5’ Category

Debt Crisis in Europe and the Limits of National Power in the Face of a Global Challenge

December 6, 2011
Kostas Kourtikakis  European Euros
Lecturer & Research Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The European debt crisis has been at the top of the news in the United States and around the world since it fist broke out in 2009.  Citizens and businesses have been watching with great concern and fascination as this seemingly endless drama is escalating before their eyes.  What is not visible to the naked eye, however, is the deep change this crisis highlights in the ability of governments to pursue their preferred policies in a globalized economy.  This essay explores the nature and roots of this important change.The first signs of trouble appeared in Greece, a small European economy, which became unable to service its debt and therefore received international financial support in 2010.  Soon the crisis spread to other European countries, and it was not long before Ireland and Portugal also had to receive international assistance loans in order to support their troubled budgets.  With time, the economic health of large European countries such as Italy, France and, even Germany, was also at stake.  At an alarming rate, governments of small and big countries alike find themselves in an untenable position, as interest rates on their debts rise sharply and their borrowing costs increase exponentially.  Today we talk about a pan-European crisis, with potentially grave implications for the world economy.  The United States, the world’s largest economy and Europe’s biggest economic partner, is not immune to this crisis either.

What is more surprising than the speed by which the crisis spreads is the inability of political leaders in Europe and beyond to take measures that will either stop it or at the very least slow it down.  This inability definitely does not stem from a lack of effort.  The leaders of the Eurozone, the currency union that includes the countries in the eye of the storm, have announced several rounds of measures with the intention of assuring markets and making their union more resilient against the current economic turbulence.  In addition, the members of G20, a grouping of powerful world economies, have also tried to weigh in and suggest solutions.  And yet, with every set of new measures or recommendations announced to halt it, the debt crisis seems to come back with a vengeance.

To make matters worse, popular discontent is also on the rise.  One can detect two main trends, both of which are related to the distribution of economic resources.  On the one hand, citizens in economically robust countries object to the disposal of funds for assistance loans to economies in trouble.  German and Finnish citizens have expressed very vocal opposition to the “bailout” of Greece, for example.  On the other hand, the governments of all the countries that have already seen their borrowing costs rise or anticipate they will, have been undertaking painful austerity measures, which reduce household incomes dramatically and lead to significant social tensions.  Demonstrations and riots in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and most recently in Britain, are all examples of this trend.

The rapid spread of the debt crisis, the inability of political leaders to solve it, and the emergence of significant social instability are three distinct phenomena, which even the casual observer can link to each other.  But what are the underlying conditions that make these phenomena so intertwined?  And why do they reinforce each other, leading to a continuous deterioration of the crisis?  The answer to these questions is that we live in a world where economic processes are increasingly global, while political decision-making is fragmented into separate national arenas.  As a result, economic problems can easily spread across countries almost automatically, while the political solutions to these problems must still be negotiated among governments that answer to different national constituencies.

In the European debt crisis, one could identify international banking institutions and rating agencies as examples of economic actors that are involved in truly global processes.  These two types of institutions are entangled in a continuous cycle of mutually dependent decisions.  When a rating agency signals that a bond becomes a risky investment, banks will only agree to buy it at a higher interest rate.  But this rate hike will increase the cost of borrowing for the government that issues the bond, and it may compromise that government’s ability to pay back its loans.  This development will fuel additional concerns among rating agencies, which may lead to more rate increases, thus further compromising the country’s ability to borrow.  The ease and speed of transmitting information and making international transactions across borders in today’s world means that large amounts of money can move easily away from the bonds of a particular government, leaving it strapped for cash.

The news of a suddenly inflated Greek budget deficit is the event that triggered this automatic process that has engulfed all of Europe.  Because Greece is a member of the Eurozone, banks and rating agencies were concerned that the roots of the Greek problem lie in the design of the currency union and raised red flags about other countries as well, causing their borrowing costs to rise and the problem to spread.  Clearly then, this is a problem that many countries are confronting at the same time, and coordinated action is necessary to assuage market concerns.

But European governments have struggled unsuccessfully to coordinate a response.  Originally they even failed to realize the transnational nature of the problem, thinking that it affects only certain economies.  Since the full extent of the problem became known, however, conflicting national priorities and conditions have made finding a common solution elusive.  What is an acceptable response for Germany is not necessarily welcome in France, Italy or Greece.  Yet, because of the rapid spread of market uncertainty, governments are under immense pressure to bridge deep differences in very little time.  The resulting measures are therefore often a sloppy compromise, rather than an effective solution to the problem.  This makes international banks and rating agencies get even more suspicious and therefore the debt crisis continues to spiral downward.

At the same time, citizens see their countries and communities in trouble, and naturally expect their governments to come up with solutions.  But the complexities of international finance are far removed from most citizens’ daily lives.  In the absence of sufficient explanations from their leaders about the true global nature of the problem, they demand national solutions to what they perceive as their own nation’s problem.  Constituencies become thus more sensitive, which exacerbates the problem even more:  as democratically elected political leaders try to satisfy their enraged citizens, national positions harden and diverge during government negotiations for a coordinated solution, making international synchronized action even more difficult.

Granted, this crisis is, to an extent, a peculiar European phenomenon because there is no other currency union like the Eurozone.  But if we take a step back and look beyond the details of these specific events, we will find a problem that is deeply engrained in transnational processes.  As such, it requires an equally transnational remedy.  In the absence of a global government, coordination through international institutions seems like the only solution.  The difficulties faced by European governments today, even after 60 years of close integration, are therefore particularly indicative of the loss of control faced by governments in dealing with global crises, precisely because both leaders’ and citizens’ perceptions are still informed by a national mindset.

Recommended readings:
Martin Heipertz and Amy Verdun, Ruling Europe: the Politics of the Stability and Growth Pact, Cambridge University Press, 2010
Saskia Sassen, Losing Control: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, Columbia University Press, 1996

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There is an “app” for that: Mobile technologies and learning

November 7, 2011

Lynne M. Rudasill

From the adze maker to the Gutenberg Bible to Project Gutenberg to the mobile “app,” technological advances both impact and support human society. The revolution in communications and technology embodied by the internet and the World Wide Web has been felt in all but the most resistant or distant corners of the world. The hardware that many societies use to access the maze of information that has become part of our lives is becoming smaller and smaller, currently existing as a hand-held device that can easily be packed in a pocket. We have the world in our hands. The impact of these devices can be observed as we watch the evening news and the 24-hour cable programs on that olden technology – television. The news of the Arab Spring, the flash mob, and global demonstrations such as Occupy Wall Street are all evidence of the ease with which people empowered with mobile phones can communicate and organize. The mobile device can also support and improve access to scholarship as more applications are developed to provide access to information.

In a recent article in College and Research Libraries News, Lori Barile reviewed several free mobile phone applications that might be useful to researchers. These include resources in diverse areas: from classical literature at Spreadsong <http://spreadsong.com> ; to the high-resolution historical cartography of the 4th to the 20th centuries from Maps of the World <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/history-maps-of-world/id303282377>; to the Social Science Research Network’s iSSRN that provides access to 250,000 papers from its repository <http://ssrnblog.com/2009/11/19/ssrns-iphone-app-issrn-is-available/>.

Science related information is offered by application resources such as the Periodic Table Explorer http://freshney.org/apps/pte.htm, and the Planets http://www.qcontinuum.org/planets/ from Q Continuum. Factual data to support researchers’ arguments is available through the OECD Factbook 2010 http://www.oecd.org/publications/factbook and the USA Factbook <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/usa-factbook-free/id305888083>.

Although most of these apps are developed for the i-device environment (IPhone, IPad, or IPod), many are now being created for the Android operating system and others. Sites that provide access to newly developed applications include AppBrain (Android) http://www.appbrain.com/, Appolicious (Android and iPhone) http://www.appolicious.com/, AppStore at iTunes http://itunes.apple.com/us/genre/mobile-software-applications/, Getjar (Android, Blackberry, iPhone and Windows Mobile) http://www.getjar.com , and Mimvi (Android, Blackberry and iPhone) http://www.mimvi.com . (Barile 2011)

Mobile technologies are readily available in academic libraries. There is an affinity between the collections and the users of libraries that support the use of the mobile phone and its applications. The university libraries at institutions that subscribe to global-e all provide some sort of access to mobile applications including such resources as online catalogs, tours, access to databases, and a host of other information providers and learning tools. Usually, it is as simple as searching for “library mobile” to pull up app resources available on any campus. At the time of this writing, the Digital Library Federation is in phase two of a competition of ideas for developing more applications for libraries, including easy to access tables of contents, citation finders, a journal abbreviation translator, a journal and conference identifier, and others.

Beyond the academic library, applications have been developed that provide support for fieldwork in the social sciences as well as the hard sciences. Global positioning applications are used for much more than geo-caching competitions and finding the nearest Starbucks. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) provides a fascinating look at the many applications of this technology at the GPS Application Exchange  http://gpshome.ssc.nasa.gov/, including submissions of projects from around the world. Mobile applications are useful in the areas of healthcare, environmental screening, recording anthropological field notes, as well as taking attendance in the classroom. Useful tools both in and out of the classroom include DropBox http://blog.dropbox.com/, the built-in camera, and the voice recorder.

Although the use of mobile application technology in learning is still new, there is a developing literature on the subject. Initially, the majority of research revolved around issues of how the technology might be applied, and by whom. The Horizon Report 2011 identifies key trends in technology and education and echoes a long-held tenet of the academic library: “People expect to be able to work, learn, and study wherever and whenever they want.” (Johnson 2011, p. 3) This report also looks at emerging technologies and predicts increased emphasis on this technology which has moved from the “near horizon” to the “one-year or less” category. “Mobiles embody the convergence of several technologies that lend themselves to educational use, including electronic book readers, annotation tools, applications for creation and composition, and social networking tools,” according to the authors of the report. (Johnson 2011, p. 13)

Further, a developing body of research being published specifically targets mobile devices and mobile learning. Theoretical work from the socio-constructivist and continuity pattern in education was done by Caron and Caronia as early as 2008 regarding the use of iPods in the classroom. (Caron 2008)  About that same time the use of mobile technology in the education of underserved students in Latin America suggested its efficacy in meeting the literacy needs of indigenous children. (Kim 2008)  A review of the impact of mobile applications in learning appeared in 2010. (Jeng 2010)  Most recently, a study comparing the usefulness of mobile technology between students near the Mexico-US border indicated the use of mobile devices increased the learning of students in more rural, less-developed communities. (Kim, et al, 2011)  What is needed now is more research regarding the applications found in mobile technology, including phones and tablets, to ascertain the best practices and most efficacious use of these programs in the classroom.

Lynne Rudasill is Global Studies Librarian and Associate Professor of Library Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

References

Barile, Lori. (2011) Mobile technologies for libraries: A list of mobile applications and resources for development. College & Research Libraries News 72 no4 222-5, 228.

Caron, A. and Caronia, L. (2008). Mobile instruction technologies and the culture of education: An empirical study on the appropriation of iPods. Conference Papers — International Communication Association, 1-27.

Johnson, L., Smith, R., Willis, H., Levine, A., and Haywood K., (2011). The 2011 Horizon Report. Austin,  Texas:  The New Media Consortium. http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/HR2011.pdf

Jeng, Y., Wu, T., Huang, Y., Tan, Q., & Yang, S. J. H. (2010). The add-on impact of mobile applications in learning strategies: A review study. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 13(3), 3-11.

Kim, P., Hagashi, T., Carillo, L., Gonzales, I., Makany, T., Lee, B., & Gàrate, A. (2011). Socioeconomic strata, mobile technology, and education: A comparative analysis. Educational Technology Research & Development, 59(4), 465-486. doi:10.1007/s11423-010-9172-3

Kim, P., Miranda, T., & Olaciregui, C. (2008). Pocket school: Exploring mobile technology as a sustainable literacy education option for underserved indigenous children in latin america. International   Journal of Educational Development, 28(4), 435-445. doi:10.1016/j.ijedudev.2007.11.002

 

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Water Issues from a Global, National, and Local Perspective

September 19, 2011

untitled (Sila Dhamma ) / CC BY 3.0

By Nathaniel Uchtmann

Water is prominent on the list of global crises that are predicted to present major challenges to human populations at scales ranging from local to global. In the coming decades, water is thus expected to acquire an increasingly important position on the global agenda. Even today, water-related human morbidity and mortality, which results from widely divergent levels of both water quality and quantity, is already widespread, and almost 80% of the global population faces exposure to high threat levels of water insecurity (Vorosmarty et al 2010). The impacts of water shortages are particularly acute in the developing world, where rising populations and climate change are expected to cause severe water shortages for one-third of the population in this century (Lall 2008).

Yet, despite such findings, awareness of the global water crisis is far from commensurate with the scale of the problem. One reason, according to former UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervis, is that “the people suffering the most from the water and sanitation crisis—poor people in general and poor women in particular—often lack the political voice needed to assert their claims to water” (UNDP 2006, p. vi). Additionally, the mainstream academic community involved with hydrology and water has largely ignored the issue and holds widely divergent opinions regarding whether and when the world will run out of water (Lall 2008). But according to one analyst, broad agreement does exist that  “there will be significantly increasing water scarcity that will turn ‘water’ into a key, or the key, limiting factor in food production and livelihoods generation for poor people (…) virtually throughout rural Asia and most of Africa” (Rijsberman 2004, p. 8).

Our understanding of global water issues can be greatly increased by examining three sub-issues: safe drinking water; pollution and degradation; and water scarcity (Lall 2008).

“Safe” drinking water implies that water is largely free from impurities and microorganisms that frequently cause disease or death. Unsafe drinking water significantly limits human progress—close to half of all people in developing countries suffer from health problems caused by water and sanitation deficits at any given time (UNDP 2006). To address this burden, the WHO outlines corrective measures, such as providing access to sufficient quantities of safe water, providing facilities for disposal of sanitary waste, and introducing sound hygiene behaviors (WHO 2011b). The cascade of ensuing benefits from government investment in water and sanitation is so powerful that it can even be labeled as preventive medicine, with apt analogies drawn to immunizations (UNDP 2006).

Major sources of water pollution are usefully divided into “point sources” and “non-point sources”. Far greater progress has been made in reducing the detrimental consequences from point sources (a definite source of pollution, such as a pipe), at least where sufficient political will and funds are available. In contrast, pollution from non-point sources (diffuse sources , such as farms) has proven to be more difficult to control due to greater costs, and because the effects are easier to ignore—perniciously affecting downstream ecosystems and gradually accumulating in water bodies and food chains (Lall 2008).

Water scarcity “refers to a situation when the water supply is inadequate in relation to the water demand for basic human and ecological necessities, including the production of food and other economic goods”. Scarcity is the principal component of the three-fold water crisis because it can drive or exacerbate both access and pollution (Lall 2008). The Human Development Report highlights the social, rather than environmental, origins of water scarcity: “the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical availability” (UNDP 2006, p. 2).

The interdependence of water issues is reinforced by the following observation: “For the first time in human history, human use and pollution of freshwater have reached a level where water scarcity will potentially limit food production, ecosystem function, and urban supply in the decades to come” (Jury & Vaux 2007, p. 2). Studying water’s interconnected issues usefully illustrates the increasing global competition over scarce necessities with widely-variable distribution.

Global Framework and Recent Developments

In July 2010, the UN General Assembly declared that safe and clean drinking water and sanitation constitutes a human right essential to the enjoyment of life and all other human rights (WHO 2011a). Yet, “around 1.1 billion people globally do not have access to improved water supply sources” (WHO 2011b). Predictably, this failure leads to high rates of sickness and death among young children from preventable diseases, and arguably qualifies among the 20th century’s greatest development failures (Gleick 2004-5). Further, water’s role reaches far beyond measures of human health: clean water and sanitation rank among the most powerful drivers for human development by extending opportunity, enhancing dignity, and helping to create a virtuous cycle of improving health and rising wealth (UNDP 2006).

There has been progress on meeting the Millennium Development Goal  for safe drinking water—the world will meet or even exceed the drinking water target by 2015 (with an estimated 86% of populations in developing regions having access to improved sources of drinking water, compared to 71% in 1990) (UN 2010). Unfortunately, the target for basic sanitation is out of reach because the estimated number of people lacking access to improved sanitation (2.6 billion in 2008) is projected to rise to 2.7 billion by 2015 (UN 2010).

Local Challenges and Opportunities

Local examples can illuminate the challenges and opportunities surrounding complex global water issues. “In Africa, the world’s second-driest continent, the availability and access to water is more crucial to existence than it is almost anywhere else on Earth. Poverty is widespread and although it is rapidly urbanizing, the majority of its population is still rural-based and dependent on agriculture” (UNEP 2010, p. 13). In sub-Saharan Africa, 69% of the population has no proper sanitation facilities, and 40% has no reliable access to safe water (UNEP 2010).

Kenya, a sub-Saharan African nation with statistics that mirror the UNEP baseline, is one of the most water-scarce countries in the world. Unsurprisingly, water heavily impacts major sectors of Kenya’s economy, including tourism (World Bank 2004). “Kenyans use water for drinking, energy generation, livestock production, agriculture, tourism, industry, and many other livelihoods. Lack of adequate, good-quality water is therefore a significant obstacle to development” (World Resources Institute 2007, p. vii). Kenya experiences particularly high child morbidity and mortality due to exposure to unsafe water (World Resources Institute 2007), and water pollution significantly contributes to increased civil strife: “Both surface and groundwaters receive urban pollution from wastewaters and sewage and chemicals from agricultural runoff. As well, declining and degraded water supplies have led to conflicts among different users, such as between pastoralists and farmers, upstream and downstream users, humans and wildlife, among others” (UNEP 2010, p. 107).

Conclusion

Water access and water scarcity are effective symbols of the ubiquitous interconnections and interdependencies of the global society. Given that the bulk of global water resources are consumed by agriculture, water pollution and shortages are directly traceable to lifestyles in the “developed” world. “It is estimated that 30 percent of all water in global food today comes from a country other than the one in which the food is consumed. This fraction is anticipated to grow, meaning that global market forces will play a role in both the supply and demand for local water resources” (Lall 2008, p. 9). Fortunately, the water crisis is not inevitable and does not result from limited availability. Instead, its roots lie in both institutions and political choices: “[l]ike hunger, deprivation in access to water is a silent crisis experienced by the poor and tolerated by those with the resources, the technology and the political power to end it…. Success in addressing [water and sanitation challenges] through a concerted national and international response would act as a catalyst for progress in public health, education and poverty reduction and as a source of economic dynamism” (UNDP 2006, pgs 1-2). Recognition of this reality will benefit the whole of humanity.

References
Gleick, P. H. “The Millennium Development Goals for water: Crucial objectives, inadequate commitments.”
The World’s Water 2004-5. pp. 1-15. http://www.pacinst.org/press_center/the_worlds_water_2004-2005/Gleick-CHAPTER01.pdf
Jury, W. A. & Vaux Jr., H. J. “The Emerging Global Water Crisis: Managing Scarcity and Conflict Between Water Users.” Advances in Agronomy. Vol. 95, 2007, pp. 1-76.
Lall, U. “Water in the 21st Century: Defining the elements of global crises and potential solutions.” Journal of International Affairs, Spring/Summer 2008, vol. 61, no. 2. pp. 1-17. http://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/files/jia/1-17_lall.pdf
Rijsberman, F.R. “Water Scarcity: Fact or fiction?” 2004. Proceedings of the 4th International

Crop Science Congress. www.cropscience.org.au/icsc2004/pdf/1994_rijsbermanf.pdf

UN Department of Public Information. Goal 7 Ensure Environmental Sustainability Fact Sheet. September 2010. http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/MDG_FS_7_EN.pdf
UNEP. “Africa Water Atlas.”2010. http://na.unep.net/atlas/africaWater/downloads/africa_water_atlas.pdf
UNDP. 2006 Human Development Report. “Beyond scarcity: power, poverty and the global water crisis.” http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR06-complete.pdf
Vorosmarty, C.J. McIntyre, M.O. Gessner, O. Dudgeon, D. Prusevich, A. Green, P. Glidden, S.

Bunn, S.E. Sullivan, C.A. Reidy Liermann, C. & Davies, P.M. “Global threats to human water security and river biodiversity.” September 30, 2010. Nature 467, pp. 555–561. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7315/full/nature09440.html

World Bank. “Towards a Water-Secure Kenya: Water Resources Sector Memorandum.” April, 2004. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2004/04/23/-
000090341_20040423105557/Rendered/PDF/283980KE.pdf
World Health Organization. 2011. “Recent developments on the recognition of safe and clean water and sanitation as a human right.” http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/recognition_safe_clean_water/en/
World Health Organization. 2011. “Water Supply, sanitation and hygiene development.” http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/hygiene/en/
World Resources Institute. “Nature’s Benefits in Kenya: An Atlas of Ecosystems and Human Well-Being.” 2007. http://pdf.wri.org/kenya_atlas_fulltext_150.pdf

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Goddess Laksmi and Cultural Traditions of Rice: Implications for the Status of Women

August 2, 2011

Bidyut Mohanty, Institute of Social Sciences (Delhi)

There is worldwide concern at the falling proportion of girls among youth populations in developing countries, especially in China and India which are otherwise making news as rising economies. Recent census figures in both countries present a still increasing gender gap and thus an alarming trend toward an expanding ‘female deficit’ over the decades. A deeper analysis of this phenomenon indicates that it is related in no small measure to the non-recognition of the economic value of women’s contribution to production processes and household work.

A glance into traditions of economy and culture can provide clues to solving this problem. The historical experiences of Asian societies, especially rice-growing regions, show that even in a prevailing patriarchal milieu, recognition of women’s participation in the agricultural process and household management has contributed to enhancing the status of women. This is illustrated by study of a social reform initiative in Eastern India which shaped popular consciousness in the sixteenth century through a literary creation rooted in the myth of goddess Laksmi, in which practices from the rural economy and the household helped convey a socially transformative message whose ritual observance continues on a mass scale until today and laid the foundation for a relatively more egalitarian and gender-just society.

The 16th-century regionalization of Indian culture accompanied the rise of great kingdoms and the unfolding of religious transformations. Regional languages challenged the dominance of Sanskrit by producing a rich variety of literature, while the great epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata were translated into local languages and adapted to local cultures. The Laksmi Purana (Laksmi Vratakatha) reflects this tendency. The purana genre is a popular Indian scripture, particularly in the tradition of Hinduism, that usually depicts the story of a goddess or god and sometimes imparts a radical message to the masses of common people. The Bhakti movement provides the example of social reformers like Balaram Das, who wrote the Laksmi Purana. This wave of the sixteenth century Bhakti movement in Odisha differed considerably from earlier phases insofar as it provided a social and philosophical orientation to the movement. Its two main sects challenged the existing patriarchal and caste hierarchy and the subordinate role of women by recruiting members from all castes, and advocating that the status of any individual be based on work, rather than birth.

The goddess Laksmi, known traditionally as the consort of Lord Vishnu, is regarded in Odisha as the consort of Lord Jagannath and resides with her husband within the boundaries of his temple at Puri while enjoying her own separate temple in his sacred precinct. The twelfth-century Jagannath temple is still considered the most important in Odisha since the god has always been recognized as the main deity of the royal family and the region itself.

In the sixteenth century different sects of the Bhakti movement worshipped Lord Jagannath, who was regarded as the incarnation of both Vishnu and Krishna. Thus the Jagannath temple became an important site for the reformers to impart their radical social messages. Balaram Das used the precinct of the temple to recite his purana among the women.

Laksmi is also known widely as Annapurna, provider of the bounty of rice. Examining the way Laksmi is conceptualized reveals her links to the cultural practices of rice cultivation. Women generally uphold cultural practices, and rice culture is no exception. The unique place of this grain in shaping the lifestyle of the people whose sustenance and livelihood depend on it is seen in the fact that only rice is associated with a goddess – Laksmi. In rice-cultivating regions in India, each stage of production is carried out on an auspicious day and rituals are performed. Odisha, a predominantly rice-producing state, knows various rituals marking stages of rice cultivation such as ploughing, transplantation, harvesting, and storage. Thus rice and Laksmi are interchangeable concepts in local imagination, and in the rural areas rituals have been performed from the sixteenth century until today. Women try to observe these rituals with devotion lest the displeasure of the goddess affect the harvest and bring starvation, concerns that ensure care and attention to the process of production. During the annual worship of Laksmi, women still recite the purana written by Das.

The purana story reads like this. Once Laksmi went out of the temple of Puri in disguise to observe devotees worshipping her on her designated day. She was disappointed to find only one untouchable woman worshipping. Being pleased with her, Laksmi went to her house and granted her a number of boons. On returning to the temple her husband Jagannath, provoked by his brother Balaram, rebuked her and demanded that she leave the temple since by visiting an untouchable household she had become an out-caste. Offended by the lack of appreciation of her visit to a devotee irrespective of caste, she cursed the brothers to be deprived of food until she fed them. She vowed to teach them a lesson by showing her own capabilities, and since she was in charge of the all the food grains of the mortal world as well as household affairs, she saw to it that the brothers went hungry. She resorted to this punishing act also realizing that otherwise men of the mortal world would not care for their women.

Deprived of food, the brothers roamed the land until they finally landed on the doorstep of the household where Laksmi was living. Laksmi fed them, declaring herself an untouchable. Realizing his fault, Jagannath promised her autonomy to move freely among her devotees without caste barriers, and allowed members of all castes to share offerings to him without stigmatization as out-caste. Jagannath receives offerings of cooked food to this day.

As mentioned in the story, women were in charge of managing the food grains at the household level. Women’s participation in the reality of agriculture work today remains obvious in rice-farming areas. Scholars from Boserup (1970) to Joan Menchor (1978) and Pranab Bardhan (1974) have all pointed out that women contribute significantly to almost every stage of rice cultivation. It has been observed that the girl child has a better chance to survive in rice-farming areas compared to areas where wheat cultivation dominates. Evidence also suggests that both the infant mortality ratio and the gender ratio (males per hundred females) are lower, thus less adverse to women, in the rice-producing regions as compared to wheat producing.

Thus it is that the Bhakti movement of the sixteenth century left traces visible to this day in rural Odisha. In the purana story not only does Laksmi assert her autonomy but, more importantly, she challenges dominant caste discriminations and raises the status of women’s labor. In the present global context some important lessons can be derived from this example. For although India and China have adopted policy measures to protect the girl child, year after year the proportion of female children continues to decline despite growing signs of social and economic prosperity. Such trends seem to indicate that cultural attitudes and perceptions may now be one of the greatest obstacles that policymakers and reformers confront. Although they should continue to advocate policies that increase job opportunities for women, they must also turn their attention to developing strategies that enhance the perceived value of women’s contributions to economy and society. Local mythologies may offer fertile ground for such activism, as the Laksmi Purana so eloquently suggests.

Bidyut Mohanty, Ph. D (Delhi) is Head of Women’s Studies at the Institute of Social Sciences (ISS) in New Delhi. She has been a Visiting Professor in the Global and International Studies program at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is the coordinator of an ISS and UNDP project on capacity building of elected women leaders in local government in India, and as well as of a project sponsored by the National Commission on the protection of child rights.

Suggested Reading

Bardhan, Pranab (1974). ‘On Life and Death Question.’ Economic and Political Weekly, Special Number, August.

Boserup, Ester (1970). Women’s Role in Economic Development, London, Allen and Unwin.

Menchor, Joan (1978). Agriculture and Social Structure in Tamil Nadu: Past Origins, Present Transformation and Future Prospects.  New Delhi, Allied Publisher Ltd.

Mohanty, Bidyut (2008). “Status of Women in an agrarian Economy: Deconstruction of Oriya Laksmi vrata katha.”  In Shimkhada, Deepak and Phyllis Herman, The Constant and Changing Face of Goddesses: The Goddess Tradition of Asia. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Mohanty, Satya P (2008). “Alternative Modernities and Medieval Indian Literature: The Oriya Lakshmi Purana as a Radical Pedagogy.” diacrities /Fall 2008

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Global Era Imaginaries: Myth Today

July 22, 2011


Victor Faessel, UC Santa Barbara

Since the 1950s, a concerted pushback against the narrative of secular modernity has followed post-colonial independence in many countries around the world and was accompanied by a proliferation of nationalist counternarratives grounded in ethnicity, religion, and shared memory. Indigenous traditions, myths, and histories became a rallying point. Yet this recovery often implied the recasting of traditions, sometimes reframing specific myths and mythic figures to assert exclusionary communitarian boundaries. In some cases this reaction was a form of resistance to the secular national state (e.g., political Islam, the Iranian theocratic revolution), in others it reflected tension with social groups seen to compete for scarce political or economic resources or was rooted in underlying animosity toward a near neighbor (e.g., Hindu nationalism). Not seldom was it a compounding of these and other factors, complicated by the legacy of colonial administration of institutions like the census, which fostered non-indigenous categories such as race, class, and property rights.

This recovery and valorization of indigenous knowledge in post-colonial states posed a serious challenge to some of the foundational assumptions of Euro-American ethnography and comparative religious studies. Ostensibly scientific approaches came under fire for supplying ideological constructs that legitimized colonial rule, foremost of which was a dialectical other—the lethargic, darker-skinned “primitive” with his irrational beliefs, childish stories, and non-productive ways. This other served as a foil for the Enlightenment program which itself partly served to justify western domination and economic exploitation. As unquestioned and commonsensical as these prejudices had seemed at the time, this cultural script of the enlightened west has the form of a mythic discourse: a story broadly accepted by its primary audience of savagery overcome by reason, of backwardness transformed into (linear) progress vouchsafed by superior European “civilization” and, more recently, by the “providential” (and therefore exceptional) status of the United States of America as the light of the world.

Economic globalization displays western liberalism’s master narrative newly rationalized and reformatted: globally integrated “free” markets fostering “free” consumer-entrepreneur citizens and rising western-style “standards” of living. Global economic integration speeds the erosion of traditional lifeways in societies everywhere, yet this external pressure is resisted in different ways. Culture is resilient; it can be creative under pressure, can accommodate or integrate non-native ideological constructs and myths; indigenous narratives may be reshaped to concord with emergent needs of resistance and survival, as the cases of indigenous Hawaiian or Christianized Congolese groups demonstrate in different ways (Friedman and Friedman, 2008).

Against this backdrop, a consideration of myth in the contemporary global setting ought to recognize the term’s usefulness for identifying a form of narrative discourse bound up with ethnic, communal, religious, and national identities that are anything but static. Myth should be defined in a manner cognizant of the layered intersections of belief, political and historical consciousness, cultural reproduction, and human agency woven through social formations, and be sensitive to the diverse pressures confronting post-colonial and indigenous societies and subjectivities (deculturation, fragmentation, development and IMF agendas, exposure to global economic cycles). But a capacious definition of myth would also recognize that the current global situation presents multiple “modernities” and nationalisms that, while generating indigenous forms of distortion and erosion, also produce assimilative and creolizing tendencies that impact bodies of narrative tradition including myth, legend, and folklore.

Myth thus defined is clearly distinct from two uses of the word common today that remain bound to its dialectical position in Christian polemics, Enlightenment visions, and colonial projections. Today ‘myth’ is commonly equated with little else but organized deception, false belief, and anachronism—as a kind of ideological critique. A conception of myth that is faithful to its actualities must acknowledge the centrality of imagination and sentiment for individuals and social groups alike, and affirm narrative’s constitutive role where social imagination, sentiments, and agency intersect. Mythic stories typically hold a kind of authoritative status and/or possess explanatory value for a group’s members, be they entire nations, sub-national and ethnic groups, class strata, religious and diasporic communities, or subsets of any of these. Elites often hold up myths as this kind of authority. Myths are usually aligned with tradition and identity, yet they should not be equated solely with religious identity because secular identities and recrudescent or “invented” historical traditions may also ground themselves in myths. As core components of a group’s repository of images and stories, myths help to constitute and express a social or cultural imaginary, and supply discursive substance for ideologies. Myths are often set in a timeless or exemplary past, yet some convey the shape of imagined futures in the form of eschatologies, revolutionary goals, utopias, and dystopias. Both taken for granted and frequently evoked, mythic images and stories are always reinterpreted to meet the challenges of the present. Myths, as implicit appeals to group sentiments in maintaining, reasserting, or reconstituting communal order and identity, may be regarded as a mode of discourse. They count among the significant repertoire of scripts and images around which social groups cohere, but they may also be divisive, and over them members can and do contend. In sum, myths contribute decisively to the habitus, the nomos, and to the discursive and performative activity of cultural reproduction and social change.

It seems reasonable to count mythic stories among the artifacts of imagination that accompany every phase of human movement across global space and time. Implied with the human encounters of migration, trade and exploration is a dialectics of exchange and mutual influence. Cultural forms are thereby transported and transformed. This is entirely consistent with conceptions of the globalizing process that see it as an intermittent but longstanding and non-singular process.

Myths constellate themes, plots, and character types that continuously infuse the universal human activity of storytelling, and so perdure outside of the traditional, community-constituting stories and cosmologies in both high/classical and popular literatures as well as in film, TV, manga, video games, etc. The ongoing work on mythic images and themes is carried forward here, for reception and reinterpretation are not limited to text-literate audiences for whom cultural canons are matters of schooling. Diasporic communities, multi-ethnic families, overseas migration, and of course media stimulate the global flow of peoples, stories and images, and thereby generate sensitivities toward cultural others that intensify myth making, adaptation, and use. Myth remains bound to the dynamism and vitality driving the globalization of culture.

Victor Faessel is Program Director of the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Secretary of the Global Studies Consortium. He is also Managing Editor of the Encyclopedia of Global Studies (Helmut Anheier and Mark Juergensmeyer, eds., forthcoming from Sage Publications) to which he has contributed an essay that is the basis for this adaptation.

Suggested Reading
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. (1983). Verso, 2006.

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minnesota,
1996.

- – -. Fear of Small Numbers. Duke, 2006.

Bottici, Chiara. A Philosophy of Political Myth. Cambridge, 2007.

Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination. 2nd edn. Eerdmans, 1998.

Doniger, Wendy. The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth. Chicago, 1998.

Friedman, Kajsa Ekholm and Jonathan Friedman. Modernities, Class, and the Contradictions of Globalization. The Anthropology of Global Systems. AltaMira/Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

Juergensmeyer, Mark. Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State from Christian Militias to Al-Qaeda. California, 2009.

Lal, Vinay. Empire of Knowledge. Pluto Press, 2002.

Lincoln, Bruce. Theorizing Myth. Chicago, 1999.

Nandy, Ashis. Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion. Permanent Black, 2002.

Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. “Representing the Rise of the Rest as Threat. Media and Global Divides.” Global Media and Communication. 2009 (5:2), 221-237.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. Pantheon, 1978.

Steger, Manfred. The Rise of the Global Imaginary. Oxford, 2008.

Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke, 2004.

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Politics of Crisis

May 27, 2011

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, UCSB

There is broad agreement that the 2008 crisis was caused by financial speculation, enabled by deregulation, in short by ‘permissive capitalism’.  After crisis then, we would expect that the Keynesian party of regulation and government intervention should win. Instead, in the US the political winners have been the GOP and the Tea party, and in the UK, the Tories. How do we explain this perplexing phenomenon?

The usual account is the electoral pendulum swing going against incumbents (which implies its swinging back again next time). Also often mentioned is the role of media promoting free market policies. Besides, the incumbents, Democrats in the US and Labor in the UK, have been a party to deregulation and to bailouts of the financial sector without strings attached.

Rather, the general climate is one in which deficits trump regulation deficit hawks rule on both sides of the Atlantic. Regulations of the banking sector, the Frank-Dodd bill in the US and the Vickers Report in the UK, have been thin and meager. The bank reforms in the US have produced even bigger banks. Not only has this not solved the problem of too big to fail but it has created an even larger problem, too big to save. In effect, regulation has morphed into consolidation.

In both countries regulation has been crowded out by the deficit and budget deliberations, which is odd because the deficit didn’t cause the crisis. In fact, for all the talk about the deficit there is little discussion of how it has come about. Nor have there been prosecutions or indictments of bankers—quite unlike after the American Savings and Loan scandal in the early 1980s. Also strangely missing is a public outpouring of moral outrage—tens of thousands marching in the streets furious about financial crisis and government indulgence, crisis-prone behavior on a scale comparable to the Iraq war and the BP Gulf oil disaster. Remuneration of CEOs and bankers is largely back to where it was before crisis, with some cosmetic changes.

*

The common shortcut explanation for these trends is ‘neoliberalism’. However, ‘neoliberalism’ doesn’t account for the actual variety of ideas nor does it explain why neoliberalism is accepted. To account for this perplexing situation I offer two main hypotheses: intellectual deficit and power deficit. According to the first hypothesis, the key problem is the lack of alternative ideas. At first sight the notion of an intellectual deficit is patently untrue. In the major US and UK newspapers during recent years there has been a steady stream of articles and comments by noted economists making the case for continued stimulus, rather than austerity, and for stronger regulation—such as Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, Robert Reich, Martin Wolf, John Kay, and many others. Yet, the argument can’t be entirely dismissed. Part of the problem is what John Kay calls ‘confirmation bias’: ‘the lesson most people have learnt [from the crash] is that they were right all along.’ So yes there were alternative ideas, but their resonance was not strong enough to sway the prevailing pro-market ideology in mainstream media and public discourse. A mere crash does not undo thirty years of free market socialization since Thatcher and Reagan. On the pages of the Wall Street Journal free market economists have continued their zeal even after the crash. Besides, ideas without organizational momentum carrying them fall short of ideologies.

Thus we turn to the second hypothesis, power deficit. That is, there are alternative ideas but the political and public momentum backing them isn’t strong enough and the ideas fall on deaf ears. First, in the US, the political economy of labor, the coalition of Democrats and trade unions, anchored in the industrial Northeast and Midwest, has been steadily eroded by thirty years of deindustrialization. Gone from the public sphere are the Keynesian principles of full employment and deficit spending, viewing trade unions as partners in growth, and Fordist principles of labor productivity and wage growth moving in tandem—not because the ideas have vanished but because the power bloc backing them, in Congress and on main street, has crumbled.

In its stead has come the political economy of services: in finance, insurance, real estate (FIRE), health care, software (Silicon Valley), the cultural industries (Hollywood), retail, education, and the government social sector. The service sector is disparate, ideologically dispersed, unorganized, and many are beneficiaries of deregulation. Wall Street and Silicon Valley are progressive factions of capital that are part of the power base of the Obama administration, that is, progressive in a technological sense. Their main ideological umbrella, if any, is innovation, a techno fix that eschews difficult political and economic questions.

The power shift from manufacturing to services is a general feature of postindustrial society, but there are degrees of postindustrialism. In northwest Europe and Japan offshoring and outsourcing to low-wage countries have generally been balanced by inward investment in technologies and factories, while in the US and UK deindustrialization has been far more drastic.

In the US what industry remains (besides the defense industries) or new industry develops is mostly in the South. Dixie capitalism has gradually taken over from Frost Belt capitalism. Starting in the seventies when industries moved from the northeast they went south. Dixie capitalism and Dixie politics trump Frost Belt capitalism. The Republican Party and the Tea Party reflect different shades of the ethos of the South—low taxes, low services, low wages, no unions. The new Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana represent the politics of extreme capitalism, feeding on resentment: if private sector workers have meager benefits and no collective bargaining, then public sector workers should not have them either. It is a politics of bringing everyone down to the Dixie level. In America this is what decline looks like. Hence the issue is not simply ideology but what Galbraith called countervailing power.

Financialization emerged first as an antidote to deindustrialization, masked its effects and enabled the boom of the ‘roaring nineties,’ but has increasingly become a major destabilizing factor, culminating in the crash of 2008. The problem is not financialization per se but the combination of financialization and deregulation, the problem of the ‘sleeping watchdog’. Moreover, low taxes resonate with the market society ethos of possessive individualism. In the US, under the sign of low taxes, liberty trumps equality. In the UK, the Tories call on the Big Society—which is reminiscent of the elder Bush in the US calling on a ‘thousand points of light’ and Bush junior relying on faith-based organizations—suggesting that voluntarism should take over state welfare functions. The paradox is that it is a call to a society in which, given the retreat of the state, market forces have been unleashed, and the call to service therefore falls on deaf ears. A society governed by consumerism and market values is to respond to a call to social values.

*

What future trends and options do these conditions portend? Given that major trends are of a structural nature—the growth of postindustrialism, services, financialization—major changes in the next ten to fifteen years are not in the cards. The US and UK will likely undergo gradual decline, mitigated to the degree that they play their cards well. Both rely too much on narrow sectors, especially finance, and anti-government ideology undercuts their capacity for self-correction. Northwest Europe is undergoing milder versions of these trends because industry, regulation and social contracts are stronger and free market ideology has less support. The problem of financialization, its size and lack of regulation, however, is a common factor but on a smaller scale than in US and UK. Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain face different problems, generally GDP growth outstripping productivity growth, weak regulation, and growth borrowed from external financing.

To read the full article, please visit www.jannederveenpieterse.com  and look at the “Politics of Crisis” PDF.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse is Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and specializes in globalization, development studies, and cultural studies. He holds a part-time chair in globalization studies at Maastricht University.

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The Role of Universities in Cultural Heritage Protection

May 20, 2011

nullDr. Helaine Silverman
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The global tourism industry has generated intense interest in and pressure on major archaeological and historic sites around the world. In addition, ethnic, religious, political and environmental disputes have arisen around some of these places. The field of cultural heritage management addresses these and other issues. This brief paper discusses two important cultural heritage management and research projects conducted by faculty affiliates of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices (CHAMP) at the University of Illinois. Their work highlights the role of universities in cultural heritage protection.

In 1992 Hindu nationalists demolished a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya, Gujarat state, India, that had been built atop the site considered to be the birthplace of the Hindu god, Rama. Deadly riots between Muslims and Hindus ensued. Ten years later, 57 Hindu train passengers were killed by Indian Muslims as they returned from Ayodhya, an attack prompted by Hindu preparations to build a new shrine in Ayodhya. Hindus immediately retaliated for the train attack and soon Gujarat was engulfed by bloodshed and widespread destruction of homes, shops and religious sites. Seen alongside UNESCO’s mantra that cultural heritage belongs to all humankind and must be respected, protected, and embraced, the violence in Gujarat challenged the idealistic notion of universal cultural heritage.

This was the context in which four professors from the Department of Landscape Architecture, in association with Indian partners from the Baroda Trust, undertook a heritage conservation project at Champaner-Pavagadh, a Hindu-Muslim contested site in Gujarat. The landscape intervention plan formulated by my colleagues Amita Sinha, James Wescoat, Gary Kesler and D. Fairchild Ruggles aimed to connect the residential population of Champaner city with the sacred hill of Pavagadh and in so doing mitigate the explosive potential of this pilgrimage site. They paid equal attention to the existing medieval mosque and to the Hindu pilgrimage summit so as to conserve culturally hybrid sites. Their design enhanced historical paths, water features and human settlements (Sinha 2004; Sinha et al. 2003) and “harmonize[d] contemporary tourist and pilgrim interests; illuminate[d] the manifold historical contribution of Sultanate, Rajput, Jain and tribal groups; and thereby deepen[ed] contemporary appreciation of the pluralistic cultural legacy at Champaner-Pavagadh” (Wescoat 2007). Their plan also encompassed local community development by means of shop houses and communal spaces (Sinha et al. 2005).

Their achievement of multiple goals was demonstrated by the fact that while Gujarat burned, Champaner-Pavagadh experienced far less physical destruction. Only two years later the Illinois team helped India gain World Heritage Site status for Champaner-Pavagadh as a testament to its “perfect blend of Hindu-Moslem architecture” and its continuous Hindu pilgrimage landscape.

My colleagues are emphatic that their conservation/protection plan succeeded because it was not premised on the sacred hill summit alone. Rather, they approached Champaner-Pavagadh as a complex environment with integrated social, economic, political, religious, and natural features. Also, they were able to make a long-term commitment to stewardship of the site, eschewed a narrow focus on building preservation, and brought to the project an academically deep understanding of the Mughal Empire, Hindu sacred landscapes, Indian politics and history, and local traditions.

Luang Prabang, Laos, offers a different scenario of heritage protection. Luang Prabang was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, in part as an emergency measure taken by UNESCO against its imminent destruction by a major Chinese highway that would soon run through the middle of the beautiful ancient city en route to Vientiane. The highway was diverted to comply with UNESCO requirements and Luang Prabang is currently praised as “an outstanding example of the fusion of traditional architecture and Lao urban structures with those built by the European colonial authorities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Its unique … townscape illustrates a key stage in the blending of these two distinct cultural traditions” (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/479).

My School of Architecture colleagues—Lynne Dearborn and John Stallmeyer—traveled to Luang Prabang to study its historic built environment and its management by the Maison du Patrimoine. In the 2010 book resulting from their fieldwork, Inconvenient Heritage, they observe that the official description (above) belies critical problems in the city, especially as generated by tourism. Once the communist government opened Laos to tourism in 1989 and legalized private enterprise, the city’s decrepit colonial villas began to be refurbished as hotels, numerous homes became guest houses, and restaurants and shops opened to service the needs of the tourism sector. Although dozens of reports have been filed with UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee since 2001 concerning threats to Luang Prabang’s built environment, Professors Dearborn and Stallmeyer found little attention being paid to the drastic changes that tourism has created in the lives of Luang Prabang’s residents. For instance, long lines of orange-robed monks on their early morning collection of alms (which reciprocally links them to the local population) now run the gauntlet past gawking, camera-toting tourists. And the internal multi-village organization of the ancient city has almost disappeared with the overflow of the tourism economy.

Dearborn and Stallmeyer’s analysis of the Maison du Patrimoine’s management plan reveals a singular representation of the city’s cultural heritage that erases “particular physical and socio-cultural pasts that are seen as unpalatable for tourists, are incongruent with contemporary development, or do not serve the political needs of the current Lao PDR government.” Luang Prabang today dutifully attends the needs of a global tourism industry but, as Dearborn and Stallmeyer observe, “the erasures necessitated by this process leave little room for the performance of locally embedded everyday activities or multiple readings of heritage.” Moreover, the World Heritage inscription and its resulting architectural preservation and urban redevelopment “have refined and redefined what heritage is in Luang Prabang, freezing the physical environment of the city as an imagined space/time.” The result is a physical environment increasingly transformed into a touristic display, rendering invisible Luang Prabang’s embedded, intangible heritage.

University scholar-practitioners are especially qualified to conduct cultural heritage projects. Our academic training makes us aware of the multiple conflicting institutions and interests that surround all cultural heritage initiatives. We argue that to undertake site protection with unquestioning adherence to adages of universal cultural heritage, or uncritical belief in the inherent value of heritage for the construction of identity, or to automatically advocate economic development through cultural heritage tourism, is to invite failure on the ground. Because we are not a profit-driven business, are reasonably unconstrained by time (at least until our grants run out), and have a university base, we do not operate in the service of influential interest groups and we are sensitive to local stakeholders whose voices typically receive inadequate attention from those in power.

Hopefully, as more universities develop programs in cultural heritage, like CHAMP’s, and their graduates move into the field of heritage management we should see greater success in the democratic management and benign sustainability of all kinds of cultural heritage sites and intangible traditions.

Helaine Silverman is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the director of CHAMP (Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices).

References Cited and Recommended

Dearborn, Lynne and John Stallmeyer
2010            Inconvenient Heritage: Erasure and Global Tourism in Luang Prabang. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA.

Logan, William S.
2007            Closing Pandora’s Box: Human Rights Conundrums in Cultural Heritage Protection. In Cultural Heritage and Human Rights, edited by Helaine Silverman and D. Fairchild Ruggles, pp. 33-52. Springer, New York.

Ruggles, D. Fairchild and Helaine Silverman (editors)
2009            Intangible Heritage Embodied. Springer, New York.

Silverman, Helaine (editor)
2010            Contested Cultural Heritage. Religion, National, Erasure and Exclusion in a Global World. Springer, New York.

Silverman, Helaine and D. Fairchild Ruggles (editors)
2007            Cultural Heritage and Human Rights. Spinger, New York.

Sinha, Amita
2004            Champaner-Pavagadh Archaeological Park: A Design Approach. International Journal of Heritage Studies 10(2):117-128.

Sinha, Amita, James L. Wescoat, Jr., Gary Kesler, and D. Fairchild Ruggles
2003            Champaner-Pavagadh Cultural Sanctuary. Gujarat, India. Design proposal and report (48 pp.) submitted to Heritage Trust, Baroda, India. Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign.

Wescoat, James L., Jr.
2007            The Indo-Islamic Garden: Conflict, Conservation, and Conciliation in Gujarat, India. In Cultural Heritage and Human Rights, edited by Helaine Silverman and D. Fairchild Ruggles, pp. 53-77. Springer, New York.

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What is Global Studies?

May 6, 2011

nullMark Juergensmeyer

What is global studies? Anxious administrators ask this question whenever a new program or degree is proposed. Is it anything different than simply international, or comparative, or area studies made over and outfitted with a bright new name?

This very question has been discussed by the Global Studies Consortium, an international organization of graduate programs in global studies. Originally proposed at a workshop in Santa Barbara in 2007, the consortium meetings draw representatives from over forty graduate programs in Asia, Europe and North America. They meet each year at such diverse locations as Leipzig, Tokyo, and Shanghai.

At one of their recent meetings, the representatives agreed upon five aspects of their programs that all of them shared in common, and which distinguish global studies from international, area, comparative, or similar fields. The five key defining characteristics of the field are as follows:

Global studies is transnational.  Global studies focus on the analysis of events, activities, ideas, trends, processes and phenomena that appear across national boundaries and cultural regions. The term “cultural regions” is meant to apply to associations of people bound together by a common language, religion, and heritage that are defined within a particular geographical area but may not be demarcated as a nation, or have occurred historically before the concept of nation was applied to states.

Strictly speaking, transnational and global studies are not the same, since an activity that appears beyond national boundaries can be largely within a particular area of the world (Europe, for instance, or the nations along the Pacific Rim), and not necessarily throughout the whole world. On the other hand all global phenomena are by definition transnational, since they occur beyond the limitations of national boundaries or control. In general, the term “international” differs from transnational phenomena since it applies to activities between and among nation-states. In common usage, however, many transnational phenomena are described as international, as in the description of some environmental issues as being international when the phenomena themselves—such as global warming—are transnational (though the responses to them may involve an international collaboration among nations).

Global studies is interdisciplinary.  Since global phenomena are economic, political, social, cultural, religious, ideological, environmental, biological, or involve new technology and means of communication, they are examined from many disciplinary points of view. Scholars involved in global studies are found in all fields of the social sciences (especially sociology, economics, political science, and anthropology) as well as the humanities, including history, literature, religious studies, and the arts. And it involves some areas of science—environmental studies and public health, for instance.

Global studies is both contemporary and historical.  Though the pace and intensity of globalization has increased enormously in the 21st century and the post-Cold War period of the 20th century, transnational activity has historical antecedents. There are moments in history—such as in the ancient Mediterranean world during the Roman and Greek Empires—when there was a great deal of transnational activity and interchange on economic, cultural, and political levels. European colonialism during the 19th and 20th centuries provides another example of a global stratum of culture, education, technology, and economic activity upon which are based many aspects of globalization in the 21st century. Thus to understand fully the contemporary patterns of globalization it is necessary to probe their historical precedents.

Global studies tend to be postcolonial and critical. Although many aspects of contemporary globalization are based on European colonial precedents, most global studies scholars do not accept uncritically the Western-privileged patterns of economic, political and cultural globalization. Some scholars avoid using the term “globalization” to describe their subject of study, since it sometimes is interpreted as implying the promotion of a Western-dominated hegemonic project aimed at spreading the acceptance of laissez-faire liberal economics throughout the world. Other scholars describe their approach as “critical globalization studies,” implying that their examination of globalization is not intended to promote or privilege Western economic models of globalization.

The postcolonial perspective of global studies is one that is viewed from many cultural perspectives. Scholars of global studies acknowledge that the perception of globalization and other global issues, activities, and trends are viewed differently from different parts of the world, and from different socioeconomic locations within it. For that reason scholars of global studies sometimes speak of “many globalizations,” or “multiple perspectives on global studies.”  This position acknowledges that there is no dominant paradigm or perspective in global studies that is valued over others.

Global studies programs aim at global citizenship. Academic programs in global studies often advance an additional criterion for programs in global studies: helping to foster a sense of global citizenship. Leaders in these academic programs aver that they are helping to create “global literacy”—the ability of students to function in an increasingly globalized world—by understanding both the specific aspects of diverse cultures and traditions as well as commonly experienced global trends and patterns. Other leaders of academic programs assert that they are providing training in “global leadership,” giving potential leaders of transnational organizations and movements the understanding and skills that will help them to solve problems and deal with issues on a global scale.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER is a professor of sociology and global studies, and director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Orfalea Center serves as the international secretariat for the Global Studies Consortium. This essay is adapted from an essay on global studies for THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL STUDIES (Helmut Anheier and Mark Juergensmeyer, co-editors; Victor Faessel, managing editor) published by Sage Publications.

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“The Nature of the Beast”: The Koran-Burning Controversy as a Media Spectacle in the Age of Globalization

January 31, 2011

Aziz Douai, Ph.D.

Globalization has increasingly subverted the sacrosanct ties between culture and place, and underscored the porous nature of traditional borders associated with the nation state. Global media and the Internet have played an unprecedented role in these de-territorialization processes.  In this context, particularly in the post 9/11 world, what goes on U.S. television matters a great deal not only to American audiences, but to global viewers.  That U.S. television continues to be ignorant of these forces was amply illustrated by its coverage of the Koran-burning controversy in the fall of 2010, and its lack of a rational debate about the place of Islam in American society.  Using Guy Debord’s concept of the “spectacle,” this essay analyzes the messages that the U.S. media’s coverage of the Koran burning threat disseminates to citizens around the world (1994).

The most important of those messages is the fact that the Koran-burning controversy highlighted the ambiguous identity and status of Muslim Americans in the U.S.  As President Barack Obama finessed his position regarding Muslims’ right, but not their wisdom, to build an Islamic Center and mosque two blocks away from New York City’s Ground Zero, Terry Jones, a Florida pastor, grabbed the news headlines with his renewed threat to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of 9/11.  The heightened drama reached a crescendo with denunciations of the pastor’s intentions by Obama and members of his administration, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defence Secretary Robert Gates, and General David Petraeus.

News coverage of Jones’ Koran burning threat became a media spectacle, which did not lead to any genuinely fruitful debate about the role of Islam in the U.S.  Clearly, the media circus was instrumental in hyping up this controversy and persisting through the media’s ensuing self-flagellation and critique.  The media circus surrounding the pastor’s Koran-burning threat displays some of the characteristics inherent in media spectacles.   Media spectacle and frenzy tend to become regular inhibitors of democratic deliberation, as the coverage of the run up to the war on Iraq revealed.  Furthermore, media spectacles thrive on self-referential, self-aggrandizing, and faux critiques to preserve television news’ credibility and ratings.

from the Associated Press

Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center at a news conference in Gainesville, Fla., September 8, 2010. John Raoux, Associated Press Photo. http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2010/09/florida_officials_worry_about.html

How media spectacles operate leaves no room for rational debate.  On U.S. cable news, the pastor’s threat quickly became a media spectacle, with cameras awaiting the implementation of his incendiary threat.  A day before his ultimatum expired, the pastor announced to the camping media throngs that he would cancel his plan.  Jones claimed that he had reached some agreement with the Imam behind the proposed Islamic Center to move the project even farther from the 9/11 site in exchange, shrewdly connecting a different controversy to his cause.  The press conference immediately became a breaking news event across the three cable news networks: CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.

For foreign audiences, the media’s responsibility question is inescapable in this debacle.  U.S. media’s indulgence of Jones’ tantalizing threat only fed the public spectacle and frenzy, even while promising not to give more airtime to the incendiary pastor.  Fox News Channel [FNC] issued a press release promising not to air any Koran burning footage should the pastor carry through with his on-and-off threat.  Michael Clemente, senior vice president at Fox News, explained: “We do not cover every flag burning that happens in this country. We don’t run every hostage tape.  If we tried to cover everyone who wants us to stick a camera in front of them, we’d run out of cameras pretty fast each day. But this is really about just using some judgment,” (Michael Clemente  qtd. by David Zurawik, 2010). The Associated Press and other news organizations announced similar decisions.

Global viewers’ impressions of the U.S. largely stem from these televised images.  What they see is a media spectacle that gives voice to acrimony and vilification rather than a public dialogue. They also see a nation struggling with how to deal with its Muslim population in the aftermath of terrorist attacks and a controversial “war on terror.” The media-fueled spectacle of paranoia and hysteria about Islam and Muslims are what dominates the pictures in people’s heads.

FNC’s dismissal of the pastor as a “media creation” could not disguise its blatant attempt to connect the controversy to the raging debate over the proposed Islamic Center near Ground Zero.  Despite its unequivocal press release, FNC’s coverage actually validated the pastor’s claims.  Many of its hosts and guests promoted the treacherous issue of sensitivity that the two controversies supposedly shared.  Fred Barnes, a long time FNC’s contributor and The Weekly Standard’s editor, acquiesced with Sarah Palin’s characterization of both controversies as an “unnecessary provocation,” (Sarah Palin  qtd. by Fred Barnes).

One can speculate that the media’s vaunted outrage at the Florida preacher’s “International Burn a Koran Day” threat was due to the preacher’s nakedly media-courting tactics that engendered his on/off planned bonfire. But one can also argue that in the age of the spectacle, the tabloid nature of TV news does not tolerate uncertainty or ambiguity. Television’s ratings game may verge on complicity.  As a prevalent cultural logic, these media spectacles continue to promote and popularize a negative image of Islam and Muslims.  There is no surprise at a recent Media Tenor analysis’ finding that  the “U.S. TV news agenda still isn’t positive on Islam or its adherents, with a rating that is more than 35% negative in September 2010′s preliminary data alone,” (Media Tenor, 2010).

More significantly, media coverage of the planned Koran burning, like media spectacles in general, did not rise to the occasion of facilitating a national conversation about the status of Islam and Muslims in American society. “Lost in the diversions of entertainment, individuals are becoming less informed and more misinformed by the increasingly tabloidized corporate media,” as Douglas Kellner puts it (2005). A deeper and serious discussion about Islam, however, needs to be had if only to heal the 9/11-seared American psyche.  As geography and borders grow increasingly irrelevant, and unable to stop the beaming and flow of these images abroad, it is these television images that dominate perceptions of the U.S.  globally.

References

“Islam in the U.S.: Controversies Raise Awareness.” Media Tenor. September 10, 2010. http://www.mediatenor.com/newsletters.php?id_news=305.

Clemente, Michael qtd. by David Zurawik. “Fox News Says it will not cover burning of Quran.” Baltimore Sun Critic David Zurawik writes about the business, culture and craziness of television. The Baltimore Sun. weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/zontv/2010/09/fox_news_will_not_cover_burnin.html.

Debord, Guy. 1994. The Society of the Spectacle, transl. D. Nicholson-Smith.  New York: Zone Books.

Kellner, Douglas. 2005. Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy: Terrorism, War, and Election Battles. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

Palin, Sarah qtd. by Fred Barnes. “Right wing compares book burning to building a community center.” Media Matters for America. http://mediamatters.org/research/201009080040.

Aziz Douai, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Communications at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada.

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“Connectivity” over “Connections”: Networking Governance and Technology Down South

January 27, 2011

Dipankar Sinha

This brief essay seeks to draw attention to certain trends that are taking place in the domain of governance-technology relations in developing societies. The question I pose is whether governance-sourced, human development-based networking in developing societies, such as India, is at all keeping pace with the spectacular development of technology-sourced networks. This very question leads us to another vital question: are developing societies prepared yet for such linkage?

In order to address the questions one has to trace the sources of tension between the imperatives of governance networking and those of technology networks.  Let us have a concrete instance. ‘Globalizing’ India is supposed to be going through a phase of transition and restructuring both in governance and technological spheres. The shrill voice and the excessive frequency in which policymakers simultaneously utter “good governance”, “inclusive technology” and “participatory development” should have been reassuring. But, as I have explained elsewhere in greater details (Sinha, 2005; 2010), there is a fundamental flaw in the policymakers’ perception, which tends to ignore the vital point that technology needs to be in the service of the people, and not the other way round.

The root of the problem lies in overestimating technological networks at the cost of human development— the base of effective governance networking. As a result, technology-induced connectivity is prioritized over human-sourced connections. For example, amidst the repeated promise of ‘access’ to information kiosks by ordinary people, the fundamental question of relevant and appropriate content for end users, which lies at the base of democratization and sustenance of access, is underestimated. There is little evidence— with notable exceptions like the voluntary organization-based Info Villages in Pondicherry, South India, or the corporate-driven e-Choupal in select regions of India— of localization of software, use of local language-based keyboards or the linkage of local knowledge and resources to the kiosks. As a result, most kiosks are largely ineffective, with a pathetic lack of footfalls. Policymakers’ zeal to negotiate the more publicized digital divide overwhelms the need to minimize the knowledge divide— making the whole process a self-defeating venture. Not surprisingly the Info Villages(1) and the e-Choupals(2) effectively use the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in conformity with local resources, knowledge and skills.

In general, developing countries are now reverberating with the slogan of ‘good governance’, along with its key indicators— transparency, accountability and responsiveness. Still, we are left with a complex knot when it comes to the interface of governance and technology. Invoking the ‘networks’ mechanically does not really solve the problem; on the contrary, in such a process the ‘solution’ itself becomes the problem.

The question is, what is ‘network’ and why is it of fundamental importance to policymaking? As Manuel Castells (1996) explains, a network is a set of inter-connected nodes which are necessary for the circulation of money, information, technology, images, goods, services, or people throughout the network. Castells adds that the most central distinction in the organizational logic is to be or not to be— in the network. As he puts it, “Be in the network, and you can share and, over time, increase your chances. Be out of the network, or become switched off, and your chances vanish…” It is true that living in the days of globalization— marked most fundamentally by unforeseen contraction of both space and time— policymakers can no longer take refuge in the argument that developing societies still have sufficient time to adjust to the network-dependent scenario. It is all the more true in a world in which late-starters are contemptuously dismissed as ‘laggards’. The imperative of ‘being in the network’ is now guided by the “do it now” spirit. Then again, such initiatives hang loose without a reasonably good baseline of human development.

Let us assert here that (new) technology, contrary to the perception of policymakers in the developing world, is not neutral. As the saying goes, technology is neutral insofar as no one knows what technology is used for and so far it is never used. The intense political implication of such ‘neutral’ stance is inescapable. As Wajcman warns (2002), the view of technology as an external and autonomous force exerting an influence on society narrows the possibility for democratic engagement— through debates and dissent— with the order of technology. We may add that not just technology, but the twin business of governance and development are ‘non-neutral’ ideas and practices as well. They are supposed to be purposive acts based on a sort of positive bias in favour of the welfare of people.

However, in the growing amnesia of policymakers the idea of human development is lost. This happens despite the fact that in the contemporary discourse of development and governance the notion of ‘capability’ has acquired an important place. Conceptually developed by Amartya Sen (1999) and Martha Nussbaum (2000), capabilities, in broadest possible terms, refer to “what people are effectively able to do and be”. Intertwined with the extremely sensitive and significant issues of justice and equality, the shaping of capabilities, as Sen clearly notes, should be an outcome of public deliberations and reasoning based on the specific context in which it occurs. The point is particularly relevant in the context of developing societies in which the poor and the marginalized are in perpetual deprivation. Technology in general and the ICT in particular have great potential to enhance capabilities, but utilizing the power of technology has to rest on two cardinal points: first, technology must limit itself to play the role of the ‘facilitator’; and second, beyond the exclusive emphasis on ‘design transfer’ policymakers need to stress building the capacity of end-users.

Ironically, the ideas of Sen— whom the Government of India and the governments of several federated states of India,  consult for advice — continue to be ignored, with disastrous implications. When technology-induced networks are hyped at the cost of human development/capability-oriented reforms in governance, ordinary people get trapped, downgraded and wasted. Such a process has substantial political implications as well. The process takes its toll by threatening, minimizing and even ending, the traces of dissent and critique vis-a-vis the effectiveness of network initiatives. In India “ICT”— the ‘backbone’ of networks— is a buzzword, a political rhetoric, a magic wand— which is supposed to do away with the symptoms of underdevelopment that “cannot” be addressed otherwise. In this technocratic order the networks are too sacrosanct to come under critical scrutiny. To reiterate, in dealing with the excessively complicated interface of governance networking and technology networks the base-strategy cannot be a blind promotion of the latter at the cost of the former. Policymakers in the developing countries should keep in mind Tom Bentley’s poignant observation (2003): “Governance would be effective not just when every strategic centre is networked but when networks extend from blue sky of long-term strategy to coal-face of everyday experience”.

Notes

  1. Info Village was initiated by M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in 1988. The objective is to provide value-added information for generating livelihood for the families of fishermen and farmers.
  2. e-Choupal, created by the corporate giant ITC, are information kiosks-cum-supply chain, providing local farmers information about agricultural inputs, farm productivity, scientific farming practices, market prices of crops, and also goods and services.
    [Both initiatives have been part of the author’s research projects.]

References
Bentley, Tom. 2003. “Governance as Learning: The Challenge of Democracy”, URL: www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=3&debateId=52&articleId=1314

Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I: The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge MA. Oxford UK: Blackwell Publishers.

Nussbaum, Martha C. 2000. Women and Human Development: The Capability Approach, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom, New York: Random House.

Sinha, Dipankar. 2005. “On Forgetting History: ICT and Colonization of Politics in Post-colonial India” in Amiya K. Bagchi, Dipankar Sinha and Barnita Bagchi eds., Webs of History: Information, Communication and Technology from the Early to Post-Colonial India, New Delhi: Manohar.

Sinha, Dipankar. 2010. (De)Politicizing Information Technology: Towards an Inclusionary Perspective, Working Paper 19, Department of Media and Communication. London: London School of Economics.  URL: www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/mediaWorkingPapers/pdf/EWP19.pdf

Wajcman, Judy. 2003. ”Addressing Technological Change: The Challenge to Social Theory”, Current Sociology, Volume 50, Number 3, May.

Dipankar Sinha is a Professor of Political Science at Calcutta University and the Hony Professor at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata.

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