Posts Tagged ‘Identity’

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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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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The Individual and the Collective: A Discussion of Identity and Individualism

December 11, 2010

Stephanie Persson

The driver appraised me as I climbed into the passenger seat of the cab. “American,” he remarked in his thick Sichuanese, pulling the car into busy traffic. The comment was not so much a question as a statement of fact. “Why, yes I am,” I replied. “But how did you know that?” “Look at you,” he laughed, “of course you are American.” 

It was small exchanges like this that permeated every aspect of my life in Chengdu and led to my fascination with identity. That comment contained many assumptions about identity – both his and mine. With one word he equated ethnicity and nationality, rid me of any possibility for a more complicated existence (dual-nationalism, for one), and labeled me as a cultural other. Every day in China I was faced with my collective identities – not only my nationality, but also my race and my gender – in ways I had never been forced to deal with. Undoubtedly this was largely because of my place as a cultural and national foreigner, but there was something more there which I found intriguing. I wanted to explore the ways in which identity, and specifically personal as opposed to collective identity, was approached and viewed differently within the Chinese context.

Central to each of us and yet ambiguous in its form and composition, identity is perhaps one of the most complex and contradictory concepts studied by social scientists. It exists between a constant pull of opposing forces. It is both singular and plural, real and imagined, individual and collective, defined by sameness and by difference. Perhaps identity’s ambiguity derives from the fact that it does not simply exist, but is instead continually formed and reformed, created and shaped by the discourse of the individual and those around them. Because of the dialectical nature of identity, it is fundamentally both individualistic and pluralistic. It is pluralistic because the individual’s identity is created through discourse and relationships with other individuals and groups (Taylor 1994: 25-35). It is individualistic because no two people will have experienced the same relationships or the same dialogue.  I use both the terms “relationships” and “dialogue” here in a broad sense. These relationships range from our closest family members to acquaintances we hardly know. The ways in which these people perceive and describe us become, in addition to our own concept of self, a broad conversation of competing narratives which attempt to define us. It is through this interaction – this dialogue, if you will – that identity is created.

This concept of identity as a dialectical creation is an extremely modern concept; indeed, scholars such as sociologist Harvie Ferguson have argued that this concept of identity is at the very heart of our concept of “modernity,” (Ferguson 2009: 47-50). Although it was still defined by relationships, medieval society certainly did not see identity as being defined by “dialogue.” Instead, hierarchy and social place defined feudal society, which was one in which “everyone ‘knows their place’, or, better, they are determined by the place they are in,” (Ibid., 50). Our modern concept of identity, in contrast, is recognized as being created both on an individual and a collective level. Furthermore, modern identity is seen as being fluid rather than static. As sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall explains, “We have now to re-conceptualize identity as a process of identification… It is something that happens over time, that is never absolutely stable, that is subject to the play of history and the play of difference,” (Hall 1991: 15).

The Social Nature of Identity and Collectivization
The dialectical nature of identity influences the creation and maintenance of collective social identities as well as individual identity. Philosopher Charles Taylor has described this process as  the “politics of recognition,” (Taylor 1994: 15). He argues that identity is shaped by recognition or its absence; in other words, the way in which an individual is or is not acknowledged. Taylor’s idea of recognition can be applied to both sameness and difference. We recognize that someone has similar qualities to us, or dissimilar ones. Through realizations of sameness and difference, we create social categories and grouping that we use to define who we are. These social categories are also, like individual identity, fundamentally dialectical. What it means to belong to a certain social category, or where the boundaries are for those categories, is created in dialogue. It is tempting to see categories such as ethnicity, gender, or nationality as inflexible or “natural” categories. Indeed states, religions and other social power brokers often put great effort into making these categories seem impenetrable. In truth, however the meaning of these categories is always defined within a society. In his work on nationalism, for example, scholar Benedict Anderson has famously shown the nation-state to be a created – or want he calls “imagined” – community. The nation-state is not a natural truth, but a created political body. Despite this, a sense of nationalism has come to be seen as a primary identity category for most people around the globe. As Anderson explains, “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lies the image of their communion,” (Anderson 1983: 6). This concept can be applied to other identity categories as well. Just as the concept of the nation-state is fluid and dialectical, concepts such as ethnicity and even gender are also socially defined.

It is important that states and individuals are aware of, and continue to investigate, the dialectical and socially created nature of identity.  This is particularly important for those people on the margins of society.  For individuals near the borders of social categories, those attempting to straddle or cross over social boundaries through what may be considered “pluralistic” identities, an understanding of the permeable, flexible nature of these boundaries becomes extremely significant.  Furthermore, it is important to recognize that the dialectical nature of identity means that the identity and collective actions of minority groups are heavily dependent on the view of themselves they see reflected in the majority culture.  When people do not receive “recognition”, in Taylor’s words, or when groups feel some element of their identity is under threat, this has significant impact on their social and individual identities.  An awareness of the social and dialectical nature of identity is therefore critical in a diverse society.

A longer version of this article entitled, “The Individual and the Collective: A Comparison of Identity, Individualism, and Social Categorization in American and Chinese Students” may be found in the Jackson School Journal of International Studies, v1. No. 1, Spring 2010.

References
Anderson, Benedict. 1983.  Imagined Communities. London: Verso.

Ferguson, Harvie. 2009. Self Identity and Everyday Life. The New Sociology. New York: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart. 1991. “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference,” in Radical America 23 (4): 15.

Taylor, Charles. 1994. Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stephanie Persson is a recent graduate of the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she studied International Studies with a focus on China.

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Global Village/Another World: Globalization as a Contending Space

April 30, 2010

Dipankar Sinha

The ancillary contention of this essay, as distinct from the advocates of ‘quick-fix alternatives’, is that the search for the transformatory axes in politics cannot be realized by any ready-made ‘alternative’. The alternative can emerge only through painstaking nurturing of different and diffused non-dominant/ non-mainstream communication channels which question and contest the dominant order of things. Harold Lasswell(1948), though by no means a scholar of alternatives, had provided a classic formulation of political communication by advancing a set of apparently simple but extremely potent questions: “Who said what when and how?”. Keeping in mind that ‘alternative’ is a contested and somewhat slippery term, when we embark on the visualization of politics beyond the dominant- mainstream forms we can extend the Lasswellian formulation to pose the moot question: whose order is it any way?.

In the days of the inequitable globalization we increasingly hear the announcement of the “death of utopia” and the “end of history”, which emerges not only from the act of colonization of the political and economic institutions but also of the aesthetic and expressive faculties as well. The latter breeds “monoculture of the mind”. The Global Village project(Sinha 2010) not only effects material exclusion of the vast majority of people it also leads to symbolic exclusion which is effected through the denial of the “power of renaming”. The very idea of the Global Village is much hyped because it perfectly serves the interests of the globally dominant political forces to hide the tremendous disparities and discriminations. Who says that discriminations do not exist in village?

It necessarily follows that any meaningful and effective exploration of the possible and plausible alternatives to the fast-paced construction of the Global Village needs a simultaneous focus on the role of communication both as a facilitator of status quo and as a means of change. As a power-laden process of meaning generation and meaning circulation, through which the ‘reality’ is constantly produced, maintained, transferred and transformed, the process of communication, on the one hand, facilitates production and reinforcement of the dominant order; on the other hand, it also gives birth to and intensifies what we would prefer to call the zones of exclusion— both material and symbolic— of the dominant scenario to provide clues to possible routes of transformation.

In this backdrop the need of the hour is to be aware of the dangers of the ‘ritual’ communication— which enforces ‘voluntary’ submission to ‘appropriately’ patterned behaviour— by exploring ways and means to critique and subvert the high-pitched process of mainstreaming. But it has to be done by being in the mainstream and not by disengaging from the prevalent order or by engaging in a head-on-collision with it. Here we have in mind the “Delinking” thesis suggested by Samir Amin and the “Cultural Dissociation” thesis advocated by Cees Hamelink— both of which call for detachment as a deliberate strategy, respectively from the prevalent international economic order and international communication order. Their theses, so to say, are radical and tempting but impractical. If the successive protest movements against the current show of globalization raise the possibility of a “new dawn” in the struggle for alternatives they remain overwhelmingly struggles not only by communication but in communication vis-à-vis the prevalent world order. If communication is the infrastructural backbone of the discriminatory mainstream politics it would also be the same for progressing towards visualization of any viable alternative global order as well. The fundamental distinction between the two cases would be that in the mainstream form— as illustrated by the idea of Global Village— a singular kind of communication ‘order’ is being promoted, but the search for alternative politics should rely on diverse orders(Boyd Barrett, 2002) beyond the hegemony of one.

Then again, the task ahead is not easy. As hinted, the issue of alternative is not a simple one and any attempt to address it should avoid simplistic generalizations that often plague the ‘alternative euphoria’. At the core of this issue lies the question of alterity of alternatives. In most studies on alternative modes the alterity question is not addressed adequately, if at all, with the result that in these studies there is some kind of taken-for-grantedness about the specific kind of alternative being advocated. The fate of the erstwhile socialist states has revealed that the construction of an ‘alternative’ order without sufficient alterity is bound to end up in failure. If alterity connotes difference from particular others, did the alternatives that are being regarded as so, have sufficient alterity in the sense of having completely different constitutive rationale and order? Or are they basically trying to advocate a supposedly alternative order at a superficial level to gain some space in the prevalent order? These questions must be addressed in order to construct the imaginary of Another World and to transform it into reality.

References:

Boyd Barrett, Oliver (2002)  “Global Communication Orders” in William N. Gudykunst and Bella Mody eds., Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication, Thousand Oaks: sage Publications, pp.325-42.

Lasswell, Harold (1948)  “The Structure and Function of Communication in Society” in L. Bryson ed., The Communication of Ideas, New York: Institute for Religious and Social Studies.

Sinha, Dipankar (2010) “Communication: The Challenges of Globalization, Information Society, Identity and Development” in Yogendra Singh ed., Social Sciences: Communication, Anthropology and Sociology, Delhi: Pearson Longman/Centre for Studies in Civilizations, pp. 231-247.

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

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The Rise of the Global Imaginary and the Persistence of Ideology

July 30, 2009

Manfred B. Steger

steger

Political ideologies emerged at a crucial historical juncture—the great American and French revolutions of the eighteenth century—as authoritative systems of meaning consciously competing with religious doctrines. Taking a more this-worldly perspective on the origin and purpose of human communities, ideologies nonetheless resemble religion in their attempts to link the various ethical, cultural, and political dimensions of society into fairly a comprehensive shared mental models. Imitating religions’ penchant to trade in truth and certainty, political belief systems rely heavily on stories that persuade, praise, condemn, cajole, convince, and separate the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’. Like narratives of the sacred, ideologies both generate and thrive on human emotions. Certain political belief systems have inspired mass murder, torture, and rape much in the same way as some religious doctrines have fueled the flames of human suffering throughout the centuries. In fact, nearly all of the major political crimes committed in the last two centuries have been justified on the basis of some ‘ism’. But although ideologies serve such deceptive and manipulative purposes, they also represent ideas and claims that express the noble aspirations of particular sections of society at a given time in history.

The defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 and the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991 enticed scores of Western commentators to relegate ‘ideology’ to the dustbin of history. Proclaiming a radically new era in human history, they argued that ideology had ended with the final triumph of liberal capitalism. But this dream of a universal set of political ideas ruling the world came crashing down with the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Since then, Western political leaders as different as George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Nikolas Sarkozy have argued that the contest with jihadist Islamism represents much more than the military conflict: as they put it, it is the ‘decisive ideological struggle of our time.’ In short, far from being moribund, competing political belief systems are live and well in the twenty-first century. But which ideologies? Liberalism? Conservatism? Socialism?

This is where the confusion starts. Although we know that ideology has not ended, we still grope for words to name what’s actually new. So what have we come up with so far? Neoliberalism. Neoconservatism. NeoMarxism. Neofascism. Postmodernism. Postindustrialism. Postcolonialism. And the list goes on. But does this proliferation of prefixes really help us to understand the novelty of our shifting ideological landscape? Are today’s isms merely updated versions of our familiar ideologies? Or have we moved into genuinely new territory?

Let me suggest that there is, indeed, something genuinely new about today’s isms. These shared mental maps that help us navigate our political universe no longer correspond neatly to our familiar mental and geographical spaces built over two centuries on the foundation of sovereign and self-contained nation-state. Instead, ideologies have begun to translate into political programs and agendas of what I call the ‘global imaginary’. What I mean is a shared sense of a thickening world community, bound together by processes of globalization that are daily shrinking our planet. The rising global imaginary finds its articulation not only in the ideological claims of political leaders and business elites who reside in privileged spaces around the world. It also fuels the hopes, disappointments, and demands of migrants who traverse national boundaries in search of their piece of the global promise. In fact, the global imaginary is nobody’s exclusive property. It inhabits class, race, and gender, but belongs to neither. It is an impressive testimony to the messy superimposition of the global village on the conventional nation-state.

Consider, for example, today’s asymmetric wars that pit alliances of nation-states and non-state actors against amorphous transnational terrorist networks that nonetheless operate in specific localities-usually in ‘global cities’ like New York, London, Madrid, or Jakarta. New global pandemics expose the limits of our national public health systems. Nationally framed environmental policies cannot respond adequately to accelerating global climate change. Conventional education and immigration schemes based on national goals and priorities are incapable of preparing shifting populations for the pressing tasks of global citizenship. Cultivating global fan clubs of millions of members, European football teams like Manchester United have long escaped the confines of nation-based geography. And the list goes on.

Indeed, well-intentioned attempts to ‘update’ modern political belief systems by adorning them with prefixes resemble futile efforts to make sense of digital word processing by drawing on the mechanics of moveable print. Since liberalism, conservatism, and socialism have been transformed beyond recognition by the forces of globalization, it is imperative that we get to know the new political belief systems that fuel the great ideological struggle of the twenty-first century. This is not merely an academic exercise but a moral imperative for people interested in finding answers to the pressing global problems of our time. For it is these new articulations of the global imaginary that have begun to offer us possible roadmaps to solving our energy crisis without adding to the pollution of our great green planet; to maintain our economic prosperity while reducing global disparities in wealth and wellbeing; and to combat new transnational forms of political violence without unleashing the nightmare of nuclear confrontation or perpetuating an ill-conceived ‘global war on terror’.

About the author:

Manfred B. Steger is Professor of Global Studies and Director of the Globalism Research Center at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Globalization Research Center at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa. He has served as an academic consultant on globalization for the US State Department and as an advisor to the PBS TV series, “Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism.” He is the author of seventeen books on globalization and the history of political ideas, including: The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Imperial Neutrality: Clashes of the Future in India’s Call Centers

May 2, 2008

A. Aneesh
Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

In the winter of 2005, while investigating India’s call centers, my research assistant, a sharp and unreserved Indian graduate student, in New Delhi made a suggestion: “Why don’t you try to get a job at a call center. You still don’t look your age, and you speak with a slight American accent. Any company would give you the job.” While not a particularly pleasing comment, I did end up following the suggestion. I had conducted quite a few interviews with workers and executives by this time, and thought I had fair knowledge of this nocturnal world, but I had no feel for the floor, the immediate experience of connecting live with customers across the globe.

I started by applying for the position of Voice and Accent Trainer at a major call center in Gurgaon, a city bursting at the seams with economic exuberance. While my credentials – having lived in the United States for over a decade – were impressive, I was not offered the position after three interviews. A snippet from the third interview may explain why:

“Could you stop using that American accent?” my interviewer, Payal, a senior trainer in her 30s, asked me.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean, can you stop rolling your R’s as Americans do, and start using a neutral accent, instead,” she said brusquely.

“But there is no such thing as a neutral accent,” I failed to control my intellectual righteousness, even though this was not the occasion for academic debate.

“Well, there is. Do you hear how I’m speaking? Plain and neutral English,” she said.

“You mean plain, Indian English,” I said.

“Yes, Indian English is global English. It is neither American nor British,” she proudly claimed.

The interview continued to deteriorate for an hour without any of us giving up our respective stand. I tried to convince her that all speech was accented, and the native speakers of American English would clearly detect an accent in her English, but she continued to claim that she spoke “global English,” which was based on the neutralization of regional accents. She was obviously not a linguist and it was easy to fault her stance. But she did bring to light an important aspect of call centers: the creation of a neutralized space for communication across cultures. Neutrality, I would soon discover, was the crux of understanding not only call centers but also key transformations of the global age.

Soon I focused on obtaining, not the trainer’s job, but that of an ordinary agent. Within a month I found myself working for GoCom, a middle-of-the-road company in size and revenue, a reseller of mortgages and mobile phone connections, employing about one thousand agents targeting American and British consumers. During my training and work as an agent I discovered that neutrality was not just about accent; it was also about the general transformation of life in a form that could fit emerging global systems, a discovery that revealed life as a means to systemic ends. This reversal of the means-end relationship between life and techno-economic systems forms the basis of the epithet Imperial Neutrality. While allegories of “the tail wagging the dog” or life plugged into the machine have become common, it is time to wring fiction and cynicism out of the discussion to reveal profound social consequences.

During training I was part of a group of 8 men and 5 women, all young, spirited, and fresh out of college. The training period was both cheerful and agonizing. This was the time when the group developed solidarity against their common opponent, the trainer, and took longer than permitted breaks between sessions. These breaks included tea, coffee, smoking, and even singing. This was a highly social and lively group, quite typical of India’s college students. Yet, the painful part was the training session itself when one could notice the trainees’ anguish of trying to suppress their previous accent and speech learnt through primary socialization. Attempts at stifling the effects of their first language on English were at once comical and sad. Still sadder was the attempt at changing their style of speech, which was heavily influenced by their first language. The transition from their First Life to Second Life, to borrow the language of the virtual world, was not easy. English is not just another language on the continent, every Indian would testify: It is a measure of success, status and class, and thus remains very much an imperial language. If I try to correct someone’s Hindi, my effort may be rewarded with respect. To correct their English would most likely cause them humiliation. Despite the trainer’s warning, the trainees kept using “sir” in every sentence to address the mock customer. The use of “sir” in India has connotations of hierarchy that appear off-key in the American frame of ideological equality. A few trainees lacked fluency in English, which made the task even harder. You could argue that this identity shift must occur in every new job situation where one tries to master new organizational languages, new rules and regulations, and new work processes. Yet, it was different in the case of my co-workers at GoCom, and indeed, every call center in India. Their identity shift required them to rub out marks of primary socialization, knowledge of their culture, and styles of speech. Contortions of identity shift were instructive. Their intimacy with the immediate social and geographical world became irrelevant in the new work situation; infantilized and embarrassed, they learned the ways of their new world. The break from their immediate horizon was alarming, something I attempt to explain in terms of a split between social and system identity.

While working in the call center, it soon became clear that the shift from a social to system identity did not affect only Indian calling agents who needed to change accents, acquire pseudonyms, work hard to know a place they would never visit, learn work skills not portable to any other industry, and work at night when the city outside their building was asleep. Their American customers were also turned into their system profiles. Indeed, a call center agent was not the one who dialed the number. It was a software program called the “Dialer,” which targeted specific American profiles, according to credit history, age, gender, region, education, and buying patterns. This global conversation was not between persons but profiles; it was not a social conversation but postsocial communication.

Just as eating emerges as a program under nutritionism, which neutralizes and subordinates our relationship with food to the higher authority of scientific knowledge; identities and places, too, have begun their journey to higher grounds. It is interesting to see this change in the lives of call center agents working in Gurgaon, and illuminate the still hazy interstices from which the present age is gradually emerging. It is a story of cultural encounter, a study at the point of contact where cultures are forced to make sense of each other. Gurgaon, “a fashionable address of the new India,” to borrow a phrase from the New York Times, bears the marks of the global age in all its complexity. Operating in American, British, or Australian time zones, Gurgaon’s call centers are unique, previously unavailable, sites of examining global transformations.

The names of individuals and corporations have been changed to protect identity.

global-e volume 2 issue 1 may 2008

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Citizenship in the Age of Globalization

February 15, 2008

Michael A. Peters
Professor of Educational Policy Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Email: mpet001@uiuc.edu

During the early part of this decade two competing and influential conceptions of the ‘new imperialism’ emerged to focus on questions of international security, world order, and the evolving world system of states. Robert Cooper (2000), one-time Deputy Secretary of the Defence and Overseas Secretariat in the British Cabinet Office, posits the development of a postmodern European state system based on transparency, interdependence, and mutual surveillance. He calls for a ‘new imperialism’ – one compatible with human rights and cosmopolitan values – in order to sort out the problems of rogue states and the chaos of pre-modern states. By contrast, Michael Hardt and Anthony Negri (2001) use the combined resources of Marx and Deleuze to chart the emergence of a new form of sovereignty they call Empire. They narrate a history of the passage from imperialism to Empire, that is, from a modernity dominated by the sovereignty of nation-states under Westphalia, and the imperialisms of European powers, to a postmodernity characterized by a single though decentred, new logic of global rule. They suggest that the passage to Empire, with its processes of globalization, “offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation,” arguing that our political future will be determined by our capacity “not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends.”(p. xv)

In a strong sense, Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Cooper’s ‘new imperialism’ are both geopolitical and juridical forms of globalization that are dependent on emergent forms of global sovereignty though not necessarily forms of global citizenship. Questions of national identity and citizenship are transformed when raised in this new geopolitical context. The difference between the two views is that whereas the former focuses on American Empire as the dominant form the latter concentrates on an emergent European postmodern state system. They both entertain extranational forms of sovereignty based on these supranational systems and yet only the latter problematizes the concept of citizenship based on the bounded system of the sovereign state to describe a complex of rights that varies with scale and location. The U.S., exhibiting a kind of ‘defensive modernity’, recoils from liberal multiculturalism to fiercely defend its borders especially against the southern influx of Mexican migrants who want to equalize global opportunity and world resources. This defensive posturing also focuses negatively on American values and identity in contradistinction to the Other, and often blatantly engages the politics of racism and stereotypes to instil fear, create division, and manipulate the voters.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world experiences processes of both integration and disintegration. The expansion of world markets as a form of economic globalisation can be understood as a process of integration composed of international flows of capital, goods, information, and people. The same process is both a form of economical integration and a polarization of wealth that exacerbates existing tendencies toward greater global inequalities between rich and poor countries and regions. It also accentuates the need for reviewing the templates of the global system of governance that emerged with the Bretton Woods agreement, which founded many of the world institutions that comprised the architecture of the postwar world system. Now, more than at any time in the past, with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet system, the consolidation of the EU, the entry of China in the WTO, and the growth of India, we are witnessing an accelerated set of changes – economic, cultural, technological and political – that impinge on one another in novel ways and create new possibilities and dangers both for the democratic state and the notions of citizenship and national identity that underpin it.

The modern concept of citizenship – a recent concept historically – implies the existence of a civil or political community, a set of rights and obligations ascribed to citizens by virtue of their membership in that community, and an ethic of participation and solidarity needed to sustain it. Most traditional accounts of citizenship begin with the assertion of basic civil, political and social rights of individuals and note the way in which the modern concept as inherently egalitarian, took on a universal appeal with the development of the liberal tradition which is often understood as synonymous with modernity. Yet the concept has appealed to both conservatives and radical democrats: the former emphasise individual freedom at the expense of equality and see state intervention as an intolerable and unwarranted violated of the freedom of the individual while the latter stress the democratic potential of citizenship. Increasingly, on the left the concept has been seen as a means to control the injustices of capitalism. For the left, the most pressing question has been the status of citizenship in the modern state and what kind of political community best promotes it.

The classic theorisation of democratic citizenship is to be found in Marshall’s famous modelling of three forms of citizenship: civil, political and social. In this conception civil citizenship referred to personal liberty and a regime of individual rights, political citizenship referred to both political participation and democratic representation, and social citizenship to intervention by the state to reduce economic inequalities and promote social justice. It is now possible to chart the significant shifts in the definitions of citizenship that have accompanied globalization, including the breakdown of the historic compromise between capitalism, democracy and the welfare state, the rise of neoliberalism, and with it the expansion of world markets.

In the U.S. under the neocons, and the U.K. under the so-called Third Way, a mantle inherited by Prime Minister Brown, there has been a shift from the concept of rights to responsibilities and a move away from state intervention towards the market and the construction of ‘consumer-citizens’ who are increasingly forced to invest in themselves at critical points in their life-cycle (education, work, retirement) or go into debt. At the same time there has been a shift to the third sector with community and church involvement in the definition of social welfare policy and an emphasis on giving, gifting and voluntary work often thinly disguising a moral re-regulation of social life, especially of single women and their children. Increasingly, with the development of information and communications technologies, there has been a rise in state surveillance and, especially after 9/11, an erosion of liberal rights and a shift from active political citizenship to passive political literacy; concomitantly, the same technologies have supported new public spaces and civil networks that are interest-based and transcend the geography of face-to-face communities and even larger collectivities like states.

Perhaps, more than ever before the question of globalization and citizenship revolves around the free movement of peoples. By this I mean not only the modern diaspora, or the planned colonial migrations, or the more recent global mobility of highly skilled labour that is rewarded by citizenship. But more importantly, I mean refugees of all kinds and asylum-seekers and all that that entails – enforced border crossings, ethnic cleansing policies, the huge illegal movement of so-called ‘aliens’ or the ‘undocumented’, detention camps the likes of Woomera in Australia and even Guantanomo Bay, where the concept of rights is fragile or has entirely disappeared. Derrida (2001) argues for a form of cosmopolitanism that entails the right to asylum while Dummett (2001) focuses on refugee and immigration policy, increasingly a defining policy issue for the U.S., France, and the U.K.

The terms ‘globalization’ and ‘citizenship’ are not normally juxtaposed in social and political analysis. They tend to appear as contradictory or, at least, conflicting: the former points to a set of economic and cultural processes of unequal and uneven world integration, based on the unregulated flows of capital and underwritten by developments in new information and communications technologies, while the latter serves mainly as a metaphor for political community or solidarity. To what extent does globalization (as financialization) threaten the sovereignty of the nation-state and with it the notion of citizenship that developed during the modern era? To what extent can citizenship be severed from questions of national identity? Within the context of globalization how can we maintain or develop a sense of community and local identity to establish or defend the hard-won entitlements of social citizenship? What possibilities are there for developing genuine transnational alliances and defining entirely new sets of rights within supranational political arenas? To what extent can the movement of individuals and peoples come to be regarded as genuinely free within states, regions, and continents; and how might states that encourage the free-floating ‘globally integrated enterprise’ also extend universal and lawful protections to migrants, refugees and those seeking asylum? These are critical questions that ought to inform a democratic response to citizenship and to the question of citizenship education.

Cooper, R. (2000) The postmodern state and the world order. London: Demos, The Foreign Policy Centre.

Derrida, J. (2001) On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. London: Routledge.

Dummett, M. (2001) On immigration and refugees. New York: Routledge.

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2001) Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

global-e volume 1 number 3 February 2008

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