Posts Tagged ‘Media and Culture’

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.

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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.

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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 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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