On
the eve of the last decade of this millennium, waves of euphoria were
catapulted through invisible globalising networks with their nodal
points in television satellites, old-fashioned radio transmitters,
computer modems, telephones and fax machines. These waves reached
places like Trinidad and the Trobriands, and engendered a widespread
feeling that a new era in the history of humanity was about to begin.
In some people's view, the East European revolutions marked the ultimate
victory of capitalism and liberal democracy as the universal ideology
of the world; some even went so far as to suggest that history had
come to an end in a Hegelian sense. These points are certainly debatable,
but it is doubtless true - and it is a point of departure for this
essay - that a majority of humanity is by now more or less fully integrated
into global systems of communication and exchange. We are forced to
be citizens, and we are consumers in a market. The interfaces of modernity
- the market, the state and the individual - unite very many of us
in a system although we are geographically widely dispersed. Culture
is being liberated, or severed, from places, and meanings flow in
inter-cultural space. Although globalisation is a fact, the popular
metaphor of the global village is fatally misleading: it mixes up
the distinctive levels of inter-cultural space, made up by disembedded
signs, and the local level, where these signs are pulled down and
anchored in subjectively experienced worlds. In this talk I shall
confront this contradiction in McLuhan's metaphor by indicating how
the global is articulated with the local without becoming the same
as the local. In doing this, I will wrap up my examples in a series
of reflections about the ways in which we think about what culture
is about.
The problem
A main source of inspiration for this paper, as for the present symposium
as a whole, is the emerging interdisciplinary research field dealing
with the globalisation of culture. Drawing on diverse empirical material,
theory and earlier research efforts, many scholars in the social sciences
and the humanities are currently attempting to come to terms with
a social and cultural world which seems increasingly to be characterised
by flux, paradox, change, lack of clear boundaries and unprecedented
complexity. Facing this world, it is becoming painfully evident that
many of our conventional methodological tools and analytic frames
of enquiry are lamentably inadequate. This is not the place to go
into these scholarly quibbles in detail, although they are important
for the future of our academic disciplines and indeed for our future
understanding of the world. Instead, I shall focus on one aspect of
globalisation which has not, perhaps, received sufficient attention
yet. I shall reflect on the power of symbols and meanings in inter-cultural
space, and will thereby ask why it is that some symbols and meanings
are so much more powerful and effective than others in the sense that
they are being appropriated and used by millions of people all over
the world.
Fifteen to twenty years ago, that is before postmodernism and the
collapse of conventional Marxism, a plausible answer to this question
could have been a simple one. The notion of cultural imperialism had
a natural place in the conceptual toolbox of any self-respecting sociologist
or anthropologist. It was more or less taken for granted that cultural
domination, the colonisation of the mind in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's words,
was a concomitant of economic, political and military domination.
Immanuel Wallerstein succeeded in nearly convincing everybody that
there is really only one world system, the capitalist world system,
which consists of centre, periphery and a few fuzzy areas which could
conveniently be described as semi-periphery. Many, Marxists and non-Marxists
alike, assumed that the masses of the Third World were the hapless
victims of ideologies spreading false consciousness, just as they
were being exploited economically by companies and governments of
the North. Consumerism and careerism were regarded as evil and harmful
ideologies; by implication, the individualism of Europe was considered
unfit for the African, Indian and South American collectivist spirit
- just as capitalism itself had been imposed from without as an alien
and ultimately harmful system.
The intellectual sterility of this general approach has been shown,
I think quite conclusively, by many scholars and artists who have
emphasised the ways in which meaning is necessarily generated locally
by people who have some notion about what they are up to. In other
words: being poor and oppressed is no excuse for not thinking, reacting
to the world, behaving, choosing between alternatives and occasionally
enjoying a Coke, a soap opera or a pop tune. Although dependency theory
in its widest, most encompassing versions may be useful at a very
general and abstract level, it tells us nothing about life-experiences
and how people make sense of the world in which they live the way
they see it. More crucially, there is no simple functional link between
economic and political circumstances on the one hand, and cultural
processes on the other. When, therefore, we wish to investigate cultural
power - power over thought, discourse, knowledge and meaning - it
may be way off the mark to start by looking into economic and political
power. In a little while, I shall try to drive this point home through
a description of cultural processes in a place I know from anthropological
fieldwork; first, a few words must be said about how we ought to think
about culture and identity.
Culture
The argument of globalisation goes approximately like this. In the
post-colonial world, that is to say the world of the micro-chip, general-purpose
money, linear time, the satellite dish and the jetplane, culture is
no longer restricted to particular places - it has in important respects
been disembedded from spatial structures. Transnational and non-localised
networks of communication and exchange function alongside localised
processes of modernisation and integration into nation-states, to
the effect that cultural variation is forcefully being channeled through
the universal interfaces of modernity. As Anthony Giddens once put
it, rather bluntly: The world is becoming a single place. However,
most globalisation theorists would stress, continued diversity and
diversification are indeed not opposed to globalisation; rather, they
are aspects of it. The Rushdie affair from 1989 on should be a reminder
of this: A book published in Britain provoked a reaction in Iran,
and as a consequence, virtually half of the world's population were
immediately involved in a public debate on religion and civil rights,
arguing from within very different life-worlds, yet united by their
shared disagreement and the channels required to make the disagreement
public.
In order to grasp this kind of cultural process, a radical re-thinking
of the concept of culture is necessary. In anthropology, that concept
of culture which is still the most common one in the literature, especially
in the United States, conceives of culture in terms of sharing and
conjugates it in the plural: under normal circumstances, so to speak,
the members of a given society were assumed to have the same culture
- a shared way of life, language, religion, customs and so on. This
notion of culture is ridden by several serious problems, and I will
not go into all of them here. Suffice it to mention the problem of
boundaries and the problem of variation: that the boundaries drawn
between "cultures" are always more or less arbitrary, and
that it is rarely accurate to claim that members of any society share
a way of life. In the age of global communications and postmodern
fragmentation of life-worlds and experiences, this general point cannot
be overlooked in any sensible study of cultural processes.
Culture is that which makes communication and misunderstanding possible,
and it is also the continuously generated result of ongoing processes
of communication. It is not a fixed entity, nor can it be delimited
to a community of individuals. To myself, there is no doubt that I
share more in terms of culture with some of my informants from anthropological
fieldwork in Mauritius and Trinidad than with my next-door neighbours
in Oslo. In general, as interacting human beings we are closer than
ships passing in the night, but tightly knit communities with shared
values and ideas are rarer than many social scientists have been wont
to think.
Furthermore, culture, seen as regular but unbounded traffic in symbols
and meanings, can profitably be studied apart from macro features
of the economy. The reason is that meaning is created intersubjectively,
between people who are in some way or another in touch with one another,
and there is no reason to assume that these processes follow the same
logic, or are directly determined by, economic and political processes.
I am not saying that they are independent from the latter, merely
that there is no one-to-one relationship. Discursive power, the power
to define the terms of discourse and to fill the social world with
meaning, is not simply congruent with economic and political power.
Culture is as such no scarce resource, unlike the resources competed
over in economic and political life. Whereas the actors in the economic
and political arenas attempt to prevent other actors from access to
their resources, the actors who shuffle ideas, images and meanings
around in the global market-place may rather try to share them with
as many as possible.
The inter-cultural space alluded to in my title refers to that imaginary
field - for these processes do not unfold in space! - where messages,
discourses and meanings of diverse origins are sifted, scrutinised,
confronted and selected. My special interest here concerns the articulation
between globalised messages and discourses and local ones. This process
always takes place locally. One could therefore say, as a rejoinder
to McLuhan and his simplistic notion of the global village, that perhaps
the world is a single place, but it is always created and re-created
in a multitude of localities: no matter how global our networks of
communication and exchange may be, in a physical and often social
sense we are necessarily placebound. The general question I am asking
is a Batesonian one: why do some ideas, images and meanings offered
survive and gain mass appeal in many such localities, whereas others
do not? Do those fragments of meaning that have a more or less global
appeal have anything in common? I now turn to an elaboration of some
of these claims by way of an example.
Mauritius
Mauritius could easily be described as an extreme case of a culturally
dependent territory - and indeed, several social scientists have approached
the island in exactly this way. Situated in the Indian Ocean eight
hundred kilometres east of Madagascar, the island was uninhabited
when first settled by European colonisers and their slaves in the
seventeenth century. Today an independent state with a population
of slightly over a million, contemporary Mauritius relies on three
main industries - sugar cane, manufacturing and tourism - for its
economic survival. Give a series of loans to the competing textile
industries of Indonesia and India, or reduce the sugar quotas to the
EC through the Lomé convention, or raise the price of crude
oil by a few dollars a barrel, and the Mauritian economic outlook
moves from optimism to despair. Given its small size, its isolation
and its great dependency on trade with the outside world, Mauritius
can thus be seen as an extreme example of that interconnectedness
with other places which is typical of virtually any location in the
contemporary world.
Similarly, it would be easy to describe Mauritian culture as an extreme
case of dependency. All that is culturally endemic to the island is,
in a certain sense, the local mix of European, African and Asian influences.
The vernacular of most Mauritians, Kreol, has been described as a
merger of Bantu grammar with French vocabulary; Mauritian cuisine,
although far from homogeneous, could similarly be described as an
incongruous mix of Indian, Chinese and French cooking. Due to the
island's peculiar colonial history, its legal system contains elements
of the Code Napoléon as well as British law. If we were to
follow these lines of reasoning, we might be able to develop a model
of Mauritian culture depicting it as a more or less fixed system of
practices, meanings and customs which were all but derivative. A few
scholars have tried to show that the Creoles, the Mauritians of African
descent, have retained important elements of "African culture";
and many local academics are concerned with the question of cultural
continuity among Mauritians of Indian descent. This way of conceptualising
culture, which can be politically efficient, is misleading because
it builds on the assumption that culture has a transcendental existence,
that it exists as a langue, so to speak; a priori, outside of the
acting agents. If we insist that culture is that which makes communication
possible as well as being the enacted outcome of that communication,
it is absolutely necessary to look more closely at the processes whereby
meanings are created; namely, in the ongoing lives of people. If they
consider themselves Indian, they are effectively Indian, even if their
way of life does not conform to academic definitions of Indianness;
and if they authentify their selves through appropriating French table
manners and American accents when singing contemporary pop songs,
then those very cultural elements are exactly what are required for
a Mauritian to be authentic. Power and exploitation enter into these
relationships only to the extent that people lose control over their
own priorities, as when zealous traditionalists in the Middle East
rule that liberal urban women should wear veils because to do otherwise
would not be in accordance with the principles of their authentic
culture.
Patrick
Let me dwell for a while on an example, before making some concluding
remarks. A young man in his mid-twenties, who lives in the town of
Beau-Bassin in Mauritius, is called Patrick. He is a light-skinned
urban Creole with a French name; most of his distant ancestors were
Indian and African, but he does certainly not dream of an Indian or
African name for his own part. Patrick's vernacular is Kreol, but
he prefers to speak French or even English with foreigners. He thinks
little of the local nationalist movement which tries to win official
recognition for Kreol: according to Patrick, French is superior as
a written language not only becayse it is an international language,
but also because it is, in his view, richer and more nuanced than
Kreol. Concerning music, which has an important place in his life,
Patrick is fond of sentimental French chansons as well as some British
and North American pop and rock'n'roll. He does not like contemporary
rap, dub and house which, he contends, lack melody and feel; nor does
he particularly enjoy so-called roots music such as reggae, rhythm'n'blues
and 'forties jazz. When confronted with North American, African and
Caribbean notions about "black culture" and the black consciousness
movement, Patrick tends to shrug and say that this movement has little
appeal to him; he does not believe in its politics and does not like
its aesthetic expressions. Similarly, he has no time for that Mauritian
cultural radical movement which tries to replace metropolitan expressions
- music, literature, language, food, clothing - with local ones. Concerning
local séga music, which is very self-consciously local and
rooted in local experiences, Patrick likes very little of it, because,
as he says, the quality of the songs is really quite poor if one compares
it with European music.
Patrick and his brothers frequently rent video films; many of them
are low-budget Hong Kong kung-fu films; others are American films
dubbed in French. He says that the criterion for a good film is its
ability to stir the sentiments of the audience, and both violent and
romantic films are in his view capable of that.
Someone infused with a traditional view of culture as a fixed, rooted
or semi-metaphysical entity shared by a population would have no other
choice than concluding a study of Patrick's views and priorities by
stating that he suffers from a serious attack of cultural dependency
and false consciousness; that he is alienated from his roots and probably
despises himself. My own conclusion is nearly opposite. It is easy
to see that Patrick's selection and consumption of symbols in inter-cultural
space are consciously undertaken in order to help him make sense of,
and enrich, his life-experiences. He has relatively little education
and works as a junior clerk; his immediate chances for promotion are
slim. He does not fancy Europe as a land of milk and honey and unlike
many Mauritians, he does not dream of professional success in France,
Canada or Australia. His life-projects are modest and local: he wants
to marry his girlfriend and to improve his social standing a little;
and he wants to continue to be able to enjoy himself through a lifetime
of work and married life. He does not see black people as being neither
superior nor inferior to white people, but as he accurately puts it,
your skin colour is important for your career opportunities worldwide.
Not a politically oriented man, Patrick does not think this will change
easily or in the near future. There is, in a word, no reason for him
to attach himself to what we middle-class intellectual Europeans may
think of as national culture on the one hand, and black culture on
the other hand. His life-projects and his codification of his own
experiences are congruent with - and informed by - the cultural commodities
he transforms into expressions of his own identity. The authentification
of the self happens in the self, not in sociological theories of oppression
and authenticity.
Inter-cultural space: Shared codes
Let me put this in a more general way. First, any cultural expression
must be commodified in order to travel in inter-cultural space: it
must be available in the market place. Secondly, people everywhere
select among the available goods offered for cultural consumption
those which best help them to make sense of their own experiences.
If they primarily regard their experiences as those of Indians severed
from the source of their culture, they may - as many Mauritians of
Indian origins do - select and fetishise cultural commodities associated
with Indianness. If, on the other hand, they regard themselves as
modern and forward-looking, they may - as many Indo-Mauritians and
others have also done - emphasise what is locally thought of as Westernness
instead. Neither of the two strategies can generally be said to be
more authentic than the other. For those members of urban middle classes
in many countries of the world who regard some version of local or
national culture as being more authentic than say, the images from
Hollywood or Bombay, the main kind of life-experience may relate to
colonialisation.
Patrick rarely distinguishes between local and inter-cultural or global
messages in his preferences. However, many Mauritians are in favour
of local musical artists because they convey aspects of a life-experience
that is uniquely Mauritian, described in the local idiom. These meanings,
one may assume, will not travel since they are embedded locally. On
the contrary, I would argue, they may - just as Jamaican reggae and
Trinidadian calypso have travelled through inter-cultural space, ending
up among youths in Europe and North America. The itinerary of Oriental
religion towards Europe and North America has been more complex and
has been marked by several transformations and processes of commodification;
some aspects of Oriental religion (notably Zen buddhism, Hinduism,
Taoism) are nevertheless being appropriated by thousands, perhaps
millions of Europeans and North Americans who use them to account
for their experiences in the world. Certainly, some cultural commodities
are unfit for international consumption, but their embeddedness in
local experiences does not seem to be the only criterion. Rather,
just as true art is said to possess an essence enabling it to transcend
its own time, it is tautologiaclly true that cultural products which
survive in inter-cultural space contain an element that makes it possible
for people elsewhere to hook themselves onto it and read their own
life's story into them.
There are significant local variations as regards which messages survive
and which do not; for example, the soap opera The Young and the Restless
is extremely popular in Trinidad, whereas it enjoys only a moderate
success in Malaysia. A main reason is that it deals with sex and intrigues,
which is a more important topic in Trinidadian society than in Malaysian
society. As regards Dallas, which is a soap largely focussing on the
topics of power and money, the situation is the opposite. However,
the variations are certainly not merely localised; they can be observed
in the localities themselves. The typical Western European jazz lover
is a university-educated urban man in his forties; the typical Mauritian
reader of French romans-photo is a teenage girl. The patterns of bricolage
whereby cultural universes are fashioned so as to make sense of the
world for the subject, vary infinitely. Some of the variation may
be related to regional differences; for example, the popularity of
French pop music in Mauritius is not unrelated to the Mauritian population's
proficiency in the French language and long history of cultural colonialisation
by images of French culture. However, much of the variation is caused
by differences between life-experiences which are not related to geographic
differences. Both the visual arts, the popular arts and literature
have a stake in the symbolic power struggles taking place in inter-cultural
space; and Michael Jackson's almost global success can justly be compared
to the almost universal recognition of Dostoyevsky's novels: although
locally embedded, they communicate shared denominators enabling people
in diverse circumstances to read them in a meaningful way.
Conclusion: The logic of symbolic power asymmetries
Many artists and intellectuals, of both socialist and conservative
persuasions, argue against the globalisation of culture on largely
aesthetic grounds: they might say that the shared symbolic repertoire
developed in inter-cultural space is flat and superficial because
it glosses over and indeed obliterates the distinctiveness of those
life-experiences which it unites. (Does this mean that Shakespeare
and Dostoyevsky are "flattening" writers?) Others would
stress the fact that the global success of Coca-Cola, Madonna, CNN
Headline News, Levi's jeans and Dynasty is caused by the economic
dominance of the companies spreading these products and the cultural
hegemony of the ideology they convey. While both of these approaches
may have something to recommend them, I would prefer to start the
analysis with a phenomenological focus on the consuming subject. Only
by observing how meaning is created at that level, can we fully understand
why the Coca-Cola bottle has become the most familiar single object
in the whold world, why European classical music is popular among
the Trinidadian middle classes, why Trinidadian steelband music is
popular among parts of the European middle classes and why, generally
speaking, some meanings are more universally applicable than others.
A main finding from my own research and that of others is that although
the elements floating in inter-cultural space are disembedded and
non-localised, meaning must always be localised to a subject. In other
words, when Patrick of Beau-Bassin listens to Jacques Brel, he effectively
interprets Brel within, and moves Brel into, a Mauritian frame of
reference, anchoring him in local experiences. For every Bob Marley
fan in the world, there is a unique interpretation of Marley, relating
his songs to a unique, localised life-experience. What appear to be
common denominators creating shared universes of meaning and flattening
experiences, may upon closer investigation turn out to be multifaceted
and polysemic symbols which are effectively used in extremely diverse
ways by agents who continue to live in different worlds despite processes
of so-called cultural homogenisation. So-called global culture is
not marked by shared meanings but by shared symbols to which diverse
meanings may be attributed.
Although political and economic power certainly exist in a very real
way and contribute to setting the parametres for the symbolic power
struggles in inter-cultural space - we notice that the Swedish telecommunications
company is a sponsor of this symposium, and I know many Indians who
do not have their own telephone - the ultimate kind of power in question
is the power of persuasion, which connects emotions and experiences
to particular symbols or cultural commodities. It could be said that
these symbols convey an ideological content; perhaps it would be more
accurate to say that they can be used to express sensologies (Mario
Perniola's suggestion), for the senses are probably more important
than ideas in the formation of identities and consumer preferences.
A final remark: The resulting kind of cultural diversity cannot meaningfully
be said to be either less rich or less authentic than the kinds of
cultural diversity described by Victorian travellers a few generations
ago, but it is different, and - to return to my initial reflections
- it must provoke us to re-think the concept of culture. Preferably,
culture ought to have been a verb.
·©Thomas Hylland Eriksen 1993 |
