ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s, sociologists, anthropologists, and human geographers have wrestled with the vague and all-encompassing task of theorizing the cultural dimensions of globalization. This has proven to be even more complicated and problematic than theorizing the economics of globalization. Although most scholars of globalization accept that the spatial stretching of production lines and the expansion of capital and free markets comprise a central component of globalization, it has been difficult to establish how the specific characteristics of global capitalism’s most recent expansion and transformation are related to ongoing cultural changes in every region of the planet. For academics concerned with culture, the empirical study of globalization, accompanied by the turn to post-structuralist scholarship across the humanities and social sciences has fundamentally challenged the presumptions built into social scientific toolkits for studying culture. Where is culture located? How can seemingly endless processes of cultural change be tracked and studied? Or, more directly, “What about modernity?”While previously, a specific evolutionary script of modernity allowed ‘us’ to ‘go’ to a faraway locations and track cultural change just by being there, something that we call globalization has forced us to forsake such easy answers, to examine the relations of power inherent in the production of knowledge about culture, and finally, to leave us without our usual theoretical hangers on which we might drape the coats of our empirical and analytical studies. Yet, new hangers abound. Efforts to create just such theoretical hangers to fill the void have
generated a powerful discourse surrounding globalization’s cultural effects, bringing to the academic forefront such themes and keywords as hybridity, de-territorialization, diaspora, and cosmopolitanism, to name just a few. The interdisciplinary debates on cultural globalization have generated a sophisticated literature on this topic.Within sociology, however, an expanding orientation towards questions of the global in recent years has led to something of a retreat from grand theories of cultural globalization, as the method of global ethnography becomes the favored method for addressing the empirical phenomena of globalization.While such studies are deeply concerned with the cultural dimensions of globalization, they tend to overwhelmingly regard the cultural and economic dimensions of globalizations as intimately and inextricably bound together. This orientation has put distance between the early grand theories of cultural globalization that emerged in the 1990s on one hand, while also returning to some of the fundamental ideas of world-systems theory emerging in the 1970s on the other
hand. The emergence of global ethnography as the favored qualitative method for empirical study of the globalization also means that sociologists are now more than ever in active conversation with the anthropological study of cultural globalization, as the boundaries between these fields become harder to distinguish. Here, I aim to provide an overview of some of the major theoretical approaches to the
culture of globalization,while attempting to identify the unifying themes and accomplishments of this literature as it relates to sociology. Diverse characterizations of the cultural dimensions of globalization share a few key convictions: First and foremost, theorists of the cultural dimensions of globalization tend to implicitly or explicitly reject older anthropological notions of culture as a bounded system located in a specific place. Indeed, it is the apparently (new?) inability to locate and define culture and the realm of the social that informs and underpins new theories. In an age of transnational migration, freely traveling consumer goods, and the ever-deepening reach of the Internet, no longer can we assume, if ever we could in the first place, a thoroughgoing coincidence between territory and community, place and identity. The recognition of this disjuncture has focused our attention on the social construction of space and spatiality.While the macro/micro, global/local lens preoccupied earlier theories of globalization, contemporary studies reject such binaries, regarding the hierarchy between them as arbitrary, and instead taking as a given the co-constitutive character of the local and the global. These transformations in our approach to culture and globalization have prompted scholars to rethink the nation as a source of identity and belonging. The study of globalization’s cultures must acknowledge the continued importance of nations while also recognizing new sources of meaning and belonging. Class culture, racial politics, and gendered subjectivities all constitute sites of culture in the context of globalization, as do professional or workplace identifications, and commitments to transnational causes. Inevitably, theorists of the cultural dimensions of globalization must grapple with some
version of the most compelling historical narrative of all: the modernization narrative. For some, world-systems theory forms the systemic economic base upon which to construct and think through new cultural shifts and flows, while for others, a progressive narrative of social and political modernity, defined by proliferating institutions and norms, rather than by an economic system, prevails. In any of its forms, these theorists reveal to us the extent to which the paradigm of modernity, one-way progress and/or development is embedded into social scientific knowledge production about culture. These theoretical concerns have been centrally concerned with mapping key philosophical
dilemmas at the heart of social science onto the contemporary landscape of globalization. This is because those key dilemmas – the relationship between the universal and the particular, continuity and change, the individual and the collective – loom larger and more befuddling than ever in the early decades of a new millennium.Yet, grand theories of cultural globalization have been found to be ill equipped to explain and understand cultural change as it is experienced in lives of individuals or even in the historical scripts of societies. How does cultural theory shift when rooted in sustained empirical studies? To answer this question, I turn to a selection of ethnographic studies that share an alterna-
tive, anti-positivist set of convictions about the construction of knowledge in the contemporary cultural landscape. These studies draw from the complementary traditions of global ethnography, reflexive sociology, and feminist epistemology that have gained enormous traction within the field of sociology in recent decades (Burawoy, 2009). Empirical studies of globalization’s cultures that emerge from these traditions reject grand theories of cultural globalization in favor of accounts of cultural change that are intertwined with the dynamics of the global political economy, while also taking seriously individual subjectivities. Such studies, I
argue, take us further in understanding and theorizing cultural globalization because of their firm grounding in observations of everyday life on one hand, and their analytical rigor in seeking out the historical and systemic connections between everyday phenomena and the global on the other. Rather than conflating “global” with “universal,” these ethnographers specify, to various extents, the differentiated landscape of the global system and how a particular site contributes to and helps to constitute the whole. Each of the studies selected highlights the connections between everyday culture and a global system in a different way. In Pei-Chia Lan’s (2006) examination of transnational domestic work,multiple sites of culture come into view as the author takes on the worlds of domestics in their home country and in the country of their employment, and the worlds of employers. An intensive focus on the everyday politics of boundary work at multiple scales illuminates global cultures of inequality in the home. Nancy Plankey-Videla’s (2012) ethnography of a high-end men’s suit factory in central Mexico explicitly traces the links between gendered subjectivities emerging and being transformed in the context of a labor dispute to the global conditions of trade. And finally, Kathy Davis’s (2008) study of the global travels of the classic feminist text,Our Bodies, Ourselves, focuses on the politics of translation in the context of a global feminist social movement. Empirical studies of the culture of globalization reveal layers of cultural process that go far
beyond even the most complex and nuanced of theories that attempt to locate (or disembed) culture in a global world. While systemic economic explanations continue to have some explanatory value and traction, allowing us to find common threads between disparate social and cultural experiences, a linear narrative of modernization, with all of the binaries and presumptions that come with it, does not seem to stand up to sustained empirical inquiry. When ethnographers take on the messiness of culture in embodied, everyday, subjects, the constructedness of globalization is exposed, raising new questions about what constitutes the cultural: where is the “center” and who occupies it? How might class position be deeply cultural? How is gender constituted and lived differently, not only in different parts of the world, but even within the same household or factory?Where is the nation and who belongs to it? Such new questions, I argue, provide us with greater analytical insight into the cultural dimensions of globalization than grand theories that may map poorly onto everyday empirical phenomena. I conclude with a set of reflections that assert the benefits of the prevailing trend of
constructing theories of cultural globalization through the lens of ethnographic work on everyday life. By sacrificing totalizing theories for limiting (rather than fragmented) ones, we are responding appropriately to the lessons that the empirical realities of globalization offer the discipline of sociology and the social sciences more generally. Ethnographic methods do not generate a world of fragments, but rather make connections
between global capitalism and cultural change in various parts of the world while also approaching cultural change in a partial, historically situated way.
