ARTICLE "Globalization and Cultural Identity" John Tomlinson

It is fair to say that the impact of globalization in the cultural sphere has, most generally, been viewed in a pessimistic light. Typically, it has been associated with the destruction of cultural identities, victims of the accelerating encroachment of a homogenized, westernized, consumer culture. This view, the constituency for which extends from (some) academics to anti-globalization activists (Shepard and Hayduk 2002), tends to interpret globalization as a seamless extension of – indeed, as a euphemism for – western cultural imperialism. In the discussion which follows I want to approach this claim with a good deal of scepticism.I will not seek to deny the obvious power of globalized capitalism to distributeand promote its cultural goods in every corner. Nor will I take up the Argument – now very commonly made by critics of the cultural imperialism thesis (Lull 2000; Thompson 1995; Tomlinson 1991) that a deeper cultural impact cannot be easily inferred from the presence of such goods. What I will try to argue is something more speci.c: that cultural identity, properly understood, is much more the product of globalization than its victim.

Identity as Treasure

To begin, let me sketch the implicit (for it is usually implicit) reasoning behind the assumption that globalization destroys identities. Once upon a time, before the era of globalization, there existed local, autonomous, distinct and well-de.ned, robust and culturally sustaining connections between geographical place and cultural experience.These connections constituted one’s – and one’s community’s – ‘cultural identity’. This identity was something people simply ‘had’ as an undisturbed existential possession, an inheritance, a bene.t of traditional long dwelling, of continuity with the past. Identity, then, like language, was not just a description of cultural belonging; it was a sort of collective treasure of local communities. But it was also discovered to be something fragile that needed protecting and preserving, that could be lost. Into this world of manifold, discrete, but to various degrees vulnerable, cultural identities there suddenlyburst (apparently around the middle of the 1980s) the corrosive power of globalization.Globalization, so the story goes, has swept like a .ood tide through the World’s diverse cultures, destroying stable localities, displacing peoples, bringing a market-driven, ‘branded’ homogenization of cultural experience, thus obliterating the differences between locality-de.ned cultures which had constituted our identities. Though globalization has been judged as involving a general process of loss of cultural diversity, some of course did better, some worse out of this process. Whilst those cultures in the mainstream of the .ow of capitalism – those in the West and, speci.cally, the United States – saw a sort of standardized version of their cultures exported worldwide, it was the ‘weaker’ cultures of the developing world that have been most threatened.Thus the economic vulnerability of these non-western cultures is assumed to be matched by a cultural vulnerability. Cultural identity is at risk everywhere with the depredations of globalization, but the developing world is particularly at risk. This, then, is the story that implicates globalization in the destruction of cultural identity, and in the threat to that particular subset of cultural identity that we call ‘national identity’. But another, quite contradictory, story can be told: that globalization, far from destroying it, has been perhaps the most signi.cant force in creating and proliferating cultural identity. This story involves a rather different understanding of the idea of‘identity’ than the somewhat rei.ed understanding of an individual or collective possession.And it also involves a rather more complex understanding of the globalizationprocess: one, at least, which allows for a degree of unpredictability in its consequences.Identity as Cultural PowerLet us begin with identity, a concept which surely lies at the heart of our contemporary cultural imagination. It is not, in fact, dif.cult in the proli.c literature of analysis of the concept to .nd positions which contest the story of identity as the victim of globalization that I sketched above. To take just one example, Manuel Castells devoted an entire volume of his celebrated analysis of ‘The Information Age’ to the proposition that: ‘Our world and our lives are being shaped by the con.icting trends of globalization and identity.’ For Castells, the primary opposition to the power of globalization lies in ‘the widespread surge of powerful expressions of collective identity that challenge globalization . . . on behalf of cultural singularity and people’s control over their lives and environment’ (1997: 2). Far from being the fragile .ower that globalization tramples, identity is seen here as the upsurging power of local culture that offers (albeit multi-form, disorganized and sometimes politically reactionary) resistance to the centrifugal force of capitalist globalization.This more robust view of the ‘power of identity’ is one to which anyone surveying the dramatic rise of social movements based around identity positions (gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, nationality) might easily subscribe. So, recognizing the signi.cant cultural sources of resistance to the power of globalization goes a long way towards getting this power in perspective. The impact of globalization thus becomes, more plausibly, a matter of the interplay of an institutional-technological impetus towardsglobality with counterpoised ‘localizing’ forces. The drive towards ‘globality’ combines a logic of capitalist expansion with the rapid development of deterritorializing media and communications technologies. But this drive is opposed by various processes and practices expressing different orders of ‘locality’. Amongst these we can count the cultural identity movements that Castells focuses on, but also less formally organized expressions of identity, for example, those involved in local consumption preferences (Howes 1996). And, on quite another level, we have to add the considerable culturaleffort exercised by nation-states in binding their populations into another culturalpolitical order of local identi.cation.This more complex formulation clearly implies that cultural identity is not likely to be the easy prey of globalization. This is because identity is not in fact merely some fragile communal-psychic attachment, but a considerable dimension of institutionalized social life in modernity. Particularly in the dominant form of national identity, it is the product of deliberate cultural construction and maintenance via both the regulatory and the socializing institutions of the state: in particular, the law, the education system and the media. The deterritorializing force of globalization thus meets a structured opposition in the form of what Michael Billig (1995) has called ‘banal nationalism’ – the everyday minute reinforcement; the continuous routinized‘.agging’ of national belonging, particularly through media discourse – ponsored by developed nation-states.Of course this is not to deny that nation-states are, to varying degrees, compromised by globalization in their capacity to maintain exclusivity of identity attachments, just as they are in their capacity independently to regulate national economies within a global market. For example, the complexities and tensions introduced by the multiethnic constitution of societies arising from global population movements – a chronic feature of all modern nation-states (Smith 1995; Geertz 2000) – pose obvious problemsfor the continued cultural ‘binding’ of twenty-.rst-century nations into coherent identity positions. This problem is, moreover, more dramatic in its consequences for some nations of the developing world, where multi-ethnic composition arising from the crude territorial divisions of colonial occupation combines with comparatively weak state structures to produce a legacy of often bloody political instability and interethnic violence.But notice that none of these problems conforms to the scenario of the general destruction of identities by globalization. Rather, they attest to an ampli.cation of the signi.cance of identity positions in general produced by globalization. It is this proliferation of identity that causes problems for the nation-state’s hegemony over its population’s sense of cultural attachment.

http://www.polity.co.uk/global/pdf/GTReader2eTomlinson.pdf

Abstract BY JUAN CAMILO PERAFAN

This article shows how the culture in different countries has been transformed thanks to globalization. Moreover, as people change their ethnic identity by having customs and ideologies from other regions of the world. Today's cultural identity is one of the most important features of the culture and personality that helps us grow and mature as individuals. On the other hand, it is true that globalization is a way to innovate in cultures but that does not lose the essence of people.