cultural globalization

1) Summary

Globalization refers to the rapidly developing network of interconnections and interdependencies that characterize material, social, economic and cultural life in the modern world. This increasing connectivity can see in our everyday lives. Connectivity forms our every actions and experiences. And the global capitalist market- McDonald,  Nike, Disney- is one of the examples.

One view of the globalization is that it will lead to a single global culture. One of the communist, Karl Marx provides the most vivid imagination of a global culture. He and Engels said that communist society is a world with a universal language, a world literature and integrated cosmopolitan cultural tastes. Marx was a internationalist who despised national sentiments as reactionary forces in all societies, set against the cosmopolitan interests of the proletariat – ‘workers of the world’.

Deterritorialization means that Decomposition between cultural experience and geographical territory. Culture is a spatially bounded entity, somehow paralleling the bounded, integrated entity of the society. But the complex connectivity of globalization threatens concept of culture. Deterritorialization is not simply the loss of the experience of a local culture. It is not as though localities, and the particularities, nuances and differences they generate, suddenly and entirely disappear. On the other hand, localities exist in globalization. Despite of globalization, we still have cultural distinctiveness. Thus, Deterritorialization refers to the integration of distant events and relationships into our everyday lives with holding local particularities.

There is a dilemma between Universal human rights and cultural identity/ sovereignty. Global culture contains the value of global human right. On the other, culture in local context has their identity. Both principles are equally important. Some view regard globalization as a threat to cultural identity makes a mistake that confusing this Western modern form of cultural imagination with a universal of human experience. All cultures construct meaning via practices of collective symbolization: this is probably as close to a cultural universal as we can get. It needs to understand thoughts about the institutionalization of identity with the issue of cosmopolitanism.

2) What was interesting / what did you learn

I was interested in the concept of cultural imperialism. Cultural imperialism is the practice of promoting and imposing a culture, usually that of a politically powerful nation, over the less powerful society. In other words, the cultural hegemony od industrialized od economically influential countries which determine general cultural values and standardize civilizations throughout the world. Although the term was popularized in the 1960s, and was used by its original proponents to refer to cultural hegemonies in a post-colonial world, cultural imperialism has also been used to refer to times further in the past. The Roman Empire has been seen as an early example of cultural imperialism. Cultural imperialism was imposed on many parts of Rome’s empire by many regions receiving Roman culture unwillingly, as a form of cultural imperialism. For example, when Greece was conquered by the Roman armies, Rome set about altering the culture of Greece to conform to Roman ideals. For instance, the Greek habit of stripping naked, in public, for exercise, was looked on askance by Roman writers, who considered the practice to be a cause of the Greeks' effeminacy and enslavement. Other example is Nazi colonialism. In Italy during the war, Germany pursued a European cultural front that gravitates around German culture. The Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels set up the European Union of Writers, one of Goebbels's most ambitious projects for Nazi cultural hegemony. Presumably a means of gathering authors from Germany, Italy, and the occupied countries to plan the literary life of the new Europe, the union soon emerged as a vehicle of German cultural imperialism. In the area of music, Michael Kater writes that during the WWII German occupation of France, Hans Rosbaud, a German conductor based by the Nazi regime in Strasbourg, became at least nominally, a servant of Nazi cultural imperialism directed against the French.

3) Discussion point

How do we find a compromise between Universal human rights and cultural identity? Both principles are equally important. But some ways, those two aspect conflict. In global society, everyone can’t use same universal standards of justice or equality of provision in healthcare, education and so forth. Standards of human right are different by religion, nation, and level of civilization. On the other hand, in world, there are exist universal values- like freedom of speech, the right to vote.