Cultural Globalization

1. Summary

-John Tomlinson

 Firstly, we need to understand culture and globalization. Globalization is a multidimensional process that complex, accelerating and integrating process of global connectivity. It is already in our ordinary life with communication technologies. He warned the economic reductionism and cultural imperialism.  

 According to Clifford Geertz, culture is a collection of social events and the construction of socially

shared meanings.That is, objective of culture is to generate meaning in life. John mentinoed some examples. The one of them is when we are shopping, this processing will be under the networking of complex global market. Culture and globalization is simultaneosly generated and shaped. 

 When we call global culture, it has general unifying character. not all the time it means the world is becoming economically or politically ‘unified'. At some point, globalization is more of an uneven process because sometimes some area has priority or concentration or density of cultural flows. Follwing this globalization could not be quite global. Also examplifying Disney, Coca-Cola, Marlboro, Microsoft, Google, he mentioned to be careful not to confuse cultural goods with the culture itself. He illustrated three different historical examples from map of thirteenth-century Europe, globalism of pre-modern and communist society bt Marx to explain cultures that have imagines the world as a single place with their own culture at the center.  

 Globalizaion is rapidly changing our experience of this ‘locality’. It made separation of culture and territory. Originally culture is a spatially bounded and integrated entity,of the society by Mann. But the complex connectivity of globalization threatens to undermine such conceptualizations.The traditional ties between cultural experience and geographical territory is weakening. The ‘telemediatization’ of culture is a key distinction in twenty first century life; mobility and instant access, these are bringing lots of changes into our life. 

 Lastly, there is a dillemma in global culture; universal human rights or cultural difference? Each culture has specific cultural identity. And all cultures construct meaning via practices of collective symbolization. It is more than collective treasure of local communities and experience of cultural belonging. In some ways, regarding globalization as a threat to cultural identity is a misunderstanding. He suggested the way to solution is the pluralism of identity positions. 

2. What was intersting?

 I was interested in the map inspired by the biblical story shows Jerusalem – the Holy City – is placed at the center in the map. We can assume those who designed this map have an intentions that Jerusalem is the center in the world based on their belifes. Because they might have thought Jerusalem is the most important place in their life. 

 I have seen like this before in reading material about China and the Josen Dynasty. When I saw an old map 'Kanglido' of the Joseon Dynasty painted by Korean, China was in the middle and the biggest part of the map. Of course there were reasons
 why China is the biggest part in the world such as limitation of information, source and another reasons that I do not know yet. The reason why I would like to mention is a map has different context compared to the map as an example in our reading material. The different part is here; the Joseon Dynasty, they had Sinocentrism(historical ideology that China is the cultural center of the world and it was the ethnocentrism of the Han society and culture and now is the modern concept of zhonghua minzu(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinocentrism)) in their mind. Folloing this, the part of China could be bigger than the Joseon Dynasty and I can guess it was an ideal map in their eyes. 

  

<source> https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%ED%98%BC%EC%9D%BC%EA%B0%95%EB%A6%AC%EC%97%AD%EB%8C%80%EA%B5%AD%EB%8F%84%EC%A7%80%EB%8F%84

3. Discussion point

 Regard to dillemma; universal human rights or cultural difference, in the part of global culture, it remind me of cultural relativity. This dillemma is familiar to me because cultural relativity has a similar limitation with it. Cultural relativity is the principle that an individual person's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture.

 Let me take a short example. Some tribes have cannibalism culture. Is that culture wrong and to be changed? Just becasue it is banned against universal laws and ethics? Then is the universal laws or human rights really universal? In their culture, the act such as killing, eating people has a meaning in their way, also it could be a rule to keep their tribes or society. Is it possible judge other people in our ways? They have their own ways. Then should we respect all kinds of culture? It is a difficult discourse to me.   

 I see these issues can converge in dillemma of  generality and specificity. I just want to say we need to constantly make and revise the boundary line between generality and specificity again and again even it is going to be forever or case by case. What do you guys think about this dillemma?