Table Of ContentCULTURAL IDENTITY AND
GLOBAL PROCESS
Theory, Culture & Society
Theory, Culture and Society caters for the resurgence of interest in culture
within contemporary social science and the humanities. Building on the
heritage of classical social theory, the book series examines ways in which
this tradition has been reshaped by a new generation of theorists. It will
also publish theoretically informed analyses of everyday life, popular
culture, and new intellectual movements.
EDITOR: Mike Featherstone, University of Teesside
SERIES EDITORIAL BOARD
Roy Boyne, University of Northumbria at Newcastle
Mike Hepworth, University of Aberdeen
Scott Lash, University of Lancaster
Roland Robertson, University of Pittsburgh
Bryan S. Turner, Deakin University
Recent volumes include:
Postmodernity USA
The Crisis of Social Modernism in Postwar America
Anthony Woodiwiss
The New Politics of Class
Social Movements and Cultural Dynamics in Advanced Societies
Klaus Eder
The Body and Social Theory
Chris Shilling
Symbolic Exchange and Death
Jean Baudrillard
Sociology in Question
Pierre Bourdieu
Economies of Signs and Space
Scott Lash and John Urry
Religion and Globalization
Peter Beyer
Baroque reason
The Aesthetics of Modernity
Christine Buci-Glucksmann
The Consuming Body
Pasi Falk
CULTURAL IDENTITY
AND
GLOBAL PROCESS
Jonathan Friedman
SAGE Publications
London · Thousand Oaks · New Delhi
© Jonathan Friedman 1994
First published 1994
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
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writing from the Publishers.
SAGE Publications Ltd
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SAGE Publications Inc
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Published in association with Theory, Culture ά Society,
School of Human Studies, University of Teesside
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
ISBN 0 8039 8637 8
ISBN 0 8039 8638 6 (pbk)
Library of Congress catalog card number 94-067397
Typeset by Mayhew Typesetting, Rhayader, Powys
CONTENTS
Preface vi
1 Toward a global anthropology 1
2 General historical and culturally specific properties of global
systems 15
3 Civilizational cycles and the history of primitivism 42
4 The emergence of the culture concept in anthropology 67
5 Culture, identity and world process 78
6 Cultural logics of the global system 91
7 Globalization and localization 102
8 History and the politics of identity 117
9 The political economy of elegance 147
10 Narcissism, roots and postmodernity 167
11 Global system, globalization and the parameters of modernity 195
12 Order and disorder in global systems 233
Bibliography 254
Index 264
PREFACE
The following collection of essays was produced over a period of fifteen
years. Partly as a result of this, there is significant overlap in a number of
the chapters. This is due to their focus on a limited number of examples
based on fieldwork and historical research. These include Hawaii, Congo,
Papua New Guinea and Western Europe and concentrate on themes
related to the practice of identity and the construction of cultural forms
as they relate to the social forms of experience that are rooted in
increasingly larger-scale social processes. Certain phenomena, such as the
Central African practice known as la sape and the Hawaiian movement,
are discussed a number of times but I have concentrated on several
different aspects of the phenomena, whether they are related to ethnicity,
consumption, narcissism or models of personal selfhood. The latter
chapters especially grapple with a number of relations that I have tried to
connect as succinctly as possible in the final essay.
I have attempted to deal with a series of critical issues in the
development of a global anthropology. To begin with, a global systemic
perspective requires that our most common categories be deconstructed.
This applies most emphatically to the concept of culture itself, since it is
the latter that has become so popular a tool and even a weapon in recent
discussions in cultural studies and anthropology. The very notion of
cultural globalization itself is one of my primary targets. From
hybridization to transethnicity, the concept of cultural mixture has been
brandished by a large number of intellectuals in a discourse that is
becoming increasingly salient and even aggressive in this period of global
Balkanization. Much of the language concerns music, meals and popular
cultural forms and expresses, in my view, an increasingly clear politics of
identification on the part of such intellectuals. Blaming power for
ethnicity while praising underclass creativity in its spectacular bricolage of
disparate cultural elements is, to my mind, not only to seriously misread
the real world, but to make a bid for power. This is the power of the
cosmopolitan, not so much the modernist, expert in concrete othernesses
now brought together by modern information technology.
Culture as product, thing, substance is culture disembodied from
experience. It is culture neutralized and turned into objects of
consumption. The latter, identified, classified, studied and enjoyed by
the new culturalist intellectuals, has become a potential basis of power,
however insignificant it may prove to be in the end. By identifying the
world in such terms, these new pretenders identify themselves as well . . .
a loose network, of course, of people in media, art galleries, journalism,
PREFACE vii
and the 'cultural sciences'. It is to be noted here that these intellectuals,
by lobotomizing experience from the cultural, have also created a
peaceful, even charming world for themselves, a veritable cocktail party
of mixed up differences. An adequate global anthropology must
understand the emergence of this form of identification and self-
identification as well as the latent social group which appears to be
surfacing in the process. This can only occur by maintaining a perspective
in which cultural processes are understood as embedded in life worlds,
life spaces, social experiences that are themselves susceptible to analysis.
It is for this reason that I have concentrated on the way in which
conditions of social existence are distributed in the global arena and the
processes involved in their formation and reproduction over time.
In such terms it can become relevant to ask just why cultural studies
have become so popular today, why ethnic identity, roots, religion and
indigenous movements have simultaneously been on the rise. It has
recently been suggested by a number of social scientists from different
countries (Berger, Maffesoli) that we are entering an age of tribalism in
which individualism is declining and being replaced by increasingly strong
collective pressures. Alain Mine has referred to all of this in terms of a
New Middle Age (Mine, 1993).
This book provides a kind of predictively accurate model of the kind
of concerns that have now begun to appear to be obvious to many
researchers. This in itself might be understood as an argument for a
global perspective that does not shy away from grappling with the
macro-economic and political processes that shape our world as well as
the cultural processes that are so intimately intertwined with the former.
The assuredness with which many simply reject as absurd the possibility
that this 'civilization', or rather civilization in this part of the world,
might be in a serious crisis of disintegration and decline is really quite as
illuminating as it is comforting. It is, after all, primarily some of our
culture experts and postmodernists that have maintained an evolutionary
view of Western or global society, and this in the face of the obviously
messy and violent state of the world. Are they the pretenders to the
urban lofts of the future, the Bunker Hills in the sky, where they can
contemplate the riff-raff bladerunner creativity that we appear to be
rapidly approaching?
The position taken throughout much of this book is diametrically
opposed to the image presented above. This is not, in my view a straw-
man image, even if I have done my best to rarefy it in this brief space. It
is a core strategy, I feel, fueled to some extent by a certain fear of
contemporary social realities, but also the kind of ideological escape that
harbors pretentions to dominance. It is of utmost importance that we dig
in to the problems that confront us rather than hiding from them, either
by ignoring them or by translating them into more palatable titbits of
intellectual consumption. It is necessary, I feel, to argue for a perspective
in which it is clear that great centers of civilization, as global systemic
viii CULTURAL IDENTITY AND GLOBAL PROCESS
products, have all tended to collapse and that it would not be unusual if
the same thing were to occur again. It is necessary to study the processes
involved, from economics to psychology, in the centralization of global
systems as well as their fragmentation. It is necessary to explore the
connections between the disintegration of a hegemony, the rise of new
classes and the fall of old, the processes of lumpenization, ethnification,
indigenization as they relate to multinationalization, the rise of new
hegemonies and the emergence of new central regions. Now of course
world music, world food and the lot are part and parcel of all of this,
but we should not concentrate merely on the former to the exclusion of
the nastier realities that are indissociable from them.
The essays assembled here have been partly reworked from published
and unpublished articles and papers. They are very much the spin-off of
work that began in the early 1970s and which has begun to bear fruit. As
I say in Chapter 1, much of this work was initiated by my wife, Kajsa
Ekholm Friedman, and the past twenty years of cooperation have been
so intensive that I see this collection primarily as a testimony to these
two decades of interaction. A number of other colleagues and students
have throughout the years played a very significant role in the
development of a global systemic anthropology. There are so many
people that have been involved in the production of these essays, aside
from Kajsa Ekholm Friedman, throughout the years that I can only
name a few: The critical discussions surrounding history, archaeology and
anthropology included Mike Rowlands, Mathew Spriggs, Kristian
Kristiansen, Lotte Hedeager, Mogens Larsen, Chris Tilley, Nick Thomas,
Johnny Persson and many others. The work on history, culture and
identity owes great thanks to Michael Harbsmeier, Poul Pedersen, Steen
Bergendorff, Ulla Hasager and Andrew Gray. The seminars at our
institute in Lund have proved to be fertile ground for the development
and elaboration of many of the ideas presented here. Among those
participants were Katarina Sjöberg, Anders Hyden, Jan Sjökvist and
Melcher Ekströmer. The late Roger Keesing of McGill University was
both discussant and supporter for many years and Bruce Kapferer of
University College London has been a source of inspiration, heated
discussions and many fine seminars in exotic places over the years. Mike
Rowlands, also of University College, has been a major partner and
contributor to the global anthropology project, and he and Susan
Frankenstein opened many of the theoretical and anthropological doors
that have made this project a success. The Center for Research in the
Humanities in Copenhagen was also a staging ground for many of the
ideas and projects that have gone into this book and I thank all the
visitors as well as the 'chief Mogens Trolle Larsen for providing such an
unusually high-standard meeting place for research and discussion.
1
TOWARD A GLOBAL ANTHROPOLOGY
It has by now become obvious to many researchers in the human and
social sciences that there is a very large and virtually uncontrollable world
system of which we are an inextricable part. When Kajsa Ekholm
Friedman first suggested that such was the case, in the early 1970s, she met
with everything from indifference to scorn among anthropologists and
sociologists (Ekholm Friedman, 1975, 1976). Only a few historians and
archaeologists were interested in cooperating in the study of global
historical relations. Global studies and especially globalization studies have
become somewhat of a bandwagon today. Very much of what is contained
in this book dates from the period 1974 to the present. Now when the
world seems to be in a state of disorder and crisis, the global has become
second nature to many. But this is not a book about globalization. It is a
book about global systemic processes. It is not about the diffusion of ideas,
recipes, clothing patterns, that is, cultural objects. It is about the structure
of the conditions in which such things occur. It is in a sense about the way
objects move, but it is more decisively about the way in which moving
objects and people are identified, assimilated, marginalized or rejected. It
tries to demonstrate the historical depth of the current fascination with
globalization itself, the historical depth of global relations and their
formative capacity. When we suggested that the West was headed toward a
crisis generated by the decentralization of accumulation in the world, this
was considered by most to be entirely unlikely, a mere fantasy. By the end
of the 1980s it had become pretty clear to many of these same people that
there was indeed a crisis in the West, although some might still deny that it
had anything to do with global systemic processes. Today with the
disintegration of the Eastern bloc and the violent fragmentation occurring
in the former Soviet empire, as well as the continuing crisis in the West, a
global systemic understanding of the contemporary world may have
become something of a necessity. But in the midst of this crisis, a great deal
of the current enlightened literature on globalization has adamantly
avoided the social issues, concentrating instead on the sometimes
spectacular products of globalization processes themselves.
The development of a global perspective in anthropology is a very
different kind of phenomenon from that in economics, history or econ-
omic history. In the latter disciplines, the field of enquiry is neutral with
respect to the definition of the discipline itself. It may focus on local
developments or be extended to encompass the entire world, or large
