Globalisation and Cultural Identity

Globalisation and Cultural Identity
by John Tomlinson

Another piece on globalisation and cultural identity. It was informative and i thought it explained brilliantly the argument of globalisation just being western cultural imperialism.

"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-defined, 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 benefit 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 suddenly
burst (apparently around the middle of the 1980s) the corrosive power of globaliza-
tion. Globalization, so the story goes, has swept like a flood 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-defined cultures which had constituted our identities. Though glob-
alization 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 flow of capitalism – those in the West and, specifically, 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 significant force in creating and proliferating cultural identity. This story involves a rather different understanding of the idea of ‘identity’ than the somewhat reified understanding of an individual or collective possession. And it also involves a rather more complex understanding of the globalization process: one, at least, which allows for a degree of unpredictability in its consequences..."

Megan