Geography, culture

and global change

Rubina Waseem
Preston University
 Culture
Cultures are part of everyday life and are
systems of shared meanings that can exist on
a number of different spatial scales (local,
regional, national, global, among
communities, groups, or nations).

Dominant groups in society attempt to impose

their definitions of culture and these are
challenged by other groups, or sub-cultures.
Culture makes the world meaningful and
significant.
(Philips Crang, 1997)

Culture as a process we are all involved in

rather than as a thing we all possess.
 The cultural turn
The subject of culture has generated a great
deal of interest in recent years, for academics,
policy-makers, and at the popular level.

This can be explained by the phrase the

cultural turn- put very simply, the world has
become more cultural.

The social sciences have witnessed a cultural

turn since the late 1980s.
The world has changed fundamentally in the
past two decades; the modern student of
geography lives in a world very different from
that of their parents at the same age, and
these changes are deeply cultural in
character.

As the age of computer technology, video

imagery and electronic music demonstrates,
the material world of commodities and
technologies is profoundly cultural.

Culture is being translated into material goods

that can be marketed and sold.
 The spatial turn
Culture can be said to operate at three spatial
scales:
1. Local
2. National
3. Global

. This cultural globalization involves the movement

of people, objects and images around the world
through telecommunications, language, the
media industries, radio and music, cinema,
television and tourism.
The second interpretation places emphasis on the
local and the localization of peoples everyday lives
and experiences.

Cultural theorists have a growing, affect peoples

sense of identity and place at both local and
national level, therefore, spatial perspective has
become central to studies of culture more widely.

Culture can be defined as a process and a system

of shared meanings. The world has become more
cultural in recent years and there has been a
spatial turn in explanations of culture, making
geography increasingly significant.
Towards a global culture?
Imagining a global
culture
Through global patterns of trade and migrations,
and through the spread of world religions and
empires, people, objects and ideas have been
circulating for centuries.

Today, the idea of a global culture is in the process

of becoming as meaningful as the idea of national
or local cultures.

Proponents of the idea of an emerging global

culture suggest that different places and cultural
practices around the world are converging and
becoming ever similar.
Shurmer-Smith and Hannam (1994),
argue, a global culture might be the product
of two different processes:

1. The export of supposedly superior cultural

character and products from advanced
countries, and their worldwide adoption
(Westernization, Americanization,
modernization).

2. The mixing of cultures through greater

interconnections and time space
compression (through technology and
communication), leading to a new universal
The first one, is a view of cultural globalization that
sees Western culture being globalized alongside
capitalism.

The second one assumes that globalization and the

mobility of people around the world is producing a
mixing of cultures, as opposed to unidirectional
Westernization, to create a global commonality.

Although both processes failed to explain the real

picture, although alternative ideas about cultures
mixing to produce a universal global culture are
problematic. No doubt, cultures are mixing, but this
does not necessarily mean we are all becoming the
same.
Debunking global
culture?
Some theorists would argue that national cultures
remain stronger than global cultures.

As many conflicts occurring throughout the world

along the geopolitical fault-lines of national cultures
e.g. conflict b/w India and Pakistan is its best example.

The late eighteenth century saw the emergence of

nation-states, national cultures and national cultural
institutions, which displaced older forms of cultural
globalization (such as mercantilism and trade).
At the end of the twentieth century, this balance
has begun to change, with international
communications and media corporations
challenging the centrality and importance of
national cultures.

However, it can be argued that despite these

changes a great deal of cultural life is still organized
along national and territorial lines.

Some cultures are more able to become globalized

than others- those reproduced through television ad
cinema have a great range and speed of spreading
than those reproduced through oral histories.
Global cultural signifies, McDonalds, the Hollywood
movie, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Honda etc.

These goods are, therefore, both globalized and

localized.

This is now a popular strategy for multinationals in

other parts of the world.

Therefore, how interactions between cultures are

played out at a local level are of significance and
suggests that imagining a universal global culture is
quite problematic.
Rethinking global culture
Those things that have become global
signifies are clearly globalized, but the ways in
which people around the world make cultural
responses to them are complex and multiple.

Instead of imagining a global culture that is

erasing local and national cultures, we can
think of local, national and global as three
important spatial levels at which culture
operates.
It is clear that multiple global cultural
networks exist, such as those connecting the
overseas Chinese with their homeland, or
those linking Islamic groups around the world.
These networks disturb any notion of a
singular global culture.

Culture is not simply a spontaneous event,

but depends upon such factors as tradition,
heritage and history. These are often
produced through institutions, such as state
governments, global media and
communication industries.
These institutions are creating infrastructures
supporting cultural globalization, including
electronic or linguistic infrastructure.

These new institutions often operate at scales

beyond the nation-state, and they are sites of
power in the production of culture.

The ownership, control and use of these institutions

remain uneven across and within countries, thus
creating a power geometry that is centered very
much on the West. Although there is no singular
global culture, but a number of different global
cultures.
Reinventing local
cultures?
Locality and culture
In the past it has often been assumed that
there is a simple relationship between local
place and local culture.

Places were thought of as having a distinct

physical, economic and cultural character.

Places were, therefore, unique, with their own

traditions, local cultures and so on that made
them different from other places.
According to Massey and Jess (1995),
On the one hand, previous logics are being
interrupted, old notions of the local place are being
disrupted by new connections with a world- beyond,
but on the other hand, new claims to the character
of places, and who belongs there, are being made.

Therefore, modern life is characterized both by

decentralization and globalization of culture and by
the revival of place-bound traditions.

Following this, the impact of the new global context

on local cultures has two contradictory outcomes i.e.
negative and positive.
Negative sense of culture
Where global processes are perceived to pose
a threat to local culture there might be an
attempt to return to some notion of the
exclusivity of culture.

Reaction to the perceived threat to local

cultures include nationalistic, ethnic and
fundamentalist responses, which also entail a
strong assertion of local cultures, such as
reviving or inventing local traditions and
ceremonies.
Conservative reactions to change can be thought of
as a kind of cultural fundamentalism through which
the process of cultural change is often bitterly
contested.

Gender plays an important role in this, as women

are often considered as guardians of the borders of
culture.

These phenomena are not all the same, but they do

share a response to globalization that involves a
closed, fixed, bounded and place-specific definition
of culture and a strong opposition to changes
signed by cultural globalization.
Positive sense of culture
A more positive response to global processes would
be to imagine cultures as fluid, ever-changing,
unbounded, overlapping and outward-looking and
progressive sense of place.

Increasing interconnectedness means the boundaries

of local cultures are seen to be more vulnerable to
change, and difficult to maintain than in the past.

Rather than everywhere becoming the same, nation-

states seem to be reconstituting their collective
identities along pluralistic and multicultural lines,
which take into account regional and ethnic
differences and diversity.
This does not mean that all people within the
same place will share the same culture and
the same sense of locality.

These groups often possess different senses

of affiliation to places and localities, posses
different cultural identities and belong to
different cultural groupings.

Localities are important in maintaining

cultural differences, but can also be sites of
cultural mixing and transformation.
Multi and hybrid cultures?
Hybridity
One of the major contemporary challenges concerns
what we do with the concept of culture in the changing
global scene, where nation-states in the West have
been forced to tolerate greater diversity within their
boundaries.

Each culture is recognized as different and distinct, but

these differences are understood and valued.

One way in which a more progressive idea of culture

might be developed is through the concept of hybridity
(mixing).
Hybridity is a powerful new way of thinking about
the manifestations of culture such as ethnicity,
gender etc.

Some analysts argue that cultures have always

been hybrid forms they have never existed in
isolation from other cultures and thus always been
subject to change and influences from elsewhere.

For those who aspire to bounded notions of

cultures and refuse this idea of continuous
hybridity, cultural mixing is felt to be threatening
and a challenge to social order.
Diaspora
Related to the idea of hybridity is the notion of
diaspora. This term was originally used to refer to
the dispersal of Jewish people.

However, it is now used in reference to the long-

term settlement of people in foreign places that
follows their scattering or dispersal from their
original homeland.

It refers to a modern condition where a sense of

belonging is not derived from attachment to
territory, and where different people mix together
through the processes of migration (forced or free).
Diaspora space is the point at which boundaries of
inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of
us and them, are contested.

Brah (1996), argues, diaspora space as a conceptual

category is inhabited, not only by those who have
migrated and their young ones, but equally by those
who are constructed and represented as local or
native.

Like notions of hybridity, the concept of diaspora is

important since it allows for the recognition of new
political and cultural formations that continually
challenge the marginalizing impulses of dominant
cultures.
Selling hybridity and the
commodification of culture
In todays world, culture sells. Hybrid cultures, in
particular, sells. Cities are now constructing
themselves as international, and hybridity has
become a form of boosterism where city authorities
create marketing images to attract investment in the
form of business and tourism.

Hall (1996), argues, we should not view the current

fashion-ability of hybridity in a wholly negative light.
The celebration of multiculturalism and hybridity
might indeed have a hidden agenda that is all about
the pursuit of profit.
For Bhabha (1994), it is the interconnections of
different cultural spaces and the overlapping of
different cultural forms that create vitality and
hold out the possibility of a progressive notion of
culture.

Hybridity and diaspora are examples of more

progressive ways of thinking about culture.

It could be argued, in fact, that all cultures are

always already hybrid: they are never pure, have
always evolved and changed through time and
through contact with other cultures, and they
continue to evolve.
 Conclusion
A progressive way of thinking about culture is
to reject the idea of boundedness and internal
cohesion.

In the modern world especially, culture is a

meeting point where different influences,
traditions and forces intersect.

Culture is a process that operates at number

of different levels local, national and global.
There is a need to negotiate between the
local, the national, the global, and the
historical, as well the contemporary diasporic.

It should be recognized that people in

marginal cultural systems at local, national
and international levels are also active in
creating their own systems of meaning; they
do not simply absorb ideas from, or become
absorbed into, more dominant cultures.