Jan Nederveen Pieterse
Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003)

Chapter 3

Globalization and Culture: Three Paradigms

Globalization or the trend of growing worldwide interconnectedness has been accompanied by several clashing notions of cultural difference. The awareness of the world "becoming smaller" and cultural difference receding coincides with a growing sensitivity to cultural difference. The increasing salience of cultural difference forms part of a general cultural turn, which involves a wider self-reflexivity of modernity. Modernization has been advancing like a steamroller erasing cultural and biological diversity in its way and now not only the gains (rationalization, standardization, control) but also the losses (alienation, disenchantment, displacement) are becoming apparent. Stamping out cultural diversity has been a form of disenchantment of the world.

Yet it is interesting to note how the notion of cultural difference itself has changed form. It used to take the form of national differences, as in familiar discussions of national character or identity. Now different forms of difference have come to the foreground, such as gender and identity politics, ethnic and religious movements, minority rights, and indigenous peoples. Another argument is that we are experiencing a "clash of civilizations." In this view, cultural differences are regarded as immutable and generating rivalry and conflict. At the same time, there is a widespread understanding that growing global interconnectedness leads toward increasing cultural standardization and uniformization, as in the global sweep of consumerism. A shorthand version of this momentum is McDonaldization. A third position, altogether different from both these models of intercultural relations, is that what is taking place is a process of cultural mixing or hybridization across locations and identities.

This is a meta-theoretical reflection on cultural difference that argues that there are three, and only three, perspectives on cultural difference: cultural differentialism or lasting difference, cultural convergence or growing sameness, and cultural hybridization or ongoing mixing. Each of these positions involves particular theoretical precepts and as such they are paradigms. Each represents a particular politics of difference—as lasting and immutable, as erasable and being erased, and as mixing and in the process generating new translocal forms of difference. Each involves different subjectivities and larger perspectives. The first view, according to which cultural difference is immutable, may be the oldest perspective on cultural difference. The second, the thesis of cultural convergence, is as old as the earliest forms of universalism, as in the world religions. Both have been revived and renewed as varieties of modernism, respectively in its romantic and Enlightenment versions, while the third perspective, hybridization, refers to a postmodern sensibility of traveling culture. This chapter discusses the claims of these perspectives, their wider theoretical assumptions, and asks what kind of futures they evoke. Arguably there may be other takes on cultural difference, such as indifference, but none have the scope and depth of the three perspectives outlined here.

Clash of Civilizations

In 1993 Samuel Huntington, as president of the Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, published a controversial paper in which he argued that "a crucial, indeed a central, aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years . . . will be the clash of civilizations. . . . With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its center piece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations."

The imagery is that of civilizational spheres as tectonic plates at whose fault lines conflict, no longer subsumed under ideology, is increasingly likely. The argument centers on Islam: the "centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline" (1993: 31–2). "Islam has bloody borders" (35). The fault lines include Islam’s borders in Europe (as in former Yugoslavia), Africa (animist or Christian cultures to the south and west), and Asia (India, China). Huntington warns against a "Confucian-Islamic military connection" that has come into being in the form of arms flows between East Asia and the Middle East. Thus "the paramount axis of world politics will be the relations between ‘the West and the Rest’" and "a central focus of conflict for the immediate future will be between the West and several Islamic-Confucian states" (48). He therefore recommends greater cooperation and unity in the West, between Europe and North America; the inclusion of Eastern Europe and Latin America in the West; cooperative relations with Russia and Japan; exploiting differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states; and for the West to maintain its economic and military power to protect its interests.

The idea of dividing the world into civilizations has a long lineage. In Europe, it goes back to the medieval understanding of a tripartite world of descendants of the three sons of Noah (mentioned in chapter 2 above). Arnold Toynbee’s world history divided the world into civilizational spheres. It informs the approach of the "Teen Murti" school of Contemporary Studies in Delhi (Sardar and Van Loon 1997: 78). Kavolis (1988) divides the world into seven incommensurable civilizational systems based on religion: Christian, Chinese (Confucian-Taoist-Buddhist), Islamic, Hindu, Japanese (Shinto-Buddhist-Confucian), Latin American syncretism, and non-Islamic African. Galtung (1981) argues that each civilization has different ways of knowing the world. Dividing the world into civilizations is a cliché that echoes in every encyclopedia of world history; but it is also old fashioned and overtaken by new historiography and the emergence of "world history" (Prazniak 2000).

Huntington’s position stands out for its blatant admixture of security interests and a crude rendition of civilizational difference. In view of its demagogic character it obviously belongs to the genre of "new enemy" discourse. In fact, it merges two existing enemy discourses, the "fundamentalist threat" of Islam and the "yellow peril," and its novelty lies in combining them.

Huntington recycles the cold war: "The fault lines between civilizations are replacing the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed" (29). "The Velvet Curtain of culture has replaced the Iron Curtain of ideology as the most significant dividing line in Europe" (31). Hence there will be no "peace dividend." The cold war is over but war is everlasting. This has been referred to as a new politics of containment and a new round of hegemonic rivalry, which is translated from an ideological into a civilizational idiom. Huntington’s thesis has given rise to extensive debate and his argument has been widely rejected (e.g., Rashid 1997, Camilleri and Muzaffar 1998) while acknowledging that its contribution has been to present culture as a significant variable in international relations. Huntington has developed his thesis in a book (1996) and followed up with a wider treatment of culture (Harrison and Huntington 2000). I will not reiterate the debate here but bring up key points that show Huntington’s view as one of three paradigms of cultural difference.

Huntington constructs the West as a "universal civilization," "directly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another" (41). The charge against "the Rest" is that they attempt modernization without westernization. This may be the actual danger: the specter of different modernities and thus the breakdown of western civilizational hegemony. By now, multiple modernities are an accepted theme (see chapter 4 below).

The geopolitics is odd. Significant arms flows between the Middle East and East Asia do not involve Islamic countries but Israel and its arms sales to China, which have been of particular concern to the U.S. because they re-export high-tech equipment of U.S. origin. Another instance, which Huntington does cite, exchanges of military technology between Pakistan and China, also involves an American angle. Major concerns from an American security point of view, such as military relations between China and Iran (and more recently, arms exports from North Korea), are not mentioned.

What is overlooked in this geopolitical construction are the dialectics of the cold war and the role the United States has been playing. It’s not so much a matter of civilizational conflict as the unraveling of geopolitical security games most of which have been initiated by the U.S. in the first place (discussed in Johnson 2000), which the hegemon in its latter days can no longer control, so it calls on allied states to help channel them in a desirable direction. At the turn of the century, the British Empire in its latter days of waning economic and military power did the same, calling on the United States to "police" the Pacific, the Caribbean, and Latin America, on Japan to play a naval role in the China Sea, and to contain the Russian empire, and seeking allies in the European concert of powers. Then as now, the waning hegemon calls on "civilizational" affinities: the White Man’s Burden and his civilizing mission, and now "democracy," freedom, and the virtues of the free market.

The sociologist Malcolm Waters formulates an interesting theorem according to which "material exchanges localize, political exchanges internationalize and symbolic exchanges globalize" (1995: 156). This is difficult to maintain because it ignores how microeconomic dynamics at the level of firms propel the macroeconomic process of globalization; but interesting in this context is the view that the cultural, symbolic sphere is the first to globalize; a perspective diametrically opposed to Huntington’s thesis. This shows the oddity of Huntington’s view: it is a political perspective on culture coined in conventional national security language. Culture is politicized, wrapped in civilizational packages that just happen to coincide with geopolitical entities. Obviously, there is much slippage along the way and all along one wonders: what is national security doctrine doing in a world of globalization and in the sphere of cultural representations? While Huntington focuses on fault lines between civilizations, his pessimism is matched by gloomy views on growing ethnic conflict (as in Moinyhan 1993, Kaplan 1996).

Indeed the most remarkable element of the thesis is its surface claim of a clash of civilizations. Why is culture being presented as the new fault line of conflict? Huntington’s framework is a fine specimen of what he blames Asian societies for: "Their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another." At a general level, this involves a very particular way of reading culture. Compare Immanuel Wallerstein on "Culture as the ideological battleground of the modern world-system" (1991), note that culture and ideology are being merged in a single frame, and that culture is defined as "the set of characteristics which distinguish one group from another." Anthony King (1991: 13) uses a similar concept of culture as "collective articulations of human diversity."

If we would take this to its ultimate consequence then, for instance, bilingualism cannot be "cultural" because "it does not distinguish one group from another." Indeed any bicultural, intercultural, multicultural, or transcultural practices could not according to this definition be "cultural." Whichever mode of communication or intercourse different groups would develop to interact with one another would not be cultural for culture refers only to intergroup diversity. We have thus defined any form of intergroup or transnational culture out of existence for such per definition cannot exist. Intercultural diffusion through trade and migration, a lingua franca between cultures, returnees from abroad with bicultural experience, children of mixed parentage, travelers with multicultural experience, professionals interacting cross-culturally, the fields of cyberspace—all of these fall outside "culture."

Obviously, this notion of culture is one-sided to the point of absurdity. Diversity is one side of the picture but only one, and interaction, commonality or the possibility of commonality is another. In anthropology this is cultural relativism and Ruth Benedict’s view of cultures as single wholes—a Gestalt or configuration that can only be understood from within and in its own terms. It implies a kind of "billiard ball" model of cultures as separate, impenetrable units (similar to the way states have been represented in the realist view of international relations). Over time, this generated ethnomethodology, ethnosociology, and a trend toward the indigenization of knowledge. This is an anomalous definition of culture. More common a definition in anthropology is that culture refers to behavior and beliefs that are learned and shared: learned so it is not "instinctual" and shared so it is not individual. Sharing refers to social sharing but there is no limitation as to the boundaries of this sociality. No territorial or historical boundaries are implied as part of the definition. This understanding of culture is open-ended. Learning is always ongoing as a function of changing circumstances and therefore culture is always open. To sharing there are no fixed boundaries other than those of common social experience, therefore there are no territorial limitations to culture. Accordingly culture refers as much to commonality as to diversity. In the next chapter, I refer to these fundamentally different notions of culture as territorial culture and translocal culture.

Cultural relativism represents an angle on culture that may be characterized as culturalist differentialism (Taguieff 1987, Al-Azmeh 1993). Its lineages are ancient. They are as old as the Greeks who deemed non-Greek speakers "barbarians." Next, this took the form of immutable cultural difference based on religion, separating the faithful from heathens, unbelievers and heretics. The romantics such as Johann Gottfried Herder revived this view of strong cultural boundaries, now in the form of language as the key to nationhood. Both nationalism and race thinking bear the stamp of cultural differentialism, one emphasizing territory and language, and the other biology as destiny. Nation and race have long been twin and at times indistinguishable discourses. During the era of nationalism, all nations claimed cultural distinction for their own nation and inferiority for others, usually in racial terms. "Jewishness," "Germanness," "Japaneseness," "Englishness," "Turkishness," "Greekness," and so forth, all imply an inward-looking take on culture and identity. They are creation myths of modern times. They all share the problem of boundaries: who belongs, and since when?

Cultural differentialism can serve as a defence of cultural diversity. It may be evoked by local groups resisting the steamroller of assorted "developers," by ecological networks, anthropologists, and artists, as well as travel agencies and advertisers promoting local authenticity. Culture and development, a growing preoccupation in development thinking, may turn "culture" into an asset (Schech and Haggis 2000; Nederveen Pieterse 2001c: chapter 5). It calls to mind the idea of the "human mosaic." An upside of this perspective may be local empowerment; the downside may be a politics of nostalgia, a conservationist posture that ultimately leads to the promotion of open-air museums. Either way the fallacy is the reification of the local, sidelining the interplay between the local and the global. The image of the mosaic is biased, as the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz (1992) points out, because a mosaic consists of fixed, discrete pieces whereas human experience, claims and postures notwithstanding, is fluid and open-ended. Accordingly critical anthropology opts for deterritorialized notions of culture such as flows and "traveling culture."

Hungtington’s thesis is at odds with the common self-understandings of East and Southeast Asian societies, which run along the lines of East-West fusion, as in "Western technology, Asian values." The Confucian ethic may carry overtones of East Asian chauvinism but also represents an East-West nexus of a kind because the neo-Confucianism it refers to owes its status to its reinterpretation as an "Asian Protestant ethic." While Confucianism used to be the reason why East Asian countries were stagnating, by the late twentieth century it has become the reason why the "Tigers" have been progressing. In the process, Confucianism has been recoded as a cross-cultural translation of the Weberian thesis of the Protestant ethic as the "spirit of modern capitalism." The Confucian ethic carries some weight in the "Sinic" circle of Singapore, Taiwan, China, and Korea; it carries less weight in Japan and no weight among the advocates of an "Asian way" such as Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia and his "Look East" program (Mahathir and Ishihara 1995). Given the tensions between the ethnic Chinese and the "bumiputra" Malays in Malaysia, just as in Indonesia, here an Islamic-Confucian alliance is the least likely option.

While Huntington reproduces standard enemy images of "the rest," he also rehearses a standard self-image of the West. "The West" is a notion conditioned by and emerging from two historical polarities: the North-South polarity of the colonizing and colonized world, and the East-West polarity of capitalism-communism and the cold war. These were such overriding fields of tension that differences within the West/North, among imperialist countries, and within capitalism faded into the background, subsided in relation to the bigger issue, the seeming unity of imperialist or neocolonial countries and of the "free world" led by the U.S. In view of this expansionist history, we might as well turn the tables and say: the West has bloody borders. Thus, Huntington practices both Orientalism and Occidentalism. In reinvoking "the West," the differences between North America and Europe are papered over. In fact, historical revision may well show that there are much greater historical affinities, in particular similar feudal histories with their attendant consequences for the character of capitalisms, between Europe and Asia than between Europe and North America.

In his usual capacity as a comparative political scientist, Huntington (1991) observes a worldwide "third wave" of democratization. Apparently, at this level of discourse civilizational differences are receding. In this domain, Huntington follows the familiar thesis of convergence, that is, the usual modernization paradigm of growing worldwide standardization around the model of the "most advanced country," and his position matches Fukuyama’s argument of the universal triumph of the idea of liberal democracy.

McDonaldization

The McDonaldization thesis is a version of the recent idea of the worldwide homogenization of societies through the impact of multinational corporations. McDonaldization, according to the sociologist George Ritzer, is "the process whereby the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world" (1993: 19). The expression "the rest of the world" bears contemplating. The process through which this takes place is rationalization in Weber’s sense, that is, through formal rationality laid down in rules and regulations. McDonald’s formula is successful because it is efficient (rapid service), calculable (fast and inexpensive), predictable (no surprises), and controls labor and customers.

McDonaldization is a variation on a theme: on the classical theme of universalism and its modern forms of modernization and the global spread of capitalist relations. Diffusionism, if cultural diffusion is taken as emanating from a single center (e.g., Egypt), has been a general form of this line of thinking. From the 1950s, this has been held to take the form of Americanization. Since the 1960s, multinational corporations have been viewed as harbingers of American modernization. In Latin America in the 1970s, this effect was known as Coca-colonization. These are variations on the theme of cultural imperialism, in the form of consumerist universalism or global media influence. This line of thinking has been prominent in media studies according to which the influence of American media makes for global cultural synchronization (e.g., Schiller 1989, Hamelink 1983; a critical view is Morley 1994).

Modernization and Americanization are the latest versions of westernization. If colonialism delivered Europeanization, neocolonialism under U.S. hegemony delivers Americanization. Common to both is the modernization thesis, of which Marx and Weber have been the most influential proponents. Marx’s thesis was the worldwide spread of capitalism. World-system theory is a current version of this perspective. With Weber, the emphasis is on rationalization, in the form of bureaucratization and other rational social technologies. Both perspectives fall within the general framework of evolutionism, a single-track universal process of evolution through which all societies, some faster than others, are progressing. A vision of universal progress such as befits an imperial world. A twentieth-century version of this line of thinking is Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary convergence towards the noosphere.

Shannon Peters Talbott (1995) examines the McDonaldization thesis through an ethnography of McDonald’s in Moscow and finds the argument inaccurate on every score. Instead of efficiency, queuing (up to several hours) and lingering are commonplace. Instead of being inexpensive, an average McDonald’s meal costs more than a third of a Russian worker’s average daily wage. Instead of predictability, difference and uniqueness attract Russian customers while many standard menu items are not served in Moscow. Instead of uniform management control, McDonald’s Moscow introduces variations in labor control ("extra fun motivations," fast service competitions, special hours for workers to bring their families to eat in the restaurant) and in customer control by allowing customers to linger, often for more than an hour on a cup of tea, to "soak up the atmosphere."

She concludes that McDonald’s in Moscow does not represent cultural homogenization but should rather be understood along the lines of global localization. This matches the argument in business studies that corporations, also when they seek to represent "world products," only succeed if and to the extent that they adapt themselves to local cultures and markets. They should become insiders; this is the principle of "insiderization" for which the late Sony chairman Akio Morita coined the term "glocalization," or "looking in both directions" (Ohmae 1992: 93). Firms may be multinational but "all business is local."

This can lead to counterintuitive consequences, as in the case of the international advertising firm McCann Erickson, whose Trinidad branch to justify a local presence promotes Trinidadian cultural specificity. "The irony is, of course, that . . . it is advertising including transnational agencies which have become the major investors in preserving and promoting images of local specificity, retaining if not creating the idea that Trinidad is different, and inculcating this belief within the population at large" (Miller 1995: 9). The profitability of the transnational firm hinges on the profitability of the branch office whose interest lies in persuading the firm that only local advertising sells.

So far, this only considers the angle of the corporation. The other side of global localization is the attitude of customers. The McDonald’s Moscow experience compares with adaptations of American fast food principles elsewhere, for instance in East Asia (Watson 1997). Here fast food restaurants though outwardly the same as the American models serve quite different tastes and needs. They are not down-market junk food but cater to middle class tastes, they are sought out for their "modern" aesthetics, are appreciated for food variation rather than uniformity, and generate "mixed" offspring, such as "Chinglish" or "Chamerican" restaurants in China. They offer a public space, a meeting place—in a sense culturally neutral because of its novelty—for new types of consumers, such as the consumer market of the young, of working women and middle class families. They function in similar ways in southern Europe and the Middle East. In wintry Tokyo, upstairs in Wendy’s young students spend hours doing their homework, smoking and chatting with friends, because Japanese houses are small.

Thus, rather than cultural homogenization McDonald’s and others in the family of western fast food restaurants (Burger King, KFC, Pizza Hut, Wendy’s) usher in difference, variety, giving rise to and reflecting new, mixed social forms. Where they are imported, they serve different social, cultural, and economic functions than in their place of origin and their formula is accordingly adapted to local conditions. In western metropoles, we now see oriental fast food restaurants and chains along with Latino, Middle Eastern, Turkish, and French eateries. Fast food may well have originated outside the West, in the street side food stalls of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. American fast food restaurants serve German food (hamburgers, frankfurters) with French (fries, dressing) and Italian elements (pizza) in American management style. American contributions besides ketchup are assembly-line standardization, in American Taylorist and managerial traditions, and marketing. Thus, it would make more sense to consider McDonaldization as a form of intercultural hybridization, partly in its origins and certainly in its present globally localizing variety of forms.

McDonaldization has sparked growing resistance and wide debate (Alfino et al. 1998, Smart 1999). In its home country, McDonald’s is past its peak, its shares declining and franchises closing. Obesity as a national disease and changing diets, saturation of the fast food market, resistance, and litigation contribute to the decline. Beyond "rationalization" this takes us to the shifting shapes of contemporary capitalism. Is contemporary capitalism a homogenizing force? A stream of studies examines the cultures of late capitalism, a problematic often structured by world system thinking (Wallerstein 1990) or at least vocabulary (King 1991). The commodification of labor, services, and information takes myriad forms, under headings each of which are another lament: McJobs, McInformation, McCitizens, McUniversity, McTourism, McCulture, McPrisons, McCourts (Gottdiener 2000, Ritzer 2002, Stojkovic et al. 1999). One study seeks "to intervene in discourses on transnational capitalism whose tendency is to totalize the world system" (Lowe and Lloyd 1997: 15), but in the process finds that "capitalism has proceeded not through global homogenization but through differentiation of labor markets, material resources, consumer markets, and production operations" (13). The economist Michael Storper finds a combined effect of homogenization and diversification across the world:

Most studies of capitalism and culture find diverse and hybrid outcomes. This suggests that capitalism itself hosts more diversity than is usually assumed—so the appropriate analytic would rather be capitalisms; and its cultural intersections are more diverse than is generally assumed. The rhizome of capitalism twins then with the rhizome of culture, which brings us to the theme of hybridization.

Hybridization: The Rhizome of Culture

Mixing has been perennial as a process but new as an imaginary. As a perspective, it differs fundamentally from the previous two paradigms. It does not build on an older theorem but opens new windows. It is fundamentally excluded from the other two paradigms. It springs from the taboo zone of race thinking because it refers to that which the doctrines of racial purity and cultural integrism could not bear to acknowledge the existence of: the half-caste, mixed-breed, métis. If it was acknowledged at all, it was cast in diabolical terms. Nineteenth-century race thinking abhorred mixing because, according to Comte de Gobineau and many others, in any mixture the "lower" element would predominate. The idea of mixing goes against all the doctrines of purity as strength and sanctity, ancient and classical, of which "race science" and racism have been modern, biologized versions.

Hybridization is an antidote to the cultural differentialism of racial and nationalist doctrines because it takes as its point of departure precisely those experiences that have been banished, marginalized, tabooed in cultural differentialism. It subverts nationalism because it privileges bordercrossing. It subverts identity politics such as ethnic or other claims to purity and authenticity because it starts out from the fuzziness of boundaries. If modernity stands for an ethos of order and neat separation by tight boundaries, hybridization reflects a postmodern sensibility of cut’n’mix, transgression, subversion. It represents, in Foucault’s terms, a "resurrection of subjugated knowledges" because it foregrounds those effects and experiences which modern cosmologies, whether rationalist or romantic, would not tolerate.

Hybridization goes under various aliases such as syncretism, creolization, métissage, mestizaje, crossover. Related notions are global ecumene, global localization, and local globalization. The next two chapters develop this perspective and discuss several objections to the hybridity thesis. Hybridization may conceal the asymmetry and unevenness in the process and the elements of mixing. Distinctions need to be made between different times, patterns, types, and styles of mixing; besides mixing carries different meanings in different cultural settings.

Hybridization occurs of course also among cultural elements and spheres within societies. In Japan, "Grandmothers in kimonos bow in gratitude to their automated banking machines. Young couples bring hand-held computer games along for romantic evenings out" (Greenfeld 1994: 230). Is the hybridization of cultural styles then typically an urban phenomenon, a consequence of urbanization and industrialization? If we look into the countryside virtually anywhere in the world, we find traces of cultural mixing: the crops planted, planting methods and agricultural techniques, implements and inputs used (seeds, fertilizer, irrigation methods, credit) are usually of translocal origin. Farmers and peasants throughout the world are wired, direct or indirect, to the fluctuations of global commodity prices that affect their economies and decision-making. The ecologies of agriculture may be local, but the cultural resources are translocal. Agriculture is a prime site of globalization (Richards 1996, Goodman and Watts 1997).

An interesting objection to the hybridization argument is that what are actually being mixed are cultural languages rather than grammars. The distinction runs between surface and deep-seated elements of culture. It is, then, the folkloric, superficial elements of culture—foods, costumes, fashions, consumption habits, arts and crafts, entertainments, healing methods—that travel, while deeper attitudes and values, the way elements hang together, the structural ensemble of culture, remain contextually bound. There are several implications to this argument. It would imply that contemporary "planetarization" is a surface phenomenon only because "deep down" humanity remains divided in historically formed cultural clusters. Does this also imply that the new social technologies of telecommunication—from jet aircraft to electronic media—are surface phenomena only that don’t affect deep-seated attitudes? If so, the implications would be profoundly conservative. A mid-way position is that the new technologies are profound in themselves while each historically framed culture develops its own takes on the new spaces of commonality.

Another issue is immigrant and settler societies where intermingling over time represents a historical momentum profound enough to engage cultural grammar and not just language. A prime example is North America. Probably part of the profound and peculiar appeal of American popular culture is precisely its mixed and "traveling" character, its "footloose" lightness, unhinged from the feudal past. In this culture, the grammars of multiple cultures mingle, and this intercultural density may be part of the subliminal attraction of American popular media, music, film, television: the encounter, and often enough the clash, but an intimate clash, of ethnicities, cultures, histories. The intermingling of cultural grammars then makes up the deeply human appeal of American narratives and its worldly character, repackaging elements that came from other shores, in a "Mississippi Massala."

Intercultural mingling itself is a deeply creative process not only in the present phase of accelerated globalization but stretching far back in time. Cees Hamelink notes: "The richest cultural traditions emerged at the actual meeting point of markedly different cultures, such as Sudan, Athens, the Indus Valley, and Mexico" (1983: 4). This sheds a different light on the language/grammar argument: presumably, some grammars have been mingling all along. Thus, a mixture of cultural grammars is part of the intrinsic meaning of the world religions (as against tribal, national religions). More fundamentally, the question is whether the distinction between cultural language and cultural grammar can be maintained at all, as a distinction between surface and depth. Certainly we know that in some spheres nothing has greater depth than the surface. This is the lesson taught by art and aesthetics. Superficial mingling then may have deep overtones. Even so we have been so trained and indoctrinated to think of culture in territorial packages of assorted "imagined communities" that to seriously address the windows opened and questions raised by hybridization in effect requires a decolonization of imagination.

A schematic précis of the three paradigms of cultural difference is in table 3.1.

Futures

The futures evoked by these three paradigms are dramatically different. McDonaldization evokes both a triumphalist Americanism and a gloomy picture of a global "iron cage" and global cultural disenchantment. The clash of civilizations likewise offers a horizon of a world of iron, a deeply pessimistic politics of cultural division as a curse that dooms humanity to lasting conflict and rivalry; the world as an archipelago of incommunicable differences, the human dialogue as a dialogue of war, and the global ecumene as an everlasting battlefield. The political scientist Benjamin Barber in Jihad vs. McWorld (1995) presents the clash between these two perspectives without giving a sense of the third option, mixing. Mixing or hybridization is open-ended in terms of experience as well as in a theoretical sense. Its newness means that its ramifications over time are not predictable because it doesn’t fit an existing matrix or established paradigm but itself signifies a paradigm shift.

Each paradigm represents a different politics of multiculturalism. Cultural differentialism translates into a policy of closure and apartheid. If outsiders are let in at all, they are preferably kept at arm’s length in ghettos, reservations, or concentration zones. Cultural communities are best kept separate, as in colonial "plural society" in which communities are not supposed to mix except in the marketplace, or as in gated communities that keep themselves apart. Cultural convergence translates into a politics of assimilation with the dominant group as the cultural center of gravity. Cultural mixing refers to a politics of integration without the need to give up cultural identity while cohabitation is expected to yield new cross-cultural patterns of difference. This is a future of ongoing mixing, ever-generating new commonalities and new differences.

At a deeper level, each paradigm resonates with particular sensibilities and cosmologies. The paradigm of differentialism follows the principle of purity, as in ritual purity in the caste system, the limpieza de sangre in Spain after the Reconquest, and the preoccupation with purity of blood and lineage among aristocracies, a concern that was subsequently translated into thinking about "race" and class (Nederveen Pieterse 1989: chapter 11). The paradigm of convergence follows the theory of emanation, according to which phenomena are the outward expressions of an ultimate numinous realm of being. In its sacred version, this reflects a theology and cosmogony of emanation outward from a spiritual center of power (as in Gnosticism). What follows upon the cycle of emanation, dissemination, and divergence is a cycle of "in-gathering," or a process of convergence. A temporal reflection of this cosmology is the ancient imperial system in which the empire is the circumference of the world and the emperor its center (as in the case of the Pharaoh, the emperor of China as the "middle of the middle kingdom," and imperial Rome) and divine kingship, in which the king embodies the land and the people. Western imperialism and its mission civilisatrice or White Man’s Burden was a variation on this perspective. Since decolonization, the principle of radiation outward from an imperial center has retained its structure but changed its meaning, from positive to negative, as in dependency theory and the critique of cultural imperialism and Eurocentrism.

The third view is the synthesis that acts as the solvent between these polar perspectives. As such, it owes its existence to the previous two principles and is meaningful only in relation to them. It resolves the tension between purity and emanation, between the local and the global, in a dialectic according to which the local is in the global and the global is in the local. An example in which we see this synthetic motion in operation is Christmas: "The ability of this festival to become potentially the very epitome of globalization derives from the very same quality of easy syncretism which makes Christmas in each and every place the triumph of localism, the protector and legitimation for specific regional and particular customs and traditions" (Miller 1993: 25).

Each paradigm involves a different take on globalization. According to cultural differentialism, globalization is a surface phenomenon only: the real dynamic is regionalization, or the formation of regional blocs, which tend to correspond with civilizational clusters. Therefore, the future of globalization is interregional rivalry. According to the convergence principle, contemporary globalization is westernization or Americanization writ large, a fulfillment in installments of the classical imperial and the modernization theses. According to the mixing approach, the outcome of globalization processes is open-ended and current globalization is as much a process of easternization as of westernization, as well as of many interstitial influences.

In the end it turns out that the two clashing trends noted at the beginning, growing awareness of cultural difference and globalization, are not simply contradictory but interdependent. Growing awareness of cultural difference is a function of globalization. Increasing cross-cultural communication, mobility, migration, trade, investment, tourism, all generate awareness of cultural difference. The other side of the politics of difference is that the very striving for recognition implies a claim to equality, equal rights, same treatment: in other words, a common universe of difference. Accordingly, the clash between cultural diversity and globalization may well be considered a creative clash.

These views find adherents in each setting and their dispute echoes in every arena. Arguably, cultural self-understandings and empirical evidence confirm the third perspective more than the others do. Through most of Asia, ideas of East-West fusion are a dominant motif. In Africa, recombinations of local and foreign practices are a common notion. Latin America and the Caribbean are steeped in syncretism and creolization. But the imprint of other paradigms runs deep, disputes over identity and meaning are ubiquitous, and besides there is disagreement over the meaning and dynamics of hybridity. The next two chapters develop the theme of hybridity as a major departure in understanding cultural difference.

Chapter 3 Globalization and Culture: Three Paradigms