With the crisis of the global capitalist economy the topic of global culture is regaining its importance and needs to be
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English Pages 376 [390] Year 2015
Globalizing Cultures
Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor David Fasenfest (Wayne State University)
Volume 82
Critical Global Studies Series Editor Ricardo A. Dello Buono (Manhattan College, New York) Editorial Board José Bell Lara (University of Havana, Cuba) Walden Bello (State University of New York at Binghamton, usa and University of the Philippines, Philippines) Samuel Cohn (Texas A & M University, usa) Ximena de la Barra (South American Dialogue, Chile/Spain) Víctor M. Figueroa (Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico) Marco A. Gandásegui, Jr., (Universidad de Panamá, Panama) Ligaya Lindio-McGovern (Indiana University-Kokomo, usa) Daphne Phillips (University of West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago) Jon Shefner (University of Tennessee-Knoxville, USA) Teivo Teivainen (Universidad de Helsinki, Finland and Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru) Henry Veltmeyer (Saint Mary’s University, Nova Scotia, Canada and Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico) Peter Waterman (Institute of Social Studies (Retired), The Hague, Netherlands)
Volume 5 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cgs
Globalizing Cultures Theories, Paradigms, Actions Edited by
Vincenzo Mele Marina Vujnovic
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Untitled Drawing by Michael Richison.
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1573-4234 isbn 978-90-04-27282-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-27283-5 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Contents Acknowledgments ix Notes on Contributors x Introduction: Globalizing Cultures: Theories, Paradigms, Actions 1 Vincenzo Mele and Marina Vujnovic
PART 1 Theoretical Examinations and Concepts: Global Culture, Global Identity, and Global Civil Sphere 1 Investigating Global Culture: Its Creation, Structure, and Meanings 23 Victoria Reyes 2 Global Interaction and Identity in Structuralist and Dialectic Perspectives: Toward a Typology of Psycho-cultural Identities 39 Ino Rossi 3 The Civil Sphere beyond the Western Nation-State: Theoretical and Empirical Reflections on Alexander’s Cultural Sociology and Its Contribution to Civil Society Discourse 66 Peter Kivisto
PART 2 Neoliberalism between State and Market: Nationalism, International Free Trade and Persistence of the State 4 The Role of the Nation-State in the Global Age 89 Andrea Borghini 5 Faustian States: Nationalist Politics and the Problem of Legitimacy in the Neoliberal Era 111 Cory Blad
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Deification of Market; Homogenization of Cultures: ‘Free Trade’ and Other Euphemisms for Global Capitalism 124 Gwendolyn Yvonne Alexis
Part 3 Transnational Practices and Resistance: Gender, Media, and Social Movements 7
“Transnational Activism, Feminist Praxis, and Cultures of Resistance” 143 Nancy A. Naples
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Transnational Flashpublics: Social Media and Affective Contagions from Egypt to Occupy Wall Street 174 Jack Bratich
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Transnational Feminist Media Practices: Seeking Alliance against Global Capitalism 196 Marina Vujnovic
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Shifting Contours in Latin American Cultures of Resistance 211 Ricardo A. Dello Buono
PART 4 Global Consumer Culture: Tourism, Taste, Consumption and Imaginary 11
Distinction and Social Class in America and Europe: Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Taste in Cross-Cultural Comparison 233 Vincenzo Mele
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Consumption, Identity, Space: Shopping Malls in Bogotá 258 Enrico Campo
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Trafficking Gypsiness in the 21st Century 288 Mihaela Moscaliuc
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Tourism, Expatriates, and Power Relations in Vieques, Puerto Rico 311 Karen Schmelzkopf
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PART 5 Human Rights, Equality and Culture of Empowerment 15
Overcoming the Divide: Arab Women between Traditional Life and a Globalizing Culture 331 Saliba Sarsar and Manal Stephan
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The Millennium Development Goals, Gender Equality, and Empowerment in India 353 Rekha Datta
Author Index 371 Subject Index 374
Acknowledgments We would like to gratefully recognize Institute for Global Understanding at Monmouth University for institutional support. Most of the chapters in this volume are a result of the fruitful discussion during Global Culture Symposium held at Monmouth University in the summer of 2012. We would like to acknowledge our family members, friends and colleagues for intellectual and personal support they’ve graciously given us over the course of many months during which we produced this book. We would like to thank our students Sandra Meola, Maria Kukhareva and particularly Enrico Campo for helping us deliver this book to our audiences. Vincenzo Mele, Marina Vujnovic
Notes on Contributors Gwendolyn Yvonne Alexis is the Lead Instructor for Business Ethics at the Leon Hess Business School, Monmouth University. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Dr. Alexis is a member of the New Jersey, New York, and Florida Bars. Her Ph.D. in Sociology was earned from the New School for Social Research; and she has a Master Degree in Ethics from the Yale University Divinity School. Her undergraduate degree in Business was earned from the University of Southern California where she was inducted into Beta Gamma Sigma, the international honorary society in Business. Cory Blad is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Urban Studies at Manhattan College. He is author of Neoliberalism and National Culture: StateBuilding and Legitimacy in Canada and Québec. Leiden: Brill Publishers. 2011. His research interests are Global Political Economy, State Theory, Nationalism and Culture, Social Movements. Andrea Borghini is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the Department of Political Sciences, University of Pisa (Italy). He mainly investigates topics related to political and social transformations (the role of the Nation-State, the processes of Global Governance) from a critical, historiographical and empirical approach. Among his works are Metamorfosi del potere (2003), Governance and Nation State (2004), Potere simbolico e immaginario sociale (2009). He has also published some books on Karl Popper’s political and social theory (Karl Popper. Politica e Società, 2000; Sociologia di Karl Popper, 2008). Jack Z. Bratich is an Associate Professor and Department Chair of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He is author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008) and coeditor, along with Jeremy Packer and Cameron McCarthy, Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality (2003). His work applies autonomist social theory to such topics as audience studies, social media, and the cultural politics of secrecy. He is a zine librarian at abc No Rio in New York City.
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Enrico Campo is Phd Student in Sociology at the University of Pisa. His doctoral thesis is on the social construction of attention in its historical dimension. He wrote his master’s thesis on the relationship between Benjamin’s analysis of the Parisian arcades and shopping malls in contemporary metropolis. He is co-editor, with Andrea Borghini, of a book on the Crisis in usa and eu and invited author for Encyclopedia of Social Theory, Wiley-Blackwell. Currently he is writing an essay on “Attention and Relevance in Alfred Schutz.” Rekha Datta Professor of Political Science at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. Served as Founding Director of the Institute for Global Understanding (igu). Author of Why Alliances Endure: The United States-Pakistan Military Alliance, 1954–1971 (1994) and co-editor, with Judith Kornberg, Women in Developing Countries: Assessing Strategies for Empowerment (2002), and Beyond Realism: Human Security in India and Pakistan in the 21st Century, (2008, 2010). Ricardo A. Dello Buono is Professor of Sociology and Department Chair at Manhattan College in New York City. He specializes in the sociology of development and is the Latin American and Caribbean editor for the journal Critical Sociology. Co-author of Latin America after the Neoliberal Debacle: Another Region is Possible (2009, with Ximena de la Barra), Dello Buono served as President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (sssp) for 2012–2013. Peter Kivisto is Richard A. Swanson Professor of Social Thought and Chair of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Welfare at Augustana College and Finland Distin guished Professor at the University of Turku. His current research involves a collaborative project on multiculturalism with colleagues in Finland. His interests include immigration, social integration, citizenship, and religion. Among his recent books are Key Ideas in Sociology (2011), Illuminating Social Life (2011); Beyond a Border: The Causes and Consequences of Contemporary Immi gration (2010, with Thomas Faist); Citizenship: Discourse, Theory and Transna tional Prospects (2007, with Thomas Faist); and Intersecting Inequalities (2007, with Elizabeth Hartung). He serves on the editorial boards of Contexts, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Intercultural Studies, and on the Publication Committee for Sociology of Religion.
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Vincenzo Mele is currently Researcher in sociology of culture at the Department of Political Sciences, University of Pisa and igu fellow at igu, Monmouth University, usa. Before coming to Pisa, he was lecturer of sociology at Monmouth University, usa (2008–2012) and visiting professor at William Paterson University, usa (spring 2008). He is invited author the Encyclopedia of Social Theory, Wiley-Blackwell and cooperates with several sociological journals, like “Simmel Studies”, “La Società degli Individui”. “Sociologica”, “Quaderni di Teoria Sociale”, “Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale”, “Theory, Culture & Society”, “Journal of Classical Sociology”. Mihaela Moscaliuc is an Assistant Professor at Monmout University. She was born and raised in Romania and came to the United States in 1996 to complete graduate work literature. Her articles on Roma, translation theory, and Asian-American poetry have appeared in Interculturality and Translation, Soundings, Orient and Orientalisms in American Poetry and Poetics, and History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe. She has published a poetry collection, Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010) as well as translations, essays, and reviews in Arts & Letters, Mississippi Review, Connecticut Review, Mid-American Review, The Georgia Review, Poetry International, and World Literature Today. She teaches at Monmouth University and in the mfa low-residency Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation at Drew University. Nancy A. Naples holds a joint appointment in Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (wgss) at the University of Connecticut where she is also Director of wgss. Her research on citizenship, social policy, immigration, and community activism has been published in several books and numerous journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, wsq: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Gender & Society, Feminist Economics, and Women & Politics. Her sole authored books are Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work and the War on Poverty and Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research; and her edited books include Community Activism and Feminist Politics: Organizing Across Race, Class, and Gender; The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossing and Mexican Immigrant Men by Lionel Cantú’, co-edited with Salvador Vidal-Ortiz; Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics, coedited with Manisha Desai; and Teaching Feminist Activism: Strategies from the Field, co-edited with Karen Bojar.
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Victoria Reyes is an Assistant Professor in the Growth and Structure of Cities department at Bryn Mawr College. Her interests include globalization, intersections of inequality, economic sociology, cultural sociology, urban sociology, space and place, borders and boundaries, and law and society. Prior to her PhD, she conducted research in the Philippines as a 2006–2007 Fulbright Scholar, and worked as an education associate at a reproductive health non-profit in Washington d.c. She has received funding from the National Science Foun dation, Law and Society Association, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies as well as Princeton University’s Department of Sociology, Center for Migration and Development, and East Asian Studies Program. Saliba Sarsar is a Professor of Political Science and Associate Vice President for Global Initiatives at Monmouth Univeristy. He earned a ba in political science and history interdisciplinary, with summa cum laude, from Monmouth in 1978, and a doctoral degree in political science, with specialization in Middle East affairs, from Rutgers University. Dr. Sarsar is active in Arab-Jewish dialogue and peace building, for which he received the Humanitarian Award from the National Conference for Community and Justice in 2001. His other awards include the Stafford Presidential Award of Excellence and the Global Visionary Award, which he received from Monmouth University in 2006 and 2007, respectively. In April 2003, Sarsar was featured in the New York Times article, “His Mission: Finding Why People Fight – A Witness to Mideast Conflict Turns to Dialogue and Peace.” Karen Schmelzkopf is an Associate Professor of Geography in the History and Anthropology Department at Monmouth University. She graduated from Pennsylvania State University, where she earned a Ph.D. in Geography. Her dissertation was on patriarchal thinking and geographic epistemology. She taught at University of California, Riverside before moving east to the position at Monmouth University. Dr. Schmelzkopf was director of the Women’s Studies Program (later the Gender Studies Program) for several years, and was the director of the Policy Program and the gis Program. Dr. Schmelzkopf’s publications and research areas include social activism in community gardens, grassroots movements and tourism development in the former naval bombing sites in Vieques, Puerto Rico, and tourism in New Jersey.
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Manal A. Stephan is an International Gender and Community Development Consultant with over 15 years of hands-on experience in the Middle East in the areas of planning, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating development programs and projects funded by various international donors, including the European Commission, usaid, caritas, and the World Bank. She holds a Master’s degree in Public Health from Birzeit University and another in Public Administration from Seton Hall University. She has taught at Birzeit University and Bethlehem University in Palestine and was an Advisor on Humanitarian and Social Affairs at the Permanent Mission of the State of Qatar at the United Nations in New York. Marina Vujnovic is an Associate Professor of Journalism in the Department of Communication at Monmouth University. She was born and raised in Croatia (Former Yugoslavia) and she came to United States in 2003 to complete her graduate work in journalism and mass communication. Her research interests focus on: international communication and global flow of information; journalism studies, explorations of the historical, political-economic and cultural impact of media on class, race, gender, and ethnicity. She is an author of the Forging the Bubikopf Nation: Journalism, Gender and Modernity in Interwar Yugoslavia, and co-author of Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers.
Introduction
Globalizing Cultures: Theories, Paradigms, Actions Vincenzo Mele and Marina Vujnovic Global Culture has become a widely used concept in the field of cultural studies and as Radha S. Hegde argues, “cultural studies have seen emerging interest in interdisciplinary approaches to study of globalization,” along with increasing internationalization.1 This volume attempts to expand on the contemporary discussion about the complexity of the concept of global culture through a collection of interdisciplinary and international scholarly contributions, including conceptual reexaminations and practical international case studies that deal with actual lives of people in the context of neoliberal global society. In other words, how people experience, understand, accommodate and resist conditions imposed by globalization. Our collection of essays provides a critical examination of the parameters, practices, and discourses surrounding the complex concept of global culture. With the works of Mike Featherstone, Arjun Appadurai, Roland Robertson, Benjamin R. Barber, Ulf Hannerz, George Ritzer and others, global cultural studies has become a sub-discipline in the field of globalization studies. Peter Kivisto, in his book, Key Ideas In Sociology observed that “with the emerging of global economy and the democratic developments throughout the world, the topic of global culture will increasingly occupy the attention of tomorrow’s social thinkers.”2 However, the problems accompanying the proposition of a singular concept of global culture are multifold. This volume presents an attempt to reexamine the singularity of the concept of global culture. More importantly, it questions the singularity of the concept by asking: Is global culture possible? What exactly is global culture? Is it merely a theory, a condition, or a set of processes through which Western modernity accomplishes itself? Which kinds of social, economic, and political processes make local cultures become global? And how do global values, laws, education, fashion, nutrition and other habits become accepted locally? In other words, how can global culture be understood as a process, a flow of specific “globalizing cultures” and how do
1 Radha Sarma Hegde, ed., Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures (New York University Press, 2011), 1. 2 Peter Kivisto, Key Ideas in Sociology (Thousand Oaks, ca: Pine Forge Press, 2011), 170.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004272835_002
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globalization and cultural diversity fit together?3 These are among the central questions addressed in this volume. Global culture as a singular term should be used cautiously, but it is useful when we wish to discuss processes and consequences of global capitalism worldwide. We do not wish to engage now in a detailed conceptual discussion on the uses of the term “global cultures” that will be done in the first section of the book (Theoretical Examination and Concepts), rather we want to draw attention to the current tendencies of the process that is based on the “greater intensity and extensity of cultural flows” and the greater velocity at which they travel. This process includes counter-globalizing tendencies that are a result of the complexity and unevenness of these flows.4 However, in order to properly understand the concept of globalizing cultures and to define what we mean by globalizing cultures we must turn first to history. Avcioğlu and Flood, in Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteen Century draw attention to the transregionality and mobility of cultural forms in the Eighteen century. In fact, they show marginalization of cultural flows and cultural exchange and argue that “appropriation, consumption, and knowledge of ‘others’ was not unique to the West, nor did a European notion of East go uncontested.”5 They show multiple ways in which transregional cultural exchange stimulates “local practices, thought, and political agendas as well as new technologies.”6 So if the multi-directionality of cultural flows has been emblematic of the age of Enlightenment, what do current multi-dimensional cultural flows tell us about our late modern moment? Any examination of the current stage of Modernity should be grounded within the confines of the capitalist institutionalized global social order, or capitalist society.7 Robinson has written extensively on global capitalism, 3 See Gerhard Steingress, “Globalizing Cultures a Challenge for Contemporary Cultural Sociology”. Euroasian Journal of Anthropology, 1(1, January 2010), 1–10. As Steingress puts it, “globalizing culture means the worldwide acceptance of international law and value standards, currencies, education, fashion, nutrition and other habits. But it also represents in a symbolic way cultural diversity as part of the international market, as for example in language, literature, music and art. Therefore, sociology has to explain not only how globalization and cultural diversity fit together, but also what kind of social processes make them work”, Ibid., 4. 4 See Paul Hopper, Understanding Cultural Globalization (Cambridge uk: Polity Press, 2007). 5 Nebahat Avcioğlu and Finbarr Barry Flood, “Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteen Century,” Ars Orientalis 89 (2010), 8. 6 Ibid, 9. 7 Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism,” New Left Review, 86 (2014).
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especially about the ways in which, more recently, capitalism has been propelled by the decrease in material and political obstacles.8 We could argue that there is a global culture of capitalism currently in play that affects large populations and their ways of life around the world, characterized by what Fraser calls “background conditions for exploitation.”9 According to Fraser, our current stage of capitalism has been characterized by a shift from “production to social reproduction” that includes diverse actions that “maintain and produce social bonds.”10 She argues: Central here is the work of socializing the young, building communities, producing and reproducing the shared meanings, affective dispositions and horizons of value that underpin social cooperation.11 In that sense, this social reproduction, according to Fraser, is the very pre- condition for capitalist production, for wage labor and the existence of a market economy.12 In this very realm of social reproduction lies the space for production and re-production of culture. As we situate our understanding of globalizing cultures within the context of late modern capitalist society, it is important to recognize the need to study the existence of other modes of production on both the level of production of capital and social reproduction, while staying critical of the potential adverse effects global capitalism may have on diverse modes of life. Chapters in this volume draw attention to the interconnectedness and consequentiality of global capitalism and transnational political, economic, and cultural processes to local and indigenous cultures. We wish to argue that current theoretical perspectives from a critical standpoint have an easier time agreeing on the definition of globalization as process “characterized by the rise of truly transnational capital and the integration (or re-articulation) of most countries in the world into a new global production and financial system”13 than on the definition cultural globalization because of the elusive and complex nature of the term culture.
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See William I. Robinson, “Global Capitalism Theory and the Emergence of Transnational Elites”, Critical Sociology, 38, n. 3 (2012), 349–363. 9 Nancy Fraser, Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode, 61. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid, p. 350.
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Traditionally, human culture has been viewed as linked to a concept of territory. If we consider culture as a shared repertoire of practices, symbols, values, beliefs and norms, it is hard to imagine something like a unified culture on a global scale. Above all, it is difficult to imagine a culture that is not tied to a certain territory, similar to indigenous cultures, for example. With the advent of modernity, things start to change and understanding culture is made increasingly complex in the current late modern moment. Modernity – western modernity – has meant an immense process of unification of languages, lifestyles, and mentalities. Probably for the first time in the history of humanity the “disjunction” between culture and territory becomes dramatic. Like A. Giddens observed, one important consequence of modernity was the “separation between space and place.”14 He argues that it is important to stress the distinction between these two notions, because they are often considered synonymous. In pre-modern societies, space and place largely coincide, since the special dimensions of social life are, for most of the population, and in most respects, dominated by “presence” or by localized activities. “The advent of modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations between ‘absent’ others, locationally distant from any given situation of face-to-face interaction. In conditions of modernity, place becomes increasingly phantasmagoric”.15 The famous proposition that “a butterfly wing in Japan can cause a typhoon in Mexico,” exemplifies this notion. With the industrial revolution and the consolidation of capitalism as a world mode of production, all countries (and cultures) become naturally interconnected and, above all, the experience of a place can be influenced by decisions and events that are happening in another place.16 The process of “emptying of space” goes together with the “emptying of time” which actually was the prerequisite of it. All pre-modern cultures possessed modes to calculate time. The calendar, for example, was a distinctive feature of agrarian societies. But the time experience which was the basis for everyday life generally linked time with place – often in a very imprecise and variable way. “When” was almost universally either connected with “where” or identified by regular natural occurrences. The invention of the mechanical clock and its diffusion to virtually all m embers 14 15 16
See Giddens, A. (1991). The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford University Press. Ibid, pp. 18–19. The uniqueness of culture, place and experience has always been threatened by the belief of a transcendental entity (God, gods) as possible explanation of human and historical events. What it is new in modernity and with disenchantment is that the belief in the power of the supernatural decreases, but increases the power of capital as a supernatural entity (cfr. the fetishism of commodity described by Marx).
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of the population was the key to the separation of time from space. The clock expressed a uniform dimension of “empty” time, bringing the different qualities of the lived experience of time to measurable quantifiable unities.17 This experience where “all that is solid melts into air” is the lived experience of modernity. In a beautiful, already “classic” book – that has precisely this title – Marshall Berman describes in these terms the experience of modernity, with the help not just of the social sciences but also of literature (Goethe, Marx, Baudelaire, Dostojevski).18 In Marx we can still find the most brilliant and synthetic description of the growth of capitalism as a process of a globalizing culture.19 The new capitalistic mode of production needed unified markets and predictable rules of commerce. As Marx described it, “independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together in one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff.”20 With the creation of the Nation-State the process of political centralization and cultural unification took a decisive twist. As Benedict Anderson noted, Nation-States are not just economic, political, and territorial entities, but also “imagined communities”.21 In order to achieve this spiritual and imaginary unity, nationalized school systems, a national language that draws from a national literature, and a unified cultural tradition were necessary. The variety of colors of local flags has to capitulate to make space for the colors of the national flag. Even if the creation of the political and cultural entity of the Nation-State was necessary, it was clear since the beginning that the capitalist mode of production was inherently cosmopolitan. Marx describes the rise of the bourgeoisie like the most revolutionary of classes: “it has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.”22 The bourgeoisie is itself the product of a series 17 Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, p. 17. 18 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air. The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). 19 The Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848 is, like Marshall Berman observed, the “archetype of a century of modernist manifestos and movements to come. The Manifesto expresses some of the modernist culture’s deepest insights and, at the same time, dramatizes some of its deepest inner contradictions” (Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 89). 20 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, (Moscow: Progress Publisher 1969), 17. 21 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. (London: Verso 1991). 22 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 16.
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of revolutions in the mode of production and exchange, based on the worldmarket, also it is inherently a global social class. “The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.”23 All old-established national industries are dislodged by new industries that no longer work from indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones and that produce goods consumed not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. Marx arrives to say that “this intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations” happens in material as well as intellectual production: “the intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a worldliterature”.24 This idea of a world-literature is really anticipatory in Marx and clearly prefigured what we can call today “global culture.” Therefore, global culture should be intended as the “culture of global capitalism,” not in the sense of the process of “globalizing” the culture of a single Nation-State, but as an arena where single local and national “languages” are forced – by the “iron law” of capitalistic profit – to interact together and to exchange meanings and symbols. Capitalism creates the possibility for people to exchange not only money and goods but also ideas, values, and symbols. But what is capitalism and what kind of exchange does it produce? There is a resurgence of critical literature on capitalism as a result of the most recent 2008 economic crisis. For example, Harvey discusses seventeen contradictions of capitalism that adversely affect capital accumulation and circulation while Streeck explores, among others, shifts between postwar social capitalism and a turn towards capitalist neoliberal order.25 In the current neoliberal capitalist order we are aware of what Lukács identified more than thirty years ago as the colonizing nature of commodity that permeates all life, including culture and art.26 While undeniably current forms of capitalism offer unprecedented possibility for exchange on a transnational level, the process is increasingly uneven. Fraser characterizes this function of capitalism as “transnational no-man’s land 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). Wolfgang Streeck, Buying time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Verso, London, 2014). 26 György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (mit Press, 1972).
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where it reaps the benefits of hegemonic ordering while escaping political control.”27 Similary, Boltanski and Chiapello argue that the “new spirit of capitalism” is inhuman and shows no regard for its social agents, and it is as Fraser asserts, an “institutional social order” that produces inequalities that are rather deliberate and non-accidental, including gender oppression, labor exploitation, ecological degradation, and political domination that is national, transnational, colonial and postcolonial.28 Obviously the language, or to use a sociological concept – the “generalized code” of the above mentioned exchange is money, which as Georg Simmel in his The Metropolis and Mental Life (1900), another manifesto envisioning the emergence of Global Culture – saw, as a terrible “leveler”: By being the equivalent to all the manifold things in one and the same way, money becomes the most frightful leveler. For money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of “how much?” Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. All things lie on the same level and differ from one another only in the size of the area which they cover.29 Money is not just a simple means of exchange, but it is also a symbolic form, something able to express something else in more simple and quantified terms. Simmel saw at the beginning of xx century a process which has became commonly debated in today’s literature on Globalization: the process of homogenization. In other terms, money became a standardized language, similar to “pidgin” English and all the local cultures that want to express themselves in the global arena have to learn that language, which also means renouncing their specific dialects. Yet, Marx and Simmel describe the formation of a global culture as the inexorable expansion of western civilization all over the globe. A declining belief in the “grand narrative” of progress and a postmodern sensibility for difference helped us to see that are several processes of interaction
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Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode,” New Left Review 86 (March/April, 2014), 67. Ibid., 67–68. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and The Mental Life”, in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed., K. Wolff (New York: The Free Press 1950), 411.
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between global and local cultures, and different paths to modernity, so called Multiple Modernities.30 In this new conceptual framework, indigenous and local culture didn’t disappear but rather interacts with the global capitalistic culture, giving birth to new, unseen configurations. The world we live in now, in which modernity is decisively “at large” surely involves a general break with all sorts of pasts.31 This break is not the one identified by the modernization theory of “grand Western social science” (not only Karl Marx and Georg Simmel, but also Auguste Comte, Ferdinand Toennies, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim), that has steadily reinforced the sense of one single moment – call it the “modern moment” – that creates a dramatic an unprecedented break between tradition and modernity and typologized as the difference between ostensibly traditional and modern societies.32 Moreover, Appadurai offers a theory of rupture that takes new electronic media and migration as its two major, and interconnected, factors and explores their joint effect on the work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity and the relationships between local and global cultures.33 Hence, global cultures are characterized by a new role for the imagination in social life. To grasp this new role, we need to bring together the old idea of images, especially mechanically produced images (in the Frankfurt School sense); the idea of the imagined community (Anderson); and the French idea of the imaginary (imaginaire) as a constructed landscape of collective aspirations, which is no more and no less real than the collective representations of Émile Durkheim, now mediated through the complex prism of modern media. From an anthropological point of view, Arjun Appadurai suggested to focus on “fluxes” and on the “disjuncture and difference” between economy, culture, and politics they are able to create on a global level.34 Following this approach, we can identify five main fluxes that characterize the new global culture economy, keeping in mind that the flow is uneven due to historical, political, economic, and social inequalities produced by the neoliberal capitalism where gender and race play crucial roles in who gets to be advantaged and who is disadvantaged in the global arena of exchange: 1. 30 31
Flow of media and ideas: both refer to the distribution of electronic information (including traditional media newspaper, magazines, television
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Multiple Modernities. Daedalus, Winter 2000, Vol. 29, n. 1: 1–29. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996). 32 Ibid., 3. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 32.
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and films, and new media powered by Internet) and to the concatenations of ideas, terms and images created by these media, generally coming from the master narrative of the Enlightenment (including terms such as freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, democracy, transparency). Flow of people: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers and other displaced individuals and groups constitute an essential feature of the global world, and appear to influence the politics of and between nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree. Flow of technology, whether it be high or low, mechanical or informational, which can now move at high speeds through previously impervious boundaries. Flow of money: the tendency of global capital to follow, not simply market laws (maximum profit, minimum cost), but the more complex relationships among money flow, technological availability, and human movement.35
This new global culture economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which can no longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models. If we think in term of “processes”, we can refer to the globalization of cultures as a process of cultural integration/disintegration at a transnational or transocietal level. The flows gain some autonomy at the global level and there may be emerging sets of “third cultures” which cannot be merely understood as the product of bilateral exchanges between nation-states. This view of cultures as being globalized rather than global raises many questions, especially as it relates to the production of culture through capitalism as previously stated. As Hopper suggests “viewing cultures by different networks or webs of meaning rather than as distinctive, bounded and coherent entities” accounts for dynamic relationships and commitments within cultures and external forces that continuously affect and shape the same.36 Diverse activities in the local context create multiple forms of cultural production and multiple forms of cultural identities. As different groups seek to re-produce their cultural values and share them through networks of communication, a problem of cultural “authenticity” and potential for shared understanding is raised. Second, unequal power of the participants in the global cultural production must focus on a consideration of those who are included versus those who are invisible or excluded. 35 Ibid., 33 and ff. 36 Hopper, Understanding Cultural Globalization, 41–42.
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These topics are evident in the selection of the chapters of the present book that examine consequences of the process of globalizing cultures such as: localization of cultural production, local and transnational strategies for coalition building, new social movements, and resistance to globalization and the traditional role of the state, new media mobilization, journalism and politics, human rights, identity politics and authenticity. This book is divided in four sections. The first section is dedicated to Theo retical Examinations and Concepts and it focuses mainly on three key concepts: global culture, global identity and the global civil sphere. Victoria Reyes (Bryn Mawr College, usa) moves from the purpose of clarification and tries to bring order to the abundant realm of theories of “global culture.” In order to consolidate what scholars mean by “global culture” and therefore allow seemingly disparate theories to advance our sociological understanding, her chapter analyzes three forms of “global culture” – those relating to (1) its creation, (2) its structure, diffusion, and possibilities for mobility, and (3) its various meanings. In order to achieve its goal, this chapter first provides an overview of definitions, dividing the various theories and empirical research into three categories: (1) Creating Global Culture, (2) Structure, Diffusion, and Mobility of Global Culture, and (3) Meanings of Global Culture. In “Creating Global Culture” she analyzes the various avenues in which global culture is created vis a vis international and global organizations such as the United Nations, and national and business constructions of travel guides and brands. Here, global culture is created through two avenues: internal, or domestic, wants and desires and international, or external, validation or success of these desires. Next, in “Structure, Diffusion, and Mobility of Global Culture,” she goes through empirical evidence on the global diffusion of cultural products and services, such as travel destinations, un World Heritage Sites, Internet routes, and various forms of mass media, and deconstruct prevailing theories – such as world polity, McDonaldization, cultural wealth, “Clash of Civilizations” and networks – and how they relate to the empirical evidence. Further, she outlines the various “Meanings of Global Culture,” from definitions of the “global citizen,” to local adaptations of multinational brands, cultural politics of food, and how they relate to theories of stigma and attraction. It also shows how these meanings are related to country-specific conditions of race and class, and how we can combine our structural understanding of global culture with meanings “onthe-ground.” Finally, she concludes by outlining how the different understandings of global culture have consequences for the political economy at the local, national, and international levels. Ino Rossi’s (St. John’s University New York, usa) chapter deals with the controversial issue of cultural and global identity. It begins with a systematization
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of traditional conceptualizations in a comprehensive typology of cultural identities (or missed identities) in relationship to selected dimensions of cultural globalization. Then, attention is turned to the facets of multidimensionality, complexity, fluidity, delocalization, displacement and deterritorialization of global cultural forms which cannot be understood in terms of static and dichotomous categories. Here, the author identifies a cluster of theories of cultural fragmentation and related theories of de-centered self (postmodernist), quasi-subject (Beck), and missed, confused, dissociative identities. A third and more viable approach relates fluid and uncertain cultural forms to the social and personal construction of a dialogic self which consists of a repertoire of positions internal to the self which are in relationship of tension, dialogue, and continuous negotiation and re-negotiation. Peter Kivisto (Augustana College, usa and University of Turku, Finland) discusses the emergence of a “global civil sphere”, with special reference to Jeffrey C. Alexander’s cultural sociology. Kivisto’s chapter is devoted to offering a judicious explication of Alexander’s detailed and complex book The Civil Sphere. He argues that the focus of Alexander’s work here and in the subsequent The Performance of Politics has been on the civil sphere of nation states, to be more explicit, of the United States. Further he assesses that Alexander is quite aware that the forces of globalization are yielding new arrangements beyond the nation-state, not signaling its demise, but locating it within a global context. Thus, at the end of The Civil Sphere Alexander points to the possibility of the civil sphere being organized beyond the boundaries and identities of nationstates. At the same time, Alexander is cognizant of the fact that the idea of a global civil society exists at best in embryonic form, and he would likely agree with John Keane that whether a global civil society has a reasonable chance of blossoming, ushering in the perpetual peace Kant wrote about, remains very much an open question. Alexander has not offered his own analysis of the transnational civil sphere, but in The Performance Revolution in Egypt he has looked outside of the Western world of liberal democracies to explore the potential of cultural power to facilitate the emergence of a viable civil society in an autocratic state. After examining the theoretical work of Keane and others as well as Alexander’s sociological journalism on Egypt, in the second section of his chapter, Kivisto turns to an exploration of a case that affords the possibility of in-depth empirical investigation, namely the European Union. Kivisto argues that over the course of its 50-plus year history, the eu has evolved into a novel political entity, with no precise parallel anywhere in the world. The question addressed concerns whether or not a transnational European public sphere – or what has been referred to as the Eurosphere – has emerged, and if so, what its implications might be at both the nation-state and the global levels.
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The second section, titled Neoliberalism between State and Market, explores some apparent paradoxes of neoliberal globalization, which is often characterized by a mix of “free trade” dogmas, neo-nationalisms, and forms of regional resistance and protest. More specifically, in his chapter, Andrea Borghini (University of Pisa, Italy) focuses on the roles of the Nation-State in the organization of political global power, starting from a short analysis of the main elements of the present global crisis. Particularly, the chapter investigates if the current situation, defined by some authors as De-globalization – a process of diminishing interdependence and integration between certain units around the world, typically nation-states – implies a return to an increasing power for the State or if the Nation-State is an institution that we are giving up because it is unable to face the new challenges of our global age (environmental, social, economic problems). Borghini tries to answer this fundamental question – on which future political organizations depend – by studying the relationship between State and Global Economy, State and Social Security, State and Global Culture, State and Cosmopolitanism. The chapter is organized through some key points: in the first part, it analyzes some fields where the presence of the State emerges strongly and reveals its ambivalence (Global governance, Penal State, State and Globalization); in the second part, it suggests a possible research agenda, concerning global culture topics, resulting from the perspective on the State that it is proposing. The author is convinced that the State also remains an important actor for the comprehension of the dynamics of global culture, because of the reorganization of the state functions and tasks in homologous ways to the organization of the global space (flows, network and so on); the cut off of the relationship between state and nation; the end of the ‘territorial trap’; the identification of its power also as a symbolic power. In conclusion, the chapter highlights the main characteristics of the State that need further sociological investigation: the State increases the flexibility and adaptability of its structures. Borghini leads us to consider the State as an autonomous and substantive actor. Cory Blad (Manhattan College, usa) also discusses the role of Nation State in the age of neoliberal globalization. His chapter argues that the contemporary efficacy of nationalist politics is a strategic response to neoliberal conditions of state legitimation. Using the double movement as a theoretical framework, he argues that neoliberalism alters the policy alternatives available to state actors by reducing the viability of economic protectionist initiatives once dominant in the embedded liberal era. This policy capacity reduction inhibits some of the key means for state legitimation (e.g., public spending, regulatory protectionism), which exacerbate the negative effects of capitalist liberalization. As national populations view the state as unwilling or unable to mitigate economic
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adversities or provide traditional socio-economic services, significant potential exists for a delegitimization of state actors and institutions. In response, neoliberal state actors have gravitated toward an increasingly cultural rhetoric of nationalism as a means to maintain popular legitimacy. This shift goes beyond simple political power struggles – in accordance with the double movement framework, systemic global capitalism requires legitimate state authority to ensure both local stability and sustained capital accumulation. Neoliberal ideology, however, discourages traditional means of state legitimation. A Polanyian examination of this ironic condition offers a structural explanation for the increased efficacy of nationalist politics; however, it also raises serious questions about the sustainability of this legitimation strategy. Gwendolyn Yvonne Alexis’s (Monmouth University, usa) chapter tries to answer the fundamental question: how has the deification of the market through the unquestioning pursuit of free trade served as justification to perpetuate the inequalities inherent in unchecked global capitalism? With the critical eye of the sociologist, the author examines how International Trade Theory became the leviathan that swallowed all non-economic input on human nurturing and societal wellbeing. She questions evaluating globalization based solely upon (a) its alleged inevitability or (b) its success in increasing the level of world trade while ignoring the global injustices inherent in a process that perpetuates economic hegemony. Comprised of the dual effects of globalization of markets and globalization of production (i.e., outsourcing), globalization’s societal impact is nonetheless more far-reaching than the economic consequences suggested by its provenance. Moral issues surface when macro-level economic analyses are prioritized over micro-level consequences for individual states in terms of their respective economies, cultures, and general societal wellbeing. Wealthy states, such as the industrialized nations of the West, are able to ward off incursions into their national autonomy by the globalization regime, even where it entails accepting the sanctions imposed for not adhering to the “free trade” mantra of the intergovernmental trinity (wto, imf, World Bank) that rides financial roughshod over the global marketplace. For example, the European Union (eu) has accepted sanctions in the form of us tariffs amounting to $120 million for its refusal to lift the eu ban on hormone-treated beef from the us – a luxury of “standing upon principle” that is inconceivable for poor countries like Jamaica which saw its own dairy industry destroyed when it was forced, in the name of free trade, to accept the importation of us-subsidized dry milk powder. The third section, Transnational Practices and Resistance, examines different forms of social activism aimed at resisting and/or contrasting neoliberal politics. The particular activist strategies chosen are further contoured by
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access to communication technologies and the development of international movements for social justice. Nancy Naples (University of Connecticut, usa) examines the possibilities and limits of women’s activism in the context of an increasingly globalized world with specific focus on activism across borders and across different types of movements. Women’s contemporary activism is shaped by the increased economic pressures resulting from the crisis of global capitalism, ethnic conflicts, and gender inequalities that persist within households, communities and national contexts. The particular activist strategies chosen are further contoured by access to communication technologies and the development of international movements for social justice. They are mediated by culturally specific factors including religion, class, racial or caste, and ethnicity. Women are differentially affected by these diverse cultural, economic, political, and technological changes. These differences contribute to boundaries as well as collaborative relationships between local activists and those located in other parts of the world. Naples draws on postcolonial feminist theorists, critical social geographers, and materialist feminist scholars and links with insights from feminist praxis to analyze women’s embodied practices and relationships developed in everyday life as well as in exile or as immigrants. Jack Bratich (Rutgers University, usa) examines recent entanglements of social media and political dissent to explore global mutations in network sovereignty. Using a number of examples (including the us State Department organized Alliance of Youth Movements, kony 2012, and Occupy Wall Street), he argues, following Galloway and Thacker, that we are witnessing a convergence of sovereign and network powers. This convergence expresses new modes of control while setting the conditions for new forms of evaluation and antagonism. Network alliances and coalitions have become key actors in constructing a public (now as “State-friended” movements) and dissuading dissent movements (“State-enemied” ones). He argues that we see a return of alliances (public/private; state/nonstate) as shapers of global public opinion, if not policy. More specifically, he asserts, counter-radicalization can take place via creating flashpublics (quickly mobilized networks that distract from and prevent other emergent networks). Flashpublics are socially mediated updates of the centuryold practice of forming publics via mediation. At the same time, these coalitions depend on social media spectators/participants, which are affective transfer points that exceed network capture. The coalitions are organized around globalsingle events: attempts at commanding a public into being through the circulation of affective states (outrage, hope, shame). But what seems to be a single issue ends up leaving traces of the organizing mechanisms that mobilized the affective public at the outset. Bratich argues that this has implications for where we
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locate power sources, as well as the types of mutations that can contest those flashpublics. In her chapter, Marina Vujnovic (Monmouth University, usa) re-examines a potential for media and journalism in serving an important role for transnational feminist practices globally by providing public arenas for alternative, multiple voices and subjectivities. She relies on the work of feminist political economists of communication, materialist feminist scholars, and transnational feminist scholars who see global capitalism in its current form as a major threat to women’s localized efforts to (re)gain control over their own political, social, economic, and personal destinies. Communication scholars who are critical of the processes of consolidation and privatization that continues to privilege elite voices and perpetuate patriarchal, misogynist and oppressive narratives have examined the problem with media within the global communication flows. Media continue to be powerful incorporated structures of communication that limit our imaginations of different social, cultural, economic and gender relations. In addition, transnational information technologies must be examined in terms of the need for the feminization of informational labor. Contemporary issues or intimacies of suffering like sexual violence in peace and war, sex trafficking, and the labor exploitation of women are global issues worthy of examination much like global worming or terrorism. However, these realities are seldom on the media agenda, and when they are they are seldom told in the way that would challenge dominant discourse because they are not told by the women themselves. She argues that media and journalism are forms of informational labor uniquely equipped to offer alternative forms of “speech” for diverse groups across the globe and should be used as a tool for activism and resistance to dominant discourses of oppression. Finally, Ricardo Dello Buono (Manhattan College, usa) explores the changing cultural contours of resistance to transnational capitalist class domina tion within Latin America. He discusses a triple-phased shift within the Latin American regional culture over recent decades, beginning with a wave of onedimensional thought (pensamiento unico) that became challenged by social movement resistance trending towards a regional integrative weltanschauung that in turn re-opened the door to an emancipatory, anti-capitalist or postcapitalist cultural paradigm. Dello Buono argues that social movements are the main actors that galvanize the popular struggle towards regaining sovereignty and self-determination. A regional, integrative weltanschauung promotes the consolidation of resistances at various levels, further helping to reconstitute social bonds that were effectively suppressed by neoliberal fragmentation, and favoring the construction of regional civil societies and/or global civil society. The collective examination of popular content as embedded
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in existing, “official” institutions of sub-regional and regional integration helps pave the way to the formulation of popular alternatives for deeper and more genuine institutions of regional integration, i.e., “another possible integration.” He ultimately suggests that the most advanced expressions of resistance involve going beyond social movement driven, regional pushes for popular forms of integration in favor of active construction of anti-capitalist/postcapitalist imaginaries. The fourth section, Global Consumer Culture, deals with some key issues in what can be also called the Global Cultural Industry. It is undeniable that the globalization of markets had as a consequence not only the commodification of culture, but also an increasing importance in the culture of commodities. It is strategically relevant, then, in studying how consumers make sense of marketing messages and create new practices and responses. Vincenzo Mele, (University of Pisa, Italy) makes a cross-cultural comparison of the topic social class and distinction in the eu and usa, mainly discussing Pierre Bourdieu’s work. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of distinction seems to be less influential in the social stratification studies in the United States than in Europe. The cause lays probably in some basic differences between the European and the American social structure, with special regard to what Bourdieu himself called the “symbolic power” of taste and consumption. This chapter reviews some of the most important concepts of Pierre Bourdieu (like habitus, symbolic space, cultural/ economic capital) and tries to put them at work in an ethnographic research based on participant observation in a nj neighborhood. Enrico Campo (University of Pisa, Italy) analyzes the spaces of consumer culture par excellence: shopping malls. More specifically, he tries to investigate the relationship between cities and shopping malls through a case study of Bogotá. The premise of this study is therefore that Bogotá is part of the global city and hence is exposed to alterations in flows, while at the same time it acts as an entity that competes and cooperates with other urban nodes to attract capital. The Colombian capital has been chosen as an object of analysis – for two periods of fieldwork in Colombia, between 2007 and 2009 – for three main reasons: (a) in South America investments are concentrated above all on consumption rather than production (b) in Bogotá the spread of shopping malls has found especially fertile ground both because investments in that sector have probably been a good way to launder money from drug trafficking, and (c) because these structures have been used by construction companies to trigger real-estate development on lands owned by the companies themselves. Finally, and consequently, Campo argues, Bogotá is particularly interesting in relation to the impact of these phenomena on their urban surroundings. The hierarchical spatial organization, which South American cities inherited
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from the colonial period, has given a freer hand to the global processes that govern the structuring of urban space. The importance of shopping malls is examined in relation to both Bogotá’s urban planning and the symbolic importance they acquire in that context. Mihaela Moscaliuc’s (Monmouth University, usa) chapter provides an interdisciplinary, contextualized view of the Roma/Gypsy situation and examines the ways in which they make us re-think and re-conceptualize human and geo-political borders, and trans-national and ethnic identities, in the context of global cultural flows. Such re-envisioning urges us to take into consideration the particularities of this minority’s experience in its various historical, geographical, and socio-economic localities, and to examine the implications of thinking of their culture as a “traveling culture” and of Roma as an ethno-global minority whose complicated situation implicates all of us. Over the last two decades, prejudice against Roma (known as Gypsies) has escalated in Europe, taking the form of populist and/or officially-sanctioned virulent hostility and discrimination in the labor market, mass media, politics, and education. The recent expulsion of a few thousand Roma from France and Italy has brought worldwide attention to their plight and created much controversy among various institutions of the European Union, Human Rights agencies, top officials, and national and local organizations. Unfortunately, conversations regarding Roma’s current position and future as members of the European Union have remained fairly unproductive; more than ever, Roma seem to represent a “litmus test” (Vaclav Havel) to European democracy and a challenge to longstanding legal and historical articulations of ethnic, racial, national, and civic identity. At the same time, Moscaliuc argues, romanticized constructions of Roma/gypsies proliferate in the Western world, not only in literature and the arts (as they have, for hundreds of years) but, with increasing virulence, in pop culture and on the global market. This chapter investigates the paradox of their current situation: while Roma remain one of the most demonized European minorities, “Gypsies” are undergoing a new phase of commodification. They fuel personal and collective fantasies, and have become a hot commodity – see the high-end designers Gypsy collections, Julia Chaplin’s Gypset Style that has become the Bible of the elite “counter-culture,” or the British “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding” and its American companion, “My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding,” two reality shows invested in heavy trafficking of stereotypes. Karen Schmelzkopf (Monmouth University, u.sa) provides an analysis of another important aspect of global culture: tourism. Her chapter focuses on Vieques, Puerto Rico, where the future of tourism is being contested within the context of struggles over rights to decision-making and ownership, as well as environmental contamination and governmental responsibilities. This case,
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she asserts, has wide-ranging implications for changes in tourism within global society. In the 1970’s, less developed communities, countries, and regions around the world began to embrace tourism as the solution to their economic problems. Tourists like to spend money (according to the World Trade Org anization, international tourism generated more than us $465 billion in 2001), tourism is labor intensive, has a significant multiplier effect, workers require minimal training, there are no messy smoke stacks or strip mines, and construction of infrastructure often can be passed on to major corporations such as Marriott and Hilton. imf and the World Bank got on board, offering start-up loans and incentive programs. However, as such places as Goa, India, Ko Samui, Thailand, and virtually anywhere in the Caribbean have demonstrated, tourism can also be problematic: expatriates from wealthy countries often take the best jobs, environmental and social problems emerge, profits can leak out to major corporations and to elites in urban areas, and – bottom line – there is no money if there are no tourists. Yet, even as governmental organizations, ngos, and grassroots groups are working to offset the inequities of the tourist industry through sustainable development, tourism continues to be vulnerable to physical and social circumstances. Finally, the last section, Human Rights, Equality and Culture of Empow erment, presents two papers that examine the impact of globalization on gender empowerment in two important areas of world. Saliba Sarsar (Monmouth University, usa) and Manal Stephan (International Gender and Community Development Consultant) deal with a very compelling topic examining lives of women in Arab world based on empirical research. The chapter is an analysis of collection of interviews conducted with women from different class, gender, ethnic, and religious backgrounds in the Middle East. Authors particularly consider the role of the new social media in transforming women’s cultural lives. The Middle East in general and the Arab world in particular are undergoing major transitions that are producing much uncertainty about the future. Authors argue that there are some major challenges that women face in their everyday lives. One challenge is how to balance the multiple experiences emanating from tradition and the globalizing world, with its multiculturalism, transnationalism, and modern technology, among others. Another challenge is how to navigate the space between the private and the public in the midst of global cultural forces that are pushing against heritage, patriarchy, religion, and tribalism. Special attention in this chapter is given to the issue of women’s identities (regarding “me” vs. “we” cultures, gender matters, interpersonal space, religion, and time) and how they are being transformed as a result of the push and pull of their traditional versus global cultural selves, and as expressed in peace or in conflict within their inner world and the world around them.
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Finally, Rekha Datta (Monmouth University, usa) examines how the un Millennium Development Goals on gender equality and women’s empowerment are being met in India. The effect of globalization on culture is a multifaceted issue. She argues that gender empowerment seems to be a widely shared value in a rapidly changing world. Yet, such empowerment has to occur within the limitations and specifics of tradition and culture in every society. When the United Nations adopted the Millennium Development Goals (mdgs) in 2000, it introduced a new paradigm to assess gender empowerment. Of the eight mdgs identified, some of which are overlapping, Goal 3 (Improve Gender Equality and Empower Women) and Goal 5 (Improve Maternal Health) are targeted primarily for ensuring empowerment of women. Gender equality and empowerment is a challenging issue in India because of its commitment to amidst such cultural constraints. Especially in a rapidly changing world, aspirations of women and discrimination and violence against them cannot continue in cultural seclusion or relativism any more. Within this backdrop, how India have addressed Goals 3 and 5 of mdgs is an interesting question to examine, Datta believes, particularly in the context of socio-economic, political, and cultural changes. Additionally, and more broadly, she addresses this issue in terms of whether a transnational organization like the United Nadistions is able to transgress cultural barriers and help promote gender empowerment through a universal global mandate. Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Avcioğlu, Nebahat and Flood, Finbarr Barry. “Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteen Century,” Ars Orientalis 89 (2010). Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts Into Air. The Experience of Modernity – New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., Multiple Modernities. Daedalus, Winter 2000, Vol. 29, n. 1: 1–29. Fraser, Nancy. “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode,” New Left Review 86 (March/April, 2014). Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Harvey, David. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Hopper Paul. Understanding Cultural Globalization. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2007.
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Kivisto, Peter. Key Ideas in Sociology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2011. Lukács, György. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972. Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick. The Manifesto of the Communist Party. Moscow: Progress Publisher, 1969. Radha Sarma Hegde, ed., Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures New York: New York University Press, 2011. Robinson, William I. “Global Capitalism Theory and the Emergence of Transnational Elites”, Critical Sociology, 38, n. 3 (2012), 349–363. Simmel, Georg. The Metropolis and The Mental Life. In The Sociology of Georg Simmel by K. Wolff. New York : The Free Press, 1950. Steingress, Gerhard. ‘Globalizing cultures: a challenge for contemporary cultural sociology’, Eurasian J. Anthropol. 1(1, 2010): 1–10. Streeck, Wolfgang. Buying time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. London: Verso, 2014.
PART 1 Theoretical Examinations and Concepts: Global Culture, Global Identity, and Global Civil Sphere
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chapter 1
Investigating Global Culture: Its Creation, Structure, and Meanings Victoria Reyes* There are currently over 34,000 McDonald’s restaurants located throughout 118 countries.1 In 2011, 63 percent (303/480) of the top ten films in 48 countries originated in the United States, and if we include movies that are joint-us in origin (82/480), this number rises to 80 percent (385/480).2 Patterns of global student transfers, social networking sites and users, book publishing, brand awareness, and cultural world heritage sites similarly reflect the dominance and the increasing centrality of a handful of countries.3 The central role of American businesses and media in the world is clear, and can be used as evidence of a global culture based on us hegemony. But what does “global culture” mean? Theories of what are “global culture” or “cultural globalization” and their consequences abound. They range from hegemonic McDonaldization, world polity, and cultural wealth to emphases on local meanings and adaptations. In order to advance our sociological understanding we need to subsume these seemingly disparate theories under an analytic umbrella that will guide our understanding of how the current era of globalization interacts, reinforces, and modifies cultures. This chapter first provides an overview of the various definitions of “global culture” or “cultural globalization.” Global culture is important to understand because culture, at the individual and institutional levels, is used as a vehicle to perpetuate inequality.4 I draw upon sociological conceptualizations of culture “as complex rule-like structures that constitute resources that can be put to * Bryn Mawr College 1 http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/our_company.html, accessed November 10, 2013. 2 Top 10 Feature Films Exhibited by Admissions, http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/ReportFolders/ ReportFolders.aspx, accessed November 10, 2013. 3 Victoria Reyes and Miguel A Centeno, “McDonald’s, Wienerwald, and the Corner Deli.” In The Global Flow of Information: Legal, Social and Cultural Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 23–40. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1984); Paul DiMaggio, “Classification in Art,” American Sociological Review 52, no. 4 (1987): 440–455; Paul DiMaggio, “Culture and Cognition,” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997): 263–286.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004272835_003
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strategic use,” which includes aspects such as tastes, styles, skills, habits, knowledge, and repertoires that create and maintain social boundaries to use as a basis for the definition of “global culture.”5 Doing so can allow for a deeper understanding of what is global and its relationship to what is cultural. Next, I categorize four related sociological theories (world polity, cultural wealth, McDonaldization, glocalization) into four aspects of globalizing cultures – those relating to (1) its diffusion, (2) possibilities for mobility, (3) its structure, and (4) its various meanings. While there are additional approaches, it is my hope that scholars can use and refine the categorization provided in this chapter to incorporate alternative understandings and approaches. For the discussion of each theory, I use the case study of u.n. World Heritage sites to demonstrate how each perspective emphasizes different concepts and units of analysis. I argue that these perspectives are not necessarily mutually exclusive or oppositional. Additionally, I examine which theories are appropriate to use when asking certain questions over others. These categories allow us to understand how differing research agendas relate to one another. Seeing global culture as multifaceted and understanding the role it plays at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels allows us to build and expand upon the foundation of prior work.
Global Culture and Cultural Globalization to Globalizing Cultures
If globalization is the increasing interconnectedness of flows across the world what is global culture or cultural globalization?6 Several scholars use the term cultural globalization to refer to the flow of cultural goods, products and symbols and differentiate cultural globalization from economic or political globalization.7 Others use the term global or world culture to denote a uniform culture spreading across the globe either in the form of a more negative view as cultural imperialism or a more positive view such as a global village.8 Still others define global culture as an interconnectedness across 5 DiMaggio, “Culture and Cognition,” 265; Michele Lamont and Virag Molnar, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 167–195. 6 David Held and Anthony McGrew, The Global Transformations Reader (Cambridge, uk: Polity Press, 2000). 7 e.g. Held and McGrew, Global Transformations; David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 8 Hugh Mackay, “The Globalization of Culture?” In A Globalizing World? Culture, Economics, Politics, (London: Routledge, 2000), 47–84; Held and McGrew, Global Transformations.
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local cultures comprised of cosmopolitan elite who travel around the world and appreciate diversity.9 Many, though, use the term global culture and cultural hybridization interchangeably in essays on global processes and cultural economy.10 In this chapter, I use the term globalizing cultures to refer to a now commonly recognized view that globalized cultures are not homogenous or an imperialist diffusion of Western culture but are rather complex and multifaceted flows of cultural practices, meanings, skills, repertoires and knowledge. I use this term instead of global culture or cultural globalization because the latter suggests that culture, economy, and politics are separate and distinct spheres of analysis; however, we know that the cultural is constitutive of both the economy and politics.11 Thus, culture cannot be separated from the economy or from politics and vice versa. Additionally, the terms “global culture” or “cultural globalization” suggests the appearance of a homogenous culture found around the globe, for example, through the imperialist diffusion of Western cultures. By using the term “globalizing cultures,” I move away from common conceptions of both global culture and cultural globalization to emphasize the malleable and context-dependent nature of cultures that are linked across the world.
The Diffusion of Globalizing Cultures
World polity scholarship shows how “world models” connect countries across the globe. These cultural world models define and legitimize the actions, policies, and organizations of nation-states, show how organizations and institutions are diffused worldwide, and can give insight into global values such as
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Ulf Hannerz, “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” Theory, Culture & Society 7 (1990): 237–251; Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996). Kevin Robins, “Encountering Globalization,” In The Global Transformations Reader, (Cambridge, uk: Polity Press, 2000), 195–201; Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” In The Global Transformations Reader, (Cambridge, uk: Polity Press, 2000), 230–238; Crane, Diana. “Culture and Globalization: Theoretical Models and Emerging Trends.” In Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1–28. e.g. Viviana Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during us Colonialism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
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education and women’s suffrage.12 The world polity model suggests “contemporary constructed actors, including nation-states, routinely organize and legitimate themselves in terms of universalistic (world) models like citizenship, socioeconomic development, and rationalized justice.”13 Although recent literature using world polity theory has examined the role of power and inequality,14 this research tends to assume that all countries are embedded in a “densely interconnected global network”15 through organizational memberships of non-governmental organizations and inter-government agencies.16 12
13 14
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John W Meyer, John Boli, George M Thomas and Francisco Ramirez, “World Society and the Nation-State,” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 1 (1997): 144–181; Francisco O Ramirez and John Boli, “The Political Construction of Mass Schooling: European Origins and Worldwide Institutions,” Sociology of Education 60, no. 1 (1987): 2–17; John Boli, Francisco O Ramirez and John W Meyer, “Exploring the Origins and Expansion of Mass Education,” Comparative Education Review 29, no. 2 (1985): 145–170; Francisco O Ramirez, Yasemin Soysal and Suzanne Shanahan, “The Changing Logic of Political Citizenship: Cross-National Acquisition of Women’s Suffrage Rights, 1890 to 1990,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 5 (1997): 735–745. Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez, World Society, 148. Melanie Hughes, Lindsey Peterson, Jill Ann Harrison, and Pamela Paxton, “Power and Relation in the World Polity: The ingo Network Country Score, 1978–1998,” Social Forces 87, no. 4 (2009): 1711–1742; Jason Beckfield, “Inequality in the World Polity: The Structure of International Organization,” American Sociological Review 68, no. 3 (2003): 401–424; Jason Beckfield, “The Dual World Polity: Fragmentation an Integration in the Network of Intergovernmental Organizations,” Social Problems 55(3) (2008): 419–442. Jason Beckfield, “The Social Structure of the World Polity,” American Journal of Sociology 115, no. 4 (2010): 1023. Evan Shofer and John Meyer, “The World-Wide Expansion of Higher Education in the Twentieth Century,” American Sociological Review 70 (2005): 898–920; Karen Mundy, “Global Governance, Educational Change,” Comparative Education 43, no. 3 (2007): 339–357; Mark Schafer, “International Nongovernmental Organizations and Third World Education in 1990: A Cross National Study,” Sociology of Education 72, no. 2 (1999): 69–88; Deborah Barrett and Amy Ong Tsui, “Policy as Symbolic Statement: International Response to National Population Policies,” Social Forces 78 (1999): 213–234; John M Shandra, Eran Shar and Bruce London, “World Polity, Unequal Ecological Exchange and Organic Water Pollution: A Cross-National Analysis of Developing Nations,” Human Ecology Review 16, no. 1 (2009): 53–63; Martha Finnemore, “International Organizations as Teachers of Norms: The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organi zation and Science Policy,” International Organization 47, no. 4 (1993): 565–597; Matthias Koenig, “Institutional Change in the World Polity: International Human Rights and the Construction of Collective Identities,” International Sociology 23 (2008): 95–114; Nitza Berkouitch and Karen Bradley, “The Globalization of Women’s Status: Consenus/Dissensus in the World Polity,” Sociological Perspectives 42, no. 3 (1999): 481–498; John W Meyer and
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The focus is on the diffusion of highly rationalized world cultural models and policy scripts, and the institutional similarities found across the globe. World polity research focuses on how and why institutions around the world are similar and how the diffusion of ideas occurs. Michael Elliott and Vaughn Schmutz examine the establishment and rise of World Heritage sites, and argue that this rise resulted from the expansion of the interconnected world polity, the diffusion of a universal concept of humanity, and the increasing use and value of science as a way to protect and preserve human progress.17 For example, a World Heritage site must have “outstanding universal value” regardless of the world region or country in which it is located.
Globalizing Cultures and the Possibility for Mobility
Scholars who use a cultural wealth lens, a relatively new perspective, focus on the mutually constitutive relationship between culture and the production, consumption, and distribution of economic activity. The key here is to understand the interaction between a given country’s symbolic resources and reputations and its economic successes. The goal is to “explore the different ways that industries become advantaged (or disadvantaged) in the global marketplace by virtue of their location and by virtue of the meanings encased in place.”18 Cultural wealth scholars often focus on how state and other actors shape and manipulate countries’ narratives. They do so by showing how indigenous participation in markets is helped or constrained by public stories and memories of indigenous heritages19 and how within-country travel destinations are affected by marketing practices.20 Additionally, Rivera, through an analysis of
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Brian Rowan. “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structures as Myth and Ceremony,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 2 (1977): 340–363; John M Shandra, Christopher Leckband, Laura McKinney and Bruce London, “Ecologically Unequal Exchange, World Polity, and Biodiversity Loss: A Cross-National Analysis of Threatened Mammals,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50 (2009): 285–310. Michael A Elliott and Vaughn Schmutz, “World Heritage: Constructing a Universal Cultural Order,” Poetics 40, no. 3 (2012): 256–277. Nina Bandelj and Frederick F Wherry, The Cultural Wealth of Nations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 1. Fredrick Wherry, “Trading Impressions: Evidence from Costa Rica,” annals American Academy of Political and Social Science 610, no. 1 (2007): 217–231; Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, “An Ethnography of Neoliberalism,” Current Anthropology 43, no. 1 (2002): 113–137. Scarlett Cornelissen, The Global Tourism System: Governance, Development and Lessons from South Africa (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 110.
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government officials’ manipulations of travel brochures and reviews, draws upon Goffman’s conception of stigma to show how government officials ‘cover’ mentions of war in Croatia and instead emphasize Croatia’s similarities to Western Europe.21 Here, attraction and stigmas associated with countries play a defining role in a country’s economy, particularly as it relates to the travel industry. In this sense, one aspect of cultural wealth analyses relates to the mobility of globalizing cultures – how officials can modify and transform their reputations within the constraints faced by their countries’ current reputations and locations. Orienting research questions relate to these processes of change, transformation, and entrenched stability, while the unit of analysis varies from individuals to countries. Cultural wealth scholars have examined world heritage sites, their role in countries’ economies and cultural reputations, and the contestations and negotiations state officials face in trying to nominate their sites to the World Heritage list. Kowalski examines the creation of the World Heritage Convention, which outlines the process for which sites are included in the World Heritage List and the ways in which states need to continually preserve them once they are included.22 Inclusion on the list is selective because it is a symbolic marker of prestige and worth, but sites also need to demonstrate “outstanding, universal” value, leading to tensions between state and unesco officials over control of each site or project. Kowalski shows how its establishment “was thus largely dependent on the contingent transformation of political or geopolitical interests and on their dialogical convergence,” how the cultural meanings and how practices associated with sites are managed by bureaucracies, and how states’ accumulation of sites and symbolic value depends “on the solid apparatus of experts and institutions that only dominant states have.”23 In my own work, I investigate culture as an indicator of global inequality, and operationalize culture as un World Heritage sites. Through a longitudinal examination of nominations and inclusions to the World Heritage list, I draw upon cultural wealth theories to differentiate between cultural and natural wealth and argue that cultural wealth and value is constructed through internal
21
Lauren Rivera, “Managing ‘Spoiled’ National Identity: War, Tourism and Memory in Croatia,” American Sociological Review 73 (2008): 613–634. 22 Alexandra Kowalski, “When Cultural Capitalization Became Global Practice: The 1972 World Heritage Convention,” In The Cultural Wealth of Nations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 73–89. 23 Kowalski, Cultural Capitalization, 83; Kowalski, Cultural Capitalization, 88.
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claims of countries and external validation of the international community.24 These appraisals of cultural value are also related to location – certain world regions are associated with higher cultural value over others. From a cultural wealth perspective, one could also examine countries’ successful and unsuccessful applications and the strategies government officials use to choose which sites to nominate and how they frame their application narratives. The emphasis in this line of research is the construction, modification, and negotiation of cultural values and its relationship to countries’ economies.
Globalizing Cultures Structure
Another common perspective that focuses on globalizing culture is that of McDonaldization, “the process by which 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.”25 Based on Weber’s work on rationalization and bureaucracy, McDonaldization scholars examine the diffusion of processes like efficiency, calculability (the quantitative measures of products and services including portion control and cost) predictability in products, rules, and worker behaviors, and control through queue lines and menus. McDonaldization is not limited to McDonald’s stores, fast food restaurants, or other types of restaurants or stores around the world; scholars have shown this process also extends to the us criminal justice system,26 sex industries,27 men’s body image,28 and the English school system.29 McDonaldization has two primary 24
Victoria Reyes, “The Production of Cultural and Natural Wealth: An Examination of World Heritage Sites,” Poetics 44 (2014):42–63. 25 George Ritzer, “An Introduction to McDonaldization.” In McDonaldization: The Reader (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2010), 4. 26 Matthew B Robinson, “McDonaldization of America’s Police, Courts and Corrections,” In McDonaldization: The Reader (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2010), 85–101; David Shichor, “Three Strikes as a Public Policy: The Convergence of the New Penology and the McDonaldization of Punishment,” Crime & Delinquency 43, no. 4 (1997): 470–492. 27 Kathryn Hausbeck and Barbara G Brents, “McDonaldization of the Sex Industries? The Business of Sex,” In McDonaldization: The Reader (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2010), 102–118. 28 Lee F Monaghan, “McDonaldizing Men’s Bodies? Slimming, Associated (Ir)Rationalities and Resistances,” Body & Society 13, no. 2 (2007): 67–93. 29 Gary Wilkinson, “McSchools for McWorld? Mediating Global Pressures with a McDonaldizing Education Policy Response,” Cambridge Journal of Education 36, no. 1 (2006): 81–98.
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focal points: institutional processes and cultural aspects. Similar to world polity theories, one perspective focuses on institutional diffusion, but the second point of view shifts the focus from world polity to the cultural representations – and in some cases accusations of cultural imperialism. Here, the spread of McDonald’s restaurants represents a cultural uniformity and an infringement on local cultures.30 In the section below, I discuss more thoroughly local adaptations of McDonaldization – ‘glocalization’. However, it’s important to note here that even in cases documenting differences in McDonald’s menus abroad and local meanings associated with the restaurants, the more structural aspects such as the line queue, the cleanliness of the bathroom, efficiency, standards of food production and the demarcating of responsibilities into tasks that require minimum training and knowledge (similar to Marx’s critique of the factory and Weber’s view of bureaucracy) heavily influence the cultural meanings of local societies. The sanitation standards raised expectations and challenged rivals’ bathroom standards while the marketing towards children (together with the one-child policy of China and the little emperor/empress syndrome) substantially influenced familial consumption patterns and re-constituted household power dynamics and negotiations within China and Hong Kong.31 Thus these structures provide a framework and baseline of interpretation that is centered on the West. In this sense, research on McDonaldization focuses on the structural aspects of globalizing cultures and how Western influences that permeate other countries. Here, guiding questions focus on structure, inequalities, and power. Although not using a McDonaldization framework, perspectives using worldsystems analyses, which highlight structural inequalities between nations and its relationship with history and power, have similar orienting research questions. For example, using a world-systems inspired framework Sapiro found that globalization has reinforced the dominance of the English language in the book publishing market.32 Janssen, Kuipers and Verboord, in their analysis of the coverage of international arts and culture in four countries, and Heilbron in his examination of book translations, all argue that there is an emergent cultural world-system, while De Swaan argues that there is a world-system 30
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e.g. Uri Ram, “Glocommodification: How the Global Consumes the Local – McDonald’s in Israel,” Current Sociology 52, no. 1 (2004): 11–31; Rick Fantasia, “Fast Food in France,” Theory and Society 24 (1995): 201–243. E.g. James L Watson, “Transnationalism, Localization and Fast Foods in East Asia,” In Golden Arches East: McDonald’s In East Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 1–38. Gisele Sapiro, “Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market: The Case of Literary Translations in the us and in France,” Poetics 38 (2010): 419–439.
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based on language, a “world language system.”33 The unit of analysis tends to be institutions (in the case of McDonaldization) or countries (in the case of world-systems analyses). In using this lens to examine World Heritage sites, research would focus on how most world heritage sites are highly concentrated among a handful of countries. For example, in my own work I find that 35 percent (362/1037) of cultural nominations and 38 percent (264/695) of cultural inscriptions (sites that are included on the World Heritage list) are in Western Europe, while Italy accounts for five percent of all inscriptions, Italy and Spain account for nine percent, six countries for 24 percent (Italy, Spain, France, China, Mexico and Germany), and 13 countries for 40 percent (Italy, Spain, France, China, Mexico, Germany, India, United Kingdom, Russia, Brazil, United States, Greece, and Canada); additionally, while nominations are the driving force behind inscriptions, inscriptions are heavily influenced by the region in the world in which countries are located – countries in Western Europe are much more likely to submit nominations to the list.34
Globalizing Cultures and Meanings
Whereas McDonaldization theories focus on institutional processes and cultural diffusion, which is often seen as imperial in nature, another set of researchers focus on how McDonald’s are transformed by, and adapted to, local conditions “on the ground” and across the world. This focus is on glocalization, the adaptation of the global into the local or the blending of global and local.35 For example, McDonald’s adapts menus to locals’ tastes as well as changing norms – both with meanings of words, where “fast food” can apply to delivery and not consumption, and with practices, where McDonald’s may represent an elite or middle class place for consumption.36 Glocalization also 33
Susanne Janssen, Giselinde Kuipers and Marc Verboord, “Cultural Globalization and Arts Journalism: The International Orientation of Arts and Cultural Coverage in Dutch, French, German, and us Newspapers, 1955 to 2005,” American Sociological Review 73 (2008): 719–740; Johan Heilbron, “Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World-System,” European Journal of Social Theory 2, no. 4 (1999): 429–444; Abram De Swaan, “The Emergent World Language System: An Introduction,” International Political Science Review 14, no. 3 (1993): 219–226. 34 Victoria Reyes, “The Production of Cultural and Natural Wealth: An Examination of World Heritage Sites,” Poetics 44 (2014): 42–63. 35 Ram Glocommodification; Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and HomogeneityHeterogeneity,” In Global Modernities (London: sage Publications, 1995), 25–44. 36 e.g. Watson Transnationalism; Ram Glocommodification.
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extends to adaptations of sports,37 advertising,38 individual foods such as spam,39 religion,40 and law.41 Much of sociological literature, though not drawing upon the glocalization framework, emphasizes the local meanings and adaptations of the global. For example, Hedegard shows how foreigners engage in capoeira, a popular form of martial arts, in Brazil and create meanings to this practice through interaction with locals’ bodies and linking its authenticity to dark-skinned locals.42 Bielby and Harrington, on the other hand, examine how industry professionals adapt exported television shows to local markets through considerations on language, translation and local notions of entertainment, while Derne shows how middle-class, non-elite Indian men who consume large amounts of cable television and foreign movies simultaneously reject cultural messages within these media (e.g. love marriages, consumerism, women’s public freedoms) that do not conform to their understandings of gender, but use other messages that bolster these world views.43 Additionally, the global diffusion of Cricket relies, in part, on local elites’ adaptation of the game, while condom use in Malawi is resisted because of what it signifies about relationships and sex – that one cannot experience sexual pleasure with a c ondom, 37
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Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson, “The Globalization of Football: A Study in the Glocalization of the ‘Serious Life,’” British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 4 (2004): 545–568; Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson, “Glocalization, Globalization, and Migration: The Case of Scottish Football Supporters in North America,” International Sociology 21, no. 2 (2006): 171–198; Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson, “Forms of Glocalization: Globalization and the Migration Strategies of Scottish Football Fans in North America,” Sociology 41, no. 1 (2007): 133–152; Isabel Jijon, “The Glocalization of Time and Space: Soccer and Meaning in Chota Valley, Ecuador,” International Sociology 28, no. 4 (2013): 373–390. Koji Kobayashi, “Corporate Nationalism and Glocalization of Nike Advertising in ‘Asia’: Production and Representation Practices of Cultural Intermediaries,” Sociology of Sport Journal 29 (2012): 42–61. Ty Matejowsky, “spam and Fast-food ‘Glocalization’ in the Philippines,” Food, Culture & Society 10, no. 1 (2007): 24–41. Victor Roudometof, “The Glocalizations of Eastern Orthodox Christianity,” European Journal of Social Theory 16, no. 2 (2013): 226–245. Shalini Randeria, “Glocalization of Law: Environmental Justice, World Bank, ngos and the Cunning State in India,” Current Sociology 51 no. 3/4 (2003): 305–328. Danielle Hedegard, “Blackness and Experience in Omnivorous Cultural Consumption: Evidence from the Tourism of Capoeira in Salvador, Brazil,” Poetics 41 (2013): 1–26. Denise D Bielby and C Lee Harrington, “Managing Culture Matters: Genre, Aesthetic Elements and the International Market for Exported Television,” Poetics 32 (2004): 73–98; Steve Derne, “The (Limited) Effect of Cultural Globalization in India: Implications for Culture Theory,” Poetics 33 (2005): 33–47.
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its association is with unsafe partners, and a lack of use signifies trust and intimacy.44 Many scholars have analyzed the meaning making of World Heritage sites by locals. For example, although it has differential effects on the rich and the poor, many people in the community of Amatita, part of the Agave Landscape and Ancient Industrial Facilities of Tequila World Heritage site, perceive the large-scale commercial tequila factories as opening up job opportunities and generating tourism revenue that would otherwise be unavailable.45 Others have shown how World Heritage sites are purposefully used for national branding efforts,46 but also have difficulty maintaining their local “authenticity.”47 The emphasis and guiding research questions in this perspective is on local adaptations and understandings of, as well as the meanings associated with, the global. Discussion I am not the first person to suggest that structural and cultural analyses of globalizing cultures are not incompatible.48 In this chapter, I have tried to show how four types of analyses can be understood using the same rubric, and that the differences among these perspectives do not necessarily have to be in conflict with one another, but rather these differences relate to unit of analyses and emphases on certain concepts over others. Additionally, I shift focus from 44
Jason Kaufman and Orlando Patterson, “Cross-National Cultural Diffusion: The Global Spread of Cricket,” American Sociological Review 70 (2005): 82–110; Iddo Tavory and Ann Swidler, “Condom Semiotics: Meaning and Condom Use in Rural Malawi,” American Sociological Review 74 (2009): 171–189. 45 Sarah Bowen and Peter Gerritsen, “Reverse Leasing and Power Dynamics Among Blue Agave Farmers in Western Mexico,” Agriculture and Human Values 24, no. 4 (2007): 473–488; Sarah Bowen and Ana Valenzuela Zapata, “Geographical Indicators, Terroir, and Socioeconomic and Ecological Sustainability: The Case of Tequila,” Journal of Rural Studies 25, no. 1 (2009): 108–119. 46 Nigel J Morgan, Annette Pritchard and Rachel Piggott, “Destination Branding and the Role of the Stakeholders: The Case of New Zealand,” Journal of Vacation Marketing 9 no. 3 (2003): 285–299; Sophia Labadi, “Representations of the Nation and Cultural Diversity in Discourses on World Heritage,” Journal of Social Archaeology 7, no. 2 (2007): 147–170. 47 Heike C Alberts and Helen D Hazen, “Maintaining Authenticity and Integrity at Cultural World Heritage Sites,” The Geographic Review 100, no. 1 (2010): 56–73. 48 Ram Glocommodification; Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and HomogeneityHeterogeneity,” In Global Modernities (London: sage Publications, 1995).
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the terms “global culture” or “cultural globalization” which suggest both a homogenizing cultural force diffused by Western imperialism and that the cultural, economic, and political globalization can be separated from one another to the term “globalizing cultures” in order to highlight the multifaceted aspects of culture. Culture includes tastes, styles, skills, habits, knowledge, and repertories that can be used strategically and as a way to create and maintain social boundaries. I argue that globalizing cultures are not just local adaptations of the global; rather, globalizing cultures signifies that culture can be strategically used and manipulated by all parties. Bibliography Alberts, Heike C and Helen D Hazen. “Maintaining Authenticity and Integrity at Cultural World Heritage Sites.” The Geographic Review 100, no 1 (2010): 56–73. Appadurai, Arjun, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” In The Global Transformations Reader, 230–238. Edited by David Held and Anthony McGrew. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000. Bandelj, Nina and Frederick F Wherry. The Cultural Wealth of Nations. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Barrett, Deborah and Amy Ong Tsui. “Policy as Symbolic Statement: International Response to National Population Policies.” Social Forces 78 (1999): 213–234. Beckfield, Jason. “Inequality in the World Polity: The Structure of International Organization.” American Sociological Review 68, no. 3 (2003): 401–424. Beckfield, Jason. “The Dual World Polity: Fragmentation an Integration in the Network of Intergovernmental Organizations.” Social Problems 55(3) (2008): 419–442. Beckfield, Jason. “The Social Structure of the World Polity.” American Journal of Sociology 115, no. 4 (2010): 1018–1068. Berkouitch, Nitza and Karen Bradley. “The Globalization of Women’s Status: Consenus/ Dissensus in the World Polity.” Sociological Perspectives 42, no. 3 (1999): 481–498. Bielby, Denise D and C Lee Harrington. “Managing Culture Matters: Genre, Aesthetic Elements and the International Market for Exported Television.” Poetics 32 (2004): 73–98. Boli, John, Francisco O Ramirez and John W Meyer. “Exploring the Origins and Expansion of Mass Education.” Comparative Education Review 29, no. 2 (1985): 145–170. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bowen, Sarah and Peter Gerritsen. “Reverse Leasing and Power Dynamics Among Blue Agave Farmers in Western Mexico.” Agriculture and Human Values 24, no. 4 (2007): 473–488.
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Bowen, Sarah and Ana Valenzuela Zapata. “Geographical Indicators, Terroir, and Socioeconomic and Ecological Sustainability: The Case of Tequila.” Journal of Rural Studies 25, no. 1 (2009): 108–119. Colloredo-Mansfeld, Rudi. “An Ethnography of Neoliberalism.” Current Anthropology 43, no. 1 (2002): 113–137. Cornelissen, Scarlett. The Global Tourism System: Governance, Development and Lessons from South Africa. Burlington: Ashgate, 2005. Crane, Diana. “Culture and Globalization: Theoretical Models and Emerging Trends.” In Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization, 1–28. Edited by Diana Crane, Nobuko Kawashima, and Ken’ichi Kawasaki. New York: Routledge, 2002. De Swaan Abram, “The Emergent World Language System: An Introduction.” International Political Science Review 14, no. 3 (1993): 219–226. Derne, Steve. “The (Limited) Effect of Cultural Globalization in India: Implications for Culture Theory.” Poetics 33 (2005): 33–47. DiMaggio, Paul. “Classification in Art.” American Sociological Review 52, no. 4 (1987): 440–455. DiMaggio, Paul. “Culture and Cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997): 263–286. Elliott, Michael A and Vaughn Schmutz. “World Heritage: Constructing a Universal Cultural Order.” Poetics 40, no. 3 (2012): 256–277. Fantasia, Rick. “Fast Food in France.” Theory and Society 24 (1995): 201–243. Finnemore, Martha. “International Organizations as Teachers of Norms: The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and Science Policy.” International Organization 47, no. 4 (1993): 565–597. Giulianotti, Richard and Roland Robertson. “The Globalization of Football: A Study in the Glocalization of the ‘Serious Life.’” British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 4 (2004): 545–568. Giulianotti, Richard and Roland Robertson. “Glocalization, Globalization, and Migration: The Case of Scottish Football Supporters in North America.” International Sociology 21, no. 2 (2006): 171–198. Giulianotti, Richard and Roland Robertson. “Forms of Glocalization: Globalization and the Migration Strategies of Scottish Football Fans in North America.” Sociology 41, no. 1 (2007): 133–152. Go, Julian. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during US Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Hannerz, Ulf. “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture.” Theory, Culture & Society 7 (1990): 237–251. Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge, 1996.
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Hausbeck, Kathryn and Barbara G Brents. “McDonaldization of the Sex Industries? The Business of Sex.” In McDonaldization: The Reader, 102–118. Edited by George Ritzer. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2010. Hedegard, Danielle. “Blackness and Experience in Omnivorous Cultural Consumption: Evidence from the Tourism of Capoeira in Salvador, Brazil.” Poetics 41 (2013): 1–26. Heilbron, Johan. “Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World-System.” European Journal of Social Theory 2, no. 4 (1999): 429–444. Held, David and Anthony McGrew. The Global Transformations Reader. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000. Held, David, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton. Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Hughes, Melanie, Lindsey Peterson, Jill Ann Harrison, and Pamela Paxton. “Power and Relation in the World Polity: The INGO Network Country Score, 1978–1998.” Social Forces 87, no. 4 (2009): 1711–1742. Janssen, Susanne, Giselinde Kuipers and Marc Verboord. “Cultural Globalization and Arts Journalism: The International Orientation of Arts and Cultural Coverage in Dutch, French, German, and US Newspapers, 1955 to 2005.” American Sociological Review 73 (2008): 719–740. Jijon, Isabel. “The Glocalization of Time and Space: Soccer and Meaning in Chota Valley, Ecuador.” International Sociology 28, no. 4 (2013): 373–390. Kaufman, Jason and Orlando Patterson. “Cross-National Cultural Diffusion: The Global Spread of Cricket.” American Sociological Review 70 (2005): 82–110. Kobayashi, Koji. “Corporate Nationalism and Glocalization of Nike Advertising in ‘Asia’: Production and Representation Practices of Cultural Intermediaries.” Sociology of Sport Journal 29 (2012): 42–61. Koenig, Matthias. “Institutional Change in the World Polity: International Human Rights and the Construction of Collective Identities.” International Sociology 23 (2008): 95–114. Kowalski, Alexandra. “When Cultural Capitalization Became Global Practice: The 1972 World Heritage Convention.” In The Cultural Wealth of Nations, 73–89. Edited by Nina Bandelj and Fredrick Wherry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Labadi, Sophia. “Representations of the Nation and Cultural Diversity in Discourses on World Heritage.” Journal of Social Archaeology 7, no. 2 (2007): 147–170. Lamont, Michele and Virag Molnar. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 167–195. Mackay, Hugh. “The Globalization of Culture?” In A Globalizing World? Culture, Economics, Politics, 47–84. Edited by David Held. London: Routledge, 2000. Matejowsky, Ty. “SPAM and Fast-food ‘Glocalization’ in the Philippines.” Food, Culture & Society 10, no. 1 (2007): 24–41.
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Meyer, John W and Brian Rowan. “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structures as Myth and Ceremony.” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 2 (1977): 340–363. Meyer, John W, John Boli, George M Thomas and Francisco Ramirez. “World Society and the Nation-State.” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 1 (1997): 144–181. Monaghan, Lee F. “McDonaldizing Men’s Bodies? Slimming, Associated (Ir) Rationalities and Resistances.” Body & Society 13, no. 2 (2007): 67–93. Morgan, Nigel J, Annette Pritchard and Rachel Piggott. “Destination Branding and the Role of the Stakeholders: The Case of New Zealand.” Journal of Vacation Marketing 9 no. 3 (2003): 285–299. Mundy, Karen. “Global Governance, Educational Change.” Comparative Education 43, no. 3 (2007): 339–357. Ram, Uri. “Glocommodification: How the Global Consumes the Local – McDonald’s in Israel.” Current Sociology 52, no. 1 (2004): 11–31. Ramirez, Francisco O and John Boli. “The Political Construction of Mass Schooling: European Origins and Worldwide Institutions.” Sociology of Education 60, no. 1 (1987): 2–17. Ramirez, Francisco O, Yasemin Soysal and Suzanne Shanahan. “The Changing Logic of Political Citizenship: Cross-National Acquisition of Women’s Suffrage Rights, 1890 to 1990.” American Sociological Review 62, no. 5 (1997): 735–745. Randeria, Shalini. “Glocalization of Law: Environmental Justice, World Bank, NGOs and the Cunning State in India.” Current Sociology 51 no. 3/4 (2003): 305–328. Reyes, Victoria and Miguel Centeno. “McDonald’s, Wienerwald, and the Corner Deli.” In The Global Flow of Information: Legal, Social and Cultural Perspectives, 23–40. Edited by Ramesh Subramanian and Eddan Katz. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Reyes, Victoria. “The Production of Cultural and Natural Wealth: An Examination of World Heritage Sites.” Poetics 44 (2014): 42–63. Ritzer, George. “An Introduction to McDonaldization.” In McDonaldization: The Reader, 3–25. Edited by George Ritzer. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2010. Rivera, Lauren. “Managing ‘Spoiled’ National Identity: War, Tourism and Memory in Croatia.” American Sociological Review 73 (2008): 613–634. Robertson, Roland. “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity.” In Global Modernities, 25–44. Edited by Michael Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson. London: SAGE Publications, 1995. Robins, Kevin. “Encountering Globalization.” In The Global Transformations Reader, 195–201. Edited by David Held and Anthony McGrew. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000. Robinson, Matthew B. “McDonaldization of America’s Police, Courts and Corrections.” In McDonaldization: The Reader, 85–101. Edited by George Ritzer. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2010.
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Roudometof, Victor. “The Glocalizations of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.” European Journal of Social Theory 16, no. 2 (2013): 226–245. Sapiro, Gisele. “Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market: The Case of Literary Translations in the US and in France.” Poetics 38 (2010): 419–439. Schafer, Mark. “International Nongovernmental Organizations and Third World Education in 1990: A Cross National Study.” Sociology of Education 72, no. 2 (1999): 69–88. Shandra, John M., Christopher Leckband, Laura McKinney and Bruce London. “Ecologically Unequal Exchange, World Polity, and Biodiversity Loss: A CrossNational Analysis of Threatened Mammals.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50 (2009): 285–310. Shandra, John M., Eran Shar and Bruce London. “World Polity, Unequal Ecological Exchange and Organic Water Pollution: A Cross-National Analysis of Developing Nations.” Human Ecology Review 16, no. 1 (2009): 53–63. Shichor, David. “Three Strikes as a Public Policy: The Convergence of the New Penology and the McDonaldization of Punishment.” Crime & Delinquency 43, no. 4 (1997): 470–492. Shofer, Evan and John Meyer. “The World-Wide Expansion of Higher Education in the Twentieth Century.” American Sociological Review 70 (2005): 898–920. Tavory, Iddo and Ann Swidler. “Condom Semiotics: Meaning and Condom Use in Rural Malawi.” American Sociological Review 74 (2009): 171–189. Watson, James L. “Transnationalism, Localization and Fast Foods in East Asia.” In Golden Arches East: McDonald’s In East Asia, 1–38. Edited by James L. Watson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Wherry, Fredrick. “Trading Impressions: Evidence from Costa Rica.” ANNALS American Academy of Political and Social Science 610, no. 1 (2007): 217–231. Wilkinson, Gary. “McSchools for McWorld? Mediating Global Pressures with a McDonaldizing Education Policy Response.” Cambridge Journal of Education 36, no. 1 (2006): 81–98. Zelizer, Viviana. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
CHAPTER 2
Global Interaction and Identity in Structuralist and Dialectic Perspectives: Toward a Typology of Psycho-cultural Identities Ino Rossi* Globalization theorizing is still a contested and, unfortunately, not a too sophisticated field of inquiry. Ask the so-called experts what globalization is and you get as many definitions as experts. Worst, most of the definitions suffer from old malaises in social sciences, behaviorism and crass empiricism. The purpose of this paper is to point at basic empiricist flaws in theorizing globalization and to argue for structuralist and dialectic alternatives. Are “global relations” concrete entities or abstractions? James N. Rosenau seems to provide an unequivocal answer: “all the dimensions of globalization are sustained by individuals at the micro level as well as by diverse organizations at the macro level”.1 Does this mean that micro, macro and global interaction are three empirically distinguishable levels of interaction?
Global Interaction from a Global Perspective
The protagonists of the “glocal” are ready to argue that global and local co-exist and interpenetrate each other. The question, however, is whether global and local interactions are to be understood as two distinct types of interaction, and if so in what sense they interpenetrate each other and still co-exist as distinct types of interaction. The term “glocal” has been used with loosely defined and shifting meanings. For Roland Robertson and associates the “glocal” means the co-presence or simultaneity of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies2 and/ or the co-presence of sameness and difference, and of “homogenizing and heterogenizing trends in globalization.3 Does this mean that local interaction 123
* St. John’s University, nyc. 1 James N. Rosenau, “Three Steps Toward a Viable Theory of Globalization,” in Frontiers of Globalization Research, ed. Ino Rossi (Springer us, 2007), 308. 2 1997 conference on “Globalization and Indigenous Culture”, quoted in http://searchcio .techtarget.com/definition/glocalization, accessed July 2013. 3 Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson, “Recovering the Social: Globalization, Football and Transnationalism,” in Globalization and Sport, by Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson (Malden, ma; Oxford: Blackwell Pub., 2007), 60. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004272835_004
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sameness and homogeneity, whereas the “global” connotes difference and heterogeneity? But aren’t there many differences and conflicts at the level of local interaction as well? Moreover, wouldn’t a co-presence of different, heterogeneous and conflictual interactions ad up to a chaotic and hybrid global interaction? Then, how could we account for universal trends in the scientific, educational, technological, political and economic realms? Anthony McGrew proposes a “methodological globalism” as an approach which seeks to avoid privileging either globalization or localization in explaining the social and focuses instead on their interpenetration, inter-relation and co-existence, and this is a continuation of a vague analogy.4 According to Ritzer, “glocalism” is the study of “both the global and the local in combination with one another” or a study of “the integration of the global and the local”.5 Elsewhere Ritzer, speaks about “the interpenetration of the global and local resulting in unique outcomes in different geographic areas”.6 This kind of theorizing clearly implies a duality of local and global without explaining how they become integrated. Interestingly enough, at one point Ritzer labels the methodological integration of the global and the local as a focus on “the dialectical relationship between the two”.7 It fails anybody’s imagination to figure out the notions of co-existence or interpenetration or integration or combination of differences add up to (or transform?) into a dialectical relationship. Still the duality must be overcome somehow and Ritzer invokes another vague analogy, Robertson’s notion of globalization from below and globalization from above, to conclude that in reality Robertson reduces globalization to glocalization. In fact, don’t all ideas and practices must adapt to the local? Therefore, Ritzer concludes, for Robertson globalization does not exist, it does not make sense.8 As a matter of fact, Robertson and White themselves come close to this conclusion when they say that the global and local are “different sides of the same coin”.9 Still, an additional vague analogy does not add much clarity to previous vague analogies. 4 5 6 7 8 9
4 Anthony McGrew, “Globalization in Hard Times: Contention in the Academy and Beyond,” in The Blackwell Companion to Globalization, ed. George Ritzer (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007), 41. 5 George Ritzer, “Introduction to Part One,” in The Blackwell Companion to Globalization, ed. George Ritzer (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007), 19. 6 George Ritzer, Globalization: A Basic Text (Malden, ma: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 255. 7 Ritzer, “Introduction to Part One,” 19. 8 Ibid., 20. 9 Roland Robertson and Kathleen E. White, “What Is Globalization?” in The Blackwell Companion to Globalization, ed. George Ritzer (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007), 62.
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The only intelligible answer to this line of inquiry can be found in the very conceptualization that Robinson and White explicitly reject, namely the positing of a tension or opposition between the local and global.10 The question is what kind of tension or opposition is posited. Let us start from an undeniable characteristics of globalization: connectivity. Isn’t true that an interactive connectivity can occur through the interface of cultures, ideologies, economic interests and political forms which are not only similar but very different, and even opposite, to each other? What else is needed to understand global connectivity, but to posit an uninterrupted and extended chain of actions and interactions among humans with similar or complementary or conflicting needs and aspirations? If so, how is the distinction between “local” and “global” coning in, if it is needed at all? Empirically, there exists only the specific interaction that a social scientist can observe or document, but that observation begins at a given point of the interaction chain, that is from an immediate referent (and in this sense, any documented social interaction is local). The scientist, then, must extend his/her focus of attention to regional, national, and international referents of the global chain of interactions because all those phases influence each other. In other words, to full account for the local interaction (or the immediate referent of the global interaction chain), the social scientist must take into account all the factors, including historical ones, that influence all the other points of the interaction chain (regional, national, and international). In doing so the social scientist adopts a global perspective on the local interaction. So the “local” and the “global’ are two perspectives on the global chain of actions and interactions: the first perspective focuses on the immediate referent of analysis, which takes into account the immediate (local and recent) factors of interaction; the second perspective takes into account all the remote and national and international factors that impinge on the global chain of interactions of which the immediate referent is part of. So we do have one concrete chain of interactions and two perspectives on it: the local perspective which is generated by the location of the observer at one point of the interactive chain (the immediate referent of analysis); the global perspective which is generated by taking into account all the factors influencing the entire interaction chain. It is important to underline that the global perspective is indispensable to fully account for any point of the “inter-active” chain for the already mentioned reason that all the moments or phases of the global inter-action chain impact on each other. 10
10
Robertson and White, “What Is Globalization?”
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Jonathan Friedman offers a structuralist formulation of this global perspective to which I now turn and which I complement with a dialectic perspective.11 Friedman proposes a systemic view of the world in the sense that any concrete and local configuration has been formed and is reproduced through large historical processes. For this reason, the ‘local” is always part of a larger system and becomes “global” when perceived in terms of the properties of the total system. “There is no global space floating above the local” and the local is not produced by the global, as an empiricist perspective implies. In fact, the global is just “the field whose processes are necessary and sufficient for understanding the formation of the local. And the local is not a common global product or concept, spread by diffusion or generated from – above – as in Robertson and Appadurai’s formulations. Localization itself is part of the global process, but the local is always an articulation between specific practices and a larger field of forces and conditions of reproduction”.12 The “global simply refers to the properties of the systemic processes that connect the world, so that it would be a case of misplaced concreteness to think about a global space floating above the local. The global is a purely structural concept”.13 “The global is about interlocal relations, not about a supralocal organism....it is about the structural properties of such relations.” The global is not an empirical field or unit or space or just an abstraction, “but a set of properties of the reproduction of any locality”.14 Systemic properties are real as constitutive factors of the local as real are the mathematical laws that permit a building to stand up. However, we cannot experience systemic and mathematical propertied since they are the deep structure embedded in physical structures and become visible only in their effects.15 This conceptualization makes the notion of the “glocal” as the combination of the “global” and “local”, as is they were two levels or types of social interaction, not only superfluous but erroneous. 11 12 13 14 15
11
Jonathan Friedman, “Global Systems, Globalization, and Anthropological Theory,” in Frontiers of Globalization Research, ed. Ino Rossi (Springer us, 2007), 109–132. 12 Ibid., 118. 13 Ibid., 111. 14 Ibid., 116. 15 Ino Rossi, ed., Frontiers of Globalization Research Theoretical and Methodological Approaches (New York: Springer Science + Business Media, 2007). On the notion of deep structure see Ino Rossi, The Unconscious in Culture: The Structuralism of Claude LéviStrauss in Perspective (New York: Dutton, 1974); Ino Rossi, ed., The Logic of Culture: Advances in Structural Theory and Methods (South Hadley, Mass.: J.F. Bergin Publishers, 1982); Ino Rossi, ed., Structural Sociology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
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In the globalization literature what I called the extended (national and international) referents of global interaction are conceptualized as a global space.
Global Space as the Interactive Encounter of Places and the Locus of Cultural Creativity “Place” consists in the concrete interactions among people and it does not have any meaning independently of the context of specific interactions among people. Global space is constructed by the interaction among electronic-based “places” along the set of referents of the interactive chain. ‘Places’ refer to local interactions as they are constructed by interacting individuals who give meaning to their existential situations. Then, ‘places’ cluster in ‘spaces’ according to the geographical, ethnic, occupational, and ideological forces which are active along the various referents of the interaction chain. Humans using digital communication technologies generate networks of instant spatializations in addition to and superimposed on territorially-based communications and interactions. These networks are not timeless spaces of flows as if they existed independently of interacting people. In fact, digital connections are created via digital media among many actors interacting at a physical distance. Stated differently, concrete individuals act both as a physical and virtual individuals and, through their virtual interaction, they construct new digital places and new sets of meanings. The interaction among ‘virtual’ individuals is an interaction among individuals existing in the real place of ‘virtuality’. Art, music, literature, the internet produce imagined or virtual realities. Although they are not physical, virtual realities are ‘real’ because they can (have the virtue) to produce real effects. At the same time, virtual communication is generated, interpreted and elaborated by individuals who are also physically anchored. Interacting exchanges among cultures produce new cultural forms, for instance, the Jamaican popular music called reggae which circulates throughout the globe in form of songs, films, and videos. In the Caribbeans, Europe, Latin America, Australia, Japan, Africa and the us reggae takes different forms; for instance, in the us is associated with the hip-hop and in Brazil it blends with This Samba. The spreading of fashion, ipod, ipad are examples of transnational cultural forms as much as global youth cultures and movements of religious and political nature. Besides consumeristic forms of cultures and social movements, we have also the spreading and transformation of political ideologies worldwide. Interacting individuals who produce ‘places’ embedded with meaning have an important role in the critique of dominant ideologies. Often new cultural
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forms are guided by and reinforce structures of domination, but the latter can be only dismantled by globally situated individuals through critical reflection. The detection of the ideological anchoring and exploitative nature of global structures by social actors with self-steering capabilities are critical skills for the hopes of steering global events. Actors digitally interacting and constituting “places” (via electronically mediated encounters) and structure (the hierarchically ordering of networks of ‘places’) are focal points of an additional tension which point to the dialectic nature of global interaction (we shall discuss below).
Global Interaction and a Typology of Personal Identity
Global interaction produces not only new cultural forms but also new identities. We all know that individual identity emerges and/or is modified in daily interaction and that daily interaction is always local but constituted globally, namely by global systemic properties. We need to tease out the impact of the local and global focus of interaction so as to be able to build a typology of psycho-cultural identities. Does the enormous literature on globalization offer any help on this matter? Manuel Castells has stated that the loss of centrality by the state produces a crisis of representation in national decision-making? As a result, people attempt collective identities on the basis of personal experience which draws on history, culture, linguistic and geographical elements. Castells distinguishes three types of identity: a “legitimizing identity” which is constructed by social institutions, especially by state controlled institutions, as it occurred in the French Revolution; “resistance-based identity” which is constructed by groups that resist assimilation, and subordination; “project-based identity”, like feminist, ecological, religious and national identity.16 Such a list of identities is of interest especially for political analysis, but isn’t this an ad hoc and a descriptive typology rather than one derived from the inner properties of glocal interaction? John Tomlinson links the issue of identity formation in a global setting to the “formal nature of global modernity”.17 Modernity by its very nature tends to form institutions and to regulate cultural practices via nation-state, urbanization, 16 17
16 17
Manuel Castells, “Globalisation and Identity,” Transfer 1 (2006): 62–63. John Tomlinson, “Globalization and Cultural Analysis,” in Globalization Theory: Approaches and Controversies, by David Held and Anthony G McGrew (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).
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industrialization, and capitalism. Modern cultural identity consists in self and communal definitions based on (usually politically inflicted) differentiations of gender, class, religion, race, ethnicity, nationality. According to Tomlinson, globalization distributes the institutional and regulatory features of modernity across cultures, and, therefore, produces identity where there was none; in other words, globalization multiplies identities instead of destroying them. Tomlinson further argues that those who see globalization as a threat to cultural identity hold a passive view of culture as “an historical storage- a kind of collective heritage to be protected because of its fragility. These authors, according to Tomlinson, underestimate the adaptive and resistive (sic) resources of local cultures.18 Well, we are left with the catch-all term of “multiple identities” and with a neglect of the culturally destructive impact of globalization around the world. On the contrary, we must develop a typology of both the positive and negative interface between distant and local cultures and related types of identity. I attempt such a task by defining the process of identity formation, first, and then by presenting a typology of positive and negative identities developed in global interaction. Daily interaction, and, hence, identity formation are impacted by the dominant social institutions at the local, national and international referents of interaction as illustrated in the following table. Table 2.1
Dimensions of Individual Identity by Referents of Interaction and Impact of Dominant Institutions.19
Referents of interaction
Local National International
Dominant Institutions Cultural
Political
Economic
Personal identity: (cognitive) Ethnic/tribal/ religious identity Global awarenss
Interactional
(Occupational)
Nationhood
(Capitalist or Socialist orientation) Global consumer
Global Actorhood (Meyer)
18 19
18 19
Ibid., 161. Modified from Rossi, Frontiers of Globalization Research Theoretical and Methodological Approaches, 5.
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It is important to remember that the three referents of interaction are only analytically distinct facets of social interaction because, as Sassen has shown, the local, national and international are embedded into each other.20 Accor dingly, “personal identity, national identity and global awareness” are facets or perhaps phases of identity formation, which are understood to be emerging in interface respectively with cultural, political and economic institutions. Let us focus on the first cell of the table – “personal identity” – to analyze the laws of its composition. “Personal identity” is formed in interaction primarily with cultural institutions, then with political institutions and finally with economic institutions in this order of importance. Why? Because the first building block of “personal identity” is the notion of “who am I?” which develops primarily in interface with cultural institutions. This cognitive dimension of identity can be relate to the ‘status’ dimension of the well-known Weberian trilogy, – status, power, class. As indicated in Table 2.1 political and economic institutions contribute also to the development of respectively the interactional and occupational dimension of personal identity. The interactional dimension of personal identity develops through socially validated transactions with others. Ultimately, I am worth what the interacting others take me for worth. We can relate interactional identity to the “power” dimension of the Weberian typology. “Occupational identity” develops through the successful performance of economic tasks which can be related to the Weberian notion of “class”. Cognitive, interactional and occupational competences are three dimensions of personal identity that each member of the society must develop to be able to interact competently in any type of social environment. This kind of analysis could be extended to the other cells of Table 2.1 so that we could develop, for instance, a typology of national identities in terms of its cultural (sentiments of nationhood), political (loyalty to the state), economic institutions (preference for capitalism or social democracy etc.). We must be aware that personal, national identity and global awareness are facets or dimensions or phases of identity that any individual develops during his/her life time, in other words, they are dimensions of individual identity; (hence the title of Table 2.1). Let us know move to the typology of psycho-social maladjustments. Toward a Typology of Psycho-Social Maladjustments Having finished a chapter on modernist and postmodernist critiques of global modernity, I can testify to the psychic stress produced by overlapping and 20
20
Saskia Sassen, “Theoretical and Empirical Elements in the Study of Globalization,” in Frontiers of Globalization Research, ed. Ino Rossi (Springer us, 2007), 301.
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contorted conceptualizations. The twisting and recasting of critiques and perspectives have considerably augmented the level of intellectual complexity, and why not, at times they have also added confusion. This consideration holds true not only for the post-modernist vocabulary, but for the post-modernist paradigms as well. Much of the literature critical of globalization, post-modernist or otherwise, has dealt with cultural and structural issues, leaving much of the psychological impact of globalization underexplored. Is there a core characteristic of globalization which is blamed for widespread psycho-cultural maladjustments? Quite a few characteristics are identifiable so that there may be room for more than one typology. Let me focus on the fact that for some authors globalization is an overwhelming force, while for others is rather an “under-whelming’ one.21 For some authors globalization produces new cultural forms and identities, for others it disintegrates cultures or produces cultural hybrids. We can suggest a typology of psycho-cultural adaptations–both of positive and negative nature, on the basis of whether the impact of cultural, political and economic institutions on local cultures is of overwhelming, balanced, exploitative or fragmenting nature. An example of the latter is providing in the following quote by a Nigerian scholar: “In the original Nigerian culture, armed robbery, indecent dressing, single parenthood, prostitution was frowned upon, but in this borrowed robes we call westernization or civilization, it is seen as a way of life. Seeing such vices as a way of life could be traced to what is gotten from the media”.22 What does Table 2.2 add to what we have previously discussed? First all, the table suggests that each of the three dimensions of globalization can produce both positive and negative psycho-social adjustments. Secondly, the table clarifies which facet of globalization is most directly related to which type of psycho-social adjustment or maladjustment. This is not an insignificant clarification if you consider the complexities and overlappings of anti-globalization critiques. Thirdly, the table clearly indicates that the postmodernist critique of globalization is a “total” critique, since globalization is seen as producing catastrophic psycho-social maladjustments or a cumulative precipitate of all three types of psycho-social maladjustments listed in the last row of 21 22
21 22
David Held et al., Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 9. Bonachristus Umeogu, “The Aftermath of Globalization on African Identity,” Open Journal of Philosophy 03, no. 01 (2013): 176.
Exploitative Fragmenting (Reflexive Modernization-Beck); Loss of the Loss of sense of reality (Lyotard); Liquid society (Bauman)
balanced (High Modernity–Giddens)
Impact of Globalization on local cultures Overdeter-mining feeling repressed, fundamentalist orientation sensitivity to global issues(cosmopolitanism)
Solitary identity (via self-elected cultures) Ratiorational orientation (Habermas), reflexivity, self-consciousness, self- identity (Giddens) Anomie “quasi subject” (Beck)-decentered subject (post-modernists) Powerlessness; mass society Fear ad insecurity because of absence of laws (Bauman)
Political globalization
Cultural globalization
Table 2.2 types of psycho-social adjustments by globalization impact and facet of globalization.
Consumerism, Conformism, Instrumental rationality Pondering pros/cons of global interdependence (constructive orientation) Alienation job insecurity and anxiety;
Economic globalization
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Table 2.2. In fact, according to postmodernists, contemporary globalization entails a total blurring of culture and a fragmentation of the social structure. This has been a much contested terrain which we must briefly touch upon to account for the various terms listed in Table 2.2.
Post-modern Critique of Modern Culture and Defenders of Rationality The Frankfurt school pioneered the notion of “culture industry,” especially Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno (1944) in their “Dialectic of Enlightenment”23 which was translated into English in 1972. They argued that films, radio broadcasting, newspapers, and magazines are factories of standardized goods controlled by advertising and commercial interests at the service of consumer capitalism. The culture industry standardizes and commodifies all arts and, by way of mass consumption, these goods make people subservient to the demands of consumer capitalism, which can create false needs contrary to the genuine needs of freedom, creativity and happiness. As a result, people lose their individuality and critical thought. In “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” Jurgen Habermas24 explains the transition from traditional culture and modernism in the arts to the mass-media production in the consumer society. The bourgeois society of the late 18th and 19th century saw the rise of a public sphere which stood between civil society and the state, thus mediating between public & private interests. The bourgeois public sphere made possible the formation of a public opinion that stood up to defend citizen’s rights vis-à-vis of the state and the bourgeoisie. Following the liberal public sphere of the Enlightenment and the French revolution, the media-emerged to dominate the public sphere of the welfare state capitalism and mass democracy, which transformed the public sphere from being a rational debate to a politically manipulated and passive mass consumption. Media arbitrate public discussion and reduce “citizens” to spectators of media discourse and objects of information and public affairs. Media have stripped away the self-interpretation of the bourgeoisie and have used literary husks as marketable forms for public service in a culture of mass consumption.25
23 24 25
23 24 25
Max Horkheimer, Theodor W Adorno, and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Dialectic of Enlight enment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). Jürgen Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1989). Ibid., 171.
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However, Habermas has a positive attitude toward our intellectual traditions, especially the Enlightenment, and finds the Nietzschean criticism of the Enlightenment to be based on irrationality for giving priority to power over reason. He also refutes the criticisms of Horkheimer, Adorno, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida. Habermas strengthens the project of modernity with his theory of communication. Against the postmodernists challenges to rationality and the cognitive subject, Habermas defends the subject-centered reason, not as an abstract principle, but as embedded in the shared structures of the ethical discourse. Habermas shows that the transformation from traditional society to modernity involved a progressive secularization of the normative behavior which is reconstructed through communicative action. Communicative action is based on an analysis of the social use of language which is oriented to reach a common understanding and co-ordination.26 Communicative action is linked to communicative rationality which identifies the historical development of rationality structures as well as extend rationality to spheres of modern life, – such as the economy, the political order, and culture. The ‘life-world’ is the taken for granted universe of everyday existence. Daily conduct is rational because it takes place in the “life-world” or the taken-for granted everyday existence which is rationalized by the linguistic context of communication. Processes of rationalization within the life-world are said to occur through communicative action. By amplifying Max Weber’s theory of rationalization, Habermas claims society can flourish along lines of progressive differentiation and rationalization. Habermas also draws on Talcott Parsons’ ‘social system’ to suggest that as it becomes more differentiated, the life-world becomes ever more rationalized.27 The important point is that the life-world and social system become ever more differentiated from each other, but as they do, each new system develop further life possibilities and thus additional emancipation. Surely, the market place (capitalism) and bureaucracy can produce false rationalizations, but we can counteract them. By resisting false rationalizations and veiled domination, we hold out hope for alternative aspirations for our collective life, revealed, says Habermas, by certain resistance movements such as feminism, environmental protest, and defense of the life-world against the incursions of the marketplace and bureaucracy. In the ‘Philosophical Discourses of Modernity’ (1990/1985) Habermas recognizes that by rebelling against tradition, modernity has placed high value on 26 27
26
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. i: Reason and the Ration alization of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). 27 Ibid.
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the aesthetic experiences of the novel, the dynamic, the unique.28 He admits also that intense innovation in technology and science has eroded the sense of security (see Beck later on) for the society and the individual. However for Habermas the project of modernity is ‘unfinished’ and has the capacity for further emancipation because of a dual force, culture can enrich our life and everyday experience can be further rationally organized. The increase of social rationality, justice and morality can occur only by way of cognitive progress and through the moral boundaries of rationality. Hence, the massive task to be undertaken is to overcome the pessimism of late modernity and the indulgence of his predecessors toward Frankfurt, Adorno and Horkheimer. He accomplishes such a task by resolving the dilemma of subject-centered reason in the paradigm of communicative action which he consider as shared structures of ethical discourse where one can find a common foundation for faith in the human future. Habermas’ entire work is aimed at defending and continuing the enlightenment project against the challenge of Weber (instrumental rationality), Horkheimer and Adorno (earlier Critical Theory) and Nietzscheanism in the forms of post-structuralism (Foucault and Derrida) and postmodernism (Lyotard). As we know, post-modernists were hardly impressed by Habermas’s reasoning. Lyotard labeled Habermas’ communicative action as another metanarrative.29 For him science and other forms of knowledge no longer refer to reality, but work on a de-realized world. All we are left with is a disintegration of narrative elements into “clouds” of linguistic combinations and collisions among innumerable and heterogeneous language games. In the different language games the subject shifts positions from sender, to addressee, to referent, and so on. The loss of continuous meta-narratives causes the subject to break up into heterogeneous moments of subjectivity which do not coalesce into an integrated identity. A self-contained and unified subject does no longer exist to evaluate a multitude of available options. The best our interactive faculties can do is to move among multiple and heterogeneous rules, from a denotative, to a prescriptive, to a performative, to a political, to a cognitive, and to an artistic mode of phrasing. Similarly, Jameson argues that psychoanalysis and linguistics have shown that the individualism of bourgeois and competitive capitalism ceased to exist with the advent of corporate capitalism and organizational bureaucracy. The contemporary individual cannot map the global, multinational and decentered 28 29
28 29
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1987). Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
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character of the communication network where he is caught. As a result, we no longer have centered subjects in anomic states, but people who are free of anxiety and other feelings because they no longer are feeling subjects; only impersonal and free-floating feelings are possible in the new stage of capitalism.30 Bauman holds that the process of globalization eradicates any trade barriers and create “markets without frontiers”.31 As a result, we have a transition from a world where people are subject to the laws and protections of their home countries to one in which radical fear and lack of security are reified. In our impermanent society human bonds are fading and solidarity is wilting. Wars, which Bauman thinks are essentially local attempts to solve global problems, become intractable. The result is an “excess of humanity,” – as waste product – completely and utterly divested of property, personal identity, or even a state that will recognize their existence. Freedoms are being liquefied and then stolen by a collusion of rational economic forces that exist above our heads.32 Modernity’s emphasis on the individual has resulted in the destruction of these norms, all in the name of giving freedom and self-determination to the individual. However, this freedom and self-determination is in many ways illusional. Society may have restricted an individual, but in many ways it enabled the individual by supplying the support and infrastructure to live his life. Now individuals are on their own. They must construct themselves from the beginning without the support that would allow them to assess the meaning and success of their lives.33 The defense of rationality could count on new champions. Early on, to explain the emergence of industrial society and urbanization Anthony Giddens (1973) chose to focus on the origins and consequences of the capitalist society as understood by the three founders of sociology, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber.34 After the post-modernist storm, Giddens also focused on modernity. In 1990 Giddens defined modernity as a great force, a juggernaut, which 30 31 32 33 34
30 31 32 33
34
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 14–15. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, uk; Malden, ma: Polity Press ; Blackwell, 2000). A more extended discussion of post-modernist theses can be found in Ino Rossi, “Postmodernity,” ed. George Ritzer, The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization (Oxford, uk, Malden, usa and Carlton, Australia: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2012). Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber (Cambridge: University Press, 1973).
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influences everything crossing its path and we still live in it.35 People have some control over it, but risk of loosing control over it. Four are the engines of modernity: capitalism with its typical institutions of private capital, wage labor, class structure, and commodity production; industrialism in economic production and all other institutions; political surveillance and administrative control; centralization of the means of violence by the state. The interaction among these four modernizing agents is governed by three mechanisms: a) disembedding mechanisms in the sense that social interactions occur on distant time and space relations (distanciation) because of digital technologies and other innovations. The distance from each other and from products makes us rely on experts (professionals, administrators, scientists) and impersonal media of exchange, such as money, which mediate the redefinition of whom we are and what our relations with people and objects are; b) reflexivity or the constant examination of our behavior and thinking since we do not leave all responsibility to the experts. Obviously, this produces uncertainty and insecurity; c) trust in a risk society. Risk is the perception of potential danger which derives from disembedded relations, reliance on experts and abstract systens and future orientation. Hence, we have continuous reflexivity on our conditions of uncertainty. While not disagreeing on some post-modern critiques, such as skepticism about grand narratives and consumerism, Giddens believes that we are still in the modernity stage or in the stage of advanced or late modernization characterized by some extreme events. Because of them, we have become more reflexive and conscious of our precariousness. In “Modernity and Self-Identity” Giddens argues that in societies with “high modernity” (the same but more intense type of modernity of previous times) the process of identity development is important.36 In fact, every individual is faced with a variety of choices throughout his entire life about relations, careers, life style, political orientation and so on. Moreover, in traditional societies most roles were well defined, whereas in modern societies the rapid changes introduced by technological, economic and political innovations imposed continuous self-reflection and redefinition of one’s role in society: reflexivity is the central mechanism. Issues of self-identity extend also to the private sphere, for instance to the various ways to use one’s own body or marriage styles or sexual diversity. There have been attempts to privatize personal 35 36
35 36
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990). Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991).
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life styles, but societal changes, like secularization, legislation, economic constraints, feminism, continue to influence role formation in private life. Mass media influence our role perception and definition with their reporting on public figures, celebrities, social trends. For Giddens self-identity is an ongoing life project via the creation and reflection on biographical narratives. People keep on selecting and integrating external events to keep the story on oneself going. The ‘romantic love’ of the late 18th century introduced the narrative in the individual life.37 Novels contributed to the public recognition of the role of private relations and ‘mutual narrative biography’ was born and so the perpetuation of self-biography. One more point will help us to understand the rest of this paper. Giddens believes that each individual chooses a “lifestyle”, which includes not only careers and consumption but also attitudes and beliefs: the life style in modern societies “concerns the very core of self-identity, its making and remaking”,38 and life style is a matter of negotiated choices. Reflexivity involves self- consciousness on the part of the individual and an ability to monitor the ongoing flow of social life when deciding on a course of action. With Giddens we have not only regained rationality, but also a self-reflecting individual who makes his own identity and keeps on enriching it. “Reflexivity” is a concept used also by Ulrich Beck, but with a different twist.39 He contends that industrial society has become a risk society because it cannot controls the risks it produces. His concerns are connected to those of the Frankfurt school and Habermas who had questioned the ability of the capitalist state to pursue both economic growth and social welfare. The economic imperatives of growth cannot depend on public consensus, therefore are imposed by the political technocracy. On the other had, the pre-capitalist values have been displaced by the growth of capitalist economy; hence, there is lack of internalized values which can restrain economic claims and provide fuel for work ethic. Moreover, the increasing number of administrative functions make the state to use more and more of the cultural capital still available, which, therefore, looses its genuine character and becomes depleted. The shortage of cultural capital keeps the capitalist state short of admunition to 37 38 39
37
Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992). 38 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 81. 39 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society towards a New Modernity (London; Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1992), http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db =nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=53304, accessed May 2013.
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justify its economic policies and to resolve conflicting class claims. The state is in a crisis of legitimacy because of a cultural shortage in a politically dominated economic order! Ulrich Beck focus on another facet of the conflict between the cultural and political realms: whereas the former is governed by the dictates of science and rationality, the latter embarks on irrational policies that produce a series of crises that can potentially threaten the existence of the society as a whole. That industrial society has become a “risk society” can be seen in the ecological crises and financial crises as well as in the nuclear, genetic and nano-technologies that can unleash uncontrollable consequences;40 the same is true of the financial policies that have periodically marked the history of the first modernity. Both Beck and Giddens deal with risks that are global and transcend all value differences and power divisions,41 but there is a difference among them. For Giddens the system of expert is a key mechanism of the second modernity which can enhance social reflexivity and social trust, and, enhances “dialogic al democracy”.42 Not so, according to Ulrich Beck, who claims that political authority uses scientific expertise to formulate risky policies which can produce uncontrollable consequences. So it is the organized irresponsibility of the modern/rational society to have produced a “risk society”.43 The rational society of the first modernity has engaged in an irrational course of action in full contradiction with its own foundations of science and rationality. “The boundary-shattering forces of market expansion, legal universalism and technical revolution” of our global age have gradually revolutionized our social institutions and “the very coordinates, categories and conceptions of change itself…”.44 In other words, not scarcity, but economic growth, rapid technological innovations, and a high employment economy have transformed industrial society into a risk society. Small surreptitious, unplanned, and “autonomized” changes have cumulatively coalesced to the “unintended consequences” of great changes.45 40 41 42 43 44 45
40 Ibid. 41 Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 154. 42 Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994). 43 Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Malden, ma: Polity Press, 1999), 99–101. 44 Ulrich Beck, Wolfgang Bonss, and Christoph Lau, “The Theory of Reflexive Modernization Problematic, Hypotheses and Research Programme,” Theory, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (April 1, 2003): 4. 45 Ibid., 5.
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What has happened to rationality? Rationality and other foundational premises of the first modernity have been dissolved and in its place “reflexive modernization” has emerged. This transition entails two stages: (a) a creative self-destruction of the first modernity whereby the institutions of the first modernity (nation-state, class, family, ethnic groups, gender role, business sector) are dissolved and the related sociological categories become “zombied” (as the latter were contained within the nation-state). Industrial threats begin to dominate amidst a lack of recognized standards through which evaluate them since the old ones have been dissolved and/or surpassed: this is a structural crisis; (b) at this point the second stage of “reflexive modernization” begins with a restructuration or re-modernization of society whereby a new kind of state, capitalism, labor, global order, nature, subjectivity, and everyday life are been formed.46 As pointed out above, Beck argues that first modernity produced a cultural crisis since the cultural sources of meaning of the first modernity, such as faith in progress and class consciousness, have dried out. Blurred have become the cultural distinctions between nature and society, scientific knowledge and belief, being a member of society or an outsider. Many forms of rationality, perspectives, and lines of inquiry have emerged with a consequent loss of certainty and confidence (Beck et al. 2003).47 Where can the individual draw from to develop his life outlook, social norms, role models? This vacuum comes in an era when Western advanced democracies are imposing plenty of conflicting demands on the individual, especially since the advent of the 1960’s welfare state and onward:48 demands on education, health, housing and occupation, and at a time when full employment and life-long careers are disappearing. In Beck’s view, when “institutions are becoming unreal in their programmes and foundations, they become dependent on individuals”.49 In other words, the rights and duties of the welfare state have become “individualized”, and the individual can no longer satisfy them in a family or village or class context. What kind of individual are we left with? Since social institutions have become fragmented and the culture blurred, the individual cannot assess the 46 47 48 49
46
Beck, Bonss, and Lau, “The Theory of Reflexive Modernization Problematic, Hypotheses and Research Programme.” 47 Ibid. 48 Ulrich Beck, “The Reinvention of Politics,” in Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, by Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, and Scott Lash (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 7. 49 Beck, Bonss, and Lau, “The Theory of Reflexive Modernization Problematic, Hypotheses and Research Programme,” 16.
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consequences of the various risk opportunities for decision-making. As a result, the self “becomes fragmented into contradictory discourses of the self”.50 The “reflective” individual of the first modernity entailed that the knowing subject grasps the nature of the object through certain and objective knowledge. On the contrary, the “reflexive” individual of the second modernity acts like a “reflex” or an interminable producer of indeterminate and immediate reflexes because he is forced to make choices at great speed and without existing models: deals, networks and alliances are continuously constructed, combined and re-combined.51 The subject becomes a quasi-subject who is at the same time the producer and the outcome of its own ever shifting boundaries. All this means that the self and the public develop in tandem through selfselecting and self-organizing and, of course, even changing activities.52 Inevitably, reflexive modernization is an era characterized by ambivalence, contradiction, and internalization of uncertainty. In a climate of uncertainty and conflict among institutions decisions will be made by the “sub-political” sector or political subjectivity and the selforganization of citizens’ groups that are not tied to parties and classes.53 Recently, Beck has sought direction for the course of re-modernization from the “enforced cosmopolitanization” that emerges from the consciousness of global risks.54 The nation-state cannot cope with global risks so that it must be involved in “a strategic game for world power” among nations, international organizations and transnational civil society. These empower states and movements of civil society, and the latter proposes new sources of legitimation and options for actions. Global civil society works for a cosmopolitan form of statehood which is based on human rights, global justice, and a democratic globalization. This methodological cosmopolitanism must replace the methodological nationalism of the first modernity. Beck tries to move beyond the post-modernity thesis on cultural fragmentation and the decentering of the individual, with his notion of restructuration and remodernization under the aegis of cosmopolitanism. One might find his thesis provoking, – that the lack of awareness of the public about the pervasiveness of risks and the fragmentation of social structure proves the point that 50 51 52 53 54
50 51 52 53 54
Beck, “The Reinvention of Politics,” 7. Beck, Bonss, and Lau, “The Theory of Reflexive Modernization Problematic, Hypotheses and Research Programme,” 21. Ibid., 25. Beck, “The Reinvention of Politics,” 19. Ulrich Beck, The cosmopolitan vision (Cambridge, uk; Malden, ma: Polity, 2006).
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the shift from a rational to an irrational society has occurred through autonomized, unplanned, unperceived processes. If that is the case, it is difficult to see how a civilization that has degenerated into a society that totally contradict its own (rational) foundations can reverse its self-created destructive path. What are we left with? A reflective individual a’ la Giddens or a reflexive quasisubject a’ la Beck (“an individual fragmented into contradictory discourses of the self” as described above).
Self-reflectivity, Dialectics of Global Interaction and the Emergence of Multiple Identities
I have discussed elsewhere the untenability of the structural fragmentation and of the “quasi-subject” a’ la Beck55 though the notion of “risk society” adds up to an intriguing hypothesis.56 Yes, we are committed to the tradition of rational and “high modernity” and of the increasing self-reflectivity of the individual. But two questions are lingering on: What is the relation between the cognitive and affective dimensions of identity? Is identity reflexive in nature or just a passive adaptation to institutional forces? First of all, individual identity entails both a cognitive and an affective dimension as indicated by the “reflexive individualization” of Elliott and Lemert who proposed the term to explain “how the global.... comes to be lived internally”,57 namely at the emotional level. Conceding that individualism is the master idea of modernity, Elliott and Lemert show a sympathy with the theories of Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, David Riesman, Jürgen Habermas, Christopher Lasch, Richard Sennett, Robert Putnam and others, all of whom agree that the experience of globalization is accompanied by “psycho-social fragmentation and a sense of loss.” However, Elliott and Lemert find that those theories leave “little space…for the creativity and sociality that individuals continue to master in the face of apparently totalitarian regimes”.58 55 56 57 58
55 Rossi, Frontiers of Globalization Research Theoretical and Methodological Approaches, 400–416. 56 Ino Rossi, “Reflexive Modernization,” ed. George Ritzer, The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization (Oxford, uk, Malden, usa and Carlton, Australia: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2012). 57 Anthony Elliott and Charles C Lemert, The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization (London; New York: Routledge, 2006), 75. 58 Ibid.
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Consequently, they find more promising the “reflexive individualization” of Beck, Giddens and Bauman according to whom globalization has opened up a large variety of viewpoints and lifestyles and, therefore, has confronted the individual with many choices, risks and continuous self-reflexivity. For Elliot and Lemert the reflexive self is far from being just a pawn of social structure. However, they find that the many opportunities presented to the individual are riddled with uncertainties so that they conclude that notion of “reflexive self” is ambivalent in nature. They concur with the critique that the theory of reflexive individualization betrays a cognitive and a voluntaristic interpretation of the interface between individual and society. For this reason they intend to complement the notion of “reflexive individualization” with the dynamism of the emotional and imaginary energy, – that is with the affective dimension of the interior life. The trouble is that Elliot and Lemert do not capitalize on their insight that globalization generates many emotional climates and socially differentiated experiences. In fact, this insight could lead to the formulation of many types of individualism, but such a possibility is barely foreshadowed in their mentioning of differentiated individualist strategies, such as conformist, defensive, privatized, genuine autonomous. Elliot and Lemert pay attention to the differenciated interpenetration of social positioning, reflexivity, and emotional imagery. Since the locations where individuals encounter one another change through life, many forms of reflexivity and identity are possible instead of being stuck to the shallowness of one dimension of the experience. This kind of analysis enables us to conclude that reflexive invidualization is not an universalisable process but an interactively specific one, so that globalization cannot be construed to have an undifferentiated impact. Through modern transportation and communication technologies we overcome geographical distances, but also the social cultural distances connected with them. How is that to be understood, is a matter of having a time-space compression or the shrinking of distances because of a dramatic reduction of time to cover them. Other authors prefer to say that social relations are stretched across distances.59 Tomlinson states that we experience the world as close, compressed, and intimate.60 The time-space compression is paralleled by cultural compression which renders the exits and entries to different cultural spaces uniform and standardized, at least, at the instrumental level of practical efficiency and standardized mass consumption. According to 59 60
59 Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity; Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994). 60 John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
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Tomlinson, this dynamics facilitates a functional proximity.61 However, the notions of functional proximity (and the homogenization of cultures) can be understood in a negative and in a positive way. It is negatively understood, if it is implied that the richness of local cultures is eliminated and reduced to an homogenous and consumerist level of functionality. It is positively understood, if functional proximity is conceptualized as an added (emergent) level of functionality in our globalized world. We must briefly recall at this point the distinction among “use”, “function”, “form” and “meaning” in cultural analysis:62 1) similarity of uses: all cultures have some sort of material technology to meet similar societal needs; 2) different cultural traditions and political systems serve similar needs for a value system, law & order, production and distribution of goods. Hence, these different institutions are functionally equivalent in terms of their functions in society; 3) the cultural form or the arrangement of the content of cultural institutions is different in different cultures; 4) people living in different cultures attribute different meaning to the same cultural practices (personal meaning). We can argue that the inter-cultural similarity of consumeristic functioning is not incompatible with the particularistic nature of deeply anchored values of different cultures. On the contrary, the functional similarity (in terms of “use” and “social function” of consumeristic institutions) is lived through and given different “meaning” by deep seated traditional values. The later can be seen as energetized by and, at the same time, as redefining the same consumeristic usages with new cultural expressions (“forms”). Hence, the interface between the instrumental level of culture (“use” and “social function” of consumption) and deep core values (“meaning” for social actors) can produce patterns of variation at the instrumental level and an enrichment of core values. John Tomlinson seems to make an opening for cultural creativity when he says the following: experiencing from their culture “the paradigmatic experience of global modernity for most people.. is that of staying in one place by experiencing the displacement that global modernity brings to them.”63 However, it would be more accurate to speak of ‘displacement’ at the instrumental level and of an enrichment or cultural collapse (the latter in the case of negative interface) at the level of core values. 61 62 63
61 62
Ibid., 6–7. Ino Rossi, ed., People in Culture: A Survey of Cultural Anthropology (New York: Praeger, 1980), 24. 63 Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture, 9.
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There is one more important consideration to be made. For Giddens and Tomlinson globalizing modernity “lifts out social relations from their embeddedness in locales”.64 In Tomlinson’s words, this means that social relations are abstracted from the particularities of their contexts.65 Tomlinson states also that for Giddens “this – locality is fundamentally transformed in modernity from the self-contained localities of pre-modernity. The predominant experience of everyday life in the global modern world is one of penetration of our locally situated life-worlds by distant events, relations and processes”.66 I must differ from Giddens’ claim that globalization lifts (or “abstract” accor ding to Tomlinson) social relations from their embeddedness in particular localities. On the contrary, it is the embeddedness of global forces in specific events to explain the ways particularities are what they are. Tomlinson’s notion of penetration and transformation of the local by the global seems to imply a total assimilation of local cultures by global forces. Such notion is contradicted by the “World Value Surveys” which document the continuing presence of traditional civilizations which are as many cultural tracks along which modernization unfold in different parts of the world.67 These finding are consistent with my distinction between the instrumental/consumeristic level of culture and deep-rooted core values. This cultural duality is a source of the dialectical tension embedded within “global interactivity” along the arch of all its referents. Social actors interpret cultural forms from distant referents in terms of the richness and depth of their local culture. Eventually, social actors learn how selectively switch among the elements of the differentiated cultural arch and learn how to enrich elements of one referent in terms of the elements of the other referents. This cultural multiplicity embedded within global interaction is the springboard for multiple identity formation. In quoting Roland Robertson John Tomlinson states that the world is becoming compressed into a “single place.”68 On the contrary, I want to argue that multiple places are inevitably created by the interface of the modern and traditional, national and civilizational, consumeristic and deep cultural core. The selective and combinatorial activity of social actors can be a source of great 64 65 66 67 68
64 65 66 67
68
Ibid., 55. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 59. Ronald Inglehart and Wayne E. Baker, “Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values,” American Sociological Review 65, no. 1 (February 1, 2000): 19–51, doi: 10.2307/2657288. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), 11.
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cultural enrichment through the production of new cultural forms and/or redefinition of new meanings. Analogous reflections hold true for the emergence of an articulated individual identity via the dialectic tensions built within the many cultural forms embedded within the arch of the referents of global interactivity.69 Let me refer to the international referent as documented by the “World Polity” group.70 Cross-national professional organizations produce an enormous expansion of the rights, responsibilities, and powers of the actors since a world of highly “agentic” Others, like teachers, consultants, and advisors are required. The scientized environment supports Actorhood by providing principles on the basis of which the world can be understood in an integrated and standardized way by everyone. This expansion of the human agency by science (a cultural form) is present in every sphere of social life. Moreover, the person is constructed as a Primordial Actor on the basis of global principles derived from the human rights of all individual persons. These rights are extended to many types of individuals, women, children, the elderly, indigenous people, handicapped people, people of all races and ethnic groups. Not only individuals are entitled to rights, but they are also active agents pursuing their rights and interests. What is of interest is that this expansion of the human agency is rooted in supranational norms, a “supranational” rooted upon the interaction among the individuals along the global interactivity chain. It is apparent that the notion of global actorhood is a specification or a new expression of individual identity at the international referent of global interaction. Bibliography Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press ; Blackwell, 2000. ———. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society towards a New Modernity. London; Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1992. 69 70
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On the notion of dialectics see Ino Rossi, From the Sociology of Symbols to the Sociology of Signs: Toward a Dialectical Sociology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Ino Rossi, Community Reconstruction after an Earthquake: Dialectical Sociology in Action (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993). John W. Meyer, “World Society, Institutional Theories, and the Actor,” Annual Review of Sociology 36, no. 1 (2010): 1–20, doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102506.
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———. The cosmopolitan vision. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2006. ———. “The Reinvention of Politics.” In Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, by Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, and Scott Lash. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. ———. World Risk Society. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1999. Beck, Ulrich, Wolfgang Bonss, and Christoph Lau. “The Theory of Reflexive Modern ization Problematic, Hypotheses and Research Programme.” Theory, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (April 1, 2003): 1–33. Castells, Manuel. “Globalisation and Identity.” Transfer 1 (2006). Elliott, Anthony, and Charles C Lemert. The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization. London; New York: Routledge, 2006. Friedman, Jonathan. “Global Systems, Globalization, and Anthropological Theory.” In Frontiers of Globalization Research, edited by Ino Rossi, 109–132. Springer US, 2007. Giddens, Anthony. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. ———. Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber. Cambridge: University Press, 1973. ———. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. ———. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990. ———. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992. Giddens, Anthony, Ulrich Beck, and Scott Lash. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. Giulianotti, Richard, and Roland Robertson. “Recovering the Social: Globalization, Football and Transnationalism.” In Globalization and Sport, by Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson. Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Pub., 2007. Habermas, Jürgen. The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. ———. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. Held, David, Anthony G McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton. Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. Horkheimer, Max, Theodor W Adorno, and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002.
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Inglehart, Ronald, and Wayne E. Baker. “Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values.” American Sociological Review 65, no. 1 (February 1, 2000): 19–51. doi:10.2307/2657288. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. McGrew, Anthony. “Globalization in Hard Times: Contention in the Academy and Beyond.” In The Blackwell Companion to Globalization, edited by George Ritzer, 29–53. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007. Meyer, John W. “World Society, Institutional Theories, and the Actor.” Annual Review of Sociology 36, no. 1 (2010): 1–20. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102506. Ritzer, George. Globalization: A Basic Text. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. ———. “Introduction to Part One.” In The Blackwell Companion to Globalization, edited by George Ritzer. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007. Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992. Robertson, Roland, and Kathleen E. White. “What Is Globalization?” In The Blackwell Companion to Globalization, edited by George Ritzer, 54–66. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007. Rosenau, James N. “Three Steps Toward a Viable Theory of Globalization.” In Frontiers of Globalization Research, edited by Ino Rossi, 307–315. Springer US, 2007. Rossi, Ino. Community Reconstruction after an Earthquake: Dialectical Sociology in Action. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993. ———. From the Sociology of Symbols to the Sociology of Signs: Toward a Dialectical Sociology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. ———., ed. Frontiers of Globalization Research Theoretical and Methodological Approaches. New York: Springer Science + Business Media, 2007. ———., ed. People in Culture: A Survey of Cultural Anthropology. New York: Praeger, 1980. ———. “Postmodernity.” Edited by George Ritzer. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization. Oxford, UK, Malden, USA and Carlton, Australia: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2012a. ———. “Reflexive Modernization.” Edited by George Ritzer. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization. Oxford, UK, Malden, USA and Carlton, Australia: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2012b. ———., ed. Structural Sociology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982a. ———., ed. The Logic of Culture: Advances in Structural Theory and Methods. South Hadley, Mass.: J.F. Bergin Publishers, 1982b. ———. The Unconscious in Culture: The Structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Perspective. New York: Dutton, 1974.
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Sassen, Saskia. “Theoretical and Empirical Elements in the Study of Globalization.” In Frontiers of Globalization Research, edited by Ino Rossi, 287–305. Springer US, 2007. Tomlinson, John. “Globalization and Cultural Analysis.” In Globalization Theory: Approaches and Controversies, by David Held and Anthony G McGrew. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. ———. Globalization and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Umeogu, Bonachristus. “The Aftermath of Globalization on African Identity.” Open Journal of Philosophy 03, no. 01 (2013): 174–177.
chapter 3
The Civil Sphere beyond the Western Nation-State: Theoretical and Empirical Reflections on Alexander’s Cultural Sociology and Its Contribution to Civil Society Discourse Peter Kivisto* Jeffrey C. Alexander’s advocacy for a strong program of cultural sociology and his efforts to offer a corrective to previous civil society theorizing constitute intertwined projects that should be conceptualized as such. He has published a substantial body of work devoted to the latter topic, culminating in The Civil Sphere,1 which is a detailed and complex book (with, for example, sustained sections devoted to cultural binary codes, the law, public opinion, social movements, and multiculturalism) that invites judicious explication as a precondition for further theoretical refinement. The first section of this chapter will be devoted to offering such an explication. The focus of Alexander’s work here and in the subsequent The Performance of Politics2 has been on the civil sphere of nation states, to be more explicit, of the United States. Alexander is quite aware that the forces of globalization are yielding new arrangements beyond the nation-state, not signaling its demise, but locating it within a global context. Thus, at the end of The Civil Sphere he points to the possibility of the civil sphere being organized beyond the boundaries and identities of nation-states.3 At the same time, he is cognizant of the fact that a global civil society exists at best in embryonic form, and he would likely agree with John Keane that whether a global civil society has a reasonable chance of blossoming, ushering in the perpetual peace Kant wrote about, remains very much an open question for the long term. Alexander has not offered his own analysis of the transnational civil sphere, but in The Performance Revolution in Egypt4 he * Augustana College and University of Trento. 1 Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 2 Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 3 Alexander, The Civil Sphere, 552. 4 Jeffrey C. Alexander, Performative Revolution in Egypt: An Essay in Cultural Power (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004272835_005
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has looked outside of the Western world of liberal democracies to explore the potential of cultural power to facilitate the emergence of a viable civil society in an autocratic state. After examining the main contours of Alexander’s civil sphere thesis, I turn to examine his sociological journalism on Egypt in the second section of the paper, linking it to a recent analysis of the Arab Spring by Farhad Khosrokhavar. Then I turn in the final section to an exploration of a case that affords the possibility of in-depth empirical investigation, namely the European Union. Over the course of its 50-plus year history, the eu has evolved into a novel political entity, with no precise parallel anywhere in the world. The question that will be addressed in this final section concerns whether or not a transnational European public sphere – or what has been referred to as the Eurosphere – has emerged, and if so, what its implications might be at both the nation-state and the global levels.
The Civil Sphere Thesis
While throughout The Civil Sphere Alexander uses the terms civil sphere and civil society interchangeably, the construction of the former term can be seen as his way of carving out his own distinctive understanding of this social space. It’s the space where justice and solidarity are made possible and where they exist, to the extent that they are present, in a state of tension. It is in the civil sphere that universalistic values manifest themselves most fully compared to the other spheres of society. Moreover, he claims at the outset that the civil sphere is made possible in part because of people’s capacity to be “oriented” to “the transcendent”,5 which he understands in a decidedly secular way. There are two aspects of Alexander’s perspective that ought to be highlighted. First, he seeks to delimit the civil sphere’s social space, and insofar as this is the case, he revises a more-or-less agreed upon contemporary demarcation. His discussion of the differences between what he refers to as Civil Society i and Civil Society ii provides a historical backdrop to his position, but does not quite get at what I think needs to be stressed. The history of the concept of civil society has progressed from its earliest formulations (e.g., Ferguson) which sought to distinguish it from the state to the sometimes tortured and confusing nineteenth century struggle to determine how civil society is related to capitalism and more generally to the economic sphere. Something of a consensus has emerged during the recent revival of interest in civil society that it constitutes, as Kevin Fox Gotham nicely summarizes it, a realm of social life 5 Alexander, The Civil Sphere, 3.
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“outside the spheres of the state and economy.”6 This tripartite division into state/economy/civil society can be seen, to cite one example, in Anthony Giddens’ work devoted to spelling out the contours of the third way.7 It similarly informs the work of Robert Putnam’s “bowling alone” thesis.8 In both instances, the institutions and voluntary associations that comprise civil society are broadly conceived. Whatever their differences, they share a rather capacious conception about what one locates in civic society. Alexander disagrees, for from his perspective not everything outside of the state and economy is part of the civil sphere. This includes religion, family, and community.9 Excluding the family is not unusual among many civil society theorists today, along with the related realm of friends. The demarcation cuts along the private/public divide. However, many theorists today would consider religious and community organizations to be vital aspects of civil society. Alexander does not. He is not prepared to see the bowling leagues that Putnam yearns for as components of the civil sphere. This is because his idea of the civil sphere bears a resemblance to Habermas’ understanding of the public sphere. Like his German counterpart, he insists that a relatively autonomous civil sphere is essential if democracy is to exist and to flourish. Second, while all of this helps to place into context what Alexander is up to, it cannot quite account for the most significant intellectual lineage that informs his theoretical project. His effort to provide a satisfactory theoretical account of what he dubs the civil sphere arises out of his ultimate disappointment with what he once thought was a promising development in Parsons’s later work on the “societal community.” He has spelled out elsewhere in some detail what he saw as both “the promise and the disappointment of Parsons’s concept”.10 In the end he concluded that the contradictions in the societal community concept were such that the salvage operation he had undertaken met insurmountable theoretical obstacles and thus the project was abandoned. The move was from Parsons to those larger contemporary currents of civil 6
Kevin Fox Gotham, “Civil Society,” ed. George Ritzer, Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks California 91320 United States: sage Publications, Inc., 2005), 98. 7 Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). 8 Robert D Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 9 Alexander, The Civil Sphere, 7. 10 Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Contradictions in the Societal Community: The Promise and the Disappointment of Parsons’ Concept,” in After Parsons: A Theory of Social Action for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Renée C Fox, Victor M Lidz, and Harold J Bershady (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005).
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society discourse. The crucial point here is that Alexander abandoned Parsons’s project, but not his problematic. Indeed, what he seeks to do with the civil sphere project is to start anew in wrestling with Parsons’s problematic, which as noted above he defines simply as the capacity to articulate theoretically the sphere of society wherein solidarity and justice are created and nurtured. He sees inherent problems in promoting both solidarity and justice, but thinks it is possible for them to exist, not necessarily harmoniously, but in a state of creative tension. Alexander’s starting point calls for stripping the project of its evolutionary mooring and unsubstantiated optimism at the hands of Parsons. He stresses that the possibility of a civil sphere begins by realizing that it exists, to the extent that it does, as a never-ending, non-teleological collective effort.
From Neofunctionalism to Cultural Sociology
When Alexander writes about the civil sphere as a bounded institution that needs to be viewed as analytically separate from other institutions and maintains some level of empirical autonomy vis-à-vis those other institutional arenas, he does so in language familiar to functionalists. Alexander depicts the institutional differentiation characteristic of modern societies in terms of the respective functions performed by different institutions. However, when he seeks to offer an account of the way the civil sphere works, its internal dynamic, he shifts to a cultural framing. Civil society, he writes, “should be conceived as a solidarity sphere, in which a certain kind of universalizing community comes to be culturally defined and to some degree institutionally enforced”.11 The civil sphere constitutes a realm of collective meaning-creating structures that emerge out of symbolic codes, which can be seen as the fundamental building blocks of civic life. Rooting his own thought in the semiotic tradition dating to the path-breaking work of Ferdinand Saussure, Alexander insists that these codes are inherently binary in nature which include good and evil, sacred and profane, just and unjust, and so on. In a democratic civil sphere, he contends, motives, relationships, and institutions are framed in terms of a civil and uncivil binary. The civil sphere is a contested arena of social life, one in which the struggle is over which social actors will prevail in shaping collective representations. There are moments when certain forces win out, as when those with a more universalistic view of solidarity get the upper hand vis-à-vis those with a more particularistic understanding. However, there is never any final or 11 Alexander, The Civil Sphere, 31. See also Kivisto and Sciortino, Solidarity, Justice and Incorporation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
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ultimate resolution, democracy being an ongoing accomplishment. The code is malleable and allows for creative reworking, but it also establishes a framework for discourse, a framework that both enables and constrains. Given the centrality accorded to language, it is not surprising that when turning to the world of the media, public opinion looms large in Alexander’s account. At the very outset of the book, he describes public opinion as “the sea inside of which the civil sphere swims”.12 This nautical image is repeated several times throughout the book. Steering a course between pessimistic perspectives on public opinion and an overly optimistic view of public opinion leading from a clash of opinions to truth, he seeks a realistic account of how public opinion is produced, focusing for example on media conduits and on the significance of polling. The civil sphere is not a debating club. It is much more than the image one might derive from Habermas’ ideal-typical portrait of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie public sphere revolving around an informed citizenry equipped with the latest news from print journalism, engaging in lively and extended coffeehouse discussions. It is not that dialogue and debate don’t occur, but so do concrete actions aimed at what Alexander refers to as “civil repair.” Social movements play a particularly prominent role here. They are not propelled by a desire to effect a revolutionary transformation of society, but rather in the interest of advancing the cause of justice and expanding the boundaries of solidarity. He discusses two movements from the second half of the past century, the women’s movement and in considerably more detail, the civil rights movement. While not disputing the fact that each movement sought to achieve both greater economic and political power, his main point is that this would not have been possible without also getting the upper hand in the struggle over civil power – a form of power he thinks has been unfortunately too often ignored by social movement theorists. Civil power is dispensed by the court of public opinion. Thus, when the police chief of Birmingham, Alabama unleashed dogs and fire hoses on young people involved in nonviolent protest, the event appeared on the evening news. The national audience came to see, in binary terms, the demonstrators as civil and the authorities as uncivil, the former as proponents of democratic action and the latter as racists intent on denying equal rights to black Americans. As the events of the 1960s indicated, the civil rights movement acquired sufficient civil power to influence legislators to produce such landmark pieces of legislation as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As the civil rights movement wound down, it succeeded in ending the Jim Crow era of mandated segregation and racial oppression. However, it did not 12
Ibid., 4.
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result in a genuine equal opportunity society. A half century later the beloved community that Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of had not been realized. Moreover, as the current challenge to the Voting Rights Act suggests, there is nothing inevitable about racial justice. On the contrary, reversals of fortunes are possible as uncivil forces overcome civil ones. In a recent essay, Alexander explains: My own studies of civil society (Alexander 2006) suggest that the values of civil society are as bad as they are good; its signifiers identify not only the qualities that allow individuals to become members of civil society, but the qualities that legitimate their exclusion. The cultural core of civil society is composed not only of codes but of counter-codes, antitheses that create meaningful representations for “universalism” and “particularism.” …The discourse of civil society is constituted by a continuous struggle among binary codes and among the actors who invoke them, each of whom seeks hegemony over the political field by gaining definitional control over unfolding events13 In his analysis of the 2008 election that brought Barack Obama to the White House, Alexander depicts the competing actors in the electoral contest as being engaged in an ongoing drama involving attempts to gain definitional control over their own image, that of their challenger, and the overall script of the campaign. Both Obama and McCain sought to establish themselves as mythic figures whose moment to lead the nation had come, while casting their opponent as in some fashion unfit for the Presidency. In offering an account of “the performance of politics” in the democratic struggle for power, Alexander stresses the provisional and flexible performances and counter-performances that were finally concluded on election night when the electorate decided which of the two candidates was to be accorded democratic legitimacy. In this drama, no small part of the task for each side entailed “working the binaries”.14 What all of this reveals is Alexander’s commitment to seeing culture permeating every aspect of the civil sphere. It is not that other factors including economic, political, and so forth do not intrude into this realm. Indeed, he pays careful attention to the significance of the impending economic crisis that was beginning to be felt during the election season. In the end, a problem was more evident for McCain than Obama because the crisis arose while a Republican occupied the White House. However, in Alexander’s view, competing social 13 Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Dark Side of Modernity, 2013, 111. 14 Alexander, The Performance of Politics, 89–110.
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imaginaries, which are crucial to a democratic society, are fundamentally cultural constructs. For this reason, he operates with the assumption that comprehending the civil sphere requires the strong program in cultural sociology that he has been advocating for over two decades.
Democratic versus Authoritarian Societies
The Civil Sphere is an American-focused book.15 Not only are the 150-plus pages devoted to the women’s and civil rights movement about American social movements, but the extended discussion of modes of incorporation and the “Jewish question” are likewise rooted in the American landscape. If one looks at Alexander’s empirical concerns in other publications, there is a similar focus on the United States, as with the case of his study of the Watergate scandal.16 In this respect, his work bears a resemblance to that of Parsons, but like Parsons he also turned his sights elsewhere on occasion, usually Europe. A recent example can be found in his article on the backlash to multiculturalism in Western Europe today.17 What distinguished Alexander from Parsons and other proponents of modernization theories he was closely associated with is that whereas the latter tended to see the United States as an exemplar of a future historical trajectory that other modern societies would come over time to resemble, Alexander presumes that multiple modernities exist that will lead to variations on a theme. I note this simply to stress that the civil sphere is to be construed as a characteristic feature of all modern democracies. There is nothing unusual about this assumption, which is shared by all contemporary theorists of civil society. But left unanswered is the following question: Do nondemocratic societies also contain a civil sphere, or are countries ruled by various forms of autocratic regimes devoid of this institutional space? Certainly, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe provoked considerable discussion about the squashing of civil society under communism and its emergence in the heady early days of post-communism.18 15 Alexander, The Civil Sphere. 16 Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life a Cultural Sociology (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 17 Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Struggling over the Mode of Incorporation: Backlash against Multiculturalism in Europe,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 4 (April 1, 2013): 531–556. 18 For someone capturing the era before the fall, see Andrew Arato, “Civil Society Against the State: Poland 1980–81,” Telos 1981, no. 47 (March 20, 1981): 23–47. And for a more recent
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Alexander has addressed the question of whether a civil sphere can be found to exist in nondemocratic societies in his Performative Revolution in Egypt.19 He traces the events leading to the collapse of the Mubarak regime by a nonviolent and non-ideological protest movement demanding that the rights and dignity of all Egyptians needed to be respected by those in political power. Moreover, there was a call for creating a more tolerant and pluralistic society, one that did not pit Muslims against Copts or Muslims against secularists, but rather one that encouraged mutual respect. The cultural struggle underlying this particular manifestation of the larger regional phenomenon known as the Arab Spring entailed working the binaries, as with the electoral battle between Obama and McCain. Thus, the regime sought to depict itself as the voice of patriotism and the force committed to creating a modern, rational, safe, and secure Egypt. At the same time, it branded the protestors as foreign instigators, spies, sectarians, and outlaws who were a danger to national well-being and a force destined to spread chaos. For their part, those who assembled in what would become seen as the iconic Tahrir Square characterized the regime as repressive, corrupt, violent, arrogant, and incapable of reform. One recurring depiction of Mubarak was that of a modern day pharaoh. Meanwhile, they sought to portray their movement as one characterized by a desire for freedom, justice, openness, and democracy, and they stressed that they were the true representatives of the people and with the emphasis on youth, constituting the nation’s future. Part of what made the demonstrators in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world possible was the extensive reliance on the Internet, including use of such vehicles as Facebook and Twitter. It is estimated that one quarter of the Egyptian population owns or otherwise has access to such media channels, which is particularly evident among educated urban youth. Of course, both sides made use of such communication networks, while simultaneously seeking to get their respective messages across on television and radio airwaves. Implicit in Alexander’s essay is the conviction that civil society is possible in at least some heretofore nondemocratic regimes. Building on this assumption and using the basic framework of the civil sphere thesis, Iranian-born and French-based sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar distinguishes three types of authoritarianism.20 In the first, a government permits a certain degree of political autonomy for political parties and likewise a level of press freedom. retrospective over a decade after the event see Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 19 Alexander, Performative Revolution in Egypt. 20 Farhad Khosrokhavar, The Crisis of the Arab Revolutions (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, forthcoming).
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Examples include Jordan and Morocco. This is the least repressive form. The second type, which he calls “oligarchic” is more repressive. It restricts the ability of political parties and civil society organizations to operate freely, but does permit avenues for dissent over some basic economic issues (such as demonstrations motivated by rises in prices of basic commodities). Some of these countries are rich and thus can afford to pay for the complacency of the population. Examples include Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The third type is the most repressive, often built around the cult of personality of a powerful ruling figure (and that figure’s small clique). Examples include Libya under Gadhafi and North Korea under the leadership of not only the current leader, Kim Jong-un, but under the rule of his grandfather and father, as well. Khosrokhavar makes clear that in the first two types, the space for an emergent civil society exists, but casts suspicion on whether it is possible in the third type. One major factor contributing to the ability of a civil society to function has to do with the openness of the society to a globalized world. At one extreme is the “Hermit Kingdom” of North Korea which has forcefully and effectively cut the population off from contact with the outside world. The first and second types of authoritarianism are less inclined to do so, with the first tending to be the most open. Returning to the Egyptian case, the Mubarak regime had made possible the penetration of global civil society. Alexander notes,21 for example, that his government hosted Wikipedia’s global annual convention in 2006. Thus, not only were Egyptians familiar with what was happening elsewhere, but the global media provided extensive coverage of events as they unfolded in the country. They were not only on the scene during the critical protest days in Tahrir Square, but increasingly came to embrace the moral classifications of the protestors, thus rejecting those advanced by the regime. Moreover, the global public was informed that this “Arab Spring” was indeed a movement committed to democracy and not to creating yet another Islamic revolution akin to Iran.22 A good illustration of the global character of these events was evident when protestors in Tahrir Square expressed their solidarity with public sector workers in Wisconsin who had challenged right-wing Governor Scott Walker’s union busting policies by occupying the state capitol building in Madison – and those workers in the American heartland reciprocated in kind. Thus, the regime’s legitimacy floundered both at home and in the court of world public opinion. Having lost the struggle for cultural power, the military decided to intervene to replace the government. But this points to one of two 21 Alexander, Performative Revolution in Egypt, 37. 22 Ibid., 71–76.
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distinct challenges to the further flowering of civil society and democracy. The military is a powerful institution with extensive control of vast sectors of the economy, and their commitment to democratic reform was always suspect. The second challenge came from Islamists, and in particular the Muslim Brotherhood. There was considerable debate in Egypt and outside about whether the Brotherhood, which had stayed on the sidelines for much of the Arab Spring, should be permitted a role in a pluralist democracy. The concern revolved around whether it was prepared to be a political party among many, committed to democracy, or whether it would seek to take advantage of the situation and attempt to fill the power void, making use of liberal means to advance illiberal goals. Further complicating the situation was the fact that though the organization’s official membership represents a small percentage of the Egyptian population, it was supported by a sizeable sector of the society, and thus excluding it from the political process would be seen as disenfranchising that sector. The subsequent history up to this writing has not been particularly sanguine. The Brotherhood succeeded in electing their candidate, Mohamed Morsi, to the Presidency in June 2012. His actions once in office disappointed those who thought the Brotherhood would promote policies insuring the rights of all Egyptians. Instead, his government sought to concentrate power, rather than share it. It took actions against an independent judiciary, created conditions threatening to the Coptic religious minority, and sought to sideline secularists rather than working with them. Protests erupted once again, and the army intervened and removed Morsi from office in the summer of 2013. Since then, they have undertaken a campaign intended to crush the Brother hood, Morsi languishes in prison awaiting trial for treason, and the army has made clear it is not prepared to simply return to the barracks. How can we explain this dramatic change of fortunes from a moment of democratic promise to one in which the prospects look increasingly remote? Khosrokhavar suggests that what occurred was the emergence of a subjective civil sphere, one defined in terms of a particular affective mood and a social imaginary characterized by a desire to see all citizens of the nation as equals and in the process overcoming sectarian divisions while respecting difference. While this is a necessary prerequisite for the development of a robust civil sphere and proved in this case to be the catalyst for the efflorescence of the days in Tahrir Square, if it is to sustain itself over time, it must be complemented by an objective civil sphere, by which Khosrokhavar means the institutionalized aspect of civil society. What is clear is that civil society actors did not have a sufficiently robust institutional structure available to stave off uncivil incursions by both the Muslim Brotherhood and the military. The civil sphere
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movement known as Arab Spring came to an end. Pessimists might conclude that this is the end of the narrative, while optimists would stress that although it ended, it may arise again and having imbibed the lessons of their Tahrir experience, pro-democracy activists may be better prepared for future struggles over cultural power. I am inclined to agree with Khosrokhavar that having had a taste of freedom, it is not likely that Egyptians committed to a democratic society will be prepared to accept the status quo ante. This being said, it remains unclear precisely which non-democratic nations of the world have some reasonable chance of being transformed into pluralist democracies with vibrant civil spheres. Certainly, there are several major impediments to this occurring in many nations. Religious fundamentalism is one such impediment, as Iran illustrates. Tribalism is another impediment, which one can see at work in countries such as Afghanistan and Yemen. As this chapter is written, global powers are trying to diffuse a civil war in the newly independent South Sudan, a war pitting two major tribes in the country, the Dinka and the Nuer. This does not bode well for this oil-rich nation that separated from Sudan only five years ago. Cult of personality totalitarian regimes represent yet another challenge, with North Korea at the top of the list, but also including several of the republics of Central Asia such as Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Of course, the list of countries that do not appear to be candidates for democratic transformation can be extended, and the same is true of those that might be so considered. In making such explorations, as Khosrokhavar’s examination of the Arab Spring nations illustrates, Alexander’s civil sphere thesis offers a valuable conceptual toolkit that is not limited to Western democracies.
Beyond the Nation-State: The European Union and the Eurosphere
Can this toolkit be of utility in exploring the civil sphere beyond the nationstate? Implicit in its American focus, The Civil Sphere is rooted at the level of the nation-state.23 This opens Alexander’s account to charges of methodological nationalism.24 One could counter the charge by pointing to the fact that
23 Alexander, The Civil Sphere. 24 Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism and beyond: Nation–state Building, Migration and the Social Sciences,” Global Networks 2, no. 4 (October 1, 2002): 301–334.
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the post-nationalist thesis25 has been increasingly criticized, particularly in the wake of the expansiveness of national security operations in the wake of 9/11. Instead of the erosion of state power, as post-nationalism proclaimed, its capacity and willingness to monitor and control has expanded, as the information provided to The Guardian and other media outlets by Edward Snowden makes abundantly clear. But at the outset of this chapter, we noted that Alexander pointed to the existence of a civil sphere beyond the boundaries of the nation; indeed, he wrote about a global civil sphere in his essay on Egypt. Suffice it to say that one can readily point to evidence of a global civil sphere, but that much about it is difficult to capture with any precision, due to the fact that it exists in somewhat inchoate and embryonic form. This should not be surprising given that the civil spheres of the world’s liberal democracies took root only after a long gestation process. Rather than attempting to apply the civil sphere thesis to the global level, a more amenable alternative is to look at something transcending the nation-state but existing nonetheless well below the global level, which is the European Union and the Eurosphere. While the former has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention for decades, the latter has not. With that in mind, the following draws on the insights into the emerging European civil sphere from one specific research project. The Eurosphere project was part of an eu Framework 6 program involving 16 countries and over 100 researchers that ran between February 1, 2007 and July 31, 2012. The overall sweep of the larger undertaking can be seen in the sheer range of topics considered: individual citizens, media actors, think tanks, ngos, and political parties, analyzed in terms of difference, including ethnic, religious, linguistic, gender, national, and regional. If there is a common thread linking the discrete projects, it is one that revolved around determining on the basis of empirical investigations how at this moment in history a European civil sphere ought to be conceptualized, particularly in terms of its ability to advance a deeper level of democracy and a more inclusive civil sphere.26
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Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Pr, 1994). Hakan G. Sicakkan, “Diversity and the European Public Sphere towards a Citizens’ Europe,” Eurosphere Evaluation of eu Policies Aiming to Create a Democratic European Public Sphere i (2013); Hakan G. Sicakkan, “Diversity and the European Public Sphere towards a Citizens’ Europe,” Eurosphere Final Comparative Study iii (2013); Peter A. Kraus and Giuseppe Sciortino, Linking the European Union with the Citizens. Evaluation of eu Diversity Policies Aiming to Create an Inclusive European Public Sphere, 2013, http:// eurospheres.org/.
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In the project’s final report, Hakan G. Sicakkan27 points out that the first mention of the term Eurosphere dates to the 1960s, when it was introduced by Jacques-René Rabier (whose involvement in the European project dates to 1953 with his role as an aide to Jean Monnet in the European Coal and Steel Community [ecsc]) and Jean Meynaud (perhaps best known for his 1964 book on technocracy). Unlike the more recent use of the term by Mark Leonard,28 which refers to the broad “sphere of influence” Europe exerts far beyond the borders of the continent, the earlier use was more in line with the way the Eurosphere project researchers have approached the term, which is simply a short hand for a European public sphere, transcending yet implicated in the respective public spheres of the member states (the members of the research team used Habermas’ public sphere language, whereas here we use Alexander’s civil sphere). Over the course of its 60-plus year history, dating to the creation of the ecsc in 1951, what has since 1993 been known as the European Union has evolved into a novel political entity, with no precise parallel anywhere else in the world. In fact, from my North American vantage, the idea that the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta) might evolve over time from an economic alliance like the original European Community into something akin to the present-day eu strikes me as not even a remote possibility, in no small part due to the asymmetries of size and level of development characterizing the three member states. That being said, ever since the global financial crisis struck, the future of the European Union has become clouded. With anti-eu parties such as Britain’s ukip on the western edge of Europe to Finland’s True Finns on the eastern periphery, with various counterparts in between, having grown in influence in recent years, this is not an especially auspicious moment for promoting further integration of the member states. Indeed, though sometimes called Euroskeptics, these parties are not skeptical about the eu, but rather are overtly hostile to it. The euro crisis has exacerbated the situation by pitting, in the operational rhetoric of the critics, “responsible” nations against “profligate” ones. And with opposition to the eu in the ascendance during the past several years, so too has there been an intensification of opposition to newcomers, both from outside the eu and from the most recent ascension states of Eastern Europe. Much of the critical discourse is framed in terms of the need for a revitalization of national identity and a reassertion of national sovereignty. Those who seek to dismantle or diminish the eu, or more often to simply succeed in getting their particular 27 28
Sicakkan, “Diversity and the European Public Sphere towards a Citizens’ Europe,” 2013, 67. Mark Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005), 4.
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country to leave it, fail to fully appreciate the reach of the eu, which extends deeply into the economic and political realms of member states. They do not appear to appreciate the difficulties entailed in disengaging from the eu, nor do they ponder the potential unintended consequences. The future of the eu cannot be predicted with any certainty. Its novelty and the sheer complexity of uniting its constituent states make such an effort particularly challenging. And yet, despite the ongoing impasse over the adoption of an eu constitution by the member states, the challenges to the euro, and the growing strength of anti-eu forces, the eu has over the course of its existence managed to become institutionally embedded. Thus, the real issues concern what it will look like in the future, and central to the focus of the Eurosphere project, whether or not it will prove to be a vehicle for forging a continent-wide deeper and stronger democracy by facilitating a public sphere that contains all of the constituent states while transcending each of them. A considerable amount of writing on the eu concentrates on its presumed shortcomings, in particular its “democratic deficit.” However, when operating with a longer historical perspective and with an appreciation of the protean character of the eu and the European public sphere, the accomplishments and the potential become evident. Recalling two interventions by a quartet of prominent European public intellectuals in the first half of the past decade offers valuable perspective. This is clearly what Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida had in mind when they published a joint statement (composed by Habermas) on the need for a common European foreign policy. According to their analysis, the mass street demonstrations in major European cities on February 15, 2003, in the run-up to the Iraq war, might be taken “as a sign of the birth of a European public sphere”.29 Habermas and Derrida contended that the fact that opposition to the war was widespread throughout Western Europe was an indication of a shared worldview that was shaped by the entire continent’s experiences with two world wars in the first half of the past century. They argued that as a consequence of the direct experience with totalitarian regimes from the left and right and the tragedy of the Holocaust, the citizens of the continent can be characterized by their “heightened sensitivity to injuries to personal and bodily integrity”.30 One of the outcomes of this immediate historical experience is the
29
30
Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, “February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe,” Constellations 10, no. 3 (September 1, 2003): 291. Ibid., 296. Italics in original.
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need felt for supranational organizations and binding policies that are capable of domesticating the power of individual states. In this regard, the difference between Europe and the us is quite stark, as opposition to the United Nations has been a recurring theme in American politics from the 1940s up through the administration of George W. Bush. One might recall that his un ambassador, John Bolton, reflected in unvarnished form a neoconservative worldview characterized by a deeply-rooted right-wing antipathy toward what is often characterized as “world government.” His disdain for multilateralism of any kind characterized his tenure, as does his editorial writing today in venues such as Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. When this worldview is fused to the religious ideology of the Christian right, replete with millennial end-of-the-world visions, which sees in world government the workings of the Antichrist, there is a potent source for justifying unilateral bellicosity. While the Obama administration has challenged this approach to foreign policy, the key point here is that there is nothing quite simply, and most fortunately comparable to such a worldview in Europe today. What this comparison points to is the existence of a European identity that transcends without being separated from the particularities of the national identities of the member states. In the wake of the rejection of an eu constitution in both France and the Netherlands in 2005, two other public intellectuals, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens published an editorial that appeared in left-of-center newspapers in several European countries in which they argued that nationalism was threatening Europe, both politically and economically (the coordinated publication of these newspapers can be taken to be a reflection of the European civil sphere). They unabashedly argued that the eu had proven to be a remarkable success story, helping, for example, to transform Spain and Portugal into multiparty democracies, transforming the economy of Ireland so that for the first time in its history a substantial portion of the population could live comfortably in a prosperous nation (this, of course, before the economic crash), and assisting in the democratization of former Warsaw Pact nations. Viewing the eu, not as an “unfinished nation” or an “incomplete federal state,” but rather as a “new type of cosmopolitan project,” they share the view of Habermas and Derrida that an eu foreign policy would serve the interests of peace, democracy, and open markets.31 I’ll leave aside what many see as Giddens rather uncritical take on the virtues of a largely unfettered market and his antipathy
31
Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, “Nationalism Has Now Become the Enemy of Europe’s Nations,” The Guardian 28 (2005): 28.
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to redistributive policies, reflected in his third way attempt to modernize social democracy. Beck and Giddens notwithstanding, in conceptualizing “Europe as a political form,” to borrow from Peter Wagner,32 there is an understandable tendency to view it as a mega-state or at least as a state-like entity, and thus to explore at this level the same empirical concerns that we have just reviewed for the nation-state. Thus, there is a concern with identifying the civil society organizations, forums, and media sources operating at the level of the eu or directing their energies toward the European project. Over a decade ago, Marianne van de Steeg,33 for example, examined weekly news magazines in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain to ascertain the extent to which they have facilitated discourse on the enlargement of the eu. In a related but distinct piece of research conducted around the same time, Hans-Jörg Trenz34 undertook a content analysis of eleven daily newspapers from six eu countries to determine the level of coverage of European news, Europeanized news (by which he means discussions of European events that have an impact on national issues), and national news. On the basis of his research, Trenz concluded that there is evidence to support the idea that a “European public sphere has come into existence.” Similar conclusions were reached by Ruud Koopmans and Jessica Erbe.35 In a more theoretical paper, Trenz, along with Klaus Eder,36 see at work a democratic dynamic in an emerging European civil society, the consequence of the dual processes of expanding transnational channels of communication and institution building and integration within the eu.37 Some have questioned whether a singular European civil sphere has materialized, or whether the evidence seems to suggest the emergence of a multiplicity 32 33 34
35 36
37
Peter Wagner, “The Political Form of Europe, Europe as a Political Form,” Thesis Eleven 80, no. 1 (February 1, 2005): 47–73. Marianne van de Steeg, “Rethinking the Conditions for a Public Sphere in the European Union,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 4 (November 1, 2002): 499–519. Hans-Jörg Trenz, “Media Coverage on European Governance Exploring the European Public Sphere in National Quality Newspapers,” European Journal of Communication 19, no. 3 (August 1, 2004): 291–319. Ruud Koopmans and Jessica Erbe, “Towards a European Public Sphere?,” Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 17, no. 2 (2003): 97–118. Hans-Jörg Trenz and Klaus Eder, “The Democratizing Dynamics of a European Public Sphere Towards a Theory of Democratic Functionalism,” European Journal of Social Theory 7, no. 1 (February 1, 2004): 5–25, doi:10.1177/1368431004040016. Erik Oddvar Eriksen, “An Emerging European Public Sphere,” European Journal of Social Theory 8, no. 3 (August 1, 2005): 341–363.
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of discrete, primarily nation-specific spheres.38 Part of this concern derives from the observation that efforts aimed at creating pan-European media outlets, particularly print outlets, have not succeeded. The failure in 1998 of the late Robert Maxwell’s The European, billed at its launch as “Europe’s first national newspaper,” is taken to be a cautionary warning about the pitfalls of such an effort. Beyond this particular concern is the related concern about a lack of a common language. Some question whether an eu public sphere is possible in a setting containing 23 official languages. Simply put, this concern comes down to questioning whether the ideal of a sphere where dialogue and debate transpire is conceivable in a setting lacking a singular lingua franca. In this regard, the Eurosphere project researchers make abundantly clear, nothing about the eu’s policies on language is simple, given a normative commitment to linguistic diversity and a pragmatic need for linguistic unity. At the same time, they suggest that linguistic diversity need not be an inevitable impediment to the development of a European civil sphere.39 In contrast to the insistent monolingualism of the United States, the eu’s encouragement of bi-or multilingualism is the proposed solution to the challenge of simultaneously respecting linguistic diversity while finding a way to communicate that manages to overcome the potential isolation of discrete linguistic enclaves. Some have questioned the viability and, or desirability of having the citizenry at large educated in one or a limited few shared languages, though the trend is in that direction. Instead, they have suggested that elites need to communicate via a shared language, after which they can serve as the transmitters of information to their fellow citizens in the shared language or languages of specific nations. The language issue is part of a larger and more fundamental topic that must be addressed in any attempt aimed at determining both the existence of and the character of a European civil sphere – the matter of European identity. Wagner notes that discussions about eu institutions have been “accompanied by a discussion about a ‘European identity’ for several decades.”40 Research from the Eurosphere project and elsewhere41 illustrate the difficulties a ssociated
38 Ibid. 39 Kraus and Sciortino, Linking the European Union with the Citizens. Evaluation of eu Diversity Policies Aiming to Create an Inclusive European Public Sphere. 40 Wagner, “The Political Form of Europe, Europe as a Political Form,” 69. 41 E.g. Ruud Koopmans and Paul Statham, The Making of a European Public Sphere: Media Discourse and Political Contention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
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with determining to what extent people view themselves as European versus particular national identities, regional identities, religious identities, etc., and how these various identities are interrelated. This issue is significant because it gets at the extent to which individuals define themselves as having a shared European culture with others who reside in different nations, perhaps speak different languages, and differ in other ways. The identity question is complicated by the fact that competing economic interests often pit nation against nation and by the fact that different welfare regimes impact perceptions of national versus European identity. Not surprisingly, the research to date has not been able to provide sufficiently robust findings about how people define their affinities with fellow eu citizens who happen to be citizens of a different nation.42 To treat the European civil sphere as an ongoing project requires viewing it less as an established social fact and more as a social construct that is in the process of coming into being, of being constituted and reconstituted. True of civil spheres at the national level, this process of coming into being is even more evident in the case of Europe, where announcements of the emergence of such a sphere are made with a certain frequency (e.g., in the joint statement by Habermas and Derrida cited earlier). Nevertheless, it is far easier to gain access to data on the working of eu governmental units involved in agenda setting and policy formulation, creating consultative forums, think tanks, and so forth than it is to get at the “self-organizing field” of the European public. This is a reflection of the fact that the eu continues to operate as it has since its creation: in a top-down fashion. Alexander’s civil sphere is an autonomous space in which the relationship between it and the state entails reciprocity and in which the claims-making and the demands emanating from collective actors in civil society have the capacity to provoke state actors to act in ways intended to facilitate civil repair. The civil sphere’s autonomy is contingent on its robustness, on its capacity to effectively exert civil power. Only then can it be a democratic force capable of advancing a more inclusive form of solidarity while simultaneously advocating for justice. With this in mind, it is evident that the existing democratic deficit is a reflection of the current fragility of the Eurosphere.
42
Sanja Ivic, “eu Citizenship as a Mental Construct: Reconstruction of Postnational Model of Citizenship,” European Review 20, no. 03 (July 2012): 419–437.
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Bibliography Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life a Cultural Sociology. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. ———. Jeffrey C. “Contradictions in the Societal Community: The Promise and the Disappointment of Parsons’ Concept.” In After Parsons: A Theory of Social Action for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Renée C Fox, Victor M Lidz, and Harold J Bershady. New York: Russell Sage, 2005. ———. The Civil Sphere. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. ———. Performative Revolution in Egypt: An Essay in Cultural Power. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. ———. “Struggling over the Mode of Incorporation: Backlash against Multiculturalism in Europe.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 4 (April 1, 2013a): 531–556. ———. The Dark Side of Modernity, 2013b. Arato, Andrew. “Civil Society Against the State: Poland 1980–1981.” Telos 1981, no. 47 (March 20, 1981): 23–47. Beck, Ulrich, and Anthony Giddens. “Nationalism Has Now Become the Enemy of Europe’s Nations.” The Guardian 28 (2005). Eriksen, Erik Oddvar. “An Emerging European Public Sphere.” European Journal of Social Theory 8, no. 3 (August 1, 2005): 341–363. Giddens, Anthony. The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Goldfarb, Jeffrey C. The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Gotham, Kevin Fox. “Civil Society.” Edited by George Ritzer. Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Thousand Oaks California: SAGE, 2005. Habermas, Jürgen, and Jacques Derrida. “February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe.” Constellations 10, no. 3 (September 1, 2003): 291–297. Ivic, Sanja. “EU Citizenship as a Mental Construct: Reconstruction of Postnational Model of Citizenship.” European Review 20, no. 03 (2012): 419–437. Khosrokhavar, Farhad. The Crisis of the Arab Revolutions. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, forthcoming. Kivisto, Peter, and Giuseppe Sciortino. Solidarity, Justice, and Incorporation: Thinking through the Civil Sphere, 2015. Koopmans, Ruud, and Jessica Erbe. “Towards a European Public Sphere?” Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 17, no. 2 (2003): 97–118.
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Koopmans, Ruud, and Paul Statham. The Making of a European Public Sphere: Media Discourse and Political Contention. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Kraus, Peter A., and Giuseppe Sciortino. Linking the European Union with the Citizens. Evaluation of EU Diversity Policies Aiming to Create an Inclusive European Public Sphere, 2013. http://eurospheres.org/. Leonard, Mark. Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century. New York: PublicAffairs, 2005. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Sicakkan, Hakan G. “Diversity and the European Public Sphere towards a Citizens’ Europe.” Eurosphere Evaluation of EU Policies Aiming to Create a Democratic European Public Sphere I (2013a). ———. “Diversity and the European Public Sphere towards a Citizens’ Europe.” Eurosphere Final Comparative Study III (2013b). Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Trenz, Hans-Jörg. “Media Coverage on European Governance Exploring the European Public Sphere in National Quality Newspapers.” European Journal of Communication 19, no. 3 (August 1, 2004): 291–319. Trenz, Hans-Jörg, and Klaus Eder. “The Democratizing Dynamics of a European Public Sphere Towards a Theory of Democratic Functionalism.” European Journal of Social Theory 7, no. 1 (February 1, 2004): 5–25. doi:10.1177/1368431004040016. Van de Steeg, Marianne. “Rethinking the Conditions for a Public Sphere in the European Union.” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 4 (November 1, 2002): 499–519. Wagner, Peter. “The Political Form of Europe, Europe as a Political Form.” Thesis Eleven 80, no. 1 (February 1, 2005): 47–73. Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller. “Methodological Nationalism and beyond: Nation–state Building, Migration and the Social Sciences.” Global Networks 2, no. 4 (October 1, 2002): 301–334.
PART 2 Neoliberalism between State and Market: Nationalism, International Free Trade and Persistence of the State
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chapter 4
The Role of the Nation-State in the Global Age Andrea Borghini* Over the last two decades, a wide range of literature has been produced on the state, its role in the global age and its destiny. One of the questions we should ponder is whether we are facing a new phase in the history of this political institution or is the state withering away? These are the main questions scholars, belonging to different sociological perspectives, have been working on.1 Regardless of the number of intellectual work produced in the last twenty years, there are still many unresolved questions begging for further analysis, i.e., what is state and does the state exist? I mean that the great debate on the state doesn’t clarify the nature and the origin of this opaque2 and “obscure objet”,3 especially if we continue to follow the orthodox paradigm of the state (the equation between the nation-state * University of Pisa. 1 There have been a lot of sociological studies on the state in the last years. And, generally, there are a lot of scholars, belonging to various disciplines (historians, political scientists, etc.) that have addressed the issue of the State in the last thirty years. See for example, Martin Carnoy, The state and political theory (Princeton: University Press, 1984); Philip. G. Cerny, The changing architecture of politics (London: Sage 1990); Anthony de Jasay, The State (OxfordNew York: Basil Blackwell, 1985); Peter Evans, Theda Skocpol, Dietrich Rueschmeyer (ed.), Bringing The State Back In (Cambridge: University Press 1985); Anthony Giddens, The nationstate and violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985); John A. Hall, John. G. Ikenberry, The State (Minnesota: University Press, 1989); John A. Hall (ed.), The State, 3 voll. (London: Routledge, 1994); Martin Van Creveld, The rise and decline of the nation-state (Cambridge: University Press, 1999); Andrew Vincent, Theories of the State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Philip Abrams, “Notes on the difficulty of studying the state”, journal of historical sociology, 1, no. 1, (1977): 58–89; Bob Jessop, The Capitalist State (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1982); Linda Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State (New York: Ithaca, 1998); John P. Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable”, world politics, 20, no. 4, (1968): 559–92; Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (London: Hutchinson, 1978); Bertrand Badie, Pierre Birnbaum, Sociologie de l’Etat (Parigi 1982: Grasset et Fasquelle); Charles Tilly, The formation of the nation state in western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, voll.3 (Cambridge: University Press, 1986–1993). 2 Daniel Chernilo, A Social Theory of the Nation-State (London: Routledge, 2007). 3 Pierre Bourdieu, Sur l’Etat (Paris: Raison d’agir, 2012), 13.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004272835_006
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and society in social theory, e.g. the methodological nationalism), instead of referring to a revisited paradigm supported by an array of heterogeneous literature.4 The classical paradigm of the nation-state makes it an institution that, inspired by Weber, has the legitimate monopoly of physical violence on a territory and a population, is an organization that controls a population of a given territory. National societies belong to the nation-states. Nation-states create and contain society. This definition don’t tells us much about the way in which state power has gradually won the right to a monopoly in the various fields, from administrative to economic. The state’s ability to withstand the pressure of economic globalization, restructuring roles and functions, and, in some cases, even expanding the scope of its powers, raises questions not only on the evolution and transformation of the state, but also requires a review of the literature that debates of its genesis. From this point of view, the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu that, as we shall see, expands up to overthrow the Weberian definition, talking about a monopoly of physical and symbolic violence (physical because symbolic), opens interesting perspectives of interdisciplinary theoretical research, concerning the nature, evolution and the genesis of that institution. And in this sense, the reflection of Bourdieu (as of other authors which we will use but that are difficult due to a homogeneous paradigm) allows us to develop a broader connections between state and (global) culture, as also suggested by Marinetto: “Analysts have shown that there are definite cultural dimensions to the modern state. For some this means the cultural realm actually constitute the state, that it is a cultural entity. Other analysts take a more considered approach and see the state and culture lying in a mutually dependent, dialectical relationship”.5 According to this last perspective, the state remains, in general, a central actor in the global arena, an institution in strong transformation, not an obsolete object. It must be taken into account when considering global culture dynamics, but only if we consider its ambivalences and revise some definitional aspects, for example the union between nation and state (hyphen). 4 Ibid.; Timothy Mitchell, “Society, Economy and the State Effect” in State/Culture. StateFormation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999); Chernilo, A Social Theory of the Nation-State; Michael Mann, The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results, in States in History, ed. John A. Hall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). 5 Michael Marinetto, Social Theory, the State and Modern Society, (Berkshire (en): Open University Press, 2007), 97.
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In order to examine some above questions, I will attempt to: analyze some fields where the presence of the state emerges strongly and reveals its ambivalence; suggest a possible research agenda, concerning global culture topic, resulting from the perspective on the state that I’m proposing; highlight the main characteristics of the state that need further sociological investigation.
The Transformation of the State
The centrality of the state in social theory is evident from the wider debate on the crisis and transformation of the nation-state,6 characterized by two main streams: the first points out the demise of the state,7 the second defines it as an institution in deep transformation.8 According to this second stance, globalization9 has undermined the political power of the nation-state but not ended it.10 6
Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization (London: Polity Press, 1994); Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (London: Heinemann, 1979); Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the Nation-State; Gianfranco Poggi, The State: its Nature, Development and Prospects (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). 7 Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: the Rise of Regional Economies (New York: Free Press, 1997); Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: the Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 8 James O’ Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martins Press, 1973); Claus Offe, Disorganized capitalism: contemporary transformation of work and politics (Cambridge: mit Press, 1985); Richard Lachmann, States and Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (trans. by T. MacCharty. Boston: Beacon, 1975); John Dunn, Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 9 With this term I mean a process of international integration arising from national economies. It is driven by processes of modern economic activity. As Marinetto claims “Globalization also encompasses culture, form of communication, identity and politics” (Marinetto, Social Theory, the State and Modern Society, 120). 10 Weiss, The Mith of the Powerless State; John A. Hall, T.V. Paul, G. John Ikenberry, The Nation-State in Question (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003); David Held and Anthony McGrew, “The Great Globalization Debate. An Introduction” in The Global Transformation Reader, ed. David Held and Anthony McGrew (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003); Saskia Sassen, A Sociology of Globalization (New York: Norton, 2006); Luke Martell, The Sociology of Globalization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Ulrich Beck, Wolfgang Bonss and Christoph Lau, “The Theory of Reflexive Modernization. Problematic, Hypotheses and Research Programme”, theory, culture and society 20, no. 2 (2003): 1–33.
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State politics in the age of globalization is changing rapidly. From a sociological point of view, it is possible to identify three main trends. The first trend is a move from the center-periphery paradigm to the global-local paradigm. This move refers to the end of a spatial organization centered on the state as the only legitimate political authority holding the function of political and value center vis-a-vis an extended periphery. The point of arrival is a polycentric organization of political space in which, on the one hand, the local level is released from the center and gains significance, and on the other hand, we find global processes guided by supranational institutions.11 The second trend is at the level of state powers. We are witnessing a crisis of the smooth and homogenous space that the state has built up over time by establishing borders and frontiers, making the portion of the globe over which it has exercised its monopoly increasingly more homogenous in terms of population, traditions, and culture. There is a move to an emblematic space represented by a network;12 this is the typical spatial metaphor for processes of globalization that connect people, social and political spaces, regions, cities, and ideas crossing classical national borders. Finally, the third trend is at the level of world ordering processes, which threatens with the demise of the traditional geographical map, which is substituted by Appadurai’s five landscape types:13 ideo, technological, media, financial, ethno. These landscapes do not claim to describe the world systematically but just to identify trends in the global world. These landscapes, which cannot be harmonized in an ordered map, indicate a total detachment between political authority and social space. Through these trends, the state figures as an institution undergoing a deep crisis and beating a retreat. It is an institution that is losing its power. In fact, as Bauman affirms, we are witnessing a divorce between power, that is worldwide, and politics based on nation-state that is local.14 11
12 13 14
James Anderson, Ch. Brook, Allan Cochrane (ed.), A Global World: Re-ordering Political Space (Oxford: The Open University, 1995); James. N. Rosenau, Turbolence in World Politics. Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Anthony D. Smith, D.J. Solinger, C.S. Topik, States and Sovereignty in the Global Economy (LondonNew York: Routledge, 1999); Andrea Borghini, Governance and Nation-state, in Alessandro Gobbicchi (a cura di), Globalization, Armed Conflicts and Security, (Soveria Mannelli; Rubbettino Editore, 2004), 47–56; Neil Brenner, Beyond State-Centrism? Space, Territoria lity, and Geographical Scale in Globalizing Studies, theory and society, 28, no. 1, (1999): 39–78; Matthew Horsman, Andrew Marshall, After the nation-state: citizens, tribalism and the new world disorder (London: HarperCollins, 1994); John Keane, Civil society and the state: new european perspectives (London: Verso, 1988); Anthony G. McGrew, Paul G. Lewis (ed.), Global politics. Globalization and the nation-state (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). Manuel Castel, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996). Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at large (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).
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In this scenario we were expecting the demise of the nation-state and its substitution with some other political organization, for example global governance. On the contrary, the state hasn’t demised. The recent global economic crisis has showed that the state isn’t diminishing, on the contrary, it has lead to the revival of the state within a process of deglobalization.15 Lachmann argues: States will become even more powerful because they are the only organizations with the capacity to foster economic development, provide social benefits, and shelter their citizens from predatory foreign investors, as well as from the effects of environmental catastrophes elsewhere.16 This is testimony to the fact that whatever concerns the state is more complex and highlights the state’s unexpected resilience. In fact many scholars have prematurely declared the demise of state but Lachmann’s assessment shows that concerns over future of state are more complex. State, Globalization and Deglobalization The recent global economic crisis has highlighted a return, in Europe, to the state lexicon (e.g. efsf: European Financial Stability Facility).17 According to Altman, “the long movement toward market liberalization has stopped and a new period of State intervention, reregulation and creeping protectionism has begun”.18 The globalization index of kof – Swiss Economic Institute – shows there was a clear break for economic globalization in 2009: “The bursting of the dot com bubble and the events of 9/11 merely slowed down the pace of globa lization; the latest economic and financial crisis has, however, created a severe setback for the globalization process.”19 Global trade, capital flows, 15
Analysts define Deglobalization as a process of diminishing interdependence and integration between the nation-states. It is used to underline the periods of history when economic trade and investment between countries decline. 16 Lachmann, States and Power, 206. 17 The European Financial Stability (efsf) was created as a temporary crisis resolution mechanism for some european countries. We want to emphasize that the economic crisis has led to a massive return, in the public language, and not just academic, of the importance of the state, seen as the guarantor of the welfare of the population and with a role of protection against the menaces of globalization. In other words, a more active role of politics is invoked and the state is still considered the only legitimate representative of the politics. 18 Roger. C. Altman, “Globalization in retreat” foreign affairs 88, no. 4, (July/August 2009): 1. 19 kof Index of Globalization, “Economic Crisis Brings Economic Globalization to Fall”, 2012/03/16: 1.
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and immigration are declining while in the past deregulation, privatization, and the openness of borders to capital and trade were rising.20 We’re witnessing in this period a double intertwined phenomena: a process of deglobalization and a revival of the state and the two processes are strictly linked. For instance, Delwaide affirms, “…massive government-financed rescue operations for banking and insurance industries in the United States and in Europe, seeking to contain the financial crisis that culminated in 2008, amounted to the biggest, broadest and fastest government response in history”.21 Recently, the role of the state is expanding again, together with a reregulation of markets. This is evident in the United States, where President Obama has moved toward a more active and bigger government. The quasi nationalization of the banking and automotive industries, as well as the pending reform of the financial system, makes this clear.22 Another sign of the continuing relevance of states is the prominence that borders have retained under contemporary globalization. National borders continue to negatively affect trade, even when largely free of cultural or trade barriers, such as between the us and Canada. Large economies, i.e., that of the United States, continue to conduct the largest part of their business within national borders. International migration, often seen as an essential aspect of contemporary globalization, remains rather modest in comparison with the mobility of capital, and this is despite the fact that labor does remain the most important factor of production, and that the labor market is the only market in which many poor countries really do have something to offer. Labor mobility was actually much more prominent – some would argue, more important than trade – during the previous globalization when, at the end of the 19th century, Europeans migrated massively, primarily toward the us, thus reducing income differences within the Atlantic world. The conclusion is, then, that “although the neo-liberals encouraged the dismantling of many of the institutional arrangements and outward forms of the post-war state, they did not reduce the scope or scale of the state very much. They merely redirected its energy and its targets”.23 In this scenario we deal with a protectionist state, a state passed from market support to regain the centre of the political scene in order to protect national economies, with some collateral consequences, such as the revival of economic nationalism.
20 21 22 23
Altman, “Globalization in retreat”. Jacobus Delwaide, “The Return of the State?” european affairs 19, no. 1 (2011): 69. Altman, “Globalization in retreat”. Delwaide, “The Return of the State?”, 73.
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In my opinion this scenario shows us a central feature of the state: its ambivalence. The protectionist state against the free market but also the protective state against the negative effects of the free-market or against terrorism. Many policymakers tend to underestimate if not ignore the importance of one crucial player, the state, in front of the inability of market actors to regulate themselves.24 Beyond what you might think of it (i.e. an invention or a real fact) it is certain that this word is once again, after a long period of neglect, at the center of the debate, though not necessarily understood in positive meaning. Global Governance and the State According to Barnett and Duvall “absent an adequate supply of global governance, states are likely to retreat behind protective barriers and re-create the conditions for enduring conflict. Global Governance is thought to bring out the best in international community and rescue it from its worst instincts.”25 In global governance, the state plays a fundamental role. If we focus on the role of the state in Europe,26 an author as Cassese stresses the ability of it to penetrate global institutions, and in doing so, it is becoming a market builder in new sectors; Cassese underlines also the strategy of infranationalism, that enables the state to keep the eu under control through middle range officials, establishing a meso-level of governance.27 Le Galès also takes up similar idea when writing about the state in Europe, and actually hints at a different definition of the state. First, the author holds 24 25
26 27
Vivien. A. Schmidt, “Putting the political back into political economy by bringing the state back in yet again”, world politics 61, no. 3 (2009): 516–546. Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, Power in Global Governance (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2005), 1. This statement of Burning and Duvall at the beginning of their text indicates a road master, one that puts the state within the architecture of the global governance not necessarily in terms of conflict, but complementary. The authors describe the process of construction of the global governance as difficult because there is a mutual tendency by supranational organizations and states to increase or maintain shares of global power placing itself in competition with each other, rather than in terms collaborative and of real governance. With the term global governance or world governance we mean a movement towards political integration of transnational actors aimed at negotiating responses to problems that affect more than one state or region. Typical institutions of Global Governance are the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the World Bank. They tend to have limited or demarcated power to enforce compliance. In this paragraph we refers explicitly to the ongoing transformation of the state in Europe. Sabino Cassese, La crisi dello Stato (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2002).
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that the ability of the state to resist and re-emerge (he calls it the resilient state) when faced with the numerous crises that have affected it, should lead to caution in any discussions concerning its crisis and demise. He refers to the crisis produced by the global economy, the building of the European union and so on. Taking Europe and the state formed within it as the field of analysis, the author claims that it has been subjected to several disjunctures that make traditional definitions rather inappropriate.28 This framework has led many authors29 to abandon the traditional vision of the state in Europe, embarking on a path that increasingly sees the state as detached from territory, fragmented, with a divided general interest, stabilized and organized social and political forces. This, however, highlights a vacuum that the state itself is trying to fill by reorganizing its structures. We are witnessing a redistribution of authority, which is also taking place within individual states. Individual groups of power can use the structures of the European Union to activate national reforms. National élites can no longer pretend to fully protect their citizens, but they can use the pressures and the risks of the new political and economical environment to justify an expansion of intervention in some domains and retreat from others.30 Therefore, Le Galès concludes that the strongest states, in an return of the struggle for survival, know how to react and adapt to new conditions. He argues: “What we are now witnnessing may therefore mark a new phase, rather than the end, of the State story.”31 From this point of view, the real challenge for a useful and efficient global governance is to turn around the weakening role of the state and to considering its crucial role in the political processes and not its demise. Thus, the debate is on the following question: more or less power to the state? There are two different perspectives on this matter. First, that sees the c rucial role of the state in suturing the different levels of governance processes. In Hirst and Thompson opinion, the central functions of the state will become those of providing legitimacy for and ensuring the accountability of supranational and
28
29 30 31
Patrick Le Galès, “New Phase of the State Story in Europe” in The Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology, ed. Kate Nash and Alan Scott (Malden: Blackwell, 2001): 402; Andrea Borghini, “The National Basis of a Sociology Without Borders” in Uncertainty and Insecurity in the New Age. ed. Vincent Parrillo (New York: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, The City University, 2009): 3–11. Giandomenico Majone, Regulating Europe (London: Routledge, 1996); Vincent Wright and Sabino Cassese, La recomposition de l’Etat en Europe (Paris: La Decouverte, 1996). Le Galès, “New Phase of the State Story in Europe”, 401. Ibid., 397.
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s ubnational governance mechanisms.32 Second, Governance without Govern ment33 is, in Rosenau and Czempiel reflection, the best solution in order to avoid all the deficits of legitimacy. This includes in input and output, for instance: the Jurisdictional Deficit: the national level that has to decide about global problems (for instance climate change); the Operative Deficit: missing information about the causal chains of the phenomenon (role of ngos as a support in this problem); the Motivational Deficit: how to convince States to participate in processes; the Participation Deficit: decisions are the result of collective polls. As Benjamin Cohen concludes: “No one else enjoys the legitimacy that comes with internationally recognized sovereignty, nor can any other actor legally exercise the ultimate right of coercion. The state is privileged in analysis because it is privileged in reality.”34 From the analysis of the global economic and political context, comes out, I believe, an analytical turning point in which the idea of the state as a monolithic unit is abandoned, and idea of the state as a flexible and adaptable construction emerges. It is not a coherent, unitary and autonomous actor;35 it is detached from territory, fragmented, with a divided general interest, and stabilized and organized social and political forces.36 This dismantles the possible contradiction, for example, between a strong state, domestically (in its national territory) and a weak state, internationally. From the Welfare State to the Penal State This phenomenon highlights how, with the demise of the welfare state, we are witnessing the growth of a security state. The sociologist Wacquant has analyzed these dynamics in some of his most prominent works37 offering an overview of the transformation of the poor classes in usa. He underlines the 32 33 34 35 36 37
Paul Q. Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in question (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 257. James Rosenau and Erns-Otto Czempiel Governance without Government. Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1992). Benjamin Cohen in Delwaide, “The Return of the State?”, 71. Timothy Mitchell, “Everyday Metaphors of Power”, theory and society 19, no. 5 (1991): 545–577. Le Galès, “New Phase of the State Story in Europe”. Löic Wacquant, Punishing the Poor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009a); Löic Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009b).
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increase in security policies leading to the social control of about 6 million individuals in the United States (above all, black people and latinos), and the contemporary diminishing social guarantees for the same classes. The origin of this passage from the welfare state to the penal state dates back to changes in the productive process from fordist to flexible, which led to the expulsion of the socially weakest members of population. Taking the marxist theoretical assumption regarding the reserve labor force, and bringing it up to date, he finds that this trend has, to a large extent, led to the criminalization of poverty. It is therefore to be attributed to the capital’s offensive, which needs to control the social order manu militari38 also because the regular manner of social spending is regressing and being revised everywhere. Wacquant’s manifesto affirms, “decline of the economic State, diminishing of the Welfare State, increasing of the Penal State.”39 In the usa, for instance, an increase in the rate of incarceration started in the ‘80s.40 Great example is famous slogan Zero Tolerance in the mid-90s during Rudolph Giuliani tenure as a mayor of New York City signaling increasing strength of the penal state. This trend is continuing even today. The political direction of security, has, first and foremost, the function of permitting established leaders, as well as those aspiring to become so, to easily reaffirm the capacity of action of the state. It is while, taking up the dogma of neo-liberalism, that those same leaders underline the impotence of the state in economic and social matters. In fact as argued by Wacquant, “…the generalized gardening of police, judicial and correctional policies…partakes of a triple transformation of the state,…wedding the amputation of its economic arm, the retraction of its social bosom, and the massive expansion of its penal fist”.41 The revival of the state, in the form of a penal state, is corroborated, through various perspectives by other scholars i.e, Simon, Bauman, Coleman and Sim. Albeit in different ways, they all insist on a restructuring of the state through managing its criminal aspects and in so doing re-legitimating the state itself. Zygmunt Bauman42 discusses a new role taken on by the nation-state in many of his writings. The nation-state, having lost cultural and economic 38
Manu militari is a latin expression which means ‘the use of military forces’. It is also popular in the common language, because is used to stigmatize situations put in place by forms of coercion or abuse. 39 Löic Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009b). 40 Bureau of Justice Statistics, ‘Bullettin’ (may 1999); James Austin and John Irwin, It’s About Time: America’s Imprisonment Binge (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2001). 41 Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, 4. 42 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: the Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
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prerogatives it once held, has dedicated itself to guaranteeing the right type of security as a new right for and of the globalized citizen. But it is a security which is no longer that of the origin of the state, that is social security, positive security, a recognition of social expectations and participation, but rather negative security, safety, in the sense of a guarantee and defense of physicalpatrimonial individual safety. The strengthening of this typology of state (the penal state) has, among its effects, the mass imprisonment. So, in this regard, Simon and Sim emphasize the revival of the state. In Simon’s reflection “mass incarceration allows the political order to deal with the most delicate problem, that of criminality, with a solution which deploys itself at a procedural level which is the only area in which it can achieve success”.43 On the other hand, from Sim’s perspectives, the State exists and is constituted through alliances and partnerships… which define its boundaries and scope of action. Neither sovereignty nor state power is in decline, but these categories are both procedural and dialectical and are subject to rescaling and relegitimation. Indeed the capacity and ideological fervor of local state actors to govern through particular forms of crime has been neglected in risk-orientated analysis….44
State and Global Culture
In believe the state remains an important actor also for the comprehension of the dynamics of global culture because: the reorganization of state functions and tasks in a homologous way to the organization of the global space (flows, network and so on); the redefinition of the relationship between state and nation,45 and the identification of its power also as a symbolic power. But what 43
44
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Jonathan Simon, Governing through Crime. How the War on Crime Transformed the American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford: The Oxford University Press, 2007). Roy Coleman and Joe Sim, “Contemporary Statecraft and the punitive obsession: a critique of the new penology” in The New Punitiveness. Trends, Theories, Perspectives, ed. John Pratt, David Brown, Mark Brown, Simon Hallsworth and Wayne Morrison (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 104. Martin Albrow The Global Age. State and Society Beyond Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? (London: Seagull Books, 2009).
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is the relationship between nation-state and global culture? While thinking about global culture, Featherstone had already called for analyzing a classic third culture “which cannot be merely understood as the product of bilateral exchanges between nation-state. It is therefore misleading to conceive a global culture as necessarily entailing a weakening of the sovereignty of nationstates.”46 We need a perspective on global culture in order to understand how individuals oppose, resist and re-center globalization and how people negotiate a sense of identity and belonging in a global context. There are several different perspectives on this point. These offer interesting interpretations in order to understand the evolution of the state and its ability to influence people from a cultural point of view at a global level, for example Bourdieu’s perspective.47 Hence, in this part of my contribution I wish to focus more on the identification of the power of the state as a symbolic power. In 1999 George Stein metz edited a volume of collected works in which the state is analyzed as being very closely tied to cultural themes. This volume brings together the works of scholars from various backgrounds. Steinmetz’s volume is particularly relevant because, starting from the ‘cultural turn’ in social sciences, it identifies a new way of interpreting both the cultural and political dynamics in state-culture connections. According to some authors that Steinmetz includes in his book, culture is part of the definition of the state and not only of the theory of the State: in his contribution Tilly notes that his definition incorporates cultures – seen as shared understandings and their representations – at each step along the way. And Timothy Mitchell argues that a cultural ‘state effect’ – a perceveid distinction between state and society – is produced through various symbolic and ideological techniques. This cultural effect is no less part of the phenomenon ‘state’ than the organizations and agents controlling coercion and exercising jurisdiction within a given territory.48 This approach makes it possibile to identify a research focus which makes the state a cultural object, regardless of both those who prophesize its demise 46 47 48
Mike Featherstone, Global Culture (London: Sage, 1990), 1. I refer to the theory of the state as a bureaucratic field in Bourdieu. For this, see Pierre Bourdieu, Sur l’Etat (Paris: Raison d’agir, 2012). George Steinmetz, State/Culture. State-Formation after the Cultural Turn (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 8.
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under the blows of globalization, and those who have theorized its historical and conceptual irrelevance. In the first case, many theorists of globalization have confused the failure of the political will with a loss of structural capacity: “the State still has crucial advantages over other actors in the effort to construct hegemonic identities and to unify the centripetal identification within any given territory along nationalist lines…the State may come to occupy central position among various sites of social power….”.49 As suggested by Michael Mann state may try to crystallize as the center of a number of power networks.50 In the second case, “Foucault himself concedes that the State retained a special status even after the disciplinary revolution of the nineteenth century, although some of his followers fail to recognize this”.51 Anyway, it is not about putting the state on a pedastal, but rather considering the reciprocal influences, in terms of its symbolic dimensions and social representations, between state and culture. By doing so, this opens up the research field and implies a reconsideration of the classic paradigm in the theory of the state, or at least that pertaining to a sociological matrix. Regarding this, we can follow French sociologist Bourdieu’s reflection on the state as the holder of symbolic power. Symbolic power is defined as “the power of constituting the given through utterances, of making people see and believe, of confirming or transforming the vision of the world and, thereby, action on the world and thus the world itself.”52 Pierre Bourdieu elaborated the notion of symbolic power within an array of reflections on the genealogy and effects of the state. He started with the concept of the state’s thought, that is the state that ‘thinks for itself’ and produces the categories with which anything else can be thought, for example society: “One of the major powers of the state is to produce and impose (especially through the school system) categories of thought that we spontaneously apply to all things of the social world – including the state itself.”53 What I find most compelling for the arguments put forth in this chapter is that in Bourdieu’s analysis, the state proceeds not solely with respect to its legal-normative guise as the origin of externally imposed order, but also at an internal molecular level of institutions. These are positioned to transform, constitute, and condition the mental structures of individuals by 49 Ibid., 11. 50 Mann, The Autonomous Power, 12. 51 Steinmetz, State/Culture, 12. 52 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1991), 71. 53 Pierre Bourdieu, Löic Wacquant and Samar Farage, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field”, sociological theory 12, no. 4 (1994): 2.
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means of socialization channels already established to accomplish such tasks: the school and family. The state provides us with our social identities, modeling them for us, and it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to escape. Both formal and cognitive levels referring to one another continuously, and adherence seems to be both immediate and impulsive because individuals consider it to be consonant with the actual structures of daily life.54 Once Boudieu’s ideas on symbolic power of state is bridged with ideas by other scholars55 such as symbolic power could be understood as a metapower that presides over all other forms of social power. It establishes the practices, categories, and cognitive schemes with which we organize society’s thought and place our individual actions within it. Symbolic power is not simply the power to organize the rules of the game; rather it is the power intrinsic to the game itself, the power to enframe the game itself.56 Traditional definitions of the state based upon the linkage between political organization, territorial jurisdiction and control over the exercise of physical coercion, are not wrong but rather incomplete. States is not only administrative, policing, and military organization. State is also pedagogical, corrective, and ideological organizations. As Loveman argues symbolic power is the reason for which power is legitimate and upon which the obedience to rules rests: “Through the establishment and routinization of myriad administrative practices, the modern State may actively constitute the subjects in whose name it claims to exist legitimately.”57 The linkage between the state and symbolic power shows itself in many practices, i.e. taking censuses, making maps, building museums, developing civil registries, creating tax lists, surveying the land, and developing other strategies to render the land and people legible for administrative purposes.58 All of this helps to remake geography and society along the lines deemed relevant by and for the state. Symbolic power is a paradoxical power because it derives from the recognition of legitimate authority, but, at the same time, it produces its effects through misrecognition, i.e. the very appearance that no power is being wielded at all. It is a sort of metapower that accrues to the carriers of specific 54
Andrea Borghini, Potere simbolico e immaginario sociale. Lo Stato nella vita quotidiana (Trieste: Asterios, 2009). 55 See also Loveman and Mitchell. 56 Mara Loveman, “The Modern State and the Primitive Accumulation of Symbolic Power”, american journal of sociology 110, no. 6 (2005): 1651–1683; Mitchell, “Society, Economy”. 57 Ibid., 1653. 58 Ibid.
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forms of power to the extent that their particular basis of power is recognized as legitimate. Bureaucratic administration is at the heart of the modern state’s ability to exercise symbolic power. Written documents and registers enable the state to contain, embrace, and penetrate individual lives. Bureaucratic administration enables the state to define more effectively the parameters of individual identities and existence and to gain control over the production, unification, codification, and dissemination of knowledge in order to constitute the natural order of things.59
A New Paradigm for the State?
The most obvious conclusion that can be drawn from what has been illustrated above is that the political scene is much more complex and uneven than it appears to be, and the state apparatus refuses to bow out. To counter its own demise, the state increases the flexibility and adaptability of its structures. This leads us to consider the state as an autonomous and substantive actor, and enables us to hypothesize a different and alternative theory of the state. First, the state does not exist; but rather several ones do, and some are stronger than others. Second, some parts of the state lose their importance and others maintain or even reinforce their importance.60 And third, the concepts introduced so far as well as their relational dynamics lead on to some remarks about the future development of the state and particularly about its relationship to the notion of nation and the giving up of the ‘territorial trap’. These conclusions allow us to build a history of the state that is partially different from the one we already know. The Divorce between State and Nation A divorce between state and nation is desired by many.61 Thereby the state frees new energies and demonstrates that it has all the capacities to be represented and imagined with the same evocative and mobilization capacity as an 59
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Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. (London: Verso, 1991); James Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998). Le Galès, “New Phase of the State Story in Europe”; Istvan Hont, “The permanent crisis of a divided mankind: ‘Contemporary crisis of the nation state’ in historical perspective” in Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State?, ed. John Dunn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 168; Guy Peters, Governance, Politics and the State (New York: St. Martins Press, 2000). Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State?; Albrow, The Global Age.
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istorical prerogative of the nation. In Butler’opinion we must get rid of the h negative part of the state linked to nationalism and maintain and sustain the abstract structures with which we are allied. In reality, the hyphen that joins state and the nation may be an element of disjunction and not of everlasting union. This is because the state is the legal structure, and legal entities that define a certain territory serve as the matrix for all the obligations of citizenship. The assumption is that the strength of the Butler family history of the state is still strong and that, in spite of global capital, the political structure is still preserved in the abstract state, a statement that, in my opinion, is contrary to Bauman and approaches that of Bourdieu. The conclusion is that the state is a minimal abstract structure that must be defended because of the origin of distribution. One could argue that the state uses the nation as a terrain on which to build and perpetuate its legitimation and truth. In fact, the nation, like the state, was invented and socially built; the root of the term nation connects it to ‘natives’. We were born amidst relationships that are naturally situated in a place. This form of relationship, which is primary and can be situated, is of fundamental importance from a human and natural point of view. However, the jump from this type of belonging to something similar to the modern nation-state is totally artificial.62 Again, “…the nation is an abstraction, an allegory, a myth that does not correspond to a reality that can be scientifically defined….”.63 The conclusion is that nations are imaginary constructs that for their very existence depend upon an apparatus of cultural narrations in which imagination literature plays a central role. Narrations, of whatever type, tell us about the world but not the entire world, they make selections and therefore contribute to the building of foundation myths which are necessary for man to justify his place in the world and to defeat his ontological insecuritas. Identifying an origin, a zero-point of beginning “…enables ritual repetition, ritualization of memory, celebration, commemoration, − in short all those forms of magical behavior signifying defeat of the irreversibility of time.”64 The second step consists in delimiting space, locking society in a space with no way out. It is evident that from this point of view there is a connection between state (closed space) and foundation myth, which the state uses for its own legitimation. This objective is attained by the influence of state politics/policy on literary production. 62 63 64
Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing for Form” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 44. See also Benedict Anderson, Imaged Community. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 51.
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In Albrow’s opinion, whether by law or through collaborative transnational practices, the rationality of the state reveals what was always its potential, namely its objective and universalizable quality distinct from any particular nationhood: the state’s root is no longer in the nation; its extent is worldwide. It does not belong to a particular set of people at a particular time, “…the State in the Global Age is uprooted, and the origins of its rules are multilocal, polycentrically administered.”65 From this point of view, it is now possible to think of the state as a worldwide web of practices, with no one center. The state has become a globally extended sphere of meaningful activities. In the global age, the state has penetrated deeply into the daily routines of the lives of ordinary people. If we take this time perspective, we can see that the state is manifested in and through the activities of its entire people as much as those of a titular head or central organ of government. The Territorial Trap Now I want to turn to a discussion about the territorial trap, presenting some approaches that go beyond the traditional idea of the state based on the triad population-territory-nation. The first approach belongs to Ulrich Beck with his theory of the leaving out the epistemology of state-centrism, moving away from methodological nationalism to methodological cosmopolitanism.66 By methodological nationalism, Beck means a social vision that studies cultural, social, and political dimensions through alternative and opposite categories such as ‘either…or’. In Beck’s opinion, this tradition comes from sociology’s tendency to study society in relation to the nation-state to which it belongs. Nation-states create and contain society and, therefore, they define the frontiers of sociology. Beck contrasts this version with methodological cosmopolitanism. Like other authors who espouse this new vision of sociology, Beck shares a similar reading of sociology’s history, emphasizing an approach based on the inclusive comparisons of ‘and…and’. The same reality is ongoing at a cosmopolitan level; for instance, the German sociologist refers to public demonstrations around the world against the Iraq war in 2003. In Beck’s opinion, we thus need a new cosmopolitan vision, centered on a borderless world; we need to challenge the iron grip of the nation-state on the social imagination.67 65 Albrow, The Global Age, 64. 66 Ulrich Beck, La società cosmopolita. Prospettive dell’epoca postnazionale, (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003). Andrea Wimmer and Nina Schiller Glick, “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences”, global networks 2, no. 4 (2002): 301–334; Chernilo, The Social Theory. 67 Peter Taylor, “Embedded Statism and the Social Sciences: Opening Up to New Spaces”, environment and planning 28 (1996): 1917–1928.
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The second approach is discussed by the sociologist Neil Brenner. As theorized by Brenner,68 we have to leave out the perspective of a monolithic state. The state is not a geographical and natural unit naturally linked to a territory (the territorial trap) as a self-enclosed geographical container of socioeconomic and politico-cultural relations. Thus, there arises the need for new modes of analysis that do not naturalize the state territoriality and its associated cartesian image of space as a static, bounded block. The old approach sees space as an a-storic realm, fixed in time, subjected to a methodological territorialism that analyzes all spatial forms and scales as being self-enclosed and territorially bounded geographical units. The alternative approach proposed by Brenner entails the territoriality of the state at both sub-and supra-national scales. Brenner argues: “States continue to operate as essential sites of territorialization for social political and economic relations, even if the political geography of this territorialization process no longer converges exclusively upon any single, self-enclosed geographical scale.”69 Here is the Glocal State, the Network State: it still plays a critical role in shaping markets by mediating these connections between the local and the global and by influencing how local specific assets are mobilized within the range of opportunities available in the global economy. “…State is increasingly moving toward a position of a network State, embedded in a variety of levels and types of governance institution….”.70 The re-scaling of the state is not only a defensive response to intensified global economic competition, but also a concerted strategy to create new scales of state regulation to facilitate and coordinate the globalization process. On one scale, states have promoted economic globalization with the formation of supranational economic blocs: eu, nafta, asean; on sub-state scales, meanwhile, states have devolved substantial aspects of their governance capacities to regional and local institutions, which are better positioned to restructure major urban regions.71 The organizational structure and strategy of these glocal states are only now beginning to be explored. The state that connects a wide range of local networks to a diverse set of global actors and networks must itself be more decentralized and flexible than states that previously presided over a centrally negotiated national development coalition.
68 69 70 71
Brenner, “Beyond State Centrism? Space, Territoriality, and Geographical Scale”. Ibid., 70. Sean Riain, “States and Markets in an Era of Globalization”, annual review of sociology 26 (2000), 203. Brenner, “Beyond State-Centrism?”, 66.
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Along the same lines, Saskia Sassen72 introduces her theme of denationalization, namely the idea that globalization has its place even in the country. Disaggregating the state makes it clear that some of its functions become more powerful than the behavior of the global economy and that the states are not submissive in front of the environment in the process of change, but react and maintain their positions of power. As we have seen, these approaches are very useful in describing the leaving out of an old conception of the state as tightly linked to the territory (the territorial trap) and enclosed in fixed boundaries.
Concluding Remarks
The genealogical reading of the state carried out here invites us to adopt concepts that are still rich, unexplored, and too rapidly held to be obsolete. It does not obviously equate to abandoning a modern perspective, but rather situating it within the second modernity of Beck and Giddens that looks towards the transformations of the state.73 According to them, even the nation-state, like other basic institutions of first modernity such as the nuclear family, are subjected to a transformation, a sign of a shift from first to second modernity. For instance, Beck and Lau argue: …all Western societies are still modern societies: there has been no movement beyond the realm of the modern to its opposite, because there has been no clear break with the basic principles of modernity but rather a transformation of basic institutions of modernity (for example, the Nation-State and the nuclear family). We would suggest, therefore, that what we are witnessing is a second modernity, a modernity which at the same time retrieves those aspects of its nature which include autonomous author as well as flexibility….74 We must therefore become aware of a new and founding theoretical paradigm of the state and its power, the pulsing nucleus of which is found in the state’s capacity to organize the world, to elaborate codes and to influence 72 Sassen, A Sociology. 73 Beck, Giddens and Lash, The Reflexive Modernization Theory. 74 Ulrich Beck and Christoph Lau, “Second modernity as a research agenda: theoretical and empirical explorations in the ‘meta-change’ of modern society”, british journal of sociology 56, no. 4 (2005): 525–526, 530.
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disciplines. Faced with these global crises, the events of which the state is both a victim and a protagonist must be read momentarily ignoring the most visible and manifest dimension, which is represented by the most functionalist and material aspects. These events must also be read examining the more latent contexts tied to the symbolic dimension that give rise to the obliging meanings that preside over rituals and customs. The legitimacy of this vision also emerges from the role of society and its relationship with the state. One can suppose that this historical phase stimulates some form of engulfment or better, eclipse of the state. However, it is not the definitive eclipse oft-announced and wished for by many analysts,75 but rather a momentary eclipse of a new phase of the state, or maybe of the manifestation of a phase that has always been present but as yet has never fully emerged. Instead, I refer to the state that goes back to society, to which it is tied historically in a dialectical relationship. The state does not die, because power, which the state holds, is physical and symbolic: it does not die but is transformed. And the state transforms with it and takes on once again the responsibility of society. The eclipse is therefore behind the horizon of society, and therefore it is there that the state can be found again and recognized in its thousands of practices and latencies; it is society that must be explored and studied to garner the signs of the presence of the state. The conclusion is that sociologists have to concentrate their efforts at this level of analysis in order to understand the complex political dynamics of our time and by doing so the political comes back to society. What I have discussed in this chapter represents both the discussion state’s present and state’s past. The first needs further exploration and analysis, while the second reveals a different and minor history and path of the state behind the state and the dominating theory. It is a history that reveals its outlines and plots only today, an era of crisis but also characterized by the emergence of long-latent logics and dynamics. Bibliography Albrow, Martin. The Global Age. State and Society Beyond Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Altman, Roger. C. “Globalization in retreat”. FOREIGN AFFAIRS, 88, no. 4, (July/August, 2009): 1–6. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at large. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 75
See Introduction.
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Barnett, Michael and Raymond Duvall. Power in Global Governance. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2005. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: the Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Beck, Ulrich. La società cosmopolita. Prospettive dell’epoca postnazionale. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Beck, Ulrich and Christoph Lau. “Second modernity as a research agenda: theoretical and empirical explorations in the ‘meta-change’ of modern society.” BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, 56, no. 4 (2005): 525–557. Beck, Ulrich, Wolfgang Bonss and Christoph Lau. “The Theory of Reflexive Modernization. Problematic, Hypotheses and Research Programme.” THEORY, CULTURE AND SOCIETY 20, no. 2 (2003): 1–33. Borghini, Andrea. Potere simbolico e immaginario sociale. Lo Stato nella vita quotidiana. Trieste: Asterios, 2009a. Borghini, Andrea. “The National Basis of a Sociology Without Borders.” In Uncertainty and Insecurity in the New Age, 3–11. Ed. by Vincent Parrillo. New York: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, The City University, 2009b. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1991. Bourdieu, Pierre. Sur l’Etat. Paris: Raison d’agir, 2012. Bourdieu, Pierre, Wacquant, Löic and Farage, Samar. “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field.” SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY 12, no. 4 (1994): 1–18. Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form.” in Nation and Narration, 44–71. Ed. by Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1999. Brenner, Neil. “Beyond State-Centrism? Space, Territoriality, and Geographical Scale,” THEORY AND SOCIETY 28, no. 1 (1999): 39–78. Butler, Judith and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Who Sings the Nation-State?. London: Seagull Books, 2009. Cassese, Sabino. La crisi dello Stato. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2002. Chernilo, Daniel. A Social Theory of the Nation-State. London: Routledge, 2007. Coleman, Roy and Joe Sim. “Contemporary Statecraft and the punitive obsession: a critique of the new penology.” in The New Punitiveness. Trends, Theories, Perspectives, 101–118. Ed. by John Pratt, David Brown, Mark Brown, Simon Hallsworth and Wayne Morrison. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Delwaide, Jacobus. “The Return of the State?” EUROPEAN REVIEW 19, no. 1 (2011): 69–91. Featherstone, Mike. Global Culture. London: Sage, 1990. Hirst, Paul Q. and Thompson Grahame. Globalization in question. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. KOF Index of Globalization. “Economic Crisis Brings Economic Globalization to Fall”, 2012/03/16: 1–7.
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Lachmann, Richard. States and Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. Le Galès, Patrick. “New Phase of the State Story in Europe.” In Companion The Blackwell to Political Sociology, 396–407. Ed. by Kate Nash and Alan Scott. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Loveman, Mara. “The Modern State and the Primitive Accumulation of Symbolic Power.” AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 105, no. 6 (2005): 1651–1683. Mann, Michael. “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results.” In States in History, 109–136. Ed. By John A. Hall. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Marinetto, Michael. Social Theory, the State and Modern Society. Berkshire (EN): Open University Press, 2007. Riain, Sean. “States and Markets in an Era of Globalization.” ANNUAL REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY 26, (2000): 187–213. Rosenau, James and Czempiel Erns-Otto. Governance without Government. Order and Change in World Politics. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1992. Schmidt, Vivien A. “Putting the political back into political economy by bringing the state back in yet again.” WORLD POLITICS 61, no. 3 (2009): 516–546. Simon, Jonathan. Governing through Crime. How the War on Crime Transformed the American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. Oxford: The Oxford University Press, 2007. Steinmetz, George. State/Culture. State-Formation after the Cultural Turn. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Taylor, Peter. “Embedded Statism and the Social Sciences: Opening Up to New Spaces.” ENVIRONMENT AND PLANNING 28 (1996): 1917–1928.
chapter 5
Faustian States: Nationalist Politics and the Problem of Legitimacy in the Neoliberal Era Cory Blad* Nationalism, it would seem, is a resurgent force in local (i.e., national) politics. From xenophobic anti-migration movements and policies to the tearful hand wringing of pundits bemoaning the rise of some sort of cultural diffusion as a sign of an apocalyptic end. The notion that nationalism, in some respective form, has become increasingly powerful is nearly cliché. More than simply anecdotal, however, the increased efficacy of monolithic nationalist politics has come to play a much more prominent role in both rhetorical and practical governance of many respective states. More to the point, the contemporary resurgence of monolithic nationalism appears to have increasingly tangible electoral benefits. In cases ranging from the Front national in France, to the Finns Party in Finland, to the sustained success of the Justice and Development Party (akp) in Turkey, political authority and monolithic nationalist legitimation initiatives appear with notable frequency. The superficial implication is that this is somehow unique to the contemporary era and is complicated by the historical longevity of cultural integration into nationalist political discourse. Commenting on the role of Christianity in American politics, Domke and Coe argue, “religion has always been a political subtext in the US, but in the past few decades the salience and strategic use of religion have become ascendant in a manner not seen before in modern American political history.”1 This chapter offers a theoretical examination of this trend, specifically focusing on the rise of nationalist politics as a causal outcome of the effect neoliberalism has on the legitimacy of actual and potential state actors. While the claim that a facet of so-called globalization has motivated this rise in cultural politics is certainly not new, the tendency has been to emphasize the rise of identity-centered movements in relation to the declining authoritative role of the state. Put simply, the state is commonly viewed as an extraneous or
* Manhattan College. 1 David Domke and Kevin Coe, “The God Strategy: The Rise of Religious Politics in America,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 42.1 (2007): 54.
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decreasingly relevant institution having been superseded by transnational capitalism or the increased power of national movements. In contrast, I argue that the state remains an authoritative socio-economic institution. However, the ideological dictates of contemporary globalization have altered the strategic legitimation capacities in advanced capitalist states. As neoliberalism becomes increasingly hegemonic, the economic regulatory and social protectionist capacities of respective states are reduced. This relationship between economic protectionism and legitimacy is derived from Karl Polanyi’s “double movement” concept that informs the larger theoretical framework utilized in this chapter. Put simply, the reduction in actual or perceived capacity to satisfy economic protectionist demands can certainly have a diminishing effect on the national legitimation of offending state actors and institutions. As Marxian state theory reminds us, a (if not the) primary state function is the maintenance of positive social conditions for capital accumulation.2 Polanyi goes further in basing his understanding of the state on the fact that capital accumulation can neither legitimate itself nor sustain any semblance of balanced resource distribution. Therefore, the role of the Polanyian state is to mitigate these adverse conditions through redistributive socio-economic protectionism, as will be discussed below. This emphasis on protectionism emerging from countermovement demands is of course essential, but incomplete without a similar recognition of the state’s role as a protector of capital accumulation. In the words of Block and Somers: “…the state acted in the interests of society as a whole when it passed protective legislation, and yet the same was true when it passed premarket laws; it clearly did not ‘belong’ to either of these forces.”3 In the current era of neoliberal hegemony, this dual legitimation of the state is increasingly altered to privilege capital accumulation.4 The obvious problem 2 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, (London: Verso, 2012[1848]), 37. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power Socialism, (London: Verso, 2000[1978]), 168. 3 Fred Block and Margaret Somers, “Beyond the Economistic Fallacy: The Holistic Social Science of Karl Polanyi,” Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984): 68. 4 Alberto Alesina and Dani Rodrik, “Distributive Politics and Economic Growth,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 109.2 (1994): 465–490. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). David M. Kotz, “Neoliberalism and the Social Structure of Accumulation Theory of Long-Run Capital Accumulation,” Radical Review of Political Economics 35.3 (2003): 263–270. Vicente Navarro, “Neoliberalism as a Class Ideology; or in the Political Causes of the Growth of Inequalities,” International Journal of Health Services 37.1 (2007): 47–62.
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from a Polanyian perspective is one of systemic stability within a seemingly unbalanced double movement framework. For some this represents a fatal flaw in Polanyian state theorizing;5 I disagree and argue that the double movement not only remains a valuable analytical framework, but also enhances our ability to explain the proportional rise of neoliberalism and nationalist politics if the latter is understood as a mechanism of state legitimation. This chapter argues that the double movement, albeit slightly re-conceptualized, offers an analytical opportunity to examine the role of monolithic nationalism as a strategic means of neoliberal state legitimation. To this end, it is necessary to first establish a conceptual definition of “nationalist politics” and offer analytical support for the presence of such a phenomenon. The second forthcoming section articulates a Polanyian theory of the state and the role of countermovement economic protectionism as a fundamental means of maintaining legitimate authority. The final section examines how a reconceptualization of the double movement offers an opportunity to understand the role of nationalist politics in facilitating state legitimacy despite the raw promotion of capital accumulation.
The Rise of Nationalist Politics
Any operational definition engaging either nationalism or cultural politics will run the risk of omission. The term “nationalist politics” is itself hopelessly vague and must be defined within a specific context. Accordingly, any operational definition hoping to examine the nexus of state legitimation and cultural political strategies must be state-centric. This bias is reflected in the use of the term “nationalist” as opposed to the more movement-oriented focus on “cultural politics.” While this is certainly not a critique of the concept (cultural politics) or corresponding analyses, it is an attempt to return attention to the active role of the state. This conceptual narrowing is limiting, but intentionally so. Therefore, nationalist politics is defined here as the strategic integration of monolithic cultural rhetoric and symbols as a means of acquiring or maintaining legitimate political authority from strategic constituencies. Conceptualized in this way, nationalist politics is certainly nothing new. Anderson and Gellner identify early efforts to legitimate European nation-states 5 Michael Burawoy, “From Polanyi to Pollyanna: The False Optimism of Global Labor Studies,” Global Labor Journal 1.2 (2010): 301–313. Dennis R. Searcy, “Beyond the Self-Regulating Market in Market Society: A Critique of Polanyi’s Theory of the State,” Review of Social Economy 51.2 (1993): 217–231.
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through national re-articulations of local cultural norms.6 The monolithic character of traditional nationalism, including emphases on normative cultural majorities, was articulated as early as Herder’s primordial treatise and later identified by Renan.7 It is only more recently (and in limited cases) that notions of a more integrative nationalism have shifted to more pluralist or cosmopolitan definitions of national cultural identity – notably in the work of scholars such as David Held and Charles Taylor.8 Others, such as Will Kymlicka and Chandran Kukathas,9 critique the nature of cosmopolitan nationalism (to varying degrees) but clearly recognize the context of contemporary cultural pluralism. The argument made here is simply that neoliberal globalization facilitates the reemergence of monolithic nationalism not that this is somehow historically novel. The question then becomes, what has changed to enable such a revival? Two approaches have largely defined inquiries into this contemporary resurgence. The first is movement-oriented and emphasizes a broad shift towards identity and cultural mobilization resulting from structural changes in post-war advanced capitalism. Inspired by Alain Touraine’s early inquiries, many scholars subsequently observed a decline in class-oriented mobilization in favor of so-called new social movements based on cultural affinity and issueorientation.10 The state, from this perspective, is commonly understood as an impediment and mobilization, as well as action, is designed to circumvent traditional political institutions. Castells, for instance, argues that: “contemporary nationalism is more reactive than proactive…more cultural than political, and thus more oriented toward the defense of an already institutionalized culture rather than toward the construction or defense of a state”.11 6
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Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (New York: Verso, 1983). Ernest Gellner, Nationals and Nationalism, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). Johann Gottfried Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Ernest Renan, Qu’est- ce qu’une Nation? (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1882). David Held, Democracy and Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). Chandran Kukathas, “Liberalism and Multiculturalism: The Politics of Indifference,” Political Theory 26.5 (1989): 686–699. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Ronald Inglehart, The Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). Manual Castells, The Power of Identity, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 33.
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The second is a complementary perspective that focuses on the development of global political economic integration (i.e., “globalization”) as a causal mechanism facilitating cultural mobilization. Sub-state sovereignty efforts centered on distinctive cultural claims – Québec, Scotland, Catalonia, for instance – are enabled as globalization processes reduce traditional state controls and create opportunities for autonomous participation.12 Others, such as Held and Moore, observe a retreat from cosmopolitan definitions of national identity resulting from adaptations in state responsibilities due in part to global political economic integration.13 From either vantage point, the contemporary efficacy of cultural politics is best explained (from these perspectives) through relative state decline. Habermas and Yúdice are more explicit in their identification of neoliberal ideology as the mechanism of such decline and facilitator of cultural ascendency. Key to each scholar is the decline of traditional economic regulatory and protectionist capacities, once central to state legitimation. According to Habermas, “The nation-state has fewer and fewer options open to it. Two of these options are now completely ruled out: protectionism, and the return to a demand-oriented economic policy”.14 He is even more explicit in his connection between state decline and the ascendency of reactionary cultural nationalism: “Our own prosperous societies are witnessing a rise of ethno-centric reactions against anything foreign…The loss of solidarity touched off by issues of redistribution can lead to political fragmentation”.15 Yúdice certainly agrees that neoliberalism has negatively affected state economic protectionism; however, he is even more explicit in arguing that these changes have somehow made culture more politically utilitarian. The retreat of the state is not an accident. Neither is the increased integration of respective cultural forms as means to achieve political economic ends: “The imbrication of culture with economics and the solution of social problems is a 12
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Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization is Re-Shaping Our Lives, (New York: Routedge, 2003), 13. Montserrat Guibernau, Nations Without States: Political Communities in a Global Age, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 19. Michael Keating, Nations Against the State: The New Politics of Nationalism in Quebec, Catalonia, and Scotland, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). David Held, Democracy and Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Gover nance, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 48–49. Henrietta Moore, “The Problem of Culture,” Culture Politics in a Global Age: Uncertainty, Solidarity, and Innovation, (Oxford: One World Publications, 2008). Jürgen Habermas, Post-national Constellations: Political Essays, (Cambridge: mit Univer sity Press, 2001), 51. Ibid., 71–72.
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conjectural phenomenon analogous to the Keynesian compromise between capital and labor brokered by nation-states”.16 Clearly, state decline, prompted by increasing neoliberal pressures for entry into the global economic system, is identified as the causal link between globalization and the rise of national cultural mobilization. The problem is that many state theorists offer substantial evidence that the state has maintained its socio-political authority despite retrenched protectionist capabilities.17 Clearly, advanced capitalist states no longer maintain the same characteristics that once defined the embedded liberal era, but neither have they been relegated to institutional obscurity. From the perspective of scholars like Habermas and Giddens, as well as from a Polanyian theoretical perspective, this reduction in protectionism should result a decline in popular legitimation. Neoliberal states have worked to privilege capital, but does this also mean that neoliberal states are less viable as institutions of social authority? The issue at hand here is one of legitimation. As economic protections wane, the adverse costs of neoliberalization are transferred to national populations and promises of political remedy are viewed with increasing skepticism. The result is a significant challenge: How to meet national popular demands for social protection from the adversities created by an increasingly unregulated capitalism, while at the same time being either unwilling or unable to meet these demands through economic means? As previously mentioned, neoliberal state legitimacy cannot be maintained through traditional countermovement strategies based on economic protectionism. State parties and actors seeking legitimacy while also confronting the market fundamentalism inherent in neoliberal ideology, are encouraged to employ alternative (i.e., non-economic) means of meeting countermovement demands. A Polanyian understanding of the state is central to this analytical framework. At once an institution in support of capital accumulation and growth, yet also one tasked with mitigating accompanying socio-economic adversities. The Polanyian state is in a relatively contradictory position. It can accomplish neither without the legitimate authority to act in such a mediating fashion. In the postwar era, such legitimacy came through national economic expansionism on the back of the Bretton Woods monetary system – and a distinctly 16 17
George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 284. Peter Evans, “The Eclipse of the State? Reflections on Stateness in an Era of Globalizaton,” World Politics 50.1 (1997): 62–87. Jan Aart Scholte, “Global Capitalism and the State,” International Affairs 73.3 (1997): 427–452. Linda Weiss, States in the Global Economy: Bringing Domestic Institutions Back In, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
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economic means of addressing the systemic inequalities of capitalism. This “embedded liberal” period was strongly tied to the role of the state as an economic protectionist institution throughout the advanced capitalist world. As the following section illustrates, economic strategies for meeting countermovement protectionist demands were central to both the Polanyian analytical model as well as the compromise era of “embedded liberalism.” The question remains whether neoliberal experiments with non-economic legitimation strategies are sustainable in satisfying protectionist demands borne of economic disparities.
Protectionism and the Role of the State
Put simply, the double movement is a description of the relationship between systemic economic forces and national populations. As liberal capitalist ideology pervades local economic practice, an unfettered and unregulated version of capitalism creates hardship conditions that elicit a national popular reaction through the development of a “protectionist counter-movement.” The ideological promise of “self-regulation” is, of course, a fallacy in practice – capitalism, itself, cannot regulate its systemic demand for perpetual accumulation nor can it legitimate itself in the face of subsequent (and systemically requisite) inequalities and hardships. The institution of the state was therefore developed to provide such legitimacy at least partially through the redress of systemic inequalities. In Polanyi’s words, “…no purely monetary definition of interests can leave room for that vital need for social protection, the representation of which commonly falls to the persons in charge of the general interests of the community, under modern conditions, the governments of the day”.18 The key issue here is the relationship between protectionism and legitimacy. While emphasis in the double movement clearly illustrates an economic bias towards social protectionism, it is essential to recognize the converse relationship between capital accumulation interests and state legitimation. As a state unable to meet national protectionist demands will lose popular legitimacy, so too will the state that neglects the interests of capital. It is therefore necessary to understand protectionism as a function of the dual legitimation interests of a mediating state. This clearly distinguishes Polanyi from many state theorists and certainly informs his more functionalist understanding of 18
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001[1944]), 162.
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capitalist social stabilization.19 More to the point, it highlights the broader understanding of capitalism as being unable to regulate itself and ensure its own sustained health. Adam Przeworski offers a similar observation of capitalist dependency on the state; put simply, accumulation can only be sustained within a context of legitimacy. Capitalism necessitates inequality,20 which certainly discourages support from non-beneficiaries. The potential withdrawal of popular support from labor market participation or consumption could certainly have deleterious effects. The state is therefore required to maintain the popular legitimacy of capitalism through the mitigation of its negative effects.21 The implication, of course, is that some sort of equilibrium must be maintained for both capitalism and respective states to remain viable. This has encouraged some to dismiss such conclusions in the face of stark imbalances between the power of financial capital and state regulatory capacities. This critique is somewhat reflective of Searcy’s argument that Polanyi overstated the potential of the countermovement, particularly, “his [Polanyi’s] contention that the protective response erodes state support for the market and for the needs of the capitalist class”.22 Indeed, the plethora of evidence pointing to exacerbated wealth inequality, regulatory decline, and social service retrenchment would suggest that the equilibrium implied in the double movement is far from observed reality. If, in fact, the contemporary neoliberal era has eroded the capacity of state economic protectionism while at the same time facilitating capital dominance, is a Polanyian conceptualization of the state salvageable? I argue that not only is it possible to maintain a Polanyian analytical framework of the state, but that in doing so we are well-positioned to understand the link between neoliberal/market hegemony and nationalist political efficacy. The crux, I contend, resides with the strategic legitimation of the state and the
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Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 78–79. Ludwig von Mises, “Inequality of Wealth and Incomes,” Policy 16 (2000[1955]): 62–64. Seymour Lipset, “Some Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review 53.1 (1959): 69–105. Theodore Lowi, Politics, Economics, and Justice: Toward a Politics of Globalizing Capitalism, Mastering Globali zation: New Sub-States’ Governance and Strategies, (2005). Adam Przeworski, The State and the Economy Under Capitalism, (London: Routledge, 2001), 67–68. Dennis R. Searcy, “Beyond the Self-Regulating Market in Market Society: A Critique of Polanyi’s Theory of the State,” Review of Social Economy 51.2 (1993): 220.
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very imbalance of economic power that many have used to minimize the potential viability of Polanyian state theory.
The Neoliberal State and the Crisis of Legitimacy
That countermovement demands could be satisfied through economic protectionism serves as the foundation for the classical double movement. Contem porary neoliberal ideology however, weakens this alternative in practice. David Harvey succinctly summarizes these changes as they have emerged empirically: “As the state withdraws from welfare provision and diminishes its role in arenas such as health care, public education, and social services, which were once so fundamental to embedded liberalism, it leaves larger and larger segments of the population exposed to impoverishment”.23 Or, to paraphrase a classic Frank Turner song title, Thatcher really has fucked the kids. The decline of embedded liberalism – in particular, commensurate state protectionism is a well-known story and one that has precipitated the ubiquitous notion of state decline. It is essential though to recognize this shift as both a decline in state economic regulatory capacity and a commensurate increase in the affective structural power of transnational financial capital. If the decline of embedded liberal protectionism is a function of state decline, it was the result of the state facilitated rise of financial capital. Or as Barrow puts it, states are, “principle agents of globalization”.24 As state-led neoliberalism succeeds in fulfilling its objective of “liberating” capital from the “constraints” of regulation, we are left with a significant problem. Global capitalism requires authoritative states to maintain local stability and amenable market conditions; however, satisfaction of capital interests is insufficient to maintain national legitimacy. The result should be, of course, a “crisis of legitimacy” in which widespread dissatisfaction with the ability of states to meet economic protectionist demands results in a relative decrease in popular legitimacy. In fact, it is possible to claim that there is evidence for such popular delegitimation. Anecdotally, we can certainly look to seemingly disparate examples of economically rooted popular mobilization in Tunisia and Egypt to the anti-state ascendency of the so called Tea Party movement in the United States as examples of such de-legitimation. In a more general sense withdrawal of 23 24
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, (News York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 76. Clyde Barrow, “The Return of the State: Globalization, State Theory, and the New Imperalism,” New Political Science 27.2 (2005): 123.
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support for a particular state party or actor is certainly a sign of diminished electoral legitimacy. The problem is, of course, that these shifts rarely result in counter-hegemonic outcomes. An electoral shift from one neoliberal actor to another does nothing to resolve the structural adversities created by unregulated capital accumulation. So how can a neoliberal state actor or group maintain legitimacy without the will or means of addressing conditions of economic disparity that motivate countermovement demands? Put another way, is it possible for neoliberal state actors to acquire legitimacy from national populations it is actively failing to protect? The questions are, of course, rhetorical. State institutions and actors can be both neoliberal and maintain popular legitimacy. One need only look to constituent support for Republican Party actors in the United States or the widespread support for the akp in Turkey. In this vein it is important to consider two points. First, the proclamations of neoliberalism’s death following the most recent global recession have certainly proven premature, at best. The power of global finance and the willingness of state actors (regardless of party affiliation) to conform to neoliberal market demands are seemingly ubiquitous. Beyond the extremity of austerity, the recession seems to have reinforced neoliberal demands rather than reduced them. The more immediate point, however, is that while there are few nationalist parties in power and those who certainly temper their rhetoric and goals (to a certain degree), there has been a consistency with which political entities have embraced exclusionary nationalist politics into electoral platforms (and indeed, party identities). The Front nationale, reorganized in 1995, has become a perennial third party option in French presidential politics with Jean Le Pen forcing a run-off in 2002 and Marine Le Pen famously garnering almost 18 percent of the vote in 2012. Vlaams Belang, the Flemmish nationalist party that restructured and renamed itself in 2004, has become an institutionalized party with elected members at all levels of the Belgian state and the European Parliament. Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria has become equally entrenched since the 1990s and regularly wins a fifth of the Austrian vote. More to the point, there is little evidence that these parties must be avowedly neoliberal in orientation. Consider that the Finns (Perussuomalaiset) party, founded in 1995, has increased its parliamentary vote totals to nearly 20 percent and is currently the third largest in the Finnish Parliament. Consider also that the Perussuomalaiset is also social democratic – its xenophobic platform argues that the future of the Finnish welfare state is explicitly tied to restrictions on immigration. This would imply that it is not a neoliberal position that facilitates nationalist political imbrication (Betz 1993, makes a similar observation), but rather the broader condition of neoliberalism. That is, the
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socioeconomic environment of neoliberalism has developed in a way that economically (gradually or rapidly) imperils respective groups through wage stagnation, employment insecurity, price increases, in short, local economic uncertainty while simultaneously expanding capital accumulation. As neoliberalism facilitates profit, it also works to delegitimize (and indeed, retrench) state protectionism. The effect exacerbates conditions of economic hardship as both economic potential and protection are limited. These conditions, plus the depressed efficacy of state protectionist alternatives, enable nationalist politics as one (certainly not exclusive) alternative legitimation strategy that goes beyond simple scapegoating or primordial ethnocentrism. This Polanyian explanation finds its roots in sustained demand for protection from adversities due to decreasingly restrained capital accumulation and restricted economic protectionist opportunities that are specific to the neoliberal condition. Swank and Betz make a complementary, yet converse, argument in which they find that political support for “radical right wing political parties” (i.e., monolithic nationalist parties) “… is weakest in universal welfare states”.25 It is precisely this relationship between popular socioeconomic protectionist demands, the role of the state in meeting (or failing to meet) such demands, and the problem of political legitimation in the neoliberal era. The double movement framework highlights the need to identify an alternative legitimation strategy as neoliberalism continues to maintain a hegemonic position and neoliberal actors eschew economic protectionism. The contemporary efficacy of nationalist politics must therefore not be understood as a function of state decline, but rather as an integral mechanism for the maintenance of political legitimacy in a neoliberal context. While the long-term sustainability (and to the point, desirability) of such culturally oriented legitimation strategies is tenuous, I would argue that the inherent contradictions of neoliberal capitalism make this one of the few strategic means available for obtaining or sustaining neoliberal state authority. Through this lens, the manifest link between neoliberal states and monolithic nationalist politics appears proportional. This highlights a system in crisis. Economic inequalities can never be resolved through cultural means, particularly the superficial and often-fictitious affinities promoted by respective nationalisms. Viewed this way, the integration of monolithic forms of cultural legitimation may provide short-term political gain, but at the cost of exacerbated economic inequalities and the potential of instigating ethno-cultural conflicts. Faustian, indeed. 25
Duane Swank and Hans-Georg Betz, “Globalization, the Welfare State, and Right-Wing Populism in Europe,” Socioeconomic Review 1.2 (2003): 239.
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Bibliography Alesina, Alberto and Dani Rodrik. “Distributive Politics and Economic Growth.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 109 (2) (1994): 465–490. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983. Barrow, Clyde. “The Return of the State: Globalization, State Theory, and the New Imperalism.” New Political Science 27 (2) (2005): 123–145. Betz, Hanz-Georg. “The Two Faces of Radical Right-Wing Populism in Europe.” The Review of Politics 55 (4) (1993): 663–686. Block, Fred and Margaret Somers. Beyond the Economistic Fallacy: The Holistic Social Science of Karl Polanyi. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Burawoy, Michael. “From Polanyi to Pollyanna: The False Optimism of Global Labor Studies.” Global Labor Journal 1 (2) (2010): 301–313. Castells, Manual. The Power of Identity 2nd Edition, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Dale, Gareth. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. Domke, David and Kevin Coe. “The God Strategy: The Rise of Religious Politics in America.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 42 (1) (2007): 53–75. Evans, Peter. “The Eclipse of the State? Reflections on Stateness in an Era of Globalizaton.” World Politics 50 (1) (1997): 62–87. Gellner, Ernest. Nationals and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Giddens, Anthony. Runaway World: How Globalization is Re-Shaping Our Lives. New York: Routedge, 2003. Guibernau, Montserrat. Nations Without States: Political Communities in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. Habermas, Jürgen. Post-national Constellations: Political Essays. Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2001. Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. News York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Held, David. Democracy and Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Inglehart, Ronald. The Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Keating, Michael. Nations Against the State: The New Politics of Nationalism in Quebec, Catalonia, and Scotland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Kotz, David M. “Neoliberalism and the Social Structure of Accumulation Theory of Long-Run Capital Accumulation.” Radical Review of Political Economics 35 (3) (2003): 263–270.
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Kukathas, Chandran. “Liberalism and Multiculturalism: The Politics of Indifference,” Political Theory 26 (5) (1989): 686–699. Kymlicka, Will. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lipset, Seymour. “Some Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy.” American Political Science Review 53 (1) (1959): 69–105. Lowi, Theodore. “Politics, Economics, and Justice: Toward a Politics of Globalizing Capitalism.” Mastering Globalization: New Sub-States’ Governance and Strategies, (2005). Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. London: Verson, 1848, edited 2012. Melucci, Alberto. Nomads of the Present. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Moore, Henrietta. “The Problem of Culture.” Culture Politics in a Global Age: Uncertainty, Solidarity, and Innovation, (Oxford: One World Publications, 2008). Navarro, Vicente. “Neoliberalism as a Class Ideology; or in the Political Causes of the Growth of Inequalities.” International Journal of Health Services 37 (1) (2007): 47–62. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, edited 2001. Poulantzas, Nicos. State,Power Socialism. London: Verso, 1978 edited 2000. Przeworski, Adam. The State and the Economy Under Capitalism. London: Routledge, 2001. Renan, Ernest. Qu’est- ce qu’une Nation? Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1882. Scholte, Jan Aart. “Global Capitalism and the State.” International Affairs 73 (3) (1997): 427–452. Searcy, Dennis R. “Beyond the Self-Regulating Market in Market Society: A Critique of Polanyi’s Theory of the State.” Review of Social Economy 51 (2) (1993): 217–231. Swank, Duane and Hans-Georg Betz. “Globalization, the Welfare State, and Right-Wing Populism in Europe.” Socioeconomic Review 1 (2) (2003): 215–245. Touraine, Alain. The Self-Production of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. von Mises Ludwig. “Inequality of Wealth and Incomes.” Policy 16 (1955 edited 2000): 62–64. Weiss, Linda. States in the Global Economy: Bringing Domestic Institutions Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Yúdice, George. The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
chapter 6
Deification of Market; Homogenization of Cultures: ‘Free Trade’ and Other Euphemisms for Global Capitalism Gwendolyn Yvonne Alexis* The 1999 Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization (wto) launched the vocalization of reservations long held by many that the globalization of markets and the (much more disdained) globalization of production was not such a great idea. Sure, prices were down on consumer goods – especially the nonnecessities of life consumed in the world’s wealthiest nations. However, jobs were being lost to overseas locations where sweatshop labor turned out sneakers, designer tee-shirts, I-phones, and dashboard cameras. Across the ocean in Europe, individual portion packets of catsup, screw-cap bottles of wine, and mtv were generating some of the harshest assessments of ‘globalization’.1 It was being described as the spread of the ‘culturally impoverished’ interests and values of the us to the rest of the world.2 These multifarious attacks against globalization reached a fever pitch in December 1999 as the wto member states convened in Seattle for another round of negotiations aimed at further reduction of trade barriers in furtherance of the wto quest for worldwide free trade. As it turned out, actual delegates to the Seattle meeting were grossly outnumbered by more than 40,000 protesters (activists, ngo s, environmental groups, student groups, the American Teamsters and other organized labor groups), blocking off streets and engaging in disruptive and riotous activities. The protests were too much for the unprepared Seattle police to handle; and, eventually, the barrage of demonstrators precipitated an early adjournment of the meeting, without the wto congregants making any substantive progress toward lessening barriers to free trade. Since the disruption of the 1999 wto meeting – which many
* Monmouth University, usa. 1 In a widely used textbook in college-level courses in ‘International Business,’ the process of ‘globalization’ is described as a shift toward a more integrated and interdependent world economy and a trend away from distinct national markets. Charles W. Hill, Global Business Today, 8th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2014), 6. (Hereafter, “Global Business Today”.) 2 Global Business Today, p. 24.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004272835_008
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consider to be the launching of the anti-globalism movement – a steady drumbeat of open hostility towards globalization and global institutions (such as the wto) has risen to a clamor for an ‘end to the spread of global capitalism.’ Indeed, the globalization of capitalist ideology is spearheading globalization, which lends support to the thesis of this essay. My central argument is that globalization is principally a market-based phenomenon with the principal actors being ‘economic actors’ focused on deriving financial gains. Therefore, the negative effects of globalization in the social, cultural, and political arenas are serendipitous rather than the result of intentional acts by the principal denizens of the global arena; namely, states and multinational corporations (mnc s). Indeed so single-minded is their pursuit of the economic advantages to be gained by operating internationally that they are willing to enter into extra-territorial liaisons despite the resultant diminishment to their autonomy and self-sufficiency. My view of globalization as an amalgamation of economically-motivated transactions is shared by others. Noted Finnish author Veli Himanen has stated that, “the current globalisation cannot be separated from the tremendous increase in financial transactions – a process called financialization.”3 And, over 160 years ago Marx and Engel used the Communist Manifesto to lament the early stirrings of globalization, essentially describing it as a non-stoppable rejection of isolationism: All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. … In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. … The Communist Manifesto (1848)4
These ‘Marxian insights’ are useful in exploring globalization as a marketbased concept that is best understood by drawing on the concepts and 3 “In fact, the current globalisation cannot be separated from the tremendous increase in financial transactions – a process called financialization.” Veli Himanen, Missing a Decent Living for Everyone (Saarbrücken, Germany: Lap Lambert Academic Publishing, 2014), 71. 4 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1972), 331–362; 338.
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v ernacular of the marketplace. Therefore, it seems appropriate to start this chapter with a brief discussion of the commercial environment in which international business is transacted. Accordingly, I turn next to a discussion of a globalized marketplace (‘The Market’). Subsequently, I discuss the global institutions that oversee much of the commercial activity that is taking place in the international arena. I cover these institutions and their influence on the denizens of the global arena (mnc s and sovereign nation-states) in the following order; to-wit, the United Nations (and its Global Compact), the International Monetary Fund (imf); and, finally, the World Trade Organization (wto).
The Market A powerful force drives the world toward a converging commonalty, and that force is technology…. The result is a new commercial reality – the emergence of global markets for standardized consumer products on a previously unimagined scale of magnitude. … theodore levitt, “The Globalization of Markets”5
The globalization of markets has been accompanied by the emergence of transcultural patterns in the consumption of brand-name goods and services. Indeed, noticeable commonalities among consumers worldwide in terms of their brand preferences has created great excitement in the business world. The mnc benefits from a convergence of national tastes in that it can sell a standardized product worldwide rather than having to customize its product to suit divergent tastes in every locale in which it operates. Of course, the transcultural appeal of certain goods and services offered by mnc s hailing from the wealthier nations of the world has provided ammunition for anti-globalists who include the destruction of other cultures (‘cultural imperialism’) as one of the many sins of global capitalism. However, it is misguided to attribute the creation of a product or service that inspires brand loyalty to malevolent intent – i.e., cultural imperialism on the part of mnc s and their wealthy countries of origin. Indeed, the only conceivable offense is aggressive marketing by mnc s of often useless products. However, the ability to saturate the global marketplace with colorful advertisements and catchy slogans is made possible by technological advances in communication – ‘a ship that has already left the port’ and not easily recalled by anti-globalism protests. There is no doubt that globalization has wrought havoc with traditional values and the status quo in 5 Harvard Business Review, May–June 1983, 92–102.
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many societies; however, this has happened in the societies of wealthy nations as well as in those of less developed nations (ldn s). Hence, to the extent that cultural homogenization is taking place in the global arena, it is most likely an unintended consequence of mnc s pursuing an economic goal of profitmaximization; and should not be attributed to cultural chauvinism on the part of mnc s.
United Nations Global Compact
The attention mnc s give to building brand equity – by applying best practices in business – is further evidence that mnc s are economic actors in the global marketplace. Maintaining good public relations, building and preserving consumer trust are critical to the long-term sustainability of mnc s as financially viable enterprises. The fact that over 12,000 mnc s from over 145 countries have voluntarily signed onto the United Nations (un) Global Compact is proof of the widespread concern among firms operating in the global arena that they uphold the standards for acceptable corporate behavior that have been agreed upon by a consensus in the global community. Firms that sign onto the un Global Compact must commit to making the ten principles of the Compact an integral part of their day-to-day operations. Further, firms are required to issue an annual Communication on Progress (cop), which is a public report to its stakeholders detailing the progress made in implementing the ten principles. Firms must post their cop on the un Global Compact website and also share it with their own stakeholders. If a firm does not issue a cop in any given year, its status is changed to “non-communicating”. If a firm goes two consecutive years without issuing a cop, it is expelled.6 Hence, there can be detrimental consequences for an mnc that voluntarily signs onto the un Global Compact but fails to file the annual cop reports. It is clear that mnc s sign onto the Global Compact because they feel it will give them a leg-up on building consumer trust and brand loyalty. So from a cost/benefits perspective, these mnc s feel that taking on the added obligation of making annual progress reports and maintaining transparency is a fair exchange for an enhanced public image as a transparent enterprise. Moreover, given that the public has grown to expect mnc s to sign onto the Global Compact, there is a strong likelihood that there would be a societal backlash 6 In 2014, 657 firms were expelled for not filing a cop for two consecutive years. United Nations Global Compact. “News & Events.” Accessed January 19, 2015. https://www.unglobalcompact .org/news/1621-01-14-2015.
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against mnc s who have not committed to the Global Compact as untrustworthy, which would be bad for business. Table 6.1 below sets forth the 10 principles constituting the un Global Compact. Clearly, an mnc that agrees to voluntarily subject its global operations to the scrutiny of a global institution (the un) incurs some risks. Certainly not the least of which is the fact that the ten principles of the Global Compact force the mnc to consider stakeholders other than its shareholders/investors (for whom it must earn a return on investment). Not only are employees (labor) and the environment held out as stakeholders to whom the mnc is accountable but the Compact’s inclusion of principles dealing with human rights and anti-corruption makes the host community a stakeholder to which an mnc is held accountable for its operations in the international arena. Yet, despite this enhanced accountability and need for transparency, over 12,000 mnc s have voluntarily opted to subject their activities in the international arena to the oversight of the United Nations. This is the type of instrumental reasoning Table 6.1
un Global Compact
Human Rights Principle 1: Businesses should support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights; and Principle 2: make sure that they are not complicit in human rights abuses. Labour Principle 3: Businesses should uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining; Principle 4: the elimination of all forms of forced and compulsory labour; Principle 5: the effective abolition of child labour; and Principle 6: the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation. Environment Principle 7: Businesses should support a precautionary approach to environmental challenges; Principle 8: undertake initiatives to promote greater environmental responsibility; and Principle 9: encourage the development and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies. Anti-Corruption Principle 10: Businesses should work against corruption in all its forms, including extortion and bribery.
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engaged in by economic actors – the willingness to take risks in order to reap the financial rewards available in the global marketplace. There should be no doubt that the focus of these mnc s is on turning a profit and not on cultural hegemony. In the next section I focus on still another global institution that serves as a gatekeeper in the global arena, the International Monetary Fund (imf). Perhaps more than any other global institution, the imf demonstrates the folly of relying on instrumental reasoning as justification for prioritizing economic objectives over and above all else.
The International Monetary Fund (imf) Jamaica and the imf Why did we think they should reduce trade barriers? The reason is that Jamaica is a very small country. It’s not a country which could sort of thrive by producing only for itself. We believe very firmly that countries are going to grow better if they’re integrated into the world economy and that means reducing tariffs. And, it needed to allow its importers [Freudian slip] – its people access to goods from the rest of the world rather than have them rely on this little – (snicker) –little economy. … stanley fischer, Deputy Director of the International Monetary Fund (imf)7
The Freudian slip made by Fischer in admitting that the importers would be the main beneficiaries of Jamaica reducing its tariffs (and not the Jamaican people) brings to mind a line from Stephen Marshall’s book, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing.8 The line, “And yet they are willing to maintain the illusion that America is bringing an evolved, humane political and economic system without acknowledging it’s a front for the free market engine that, once implemented, will ensure the short-term strengthening of their own economy.” Indeed, the us economy did benefit from Jamaica obediently removing its tariffs in compliance with the prerequisite for obtaining loans from the imf. For this made Jamaica a vulnerable target as a dumping ground for dry milk powder surpluses from the us, where heavy subsidization of agricultural
7 Jamaica Kincaid. Life and Debt. Documentary Film. dvd. Directed by Stephanie Black. New Yorker Films, 2001. 8 Stephen Marshall, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: The New Liberal Menace in America (New York: The Disinformation Company Ltd., 2007), 5.
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roducts serves as an incentive for dairy farmers to create surpluses on an p annual basis. As might be expected, Jamaica’s dairy farmers could not compete pricewise with the subsidized dry milk powder being imported from the us even though some on-site labor costs were incurred in Jamaica to reconstitute the milk powder into liquid form prior to distribution by retailers. Since labor is cheap in Jamaica, the reconstituted milk powder was still bargain-priced compared to fresh milk. Jamaica is one of the poorest countries in the world based on Gross Domestic Product per capita.9 Consequently, Jamaican consumers are very price conscious and where a close substitute for fresh milk is available at a much lower price, tight family budgets dictate opting for the cheaper fresh milk substitute. The level of poverty in Jamaica precludes Jamaicans from exercising a consumer’s right to choose. Hence, today only milk that has been reconstituted from dry milk powder is available to the inhabitants of Jamaica. As a result of the various rounds of trade negotiations among wto member nations, barriers to trade have been substantially lowered. This has resulted in enhanced competition in the global marketplace which means lower prices for consumer products worldwide. Consequently, consumers in wealthier countries have more choices than they have ever had in terms of what products and/or services they select to purchase, rent, lease, or access on-line in a limitless virtual world of cyberspace. In contrast to the limited milk decision confronting the Jamaican consumer, a more affluent consumer could choose not to purchase dry milk powder based upon (a) its inconvenience, (b) its taste or smell, or (c) based upon the belief that its nutrient value is inferior to that of fresh milk. However, even if Jamaica’s dairy industry had not been destroyed; when faced with two alternatives, the average Jamaican family would have to opt for buying the cheapest alternative available; namely, imported dry milk powder. Civil Society and ldn s In ldn s like Jamaica, civil society is weak and therefore organized boycotts of products are rare. So, there was little chance that Jamaicans – in a show of solidarity with the local dairy farmers and to evince national pride – would boycott the imported dry milk powder product. Indeed, national pride had ebbed in Jamaica. The fact that Jamaica could not sustain the small local farms and cottage industries that were an integral part of the country’s cultural heritage 9 Valentina Pasquali, “The Poorest Countries in the World.” Global Finance. September 27, 2014. Accessed January 11, 2015. https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/the-poorest -countries-in-the-world.
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was devastating – generations of Jamaicans had worked the land, and fed their families from the fruits of their labor. Such deeply ingrained traditions do not go quietly into the night. Consequently, the result was a loss of self-esteem among Jamaicans. They watched the crippling of their nation by the sword of global capitalism and with the nation’s seeping autonomy, they experienced a loss of their own sense of self. Gone was the strong sense of national identity that existed in 1962 when jubilant Jamaicans celebrated independence from Great Britain and the end of over 300 years of dominance by that colonial power. From that high point, we come to the present which is symbolized by a televised news report included in the Life and Debt documentary. In the newsreel, an irate factory worker proclaims, ‘No government; we don’t have no government. We don’t have nobody to fight for us.’10 The news report dealt with disgruntled factory workers in the Kingston, Jamaica Free Zone – an area where many us designer labels have their clothing assembled without ‘officially’ being in Jamaica and obligated to pay taxes to Jamaica. The report starts off in the television studio with the news anchor stating that the Jamaican Government has been accused of being a co-conspirator in the exploitation of Free Zone labor by foreign companies. The news anchor note that workers often receive their wages two to three weeks late (wages which were based on piecework rather than on a fixed salary). Of course, a critical aspect of the problem is that Jamaica, as is common in the Third World, lacks laws to protect workers – such as laws ensuring fair labor practices, minimum wages, workplace safety, and mandatory overtime pay. Indeed even if such laws were in existence, it is unlikely that Jamaica could afford to put in place the necessary regulatory framework to enforce the laws. Inhabitants of ldn s must swallow their pride and accept being banned from their own market – unable to produce their own food even though, as one of the farmers in the documentary laments, Jamaica has the fertile soil and sunny climate that would enable them to grow their own food. In this vein, one of the most poignant scenes in the Life and Debt documentary is when the owner of a major well-established, family-owned Jamaican dairy opens the spout to let the fresh milk (fruits of the labor of those milking cows on his farm as well as those milking cows on smaller nearby farms) spill down to the earth and run down the same dirt path that in the next scene is being traversed by cows on their way to the slaughter house to be made into hamburger meat.
10
Fineline Industries of West Virginia is the particular factory owner that was the subject of the newsreel.
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With a weak or non-existent civil society, the chance of an outraged electorate voting in a more forceful government is nil.11 And, of course, there is even less chance of organized citizens’ groups applying pressure on the extant weak government (a ‘beggar nation’ in the international arena) to get it to hire one of the many experts in the field of negotiating favorable loan terms for ldn s.12 Such a strategy would have to be followed for assurance that consideration is given to the social, cultural and political consequences for nations that singlemindedly pursue their economic goals, turning a blind eye to all else. Alas, ldn’s like Jamaica are ill equipped to resist the most devastating effects of globalization. The combination of a financially strapped government that must go ‘hat-in-hand’ to global institutions like the imf along with a dysfunctional civil society has meant that the hegemonic activities of some of the key players in the global marketplace have gone largely unchecked – if not, unnoticed. It is non-governmental organizations (ngo s) that have become the voice of those who are victimized by globalization, but whose voices are silenced by the mean circumstances of their daily lives. Many of the people and communities left behind by the development and globalization projects look to nongovernmental organizations (ngo s), rather than to states or international agencies, to represent them and to meet their needs. Indeed, we are currently in a phase of ‘NGOization,’ in 11
12
Or, as was the case with Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou in 2011, getting the government to voluntarily step down. The situations are somewhat similar in that in Greece, the ire of the citizenry was raised over the Greek Government allowing their fate to be determined by a supranational body – in that case, the European Union. Michael Ray, “George Papandreou,” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Accessed 13 January 2015 at: < http:// www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1343637/George-Papandreou>. “Gwen, … I have been working with some two dozen governments trying to help them to get better deals in negotiations with the wto, eu, imf, and other organizations and I have seen time and again that the representatives of these governments either did not ask for advice or did not take it. In many cases, they were actually very comfortable signing a deal that would be good for international ‘investors’ coming after the natural resources of the respective country, but really bad for their population and/or the environment. You may want to think about the real dichotomy, which is not between North and South. It is between rich and poor.” Answer posted to author’s question on ResearchGate Blog (Question: “Are “Globalization” and “Regionalization” principally market-based phenomena that fortuitously have unintended social and political consequences?”), January 18, 2015. Accessed 20 January 2015 at: .
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that national governments and international institutions have lost much of their legitimacy, and ngo s take considerable initiative in guiding grassroots development activities. … philip mcmichael, Development and Social Change13
Wealthy Nation-States In a special address delivered to the us Congress on March 15, 1962, then President John F. Kennedy introduced the Consumer’s Magna Carta, depicted in Table 6.2 below.14 Although aspirational in 1962 when created by President Kennedy, the Consumer’s Magna Carta is today an accurate depiction of the situation in which consumers living in affluent societies find themselves. Globalization has greatly increased the ‘variety of products and services’ available at competitive prices, giving consumers the right to choose (as well as the right to Table 6.2 Consumer’s Magna Carta
Right to Safety Right to be Informed
Right to Choose
Right to be Heard
13 14
To be protected against the marketing of goods which are hazardous to health or life. To be protected against fraudulent, deceitful, or grossly misleading information, advertising, labeling, or other practices, and to be given the facts needed to make an informed choice. To be assured, wherever possible of access to a variety of products and services at competitive prices; and in those industries in which competition is not workable and Government regulation is substituted, an assurance of satisfactory quality and service at fair prices. To be assured that consumer interests will receive full and sympathetic consideration in the formulation of Government policy, and fair and expeditious treatment in its administrative tribunals.
Philip McMichael, Development and Social Change, (Thousand Oaks, ca: Pine Forge Press, 1996), 239. John F. Kennedy: “Special Message to the Congress on Protecting the Consumer Interest.” March 15, 1962. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9108. Accessed 14 January 2015.
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become confused by the wide variety of choices). The right to be heard has been greatly facilitated by the internet; blogs such as Killer Coke and VW Lemon.com empower consumers to get their messages and gripes before millions in addition to getting the attention of the manufacturers of the products that are found to be unsatisfactory. Finally, all developed nations have laws in place to prevent fraudulent marketing of products (‘right to be informed’) and protecting the consumer from hazardous and unsafe products (‘right to safety’). Ironically, it is because globalization and a digital age have made accessible to all (who possess the financial wherewithal) products and services from all over the world that wealthy nations have not escaped the cultural homogenization that is an organic result of one global marketplace. It is the “onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food – with mtv, Macintosh, and McDonald’s pressing nations into one commercially homogeneous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications commerce.”15 So, here again, the facts do not support the claims of anti-globalists that it is ‘cultural imperialism’ that is driving the melding of cultures. Additionally, it is clear that nation-states – wealthy and poor – are willingly linking their economic futures together by actively seeking membership in extra-territorial pacts that offer the promise of financial gain to participants in the global marketplace: Some protesters might believe there is a growing international backlash against the wto. But the countries queuing up to join the wto, from the most populous (China) and the largest physically (Russia) to tiny Andorra, are proof that a significant part of the world believe that their economic future lies in the wto system. And opinion polls suggest that the public in the us and elsewhere are in favour of freer trade even if they have reservations about some aspects. (Emphasis Added.) … World Trade Organization (wto)16
As a major target of the globalization backlash, the wto felt compelled to give the above response to the ‘accusations’, ‘misinformation’ and ‘incorrect 15 16
Benjamin R. Barber, “Jihad vs. McWorld,” The Atlantic, March 1, 1992. Accessed January 17, 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1992/03/jihad-vs-mcworld/303882/. World Trade Organization. “Top 10 Reasons to Oppose the World Trade Organization? Criticism, yes…misinformation, no!” Accessed January 17, 2015. http://www.wto.org/ english/thewto_e/minist_e/min99_e/english/misinf_e/10tide_e.htm.
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facts’ about the wto that were being posted in 1999 on the websites of various activist groups and ngo s to encourage protestors to join the demonstrations planned that year for the Seattle Conference. The wto response is useful in that it points to deriving economic benefits as the primary reason that countries seek to join the wto. This means that an insightful analysis of the actions and motives of those countries judged to be domineering forces in the global arena requires the use of ‘instrumental reason’ and not the emotion-laden name-calling and tagging that is the bailiwick of ‘Pop Psychology’.17 Hence, catchall labels such as ‘cultural imperialism,’ ‘cultural chauvinism,’ and the like only serve to short-circuit meaningful exploration. Therefore, it is in a spirit of investigation that I now turn to a discussion of the wto and Free Trade.
The World Trade Organization (wto)
On January 1, 1995, the wto succeeded the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, gatt, as a result of the successful Uruguay round of gatt negotiations that took place from 1986–1994. The wto is a forum for governments to nego tiate trade agreements and to settle any trade disputes arising from those agreements. It also has special provisions for ldn s to increase their trading opportunities and help them build their trade capacity. As of June 2014, the wto membership consists of 160 member countries, over 3/4ths of which are ldn s.18 The wto acts by consensus, not by voting. Voting is only utilized when consensus is not possible; and then, it is ‘one country, one vote’ with a majority of the votes cast necessary to win. Free Trade ‘Free Trade’ is an absence of restrictions on the free flow of goods and/or services from one country to another. It is an ‘ideal type’ that can never be realized 17
18
“There is a widespread unease that instrumental reason not only has enlarged its scope but also threatens to take over our lives. The fear is that things that ought to be determined by other criteria will be decided in terms of efficiency or ‘cost-benefit’ analysis, that the independent ends that ought to be guiding our lives will be eclipsed by the demand to maximize output.” Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, (Canada: House of Anansi Press, 1991), 4–5. World Trade Organization. “About the wto.” Accessed January 17, 2005. http://www.wto .org/english/thewto_e/thewto_e.htm. The wto also has an ‘observer status,’ which is held by 23 governments and the Holy See (Vatican). Observer governments are required to apply for membership status within 5 years of becoming observers.
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in the real world because of emotional barriers such as nationalism and patriotism and also because of the actual threats to national security posed by allowing foreign-owned companies to provide goods or services in sensitive industries such as border patrol.19 Therefore, the commitments countries make to uphold treaties lessening trade barriers are always subject to an implied proviso that agreements which imperil a nation’s security interests will not be upheld. Another factor that makes commitments conditional is the possibility of a change in the political winds of a country. In stable democracies, the decision of the sitting administration to prioritize economic growth by entering into foreign markets is subject to voter veto. Hence, if the political mood of the country becomes more isolationist, voters may not agree with the administration’s decision to become entangled with foreign economies. And, in democratic societies when voters don’t agree, they promptly express their displeasure at the polls. As an example of such a display of voter push-back, the reason that the us has not been receptive to opening up the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta) to other countries in the region (beyond Canada and Mexico) is due to the strong opposition of us voters to nafta with just the existing three members.20 It is interesting to compare the availability of alternatives in developed nations with the lack of options in Jamaica. Although Jamaica would like to have withdrawn from the global arena, the choice was not available. Opening up her market to importers was a fait accompli even though the weakness of the Jamaican economy made it clear that it would not be competing on a level playing field with foreign imports into its economy. Alas, Jamaica was unable to resist having the global marketplace foisted upon it by the imf. Clearly, there is a marked difference in how the ‘Free Trade’ mantra is operationalized for wealthy members of the wto and their poorer counterparts. There are laws in the us to guard against American firms falling victim to 19
20
See, David E. Sanger, “Under Pressure, Dubai Company Drops Port Deal,” The New York Times, March 10, 2006. Accessed January 17, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/ politics/10ports.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, both Democratic candidates (Obama and Clinton) came out strongly for a tougher stance towards Mexico – one that would condition continuation of the trade agreement benefits on Mexico enacting tougher environmental laws and implementing fair labor standards. Moreover, getting nafta approved by us and Canadian voters has been described as “a bruising experience” which neither government wants to repeat soon. Global Business Today, p. 268.
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the kind of unfair competition that the us inflicted upon the Jamaican dairy industry. Antidumping laws in place in the us can result in substantial fines (dubbed, “countervailing duties”) being imposed on foreign firms that dump their products on the us market. In international trade, ‘dumping’ is loosely defined as selling goods in a foreign market at less than a ‘fair’ price. The price can be unfair because (1) the sales price is less than what the product is sold for in its domestic market; (2) the sales price is less than the cost the firm incurs to make the product; or (3) a situation exists where a product is heavily subsidized in the home market, which provides an incentive for firms to overproduce the product in anticipation of dumping the surplus abroad – the situation with the American dry milk powder sold in Jamaica. Generally, once the foreign firm has driven all of the local firms out of business by undercutting their prices, it will raise its prices in order to reap a suitable (or excessive) profit. Two us federal agencies are on the ready to receive complaints from us firms that believe a foreign firm is dumping products in the us; to-wit, the Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission (itc). In 2004, us Magnesium filed a petition with the itc accusing firms in China and Russia of dumping magnesium on the us market.21 After a year-long investigation, in March 2005, the itc imposed duties ranging from 50% to 140% on magnesium imported from China and duties ranging from 19% to 22% on magnesium imported from Russia. Initially the duties were to stay in place for a full five-year period. However, the itc subsequently revoked the order against Russia, leaving the duties in place only for China for the full period.22 Antidumping laws are not the only protectionist policies and institutionalized practices separating wealthy wto member states from poor wto member states. Moreover, the light-heartedness with which nations commit to uphold the principles of free trade is demonstrated by the fact that the agricultural industry is wrought with protectionist policies that wealthy nations have put in place to protect their agricultural industries. Table 6.3 below sets forth the range of tariffs and subsidies of selected wealthy nations.
21
22
International Trade Commission, “Magnesium from China and Russia,” Investigations Nos. 731-TA-1071-1072 (Preliminary), Publication 3685 (April 2004), accessed 11 January 2015 at: . Global Business Today, p. 196.
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Table 6.3 Tariffs and Subsidies in Wealthy Nations Protectionism In Country
Non-Agricultural Products (Average Tariff Rates)
Agricultural Products (Average Tariff Rates)
Percentage of Agricultural Production Costs Attributable to Government Subsidies
Canada European Union Japan us
4.2% 3.8% 3.9% 4.4%
21.2% 15.9% 18.6% 10.3%
17% 35% 59% 21%
Conclusion Over 160 years ago, The Communist Manifesto deftly described the rending of the social fabric wrought by the forces of global capitalism. Hence, even before it was given the pejorative label of ‘globalization’ and defensively promoted under the banner of free trade, international commerce had catapulted to the top of the national agenda of all countries able to partake of the lucre of yetuntapped markets. In the haste to enter into lucrative extra-territorial liaisons, previous arguments in favor of isolationism, such as ‘self-sufficiency’ and ‘sovereign autonomy,’ lost currency, becoming relics of a bygone era. Yet, in light of the rapid global spread of the 2008 us financial crisis, most acknowledge that the “universal inter-dependence of nations” bemoaned in the Communist Manifesto is a stark reality of our time. I have argued that states and mnc s enter into extraterritorial pacts with global institutions like the wto, un, and imf to derive economic benefit from international trade. Given that both entities are drawn to international trade by the quest for financial gain, there is no justification for attributing to either corporations or their countries of national origin malevolent intent such as colonization of the world under the banner of a particular culture. Economic actors direct their deliberate and intentional activities towards achieving economic goals; and this is done to such an extent that they are often willing to overlook the drawbacks of their single-minded pursuit. Drawbacks such as loss of self-sufficiency and national sovereignty, as well as becoming linked economically with their counterparts in the global arena are downplayed. Finally, I have shown that mnc s – as the consummate ‘economic actors’ – focus their activities in the global marketplace not on
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destroying a nation’s culture, but on acquiring its business, on making its inhabitants loyal consumers of its product. Bibliography Barber, Benjamin R. “Jihad vs. McWorld.” The Atlantic, March 1, 1992. Accessed January 17, 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1992/03/jihad-vs-mcworld/ 303882/. Hill, Charles W. Global Business Today, 8th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2014. Himanen, Veli. Missing a Decent Living for Everyone. Saarbrücken, Germany: Lap Lambert Academic Publishing, 2014. International Trade Commission. “Magnesium from China and Russia,” Investigations Nos. 731-TA-1071-1072 (Preliminary), Publication 3685, April 2004. Accessed January 11, 2015. http://www.usitc.gov/publications/701_731/pub3685a.pdf. Kennedy, John F. “Special Message to the Congress on Protecting the Consumer Interest.” March 15, 1962. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. Accessed January 14, 2015. http://www.presidency .ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9108. Kincaid, Jamaica. Life and Debt. Documentary Film. DVD. Directed by Stephanie Black. New Yorker Films, 2001. Levitt, Theodore. “The Globalization of Markets,” Harvard Business Review, May-June 1983: 92–102. McMichael, Philip. Development and Social Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1996. Marshall, Stephen. Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: The New Liberal Menace in America. New York: The Disinformation Company Ltd., 2007. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1972. Pasquali, Valentina. “The Poorest Countries in the World.” Global Finance, September 27, 2014. Accessed January 11, 2015. https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic -data/the-poorest-countries-in-the-world. Ray, Michael. “George Papandreou,” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Accessed 13 January 2015 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1343637/George-Papandreou. ResearchGate Blog (Question: “Are ‘Globalization’ and ‘Regionalization’ principally market-based phenomena that fortuitously have unintended social and political consequences?”). January 18, 2015. Accessed January 20, 2015. .
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Sanger, David E. “Under Pressure, Dubai Company Drops Port Deal.” The New York Times, March 10, 2006. Accessed January 17, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2006/03/10/politics/10ports.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0. Taylor, Charles. The Malaise of Modernity. Canada: House of Anansi Press, 1991. United Nations Global Compact. “News & Events.” Accessed January 19, 2015. https:// www.unglobalcompact.org/news/1621-01-14-2015. World Trade Organization. “About the WTO.” Accessed January 17, 2005. http://www .wto.org/english/thewto_e/thewto_e.htm. World Trade Organization. “Top 10 Reasons to Oppose the World Trade Organization? Criticism, yes…misinformation, no!” Accessed January 17, 2015. http://www.wto.org/ english/thewto_e/minist_e/min99_e/english/misinf_e/10tide_e.htm.
Part 3 Transnational Practices and Resistance: Gender, Media, and Social Movements
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chapter 7
“Transnational Activism, Feminist Praxis, and Cultures of Resistance” Nancy A. Naples* This chapter is centrally concerned with the political tensions, inequities, and colonizing tendencies as well as the radical possibilities of transnational feminist praxis. I begin by defining terms and then shift to discuss the limits and radical possibilities of transnational feminist praxis, and its relationship to globalizing cultures of resistance in different sites and forms of activism. I resist the view of culture as a singular construction in an effort to unpack the multiple of tendencies within the ever-shifting practice of transnational feminisms and social justice movements. In this vein, I consider the broader question posed by Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty, namely, when does transnational feminist activism reproduce inequalities and hierarchies, and “when does it perform a radical decolonizing function?”1 The first problematic to address is how and to what extent can transnational feminist praxis be conceptualized as a cultural practice? This raises a related question of who constitutes the community or communities of transnational feminist practitioners within a global context? I address these related issues by conceptualizing transnational feminist praxis as engaged political cultures of resistance with attention to practices of solidarity as well as exclusions, silences, and contradictions. In the introduction to their edited book, Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar argue for a critical transnational feminist praxis “grounding feminisms in activist communities everywhere…to interrogate all forms of implicit and explicit relations of power…and to contest those power relations through ongoing processes of self-critique and collective reflection.”2 Although it is daunting to imagine what their vision would look like in practice, I want to explore the limits as well as the possibilities of these efforts as evident in contemporary transnational feminist praxis. In order to do * University of Connecticut, usa. 1 Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997), and Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar, eds. Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis (Albany New York: suny Press, 2010), 15. 2 Swarr and Nagar, Critical Transnational Feminist Practice, 5.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004272835_009
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so, I draw on four different aspects of transnational feminist praxis: (1) transnational women’s movements; (2) transnational social justice movements with broad or cross-sectional political goals; (3) transnational activism in support of local organizing efforts such as movements against violence against women; and (4) transnational organizing around defined issues of specific relevance to women such as sex trafficking, migrant domestic labor, and reproductive rights. The first section of the chapter considers how postcolonial feminist scholars define transnational feminism praxis. I will use this critical exercise to set the stage for the second half of the chapter where I explore these four dimensions of transnational feminist praxis.
Defining Terms
Scholars interested in analyzing feminist praxis in a globalizing context use the term transnational, as opposed to other conceptualizations like international women’s movement or global feminism, to signify the diversity and complexity of women’s agency.3 According to Swarr and Nagar, international feminism remains invested in nation-state borders and does not effectively attend to the dynamics of globalization. Global feminisms prioritize “northern feminist agendas and perspectives and for homogenize women’s struggles for socio political justice, especially in colonial and neocolonial contexts.”4 In contrast, transnational feminism, as a conceptual frame, arose from postcolonial feminist challenges to a totalizing and globalizing gesture that fails to engage differences among women. It also attends to the power imbalances that shape a hegemonic feminist praxis that subsumes or marginalizes the activist efforts and goals of Third World women’s feminist praxis. Alexander and Mohanty use the term “transnational feminism” as a corrective to counter the earlier tendency to claim a so-called global sisterhood which, among other things, marginalized Third world women’s feminist organizing and the power relations that contour their everyday lives as well as transnational feminist activism.5 Postcolonial and Third World feminists have long critiqued the construction of Third World women as undifferentiated victims 3 Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds. Scattered hegemonies: postmodernity and transnational feminist perspectives (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, mn, 1994), 17. 4 Swarr and Nagar, Critical Transnational Feminist Practice, 4. 5 Alexander and Mohanty, Feminist Genaologies, xxi; see also Lal et al., “Recasting Glboal Feminisms: Toward a Comparative Historical Approach to Women’s Activism and Feminist Scholarship,” Feminist Studies 36(1): 2010, 13–39.
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of conservative patriarchal and religious traditions, rather than as agents resisting complex ruling relations using diverse resistance strategies.6 As Una Narayan explains, colonized nations “were conversely often represented as victims of a static past of unchanging custom and tradition, virtually immune from history.”7 In this regard, activist scholars interested in resisting “the old sisterhood model of missionary work, of intervention and salvation” Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan stress the significance of feminist praxis for “link[ing] diverse local practices to formulate a transnational set of solidarities.”8 Grewal and Kaplan call for the development of transnational feminist practices based on comparing “multiple, overlapping, and discrete oppressions rather than to construct a theory of hegemonic oppression under a unified category of gender.”9 In order to do so, they argue, feminist praxis “must be open to rethinking” and informed by “self-reflexivity as an ongoing process if we are to avoid creating new orthodoxies that are exclusionary.”10 The critical reflection on how power functions to silence women in the South or to marginalize poor women in all regions from those with the resources to participate in transnational organizing, has raised consciousness about the needs to develop more creative and effective strategies for uncovering and resisting the inequalities within feminist movements.11 Given the inequalities that exist between women in different parts of the world, transnational feminist praxis requires commitment to interrogating the different investments that motivate engagement in diverse transnational political projects. Yet, it is extremely difficult to work against hierarchical structures and asymmetrical power relations, even in collaborations that are explicitly anti-hierarchical. In challenging these power relations and inequalities, Swarr and Nagar argue for a self-reflective practice that includes collaboration and dialogue – a form of praxis that, in Piya Chatterjee’s words includes the development of affective ties based on diverse experiences of struggle to produce “global literacies – in the service of social transformation, compassion and 6
7 8 9 10 11
See, for example, Chandra T. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra T. Mohanty et al. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1991), 51–80. Una Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminism (ny: Routledge, 1997), 16. Grewal and Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies, 19. Ibid., 17–18. Ibid., 18. Lyndi Hewitt and Marina Karides, “More Than a Shadow of a Difference? Feminist Participation on the World Social Forum,” in Handbook for World Social Forum Activism, ed. Jackie Smith et al. (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2011), 85–104.
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justice.”12 This requires that activists help “tie the threads of such connected suffering, across spaces of embodied difference, with ethical purpose and reflection.”13 For example, Mohanty argues for the potential of one form of feminist praxis developed through solidarities of Third world women workers that stand “in opposition to ahistorical notions of the common experience, or strength of Third World women.”14 Chatterjee’s poetic activist call raises the stakes for implementing an anti-hierarchical transnational feminist praxis in different localities and sites of activism and through globalizing cultures of resistance.
Dilemmas of Transnational Feminist Praxis
Transnational organizing takes place in multiple sites through different forms of resistances. As Luis Eduardo Guarnizo and Michael Peter Smith explain, “transnational political spaces should be treated as the resultant of separate, sometimes parallel, sometimes competing projects at all levels of the global system – from the ‘global government’ agenda of international organizations and multinational corporations to the most local ‘survival strategies,’ by which transnational migrant networks are socially constructed.”15 They use the term “transnational social formation” to emphasize how “transnational practices, while connecting collectivities located in more than one national territory, are embodied in specific social relations established between specific people, situated in…localities, at historically determined times.”16 Following this conceptualization, transnational feminist praxis must be understood as a process generated from the everyday activities and negotiations of diverse individuals, communities, and transnational networks. These sites produce localized practices and political strategies that contribute to diverse cultures of resistance. Transnational feminism, as a form of praxis, includes numerous political projects that weave in and outside different social justice movements. Women’s transnational activism has a long history that includes the effort to achieve 12
Chatterjee (2009) as quoted in Swarr and Nagar, Critical Transnational Feminist Practice, 146. Emphasis in original. 13 Swarr and Nagar, Critical Transnational Feminist Practice, 146. 14 Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2003), 168. 15 Luis E. Guarnizo and Michael P. Smith, “The Locations of Transnationalism” in Transnationalism From Below, eds. Michael P. Smith and Luis E. Guarnizo (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 6. 16 Ibid., 11.
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suffrage, among other rights for women. Feminist activists have also worked within broader social justice movements such as the World Social Forum to instill feminist perspectives and democratic practices. Still, other feminist organizing efforts are less formal and are mobilized in the context of specific local struggles against neoliberal globalization and other relations of ruling. Some of these political projects are broadened to engage in transnational activism designed to address specific mobilizations for labor rights, reproductive justice, access to education, environmental justice, sex workers rights, among other political projects. Each of these forms of feminist praxis offers new challenges and possibilities for building globalizing cultures of resistance.
Transnational Women’s Movements with Broad or Cross-sectional Political Goals
Women’s transnational organizing can be traced at least from the 1800s. Bonnie Anderson describes the collaboration of women “from Constantinople to Mississippi” who “embraced democracy, feminism, and socialism derived from the fundamental principle of human equality.”17 Historian Leila Rupp examines women’s activism from 1880s to World War ii with the focus on anti- slavery, women’s suffrage, peace, and labor legislation. She highlights the efforts of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, International Alliance of Women, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, among other groups. Rupp acknowledges how the limited membership “served as a source of solidarity for those within its walls.” but excluded many women from the ranks.18
17 18
Bonnie Anderson (2000) as in Mary E. Hawkesworth, Globalization and Women’s Activism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 37–38. Leila Rupp. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, ny: Princeton University Press, 1997), 51. In her review of Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics by Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink (1998), Karen Beckwith raises the following questions: “Are liberal political thought and practice liberating form women, or do they underpin a system of exclusion and oppression of women?” and “Does women’s political practice carry within it a transformative capacity?” (p. 603). In answering these questions, the authors conclude that “a global cultural process of expansion of liberal values” and a liberal discourse of states “‘can provide opportunities for activists to expose the gap between discourse and practice, and that this has been an effective organizing tool’”(p. 206, quoted in Beckwith 2001, 604).
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European and us women activists were instrumental in lobbying the League of Nations and the Pan American Organization that led to the drafting of the un Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Early efforts focused on gaining legal recognition for women’s rights, then expanded to address women’s social and economic needs. Achievements in these arenas included the establishment of the Commission on the Status of Women, the Convention on the Political Rights of Women, “the first international instrument to recognize and protect women’s political rights.” and the passage of the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women [cedaw].19 By drawing on tools of transnational feminist praxis like cedaw, many activists enhanced their ability to advance the rights of women in their national context.20 For example, following Moroccan women activists’ success in gaining their country’s ratification of cedaw, they were able to achieve changes in the family and work codes that improved women’s position as wives, mothers, and workers.21 Southern African countries that did not ratify cedaw generated shadow reports to challenge the state’s inertia regarding addressing women’s inequality.22 Women’s activism led the u.n. to declare 1975 the International Women’s Year which was marked by the First Women’s World Conference in Mexico City. Manisha Desai notes that the Conference was attend by “[t]wo-thousand delegates from 133 countries, of which women headed 113.”23 Subsequent conferences were held in Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985), and Bejing (1995). Desai points out that “[t]he most enduring impact and contribution of the decade was its facilitation of transnational solidarities.” She reports that attendance at the ngo Forums that accompanied the world conferences grew from 6000 in Mexico City to 15,000 in Nairobi and 30,000 in Beijing. Women’s participation in these events was facilitated by an unprecedented 19
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22 23
Manisha Desai, “Transnational Solidarity: Women’s Agency, Structural Adjustment, and Globalization,” in Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics, eds. Nancy A. Naples and Manisha Desai. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 25. Peggy Antrobus, The Global Women’s Movement: Issues and Strategies for the New Century (London: Zed Books, 2004); and Anu Pillay, “Women’s Activism and Transfor mation: Arising from the Cusp,” Feminist Africa 12, 2010: 63–79. Fatima Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji, “The Feminization of Public Space: Women’s Activism, the Family Law, and Social Change in Morocco,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 2(2), 2006.: 86–114. Anu Pillay, “Women’s Activism and Transformation: Arising from the Cusp,” Feminist Africa 12, 2010: 63–79. Manisha Desai, “Transnational Solidarity,” 28.
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growth in regional networks and non-governmental organizations [ngos], some of which were financed by governments and Western or Northernbased foundations.24 Some of these funding arrangements served to redirect the goals of ngos away from locally defined goals.25 For example, the us Agency for International Development (usaid) was the primary sponsor of the Latin American regional process which was put in place to provide a mechanism to link local ngos to the un Conference planning process (Friedman 1999). Elisabeth Friedman reports that women’s activists throughout Latin America “debated whether or not to accept money from an agency with a history of promoting us interests to the detriment of those of Third World nations.”26 Despite these concerns, the government and Northern or Western funding did facilitate the participation of women from different parts of the world and expanded the dialogue among activists beyond a Western and white Anglo definitions of women’s needs and issues.27 Furthermore, Desai notes, “Third World women were able to show First World women their own privilege and complicity in the oppression of women in the Third World.”28 24 Ibid. 25 In another case example, “Argentine feminists found the influence of the dominant Argentine political party so pervasive at the Latin American ngo regional preparatory conference [for Beijing] that they set up an alternative forum at the September 1994 meeting in Mar de Plata” (p. 363). Although Venezuela’s women’s movement benefitted greatly from participation in the Nairobi conference in 1985, ngos and women’s movement organizations did not receive similar benefits from the 1995 Fourth world conference in Beijing. Sonia E. Alvarez, “Advocating Feminism: The Latin American feminist ngo ‘boom’,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1(2), 1999.: 181–209. 26 Elisabeth J. Friedman, “The effects of ‘transnationalism reversed’ in Venezuela: Assessing the impact of global un conferences on the women’s movement,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1(3), 1999: 362. 27 Swarr and Nagar, Critical Transnational Feminist Practice and Valerie Sperling, Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia: Engendering Transition (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press: 1999); Wang Zheng and Ying Zhang. 2010. “Global Concepts, Local Prac tices: Chinese Feminism since the Fourth un Conference on Women.” Feminist Studies 36(1): 40–70. 28 Manisha Desai, “Transnational Solidarity,” 29. Related contestations were taking place within national borders as women of color called for an intersectional understanding that reflected the ways in which race, class, sexuality, country of origin further contoured women’s lives. See, for example, Chandra T. Mohanty “Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. by Mohanty, Chandra Talpade et al. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1991a), 1–47; Elizabeth R. Cole and Zakiya T. Luna, “Making
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The growing complexity of feminist analyses that resulted from the ongoing engagement of women from around the world deepened transnational feminist praxis and let to insights about the need to fight for women’s rights in all sites of global governance. The argument that “Women’s Rights are Human Rights” became a central theme in these arenas and was especially powerful as a frame in organizing against violence against women, understood broadly to include domestic violence, sexual abuse, and rape as a tool of war.29 The networks formed through the u.n. Conferences on Women and the regional networks that sustained them, led to ongoing activism and on conferences on environment, social development, and human rights and reproductive rights, among others.30 In 1984, reproductive rights activists from around the world joined together for the fourth International Women and Health Meeting organized by the International Contraception, Abortion and Sterilisaton Campaign to share their experiences and led to the development of the Women’s Network of Reproductive Rights [wgnrr]. The Latin American Women and Health Network and Women Living Under Muslim Laws were also organized during this conference. Almost a decade later wgnrr held a meeting in Madras, India, to further develop global solidarity despite diverse opinions on issues related to sexual and reproductive rights and approaches to women’s health. They were able to develop what they describe as a “global solidarity” through a commitment to self-determination as the core of the movement. wgnrr linked their efforts with the broader women’s movement through the Women’s World Conference in Beijing where they argued “that women’s health issues could not be separated from other women’s rights concerns and needed to be seen in a holistic manner.”31 The cultures of resistance developed over 50 years of struggle include a broadening of voices and perspectives represented in transnational feminist
29
30 31
Coalitions Work: Solidarity across Difference within us Feminism,” Feminist Studies 36(1)2010: 71–98. Charlotte Bunch, Mallika Dutt, and Susana Fried, Beijing’95: A global referendum on the human rights of women (Rutgers, nj: Center for Women’s Global Leadership, 1995), Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1993), and Elisabeth Friedman, “Women’s human rights: The emergence of a movement,” in Women’s Rights/Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives, ed. J. Peters, & A. Wolper (New York: Routledge, 1995), 18–35. Rosalind P. Petchesky, Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights (London and ny: Zed Books, 2003). “Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights,” accessed November 15, 2014 http:// wgnrr.org/.
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organizing, an expansion of issues and analyses, and the diversification of strategies. However, and not surprisingly, inequalities in access to the transnational political stage, the dominance of Western or Western-funded ngos, and the displacement of local concerns are just three of the many challenges that remain within transnational feminist praxis.32 A theme that also permeates feminist analyses of women’s activism in diverse cultures and national contexts relates to the extent to which feminism is understood or defined as a “Western” frame. Many women activists also raised concern that any claims to a global sisterhood in the name of feminism must be carefully examined in order to make visible the long history of what is called “colonial feminism.”33 Founder and president of the Association of African Women Scholars, Obioma Nnaemeka, illustrates this point in her discussion of the challenges facing indigenous women who participate in transnational organizing efforts. She points out how they are continuously marginalized and are often met with “the incapacity and unwillingness of Western feminists to create a site for true collaboration and equal partnership.”34 However, indigenous women have also organized autonomously in a variety of settings to foster solidarity and to identify political goals and strategies. For example, Aboriginal women have been fighting for decades to reclaim their lands and gain rights for themselves and their communities. During the 1960s, the Council for Aboriginal Women contributed to the development of the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement and the Aboriginal Land Rights Support Group.35 Māori women activists organized the fourth national United Women’s Conference in 1979 in Hamilton, New Zealand, where 32
33
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As Desai points out: “Of the 30,000 women present at Beijing over 8000 women were from the us alone. Furthermore, as Basu (2000), argues transnational activism creates divisions at the national level between the elites who belong to such networks and the vast majority of grassroots women who don’t.” Meydu Yeğenoğlu, “Satorial Fabric-ations: Enlightenment and Western Feminism,” in Postcolonialism, Feminisms and Religious Discourse ed. by Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-Lan, p. 63 (New York: Routledge); also see Deborah Mindry, “Non-Governmental Organizations, ‘Grassroots,’ and the Politics of Virtue,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26(4), 2001: 1187–1211; Nima Naghibi, Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran (Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); and Gada Mahrouse, Conflicted Commitments: Race, Privilege and Power in Transnational Solidarity Activism, (Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press). Obioma G. Nnaemeka, Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses (Westport, ct: Praeger, 2005), 5. Pat Dudgeon and Abigail Bray. Forthcoming 2016. “Women’s and Feminist Activism: Aboriginal and Torress Strait Islands,” in the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, ed. by Nancy A. Naples. London: Wiley-Blackwell.
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they articulated an analysis of feminist praxis that recognized the intersection of patriarchy with a racist nation state.36 Indigenous women have also been central to struggles for food sovereignty, environmental justice, and economic.37 However, like many Third World women activists, their issues or the particular challenges they face have not been readily embraced or understood by other feminists within the transnational feminist movement. As Nnaemeka explains, “[a]s they join transnational feminist forces, Third World women face a doublepronged challenge – the fight against patriarchal nationalisms on the one hand and the resistance against colonialist and imperialist feminism on the other hand.”38 However, a key aspect of transnational feminist praxis is the commitment to recognize these inequalities and to creatively address them through forms of democratic practice that have been imported into other social justice movements.39
Transnational Activism in Broad-Based Feminist & Social Justice Movements
Broad-based social justice movements take two different forms – one beginning from feminist praxis in which the different issues of importance to women across the world are honored through a loose coalition of local and transnational networks, the second involves feminist activism within broader social justice movements. One of the most recent manifestations of the first form is the World March for Women. The World March was created by the Féderation des femmes du Québec following the success of the 1995 World the Bread and Roses March inspired by the 1912 Lawrence Textile Mill strike where they called for “[b]read 36
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Michéle D. Dominy, “Măori Sovereignty: A Feminist Invention of Tradition,” in Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific, edited by Jocelyn Linnekin and Lin Poyer (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1990, pp. 237–257). See, for example, Lady Katherine Galeano Sánchez and Meike Werner, “Abya Yala’s Indigenous and Aboriginal Women: International Agenda of Integration and Solidarity,”. Latin American Policy 5(2): 265–278; and Veronica Schild, “Institutional Feminist Networks and Their ‘Poor’; Localizing Transnational Interventions,” Latin American Policy 5(2): 2014, 279–291. Obioma G. Nnaemeka, Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge, 12. Nancy A. Naples, “Sustaining Democracy: Localization, Globalization, and Feminist Praxis.” Sociological Forum 28(4)2013: 657–681. Portions of this paragraph are excerpted from Nancy A. Naples and Nikki McGary, “Feminism, Activism, and Scholarship in Global Context,” in The International Studies Encyclopedia, ed. by Robert A. Denemark (London: Blackwell, 2010), 2044.
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for their basic needs and roses for a better quality of life.”40 After years of planning, the World March brought together activists from 135 countries representing 2220 organizations to connect grass-roots organizations with the goal of eliminating violence against women and to address the root causes of poverty. The March highlights the significance of respecting and recognizing women’s diversity, the importance of women’s leadership, and strengthening alliances with women and progressive social movements.41 They have taken the many lessons of transnational feminist praxis to link the struggles of women around the world. They declare their solidarity with indigenous women in Quebec, women cleaners in Greece, and women in resistance in Kurdistan as well as condemn Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, Palestine. On December, 2004, they adopted a visionary “Women’s Global Charter for Humanity” based on the values of equality, freedom, solidarity, justice and peace.42 Given the extensive experience that feminists have in organizing transnationally, they have contributed significantly to the political vision and intersectional democratic praxis within various social justice movements. For example, Brazilian feminists who organized with the World March of Women against Violence and Poverty were key contributors to the first World Social Forum that met in São Paulo, Brazil, on April 9, 2001,43 and World March of Women activists have been involved with each subsequent Forum. Contributions of feminist praxis include providing models that emphasize a “holistic approach that recognizes intersections of multiple oppressions, and critical and inclusive methods of organizing.”44 Feminists also promote anti-hierarchal organizational practices that would silence diverse voices in broad-based social justice movements. For example, feminist activists working through the World Social Forum, for example, provide analyses of the ways in which “gender subordination” is an essential component of neoliberal globalization.45 Myra Marx Ferree and Aili Tripp explain 40
41 42 43 44 45
World March of Women, “Women on the march until we are all free! A Brief History of the World March of Women,” accessed November, 15, 2014, 2010, http://www.dssu.qc.ca/wp -content/uploads/a_brief_history_of_world_march_of_women.pdf. World March of Women, accessed November 15, 2014, http://www.marchemondiale.org/ index_html/en. World March of Women, accessed November 15, 2014, http://www.marchemondiale.org/ qui_nous_sommes/charte/en. Sonia E. Alvarez, “Beyond ngo-izing? Reflections from Latin America,” Development 52(2), 2009: 181. Lyndi Hewitt and Marina Karides, “More Than a Shadow of a Difference,” 92. Ibid., 86. See also Smith et al., Global Democracy and the World Social Forum (Boulder, co: Paradigm Publishers, 2007).
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that “[g]lobal terrorism and ‘national security’ are also increasingly recognized as being intertwined and gendered issues.”46 A group that has been especially prominent in bringing feminist praxis to the transnational social justice movement is Development Alternatives for Women in a New Era [dawn]. dawn is a network of feminists from the Global South which came together in 1984 to consider approaches to development that foreground women’s issues and the sustainability of their environments.47 During the 4th World Social Forum in 2004 in Mumbai, dawn (2004) co-organized Feminist Dialogues along with Indian feminists in which they posed several questions that are central to inclusive modes of feminist solidarity, including linking the local and global organizing, who gets to speak for whom, “how local issues are distorted/[or] misrepresented by international, regional and national networks” and how the transnational feminist movement is “addressing issues of power, accountability and transparency, and structural inequities both within the North and the South and across the North–South, in relation to deciding agendas, division of work, resource sharing and access.”48 By reflecting on these questions, the Feminist Dialogues encourages activists to address power imbalances in their organizing practices. The extent to which activists can correct for structural inequities varies by region and by issue; however, engaging in this process of reflexivity facilitates transparency and accountability that could further movement goals in other ways. The many differences that divide social movement participants, even those who share a commitment to social justice goals, pose a fundamental challenge to the process of moving from deliberation and dialogue to action. There are also a number of issues that historically divide women’s movement activists including those related to abortion rights, sexual rights, displacement, and nationalisms.49 Furthermore, in sites of transnational social justice like the World Social Forum as well as other sites of transnational feminist organiz46 47 48 49
Myra M. Ferree, and Aili Mari Tripp, eds, Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights (ny: New York University Press, 2006), 13. Gita Sen and Caren Grown, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives (New York, ny: Monthly Review Press, 1987). Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (dawn). 2004. dawn Web site. Retrieved October 9, 2008 (http://www.dawnnet.org/index.html), n.p. Seyla Benhabi, and Judith Resnik, Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender (New York: New York University Press, 2009), Valentine Moghadam, ed., Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective (Westview Press, 1994), and Rosalind P. Petchesky and Karen Judd, ed. Negotiating Reproductive Rights: Women’s Perspectives Across Countries and Cultures (London and New York: Zed Books, 2001).
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ing, Western feminists and women’s ngos often fail to follow the lead of local feminists engaged in struggles specific to their communities.50
Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Organizing
This failure points to a number of other problematic tendencies within scholarly and popular depictions of transnationalism. For example, the marginalization of local struggles that do not get taken up by or articulated within transnational politics and the invisibility or silencing of issues and activists who cannot take their struggles to the global political stage. Here I have found a concept drawn from the work of feminist geographers to be especially powerful for moving towards a reflexive form of praxis. This term foregrounds the notion of scale in constructing what Cindi Katz calls a “countertopography” to contest the uncritical approach to the local in the context of global capitalist expansion. Countertopography is placed up against the more common term “topography” which is merely a descriptive depiction of the local that masks the relations of ruling in different localities.51 By shifting a transnational feminist praxis away from a reliance on the dichotomies of local and global, a countertopography reveals the contradictions of capitalism and other ruling relations as they land in the lives of particular social actors. It also highlights ways in which it is resisted in different spaces and places. As Katz explains, “without romanticizing the local scale or any particular place, I want to get at the specific ways globalization works on particular grounds in order to work out a situated, but at the same time scalejumping and geography-crossing, political response to it.”52 She suggests that “[t]racing the contour lines of such a ‘counter-topography’ to other sites might encourage and enable the formation of new political-economic alliances that transcend both place and identity and foster a more effective cultural politics to counter the imperial, patriarchal, and racist integument [or cloak] of globalization,”53 The following cases are chosen to illustrate the challenges in achieving new political alliances and cross-border solidarities.54 50 51
The above three paragraph were adopted from Naples (2013, 672–673). Cindi Katz, “On the Grounds of Globalization: A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement.” Signs 26(4): 213–1234. 52 Ibid., p. 1216. 53 Ibid. 54 Nancy A. Naples and Jennifer B. Mendez, Border Politics: Social Movements, Collective Identities, and Globalization (ny, ny: New York University Press, 2015).
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In her analysis of the movement against acid violence in Bangladesh, Elora Halim Chowdhury explains how anti-acid mobilization began as a local initiative with more progressive and critical goals that were redirected through individualist neoliberal strategies adopted by ngos and international development organizations.55 Local activists’ successful public awareness campaigns drew the attention of Western feminists and international donors. The transnational networks that developed to address the problem “transformed [the local group’s] radical vision of structural change and women’s communal empowerment into a neoliberal one of incremental change and individual transformation.”56 Here we see another contradiction of social movement success in the context of structural inequalities. Transnational networks to address violence against women developed quickly once the issue was placed on the un agenda in 1985.57 Violence against women was one of the four issues highlighted in the 1995 Beijing Platform. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink explain that the linking of violence against women with human rights provided a framework that “resonated across significant cultural and experiential barriers.”58 It also permitted activists working against violence against women to join their efforts with a broad-based preexisting network which enhanced their reach. As Chodhury demonstrates, movement success has led to the professionalization and institutionalization of feminist practice with differential impact on women in different regions. For example, while urban women’s movements organizations in Bangladesh were enhanced by participation in transnational networks, these transnational alliances interfered with “a more nuanced engagement with diverse women’s realities in the group” and contributed to the emergence of “new kinds of hierarchies” and where “only certain kinds of organizing are visible.”59 In another example, this time related to transnational activism along the US-Mexico border, Michelle Téllez and Cristina Sanidad emphasize the significance of cross-border alliances for contesting unfair workplace practices of multinational corporations. Although they do not draw on the conceptualization of counter-topography, Michelle Téllez and Cristina Sanidad’s analysis of 55
Elora H. Chowdhury, Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh (Albany, ny: suny Press, 2011). See also, Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Paragon, 2009). 56 Chowdhury, Transnationalism Reversed, 1216. 57 Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders (Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press, 1998). 58 Ibid., 167. 59 Chowdhury, Transnationalism Reversed, 176.
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women’s organizations in the border region of Tijuana and San Diego evokes Katz’s understanding of the term.60 They draw on Millie Thayer’s conceptualization of “transnational feminist counterpublics”61 that Thayer “defines as political spaces where oppositional perspectives can be articulated, debated, constructed, and shared” and “activists engage with each other collaboratively to develop solidarity and democratic practices across power differentials and differences of class, nationality, race, and ethnicity.”62 The transnational activist networks established between Mexican women’s labor organizers in the factories along the us-Mexican border and their allies in the North helped raise consciousness on both sides of the border to the labor abuses and other human rights violations. Téllez and Sanidad note that: “Because the collective identity – based on the recognition of shared human experiences and values, and their critiques of neoliberalism – is contingent in part on a physical space that transcends borders, activists offer a model and a sense of hope for other grassroots organizations located along the us-Mexico border for issue-based organizing.”63 Valerie Francisco and Robyn Rodriguez (2011) illustrate the significance of a counter-topographic approach in their analysis of cross-border organizing of Fillipino migrant domestic workers in New York City and Hong Kong who are connected through the transnational alliance, Migrante International. They find that the activist strategies varied across the different locales but are enriched by participation in the transnational networks and by the “shared experience of being laboring Outsiders.”64 Their explication of solidarities fostered across these different spaces affirms Mohanty’s argument about the power of transnational solidarities of Third world women workers. Despite the 60
Michelle Téllez and Cristina Sanidad, “‘Giving Wings to Our Dreams’: Binational Activism and Workers’ Rights Struggles in the San Diego” in Border Politics: Social Movements, Collective Identities, and Globalization, ed. Nancy A. Naples and Jennifer B. Mendez (ny, ny: New York University Press, 2015), 323–354. 61 Millie Thayer, Making Transnational Feminism: Rural Women, ngo Activists, and Northern Donors in Brazil (New York: Routledge);. 62 Bickman Mendez and Naples, Border Politics, p. 24 referencing Thayer, Making Transnational Feminism; see also Chandra T. Mohanty, “Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideologies of Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra T. Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3–30. 63 Michelle Téllez and Cristina Sanidad, “Giving Wings to Our Dreams,” 346. 64 Valerie Francisco and Robyn Rodriguez, Countertopographies of Migrant Transnational Feminism: Family, Labor and Citizenship, Feminist Fantasies Conference, Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University, 2011, 18.
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distance, the domestic workers share the embodied experiences that create a basis for shared understanding and political action.65 Their approach also echoes Desai’s “translocal” approach that, she explains, can “capture the relational and fluid cartography of transnational but…decenter the nation.”66 In the final section, we come full circle from transnational organizing around broad-based social justice issues to more specific concerns that are taking place at the transnational level. Here we can see the complex interplay of feminist praxis within and across transnational movements with different investments that lead to both transformation within and tensions across movements.
Transnational Feminist Organizing around Defined Issues
Feminist transnational activists have a variety of investments that motivate their activism and that either enhance or conflict with one another’s movement goals. Ferree and Tripp note that “[r]ather than one unitary principle of feminism being the basis for networking, as in the International Council of Women, adopted at the beginning of the last century, the actual political work of such ngos and networks is differentiated and issue-specific.”67 Zillah Eisenstein reports that feminists at the World Social Forum were developing “new strategies to resist the growing militarization of the world” and “open resistance to the increasing marketization/privatization of” health, welfare or education and “anti-fundamentalisms politics.”68 As feminisms have diversified within these different issue-areas, we also see the development of competing definitions of the problem and political strategies to address them.69 One powerful illustration of the contradictions and tension between different feminist mobilization is found in the sex worker rights movement and the movement against sex trafficking.70 As the movement against sex trafficking 65 66 67 68 69 70
Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Beyond Borders. Manisha Desai, “Through and Beyond Transnational Feminisms,” paper presented at the Nordic Gender Research Conference, Roskilde University, November 5–7, 2014. Myra M. Ferree and Aili Mari Tripp, ed. Global Feminism, 13. Zillah Eisenstein, Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism, and the West, (London and ny: Zed Books, 2004), 141. Rosalind P. Petchesky, Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights (London and ny: Zed Books, 2003). See, for example, Elizabeth Bernstein, 2010. “Militarised Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Poltiics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Anti-Trafficking Campaigns.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36(1): 45–71; Kamala Kempadoo,
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has gained traction, the criminalization of sex work and homogenization of sexual labor has intensified. This has also shaped the treatment of those who are found to be sex trafficked. The movements overlap in their efforts to contest the deportation and arrest of women who have been determined to be sex trafficked, yet there are a number of contradictions that shape activists framing of the issue and the political strategies they adopt. While local campaigns to support sex worker rights has generated a transnational movement to support sex worker rights in different contexts, there remains a tendency to construct sex workers primarily as victims of economic and social circumstances beyond their control. Laura Agustin finds the continuity of “rescue narratives” in some transnational feminist approaches to sex work, especially when discussing migrant women who are depicted as trafficked.71 Organizing under the banner of “Save Us From Saviours,” the Indian sex worker collective vamp argues that: For sex workers to access and enjoy their rights, misgivings and certain stereotypes about sex work need to be broken down: sex workers do not necessarily need or want to be rescued; they are not a threat to the greater “chaste” society, nor are they mobile cases and/or transmitters of hiv. They are capable of advocating for themselves, and of demanding their own rights. While they certainly face discrimination and hardship, people in sex work do not need pity. Rather, they need the rest of society to recognise and fight against its own misconceptions, judgments and unfounded fears.72 As Amalia Cabezas points out, “women’s sexual rights have not been established within national and international legal instruments even though sexual rights discourse has been on the international women’s organizing agenda for several decades.”73 For example, so-called “anti-prostitution laws” using what
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ed., Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights (Boulder, co: Paradigm, 2005); and Jo Doezema, “Sex Worker Rights, Abolitionism, and the Possibilities for a Rights-Based Approach to Trafficking,” in Alliance News, 22 (2004) 15–22; and Adriana Piscitelli, “Transnational Sisterhood? Brazilian Feminisms Facing Prostitution,” Latin American Policy 5(2): 2014, 221–235. Laura Maria Agustin, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (Boston, ma: Zed Books, 2012), 7. vamp “Save Us From Saviours,” accessed December 16, 2014 http://saveusfromsaviours .net/?p=31. Amalia Cabezas, “Between Love and Money: Sex, Tourism, and Citizenship in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.” Signs 29(4), 2004: 1008–1009. See also Charlotte Bunch and
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has been called the “Nordic Model” have been challenged by sex workers who claim that the new Canadian bill, the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, “makes it illegal to buy sex, though not to sell it” leaves sex workers “more vulnerable to attack, with less time and opportunity to vet clients and less ability to share information about violent punters.”74 This law was supported by Equality Now which has worked with “grassroots women’s and human rights organizations and individual activists since 1992” and “documents violence and discrimination against women and mobilizes international action to support efforts to stop these abuses.”75 As a consequence of their criminalization in many contexts and their marginalization within human rights discourse and international governance more generally, sex worker rights activists have been forced to be especially careful in their framing and strategies. For example, given the context in which sex trafficking is the dominant framework through which sex work is understood, sex worker rights organizations have to keep their distance from teenaged sex workers, even when these young women and men seek assistance from these organizations. Sex worker rights’ activists also have to be extremely careful in what kinds of demands they make on the state. For example, in Las Vegas, the sex workers describe their efforts as “chipping away” at state regulation and criminalization.76 They link their efforts with sex workers in other locales while fighting against local ordinances and law enforcement practices. In Las Vegas, they are fighting the arrest of sex workers who are found carrying multiple condoms and who have had previous arrests. The implication of this law enforcement strategy undermines safe sex practices among sex workers. The activists also supported efforts to insert their demands for sex workers’ rights within the transnational labor movement and human rights’ documents. One example of the way in which the dominant discourse on sex trafficking poses a challenge to the political organizing of the transnational sex worker rights movement was evident in the 2012 International aids Conference held in d.c. when sex workers representing groups in other parts of the world were
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Susanna Fried. “Bejing’95: Moving Women’s Human Rights from Margin to Center,” Signs 22(1), 1996: 200–204. Liam Casey, “Canada’s ‘anti-prostitution law’ raises fears for sex workers’ safety,” The Guardian, December 12, accessed December 16, 2014. Equality Now, “About Us,” accessed December 16, 2014 http://www.equalitynow.org/ about-us. Jennifer Heineman and Crystal A. Jackson, “Sex Worker Organizing.” Presentation for session on “Women’s Community Activism,” sponsored by the Division of Sociology and Social Welfare, Society for the Study of Social Problems, Denver, Colorado, August 18, 2012.
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barred from entry to the us and therefore could not participate in the conference. Reuters reported that: “As the conference was taking place in the us, more than 1,000 sex workers from India and 42 other nations including Kenya, Mexico, Uganda, China and Indonesia convened in Kolkata, India for a five-day ‘Sex Worker Freedom Festival’.”77 Activists organizing on behalf of sex worker rights align with different mobilizations depending on the social location and political constraints shaping the everyday lives, mobility, and legality of sex workers. Some work closely with immigrant rights groups (see, for example, Agustin 2012), others align with the transnational labor movement which has become an important site for transnational organization.78 However, Greger Gall (2010) identifies a number of drawbacks faced by sex worker activists working through labor unions including forsaking a key characteristic of labour unionism, namely, the focus of collective self-activity in and on the workplace and from a basis on having a tangible presence in the workplace through membership among workers. In other words, the sense in which collective bargaining, whether formal or informal, in the workplace as the quintessential characteristic of labour unions is inverted, not because of strategic or ideological choice but because of the result of an extemely unequal balance of power enforced upon the sex worker milieus.79 Gall analyzes what he terms the “return to advocacy” that is partly a consequence of the diversity of sites in which sex work takes place and the inequalities among sex workers in these different venues and locales. His findings point to the significance of having a critical mass of sex workers as union activists to achieve visibility and “to construct wider effective alliances with feminists and labour unionists” to generate solidary and achieve the movement’s goals.80 As Valentine Moghadam, Suzanne Franzway, and Mary Margaret Fonow 77 “International aids Conference 2012: Sex Workers Unite In India After Getting Banned From d.c. Conference,” Huffington Post, 2012, accessed December 1, 2014, http://www .huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/29/international-aids-conference-sex-workers_n_1716423 .html. 78 Laura Maria Agustin, Sex at the Margins, and Gregor Gall, “Sex Worker Collective Organi zation: Between Advocacy Group and Labour Union?” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journey 29(3): 289–304. 79 Gregor Gall, “Sex Worker Collective Organization: Between Advocacy Group and Labour Union?” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journey 29(3): 2010, 290. 80 Ibid., 302.
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demonstrate, insights from feminist praxis can also enhance the progressive possibilities of transnational labor organizing.81 Moghadam, Franzway, and Fonow explore the diverse ways in which solid arities developed between women’s and lbgt movements have expanded the rights for workers who have been neglected by traditional labor union organizing. While feminist activism has often dovetailed with the goals of lgbt movements, the contemporary emphasis on intersectional coalition politics has deepened these affiliations.82 Franzway and Fonow demonstrate that feminist union activists model coalition politics within the transnational worker rights movements as feminists join with queer activists “to revitalize and expand the boundaries of the labor movement by pushing unions to consider new forms of organizing, new types of workers and workplaces, and new agendas”83 (p. 301). Union feminists not only challenge the sexual politics within unions and work to mobilize women, they have built networks to broaden participation in union politics and link their efforts with feminist movements more generally. Feminist union activists have been central in building the analyses and collaborations to broaden union activism to reflect diverse concerns and, “[i]n turn, unions have the potential to provide queer activists and feminists with resources to participate in transnational politics that aims to win political justice and the social/economic rights of lgbt workers around the world.”84 These case studies reveal the diverse ways that transnational feminist praxis contribute to distinctive cultures of resistance, the contradictions in different approaches, and the continuity of themes that are evident across these different venues, a phenomenon that Angela Miles has termed “integrative feminisms.”85 She explains that “[g]lobal feminist dialogue has thus supported integrative feminist revaluation of the female, confirmed its radical political potential, and strengthened both feminist autonomy and the conceptualization of feminist struggle as women-defined social change.”86 In the concluding 81 Valentine Moghadam, Suzanne Franzway, and Mary Margaret Fonow, Making Globalization Work for Women The Role of Social Rights and Trade Union Leadership (Albany, ny: suny Press, 2011). 82 Ibid. 83 Suzanne Franzway, and Mary Margaret Fonow, “Demanding Their Rights: lgbt Transna tional labor Activism.” in Making Globalization Work for, ed. Valentine Moghadam, 2011, 289–308. 84 Ibid., 304. 85 Angela R. Miles, Integrative Feminisms: Building Global Visions, 1960s–1990s. (ny: Routledge, 1995). 86 Ibid., 135. Aspects of integrative feminisms include refusal of “the fragmentation of industrial, patriarchal society,” “resistance to all dominations,” and emphasis on “life-centered values.”
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section, I highlight some of the most salient themes identified in this chapter and conceptualize them as lessons from transnational feminist praxis. Conclusion transnational feminist praxis has established itself as a multifaceted political force that is uniquely positioned to contribute to diverse cultures of resistance. Feminist activism on behalf of women’s rights includes advocacy within the United Nations and through non-governmental organizations as well as loose networks of feminist activist groups engaged in organizing through Women’s March of Women and dawn, among others. Feminist activist interventions in these different political formations include diverse strategies to address a range of political goals, from liberal to radical.87 Transnational feminist praxis is evident in commitments to anti-hierarchical and participatory democratic practices in even broader social justice movements like the World Social Forum. It also informs coalition work on behalf of specific goals such as sex worker rights and reproductive justice and within other movements such as the international labor movement. Each of these forms of transnational feminist praxis offers important lessons for building globalizing cultures of resistance. Among the many lessons from the diverse cultures of resistance developed through transnational feminist praxis chronicled in this chapter is the way in which different perspectives and leadership are incorporated in transnational organizing in broad-based women’s movements. For example, Rosalind Petchesky argues that “[d]espite political differences and disparities in access to power and resources…,…activists and thinkers from the South assumed intellectual and political leadership in shaping a more holistic and integrative direction for the transnational women’s health movement in the 1990s.”88 Latin American and African feminist have been especially effective in challenging inequalities in transnational feminist praxis.89 Transnational feminist 87 Ibid. 88 Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights (London and ny: Zed Books, 2003), 5. 89 Sonia Alvarez et al, “Encountering Latin American and Caribbean Feminisms,” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, 2003: 2537–2579, Elizabeth Maier, and Nathalie Lebon, ed., Women’s Movements in Transition Politics. Princeton, (nj: Princeton University Press, 2010), Obioma G. Nnaemeka, “Nego-Feminism,” and Oyeronke Oyewumi, African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood (Trenton, nj: African World Press, 2004).
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organizations like Women Living under Muslim Laws and Islamic Feminists Transforming Middle East have also organized across national borders to address the specific concerns of women who are often constructed as victims rather than agents of their own lives.90 A second lesson of transnational feminist praxis is the need to deepen critical engagement through various political and organizational strategies including building extensive networks and formal institutional structures.91 While transnational feminists recognized some of the limits of the so-called ngoization of feminist activism and advocacy, they also acknowledge the significance of ngos for sustaining feminist cultures of resistance and political interventions over time and place. Sonia Alvarez observes in “Beyond ngoizing? Reflections from Latin America”: As discursive fields of action, feminisms are dynamic, always changing, on the move. They are continually reconfigured by a mix of internal and external forces and have shifting centres of gravity. Which actors, discourse, practices and organizational forms prevail or are most politically visible at any given time in a given socio-political context therefore necessarily varies. There is, in short, no 211st century Iron Law of ngo-ization.92 A related lesson relates to the contradictions of incorporation of feminist issues in institutions and documents of global governance such as cedaw. Many activists enhanced their ability to advance the rights of women in their local context through the legitimacy of women’s rights claims at the level of the u.n.93 For example, Susanna Wing (2002) documents how the women in the Sahelian State of Mali used the international discourse on women’s rights to increase women’s activism on behalf of their constitutional rights and their political representation. However, feminists and other activists also point out that there are many women’s concerns and indigenous peoples’ political claims that do not fit neatly within the neo-liberal human rights framework, including access to education, environmental issues, and sovereignty. As Alexander and Mohanty 90 91 92 93
Valentine Moghadam, Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement, (Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012). Myra M. Ferree, and Aili Mari Tripp, ed., “Global Feminism”. Sonia E. Alvarez, “Beyond ngo-izing? Reflections from Latin America,” Development 52(2), 2009: 182. Peggy Antrobus, The Global Women’s Movement: Issues and Strategies for the New Century (London: Zed Books, 2004) and Anu Pillay, “Women’s Activism and Transfor mation: Arising from the Cusp,” Feminist Africa 12, 2010: 63–79.
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explain, “there is no language or conceptual framework to imagine territorial sovereignty as a feminist demand or to theorize decolonization as a fundamental aspect of feminist struggle.”94 However, as I have argued elsewhere, “the strength of transnational feminist praxis lies in its ability to remain critical of exclusionary practices in movement politics and organizations, to work simultaneously against capitalist globalization, patriarchal, [racist,] and other forms of oppression, and to offer new alternatives to the dominant forms of globalization”.95 This approach also provides the tools for, in Mohanty’s words, “knowing differences and particularities” in order to “better see the connections” between different political perspectives and strategies “because no border is ever complete or rigidly determining.”96 And, finally, as Mary Hawkesworth (2006) explains, “[b]y disagreeing openly and giving voice to multiplicity and difference, transnational feminist activists can model a different mode of democratic practice as they struggle against global hegemony.”97 A fourth lesson is the importance of developing transnational solidarities and avoiding organizing around “distinct issues, separate from one another” as expressed by wgnrr at the 1996 Regional Members’ Meeting in Amsterdam. As they report, “[t]he meeting reflected the overall global trend of looking at women’s health as an interrelated issue and diverging into the interlinked realms of violence against women, endemic poverty of women, women in emergency and conflict situations; amongst others.”98 In practice, they support a wide range of issues that go far beyond sexual and reproductive health and rights. For example, they have come out against the anti-homosexuality bill in Kenya and have organized around World aids Day and the Elimination of Violence Against Women. wgnrr also stresses the importance of another lesson from transnational feminist praxis; namely, the development of regional networks to help link the local with the global women’s movement.99 As they explain: 94 95 96
97 98 99
Jacqui Alexander, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ed., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, xxxiv–xxxv. Nancy A. Naples, “Crossing Borders: Community Activism, Globalization, and Social Justice.” Social Problems 56(1)2009, 14. Chandra T. Mohanty, “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited,” in Women’s Studies for the Future, ed., Elizabeth Lapovksy Kennedy and Agatha Beins. (New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 76. Mary E. Hawkesworth, Globalization and Women’s Activism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 145. wgnrr, 2014. See, for example, Almudena Cabezas, “Transnational Feminist Networks Building Regions in Latin America.” Latin American Policy 5(2): 2014, 207–220.
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Regionalisation ensures our members’ active and meaningful participation for promoting women’s reproductive rights in all continents. It gives more power and autonomy to the members and allows for stronger coordination in the regional and sub-regional levels. It also gives a better space for members to pressure their governments, via strong voices and common agendas based on their local needs. The regionalisation strategy and the location of wgnrr in the regions has enabled us to understand better the issues, and the opportunities for strengthening campaigns resulting in active defence and promotion of srhr [sexual and reproductive health and rights].100 They have supported the development of regional networks in Asia and the Pacific, Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean. This fifth lesson relates to the need to recognize local meanings and political concerns. In her insightful study of transnational organizing of garment workers, Ethel Brooks argues that: It is the local that matters and on which the transnational depends. Without a consideration for local meanings, organizing efforts, and contestations, transnational organizing will continue to replicate the global– local split and reinforce the new international division of labor – both within the campaigns and on the factory floors of the garment industry.101 In order to implement this lesson, a counter-topographical approach to feminist praxis calls for localizing transnational politics, and, in turn, to link local political struggles with relevant or related struggles in different parts of the world. A final lesson is the importance of learning from previous activist efforts. Despite moments in history when women’s activism and feminist politics have been silenced or repressed,102 feminist praxis has persisted, deepened and 100 Ibid. 101 Ethel Books, Unraveling the Garment Industry: Transnational Organizing and Women’s Work (Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 137. 102 Anne Cova. “International Feminisms in Historical Comparative Perspective: France, Italy and Portugal, 1880s–1930s,” Women’s History 19(4), 2010: 595–612, Angela R Miles, Integrative Feminisms, Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), Sheila M. Rothman, Women’s Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideas and Practices. (ny, ny: Basic Books, 1979), and Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, ny: Princeton University Press, 1997).
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expanded into diverse local mobilizations, coalition politics, and global social justice movements. The lessons and spirit of feminist praxis are now integral to diverse globalized cultures of resistance to gender inequality, racism, poverty, violence, and degradation of communities and the environment. Bibliography Agustin, Laura Maria. Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. Boston, MA: Zed Books, 2012. Alexander, Jacqui, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge, 1997. Alvarez, Sonia E. “Advocating Feminism: The Latin American feminist NGO ‘boom’.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1 2 (1999): 181–209. ———. “Beyond NGO-izing? Reflections from Latin America.” Development 52 2 (2009): 175–184. Alvarez, Sonia, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Ericka Beckman, Maylei Blackwell, Norma Chinchilla, Nathalie Lebon, Marysa Navarro, and Marcela Rios-Tobar. “Encountering Latin American and Caribbean Feminisms.” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (2003): 2537–579. Anderson, Bonnie. Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement 1830–1860. NY, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000. Antrobus, Peggy. The Global Women’s Movement: Issues and Strategies for the New Century. London: Zed Books, 2004. Beckwith, Karen. 2001. Review of Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics by Margaret E. Keck, Kathryn Sikkink; Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader by Cathy J. Cohen, Kathleen B. Jones, Joan C. Tronto Review by: Karen Beckwith Signs 26 (2): 602–606. Benhabib, Seyla, and Judith Resnik. Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Bernstein, Elizabeth. “Militarised Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Poltitics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Anti-Trafficking Campaigns.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36 1 (2010): 45–71. Bickman Mendez, Jennifer, and Nancy A. Naples. Border Politics, Globalization and Social Movements. NY, NY: New York University Press, 2015. Books, Ethel. Unraveling the Garment Industry: Transnational Organizing and Women’s Work. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Bunch, Charlotte, and Susanna Fried. “Beijing’95: Moving Women’s Human Rights from Margin to Center.” Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society 22 1 (1996): 200–204.
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Bunch, Charlotte, Dutt, Mallika, and Fried, Susana. “Beijing’95: A global referendum on the human rights of women.” Rutgers, NJ: Center for Women’s Global Leadership. 1995. Cabezas, Almudena. “Transnational Feminist Networks Building Regions in Latin America.” Latin American Policy 5 (2 (2014)): 2-7-220. Cabezas, Amalia. “Between Love and Money: Sex, Tourism, and Citizenship in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.” Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29 4 (2004.): 987–1015. Casey, Liam. “Canada’s ‘anti-prostitution law’ raises fears for sex workers’ safety.” The Guardian, December 12, 2014. Retrieved December 16, 2014, 5:45 PM. Chatterjee, Piya. “Transforming Pedagogies: Imagining Internationalist/Feminist/ Antiracist Literacies.” In Activist Scholarship: Antiracism, Feminism, and Social Change, edited by Margo Okazawa-Rey and Julia Sudbury. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2009. Chowdhury, Elora Halim. Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011. Cole, Elizabeth R., and Zakiya T. Luna, “Making Coalitions Work: Solidarity across Difference within US Feminism,” Feminist Studies 36 1 (2010): 71–98. Cova, Anne. “International Feminisms in Historical Comparative Perspective: France, Italy and Portugal, 1880s–1930s.” Women’s History 19 4 (2010): 595–612. Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN). 2004. DAWN Web site. Retrieved October 9, 2008 http://www.dawnnet.org/index.html. Desai, Manisha. “Transnational Solidarity: Women’s Agency, Structural Adjustment, and Globalization.”. in Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics, 15–33, edited by Nancy A. Naples and Manisha Desai. New York: Routledge, 2002. ———. “Transnationalism: The Face of Feminist Politics Post-Beijing.” International Social Science Journal 57 2 (2005): 319–330. ———. “Through and Beyond Transnational Feminisms.” Paper presented at the Nordic Gender Research Conference, Roskilde University, November 5–7, 2014. Development Alternatives With Women for a New Era (DAWN). “International Feminist Dialogue.”, 2004. Retrieved July 9, 2013 http://dawn.org.fj/global/ worldsocialforum/. Doezema, Jo. “Sex Worker Rights, Abolitionism, and the Possibilities for a Rights-Based Approach to Trafficking,” in Alliance News, 22 (2004): 15–22. Dominy, Michéle D. “Măori Sovereignty: A Feminist Invention of Tradition.” In Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific, edited by Jocelyn Linnekin and Lin Poyer, 237–257. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1990. Dudgeon, Pat, and Abigail Bray. “Women’s and Feminist Activism: Aboriginal and Torress Strait Islands.” In the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Nancy A. Naples. London: Wiley-Blackwell, Forthcoming 2016.
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Eisenstein, Hester. Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World. . Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2009. Enloe, Cynthia. The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. Equality Now. “About Us.” 2014. Retrieved from http://www.equalitynow.org/about-us on December 16, 2014, 6:07 PM. Franzway, Suzanne, and Mary Margaret Fonow. “Demanding Their Rights: LGBT Transnational Labor Activism.” in Making Globalization Work for Women: The Role of Social Rights and Trade Union Leadership, edited by Valentine M. Moghadam, Suzanne Franzway, and Mary Margaret Fonow, 289–308. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011. Friedman, Elisabeth. “Women’s human rights: The emergence of a movement.” In Women’s Rights/Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives, edited by J. Peters, and A. Wolper, 18–35. New York: Routledge, 1995. ———. “The effects of ‘transnationalism reversed’ in Venezuela: Assessing the impact of global UN conferences on the women’s movement.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1 3 (1999): 357–381. Hawkesworth, Mary E. Globalization and Women’s Activism. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Hewitt, Lyndi. “Framing Across Differences, Building Solidarities: Lessons from Women’s Rights Activism in Transnational Spaces.” Interface: a journal for and about social movements 3 2 (2011): 65–99. Hewitt, Lyndi, and Marina Karides. “More Than a Shadow of a Difference? Feminist Participation on the World Social Forum.” In Handbook for World Social Forum Activism, edited by Jackie Smith, Scott Byrd, Ellen Reese, and Elizabeth Smyth, 85–104. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2011. Huffington Post. “International AIDS Conference 2012: Sex Workers Unite In India After Getting Banned From D.C. Conference.” 2012. Retrieved December 1, 2014, 11:47 AM at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/29/international-aids-conference -sex-workers_n_1716423.html. Eisenstein, Zillah. Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism, and the West. London and NY: Zed Books, 2004. Ferree, Myra Marx, and Aili Mari Tripp, eds. Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights. NY: New York University Press, 2006. Francisco, Valerie, and Robyn Rodriguez. “Countertopographies of Migrant Transna tional Feminism: Family, Labor and Citizenship.” Feminist Fantasies Conference, Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University, May 12, 2011. Franzway, Suzanna, and Mary Margaret Fonow. “Demanding Their Rights: LGBT Transnational labor Activism.” In Making Globalization Work for Women: The Role of Social Rights and Trade Union Leadership, edited by Valentine M. Moghadam, Suzanne Franzway, and Mary Margaret Fonow, 289–308. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011.
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———. “An Australian feminist twist on transnational labor activism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33 3 (2008): 537–43. Gall, Gregor. “Sex Worker Collective Organization: Between Advocacy Group and Labour Union?” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journey 29 3 (2010): 289–304. Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan, eds. Scattered hegemonies: postmodernity and transnational feminist perspectives, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1994. ———. “Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Feminist Practices.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 5 1 (2000). Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan, eds. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press 1994. ———. “Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmoder nity.” In Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices,. Grewal; Inderpal and Caren Kaplan 1–33. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnea polis Press, 1994. Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo, and Michael Peter Smith. “The Locations of Transnationalism.” in Transnationalism From Below, edited by Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, 3–34. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1998. Hawkesworth, Mary E. Globalization and Feminist Activism. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Heineman, Jennifer, and Crystal A. Jackson. “SexWorker Organizers.” Presentation for session on “Women’s Community Activism,” sponsored by the Division of Sociology and Social Welfare, Society for the Study of Social Problems, Denver, Colorado, August 18, 2012. Kempadoo, Kamala, ed. Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2005. Katz, Cindi. “On the Grounds of Globalization: A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement.” Signs. Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26 4 (2001): 1213–1234. Keck, Margaret E. & Sikkink, Kathryn. Activists Beyond Borders. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Lal, Jayati, Kristin McGuire, Abigail J. Steward, Magdalena Zaborowsky, and Justice M. Pas. “Recasting Glboal Feminisms: Toward a Comparative Historical Approach to Women’s Activism and Feminist Scholarship,” Feministt Studies 36 1 (2010): 13–39. Mahrouse, Gada. Conflicted Commitments: Race, Privilege and Power in Transnational Solidarity Activism. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. Maier, Elizabeth, and Nathalie Lebon, eds. Women’s Movements in Transition Politics. Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
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Miles, Angela R. Integrative Feminisms: Building Global Visions, 1960s–1990s. NY: Routledge, 1996. Mindry, Deborah. “Non-Governmental Organizations, ‘Grassroots,’ and the Politics of Virtue.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26 4 (2001): 1187–1211. Moghadam, Valentine M. Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement. Lanham, MD. Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. ———, ed. Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective. Westview Press, 1994. Moghadam, Valentine, Suzanne Franzway, and Mary Margaret Fonow. Making Globalization Work for Women. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism beyond borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. ———. “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited.” pp. 72–96 in Women’s Studies for the Future, edited by Elizabeth Lapovksy Kennedy and Agatha Beins. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. ———. “Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideologies of Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity.” In Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, edited by Alexander, M. Jacqui, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 3–30. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———. “Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, 1–47. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1991. ———. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, 51–80. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1991. Nagar, Richa, and Amanda Lock Swarr. “Introduction: Theorizing Transnational Feminist Praxis.” In Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, Edited by Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar, 1–22. New York: State University of New York Press, 2010. Naghibi, N. Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Naples, Nancy A. “Crossing Borders: Community Activism, Globalization, and Social Justice.” Social Problems 56 1 (2009): 2–20. ———. “Sustaining Democracy: Localization, Globalization, and Feminist Praxis.” Sociological Forum 28 4 (2013): 657–681. Naples, Nancy A., and Manisha Desai. Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles with Transnational Politics. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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Naples, Nancy A., and Nikki McGary. “Feminism, Activism, and Scholarship in Global Context” (co-authored with Nikki McGary).in The International Studies Encyclopedia, edited by Robert A. Denemark, 2042–2062. London: Blackwell, 2010. Naples, Nancy A., and Jennifer Bickman Mendez. Border Politics, Globalization and Social Movements. NY, NY: New York University Press, 2015. Narayan, Una. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminism. NY: Routledge, 1997. Nnaemeka, Obioma G. “Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29 2 (2004): 357–386. Offen, Karen. European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Oyewumi, Oyeronke. African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood. Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 2004. Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights. London and NY: Zed Books, 2003. Petchesky, Rosalind P., and Karen Judd, eds. Negotiating Reproductive Rights: Women’s Perspectives Across Countries and Cultures. London and New York: Zed Books, 2001. Pillay, Anu. “Women’s Activism and Transformation: Arising from the Cusp.” Feminist Africa 12 (2010) 63–79. Piscitelli, Adriana. “Transnational Sisterhood? Brazilian Feminisms Facing Prostitu tion,” Latin American Policy 5 2 (2014): 221–235. Rothman, Sheila M. Women’s Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideas and Practices. NY, NY: Basic Books, 1979. Rupp, Leila. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 1997. Sadiqi, Fatima, and Moha Ennaji. “The Feminization of Public Space: Women’s Activism, the Family Law, and Social Change in Morocco.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 2 2 (2006): 86–114. Sánchez, Laty Kathering Galeano, and Meike Werner. “Abya Yala’s Indigenous and Aboriginal Women: International Agenda of Integration and Solidarity.” Latin American Policy 5 2 (2014): 265–278. Schild, Veronica. “Institutional Feminist Networks and Their ‘Poor’; Localizing Transnational Interventions,” Latin American Policy 5 2 (2014): 279–291. Sen, Gita, & Grown, Caren. Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1987. Shehabuddin, Elora. Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh. NY, NY: Columbia University Press, 2008. Smith, Jackie, Marina Karides, Marc Becker, Dorval Brunelle, Christopher Chose-Dunn, Donatella della Porta, Oosalba Icaza Garza, Jeffrey S. Juris, Lorenzo Mosca, Ellen Reese, Peter (Jay) Smith, and Roland Vázquez. Global Democracy and the World Social Forum. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007.
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chapter 8
Transnational Flashpublics: Social Media and Affective Contagions from Egypt to Occupy Wall Street Jack Bratich* Recent popular uprisings have been, if anything, transnational in scope, even in essence. It is a mistake to analyze the twenty-first century protests as isolated national events. They constitute what autonomist marxist analysts call a cycle of struggles, operating via swarms and viral spreads which are “contagious and infectious”.1 This chapter explores this trans-local transmission of struggles by focusing on a particular combination of factors including spectatorship, media networks, and political mechanisms that encourage and discourage affective contagion. It will focus on an early local expression in the cycle, the 2011 Egyptian uprising. This chapter begins with a sketch of some philosophies of political spectatorship represented by Michel Foucault and Paolo Virno as they Kant.2 This is accompanied by a hybrid conceptual framework that I call “autonomist affect media studies.” Drawing on Maurizio Lazzarato, this chapter will examine the technological dispositifs of action-at-a-distance central to noopolitics.3 Lazzarato’s diagram of public-making, drawn from an analysis of early 20th century techniques, foregrounds contexts of war and control. Tiziana Terranova updates Lazzarato’s analysis for the 21st century Terror-War era, adding the affective turn in assessing what she calls futurepublics.4 Finally, Anna Gibbs’ research on affective contagion and mimesis provides theoretical * Rutgers University. 1 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration (New York, N.Y.: Argo-Navis Author Services, 2012, 54). 2 Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997),; Paolo Virno, Multitude between innovation and negation (Los Angeles, ca; Cambridge, Mass.: Semiotext(e) ; Distributed by the mit Press, 2007). 3 Maurizio Lazzarato, “The Concepts of life and the living in the Societies of Control,” in ed. Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sorensen, Deleuze and the Social, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 171–190. 4 Tiziana Terranova, “Futurepublic: On Information Warfare, Bio-Racism and Hegemony as Noopolitics,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (May 1, 2007): 125–145, doi:10.1177/ 0263276407075960.
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and historical insights into these techniques. All three thinkers are interested in the early formations of public opinion, psywar, and the networks of persuasion and control, or what will be referred to as communications warfare. This chapter argues that the recent wave of global youth movements represents a new phase of this communications warfare. How do the initial conditions of a revolt, the ones resulting from a war-oriented dispositif, get absorbed and carried by spectator-participants?5 The role of social media in promoting affective contagion will also be examined. The Egypt case pushes us to rethink the affective tone of transnational publics. Society is too broad a transition from fear to hope. Ultimately, understanding these dispositifs of control allow us to make sense of contemporary affective strategies rather than simply reacting to them.
Crowds and Turbamancy
The year 2011 saw an incredible proliferation of images of assembled bodies in streets. From Cairo to Madison, Athens to Lower Manhattan, Madrid to London, the crowd became an emblematic figure. Perhaps the most globally mediated, intense case occurred in and around Egypt’s Tahrir Square in January–February 2011. Rather than explain what composed this crowd or what caused the uprising, this chapter seeks to understand how the image and figure of the crowd circulated to mobilize and immobilize others. Religious groups claimed to have seen a ghostly image in the Tahrir crowd, which they interpreted as a pale horse, a sign from the Book of Revelations of the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse. This marginal perspective nonetheless reveals to us a common practice during that time of seeing something in those Cairo crowds. Pundits, journalists, activists and other publics made comparisons with all kinds of revolutions including the French, Russian, American, and Iranian. These projections involved prognostications; the crowd became a source for political divination or turbamancy.6 Tahrir, among all of its other 5 What is key for our purposes is not what actually happened in Egypt (in terms of causes and compositions). That is a contested account, in terms of Jan 2011, the summer 2012 election of Morsi, and the summer 2013 ouster of him (and the role of military, media, and popular sentiments). Instead, I want to focus on the Social Media Spectator in the us (and potentially elsewhere, but the us is key here for foreign policy reasons elaborated later). 6 Among the dozens of types of divination found in the Middle Ages, the closest here might be clamancy divination by random shouts and cries heard in crowds. But these were more than random, and they occurred day and night. All kinds of perception and imaginations are made
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functions, was a crucible in which diviners could scry their hopes through the crowd and its Revolutionary signs. This type of seeing is a more concentrated version of general importance of spectatorship in the transnational transmission of Egypt’s revolt. Spectators are not secondary to this narrative of global uprising, or any revolutionary process, as has been noted for some time. Michel Foucault, in a minor text called “What is Revolution?” turns to Immanuel Kant’s account of the French Revolution to understand revolutionary subjectivity. Kant is concerned with “how Revolution becomes spectacle, how it is received by spectators who do not participate in it but who watch it, who attend the show and, for better or worse, let themselves be dragged along by it”.7 Why this emphasis on non-participants? Paolo Virno goes on to elaborate how ultimate significance of a militant uprising “can only be understood by those who were ‘not themselves caught up in it’.”8 Their spectatorship is not completely dispassionate, but a form of “inactive delight,” a “sympathy that borders almost on enthusiasm.”9 These spectators turn revolution from a particular action by militants into an event as world-historic sign “of progress, of a permanent cause.”10 In such a case, the defining feature is not the success or failure of a particular (sometimes parochial) revolution, but a predisposition that cannot be annulled in the political details. Even if it is a “failed” revolution, even if the political order returns to old ruts, a faculty of progressing has arisen. Enthusiasm becomes a predisposition that remains deeply enmeshed in people’s memory, and can be called upon in favorable occasions and be recalled in moments of crisis. Kant’s more idealistic notion of revolutions and Enlightenment is given more concreteness in Foucault and Virno, but we can also add here Toni Negri’s notion of a constitutive ontology.11 Ontological subjects, according to Negri, are not substantialist beings, but mechanisms and agencements, expressing themselves historically at a moment of accumulation.12 Negri argues that we need a genealogy of such mechanism, that produce subjectivity, but one that does not begin in the turba (“turmoil, crowd,” probably from Greek tyrbe “turmoil”) (tumult of assemblies) – a Turbamancy. At the same time, the root of crowd also became turbare “to confuse, bewilder.” 7 Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 93. 8 Virno, Multitude between innovation and negation, 83. 9 Ibid., 83–84. 10 Ibid., 83–84. 11 Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, uk; Malden, ma: Polity Press, 2005), 129. 12 Ibid., 128–130.
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and end within the expansion of the state.13 Arguably, the spectator is inseparable from that subjective ontology, as enthusiasm bordering on sympathy ensures that subjectivity is not a substance, but relational, even networked. Almost 150 years after the French Revolution, political observers and public philosophers once again considered the importance of the spectator. Stuart Ewen documents and analyzes this development in his critical history of public relations.14 Walter Lippman famously put the spectator back on center stage.15 For Lippman, when it comes to political matters, most people are innocent bystanders. They are deluged with propaganda, and have neither the time nor the resources to make informed decisions. How was an individual to understand the big picture, to see through manipulations and align oneself with a correct position? The answer Lippman proffered was to ensure the proper conditions for “interested spectators” to register their opinions. Meanwhile, intellectual leaders were defined as specialized agents (Ewen calls them “unseen engineers”16) working to shape perception and construct that public. The public is to be formed via identifications with certain interests and alignment with objectives. The public merely observes and registers its opinion within the parameters set by the professionals (journalists, public opinion shapers, communication managers). And what do these spectators see? For Lippman, what ought to be seen is a pseudo-environment; access to the real environment must be limited, a barrier must be placed between the public and the event.17 Emotion-laden images and symbols work well in these cases, as do simple narratives involving heroes vs. villains. The result would be to unify disparate positions and conflicting emotions. Imaging technologies, aka media, are thus key to the production of the public.18 13
Antonio Negri, The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics (Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2008), 35–39. Resistance, says Negri, is “a general phenomenon…a multiform apparatus of subjective production” whose development “comprises the movements of desire and reasoning”. Our theoretical and empirical attention to resistance-based dispositifs needs to go beyond local and episodic research to elaborate the mechanisms that persist across and connect them, to explain the “continuity of antagonistic expressions.” 14 Stuart Ewen, PR!: A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996). Jack Z Bratich, Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 15 Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy, (New York: Mentor Books, 1955). 16 Ewen, PR!: A Social History of Spin, 146–173. 17 Ibid., 22. 18 Armand Mattelart, Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion:
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Managing the growing power of masses was paramount at this time, which meant devising means of recruiting, directing, and harnessing them. As George Creel put it, what should bind a public is not “mere surface unity, but passionate belief in justice of America’s cause that should weld the people into one white-hot mass instinct”.19 As Ewen and others note, these experts develop techniques to assemble mass support behind executive action, to align the masses with the objectives of the state.20 At the same time, those masses cannot escape seduction by enemy forces, so “an antidote to willfulness” must be invented, according to Harold Lasswell.21 The public becomes that antidote, organized through propaganda. Another way of saying this is that the spectator is a figure in the passage from a crowd into a public. Early 20th century imagineers of the mass mind (Walter Lippman, Harold Lasswell, George Creel, Edward Bernays, among others) sought to understand and harness the power of crowds to form publics via communications technologies. The passage from a crowd to the public was a key strategic objective, especially around unification via opinion.22 The public Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Anna Gibbs, “Panic! Affect Contagion, Mimesis and Suggestion in the Social Field,” Cultural Studies Review 14, no. 2 (April 8, 2011): 130, doi:10.5130/csr. v14i2.2076. Anna Gibbs’ analysis of this milieu finds that the techniques employed include Suggestion, induction, persuasion, images, alignment, simple narratives (hero/villain). At times, these involved a sleight of hand: top-down directives from mechanisms such as wwi’s Committee on Public Information had to appear as persuasion immanent to crowds, even coming from them. For instance, George Creel employed techniques like embedding opinion leaders in the population (e.g., the Four Minute Men). Stealth, peerto-peer influence in organizing publics was to become a fixture from then on, part of what we could call “communications warfare.” Communications warfare here refers to warfare’s reliance on interpersonal, mass, and social technologies of persuasion. Rhetoric, persuasive media, knowledge transmission, compliance-gaining expand what has normally been called infowar to broader areas of everyday life. From early propaganda research to the Cold War model of researching insurgent culture to the more recent study of enemy social networks, the field of communications has been central to psychological operations. 19 Ewen, PR!: A Social History of Spin. 20 Ibid., 147. 21 Harold Dwight Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in World War I (New York, 1927), 222. Cited in Ewen, PR!, 175. 22 For someone like Gabriel Tarde, publics were less susceptible than crowds. However, Gibbs notes that Tarde was concerned about the potential volatility of publics, of their potential to form crowds Gibbs, “Panic! Affect Contagion, Mimesis and Suggestion in the Social Field,” 136. Indeed, Gibbs notes that in contemporary global contexts, media are
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is a mode of organizing crowd behavior at a distance (emotions, binding to leaders, unification). It is a type of pre-emption of action in which only some act, while others support instead of developing their own action. The public is not opposed to crowds, but a directed one. From the early 20th century onwards, thus, a managed public was the objective for a communications warfare model. Maurizio Lazzarato, while not calling it communications warfare examines the emergence during that time period of what he calls a diagram of war and control. Drawing from Gabriel Tarde, Lazzarato delineates three dimensions of this diagram. First, the cooperation between brains and its functioning by flows and connections, network and patchwork. These interconnected brains comprise what Lazzarato calls noopolitics. The nous, or mind/spirit, is what connects a public in a mediated age: “the new relations of power which take memory and its conatus (attention) as their object.” Noopolitics names the organization of actions via collective attention and memory, via cognitive and affective pathways spread through interconnected, networked brains. Second, this nous is highly dependent on the rise of the technological dispositifs of action at a distance, which modulate memory and its virtual powers. In Tarde’s time, print telegraphy, and telephony were the primary media forms, and Lazzarato updates this technical dimension with radio, television, and cinema. Now, of course, we can add the digital, globalized information and communication technologies to this ecology. Third, the diagram has corresponding processes of subjectivation and subjection. This involves the formation of publics, the constitution of a being together that takes place in time. We can of course provide other related names for the diagrammatic collective subject (mass, audience, fan, user), but the public is most relevant here, insofar as it names a taming and harnessing of the crowd into a manageable networked collective. Lazzarato’s diagram centralizes what Michel De Certeau (1984) famously called the “polemological” dimension, the warfare dynamics that infuse communicational and cultural practices. Bringing together this diagram with the history of communications warfare and public formation in the early 20th century allows us to put the contemporary case of Egypt in clearer relief. The role of mechanisms is significant in shaping the direction and speed of the transmission of images. Tarde understood the importance of such mechanisms in terms of “channelling, monitoring and managing…forms of imitation
now also used in “the services of crowd formation, in the creation of organised public events” Ibid., 141–142.
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and contagion,”23 according to Anna Gibbs. A public is not formed via “a collective consciousness pushing down on the individual, but is instead the ‘coherent’ outcome of ‘desires that have been excited or sharpened by certain [social] inventions,’ which imitatively radiate outward, point-to-point.”24 Nigel Thrift calls the mechanisms “sites of behavior modification” generated by “corporate and political agencies to produce the necessary mood environments ripe for capturing the accidents of desire in social inventiveness, and making populations readily infectious.”25 For Tony Sampson, such mechanisms illuminate “how spontaneous events can be captured, measured, primed and organized, even made to look like an accident or chance encounter.” Ultimately, the collective subject, or public, is not a result of pure spontaneous transmission of ideas and affects through imitation and sympathy, but is “consciously and carefully steered.”26 Contagion is not spontaneous and inchoate; its collectives are produced. To put it simply, any discussion of contagion needs to go beyond the medical discourse’s epidemiological model to the military discourse’s model of bio-warfare.
What was Egypt’s Enthusiasm?
What can we say about the us spectator of the Arab Spring? First, we can note the Lippmanian quality of the narrative that framed the turbamancy. Viewers were furnished with a simple drama, complete with heroes and villains. News accounts of the Tahrir Square events focused on a primary bifurcation, the sovereign power of Mubarak (depicted in the repetition of his face on street signs) vs. “people-power” (conveyed via images of crowds in these streets). Second, and more importantly for our purposes, the technologically mediated nature of this spectatorship (Lazzarato’s second diagrammatic function) provided an endless supply of vibrant, real-time images. Other spectators over the past century have been highly mediated (from print-based ones of modern revolutions to the tv-induced publics of 1960s protests). But here we have the 23
24 25 26
Andrew Barry and Nigel Thrift, “Gabriel Tarde: Imitation, Invention and Economy,” Economy and Society 36, no. 4 (November 1, 2007): 509–525, doi:10.1080/03085140701589497. Cited in Gibbs, “Panic! Affect Contagion, Mimesis and Suggestion in the Social Field.” Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, 109, quoted in Tony Sampson, “Contagion Theory Beyond the Microbe,” Ctheory, (January 11, 2011) www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=675. Nigel Thrift, “I Just Don’t Know What Got Into Me: Where Is The Subject?” Subjectivity 22 (2008): 82–89. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.1. Sampson, “Contagion Theory Beyond the Microbe,” 78.
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convergence of two factors producing a spectator singularity. One is the realtime continuous broadcast of crowd images and the other is the role of social media in composing, circulating, and amplifying enthusiasm around that feed. Of course, one can hardly mention the Egyptian uprising in the us without addressing social media. Most of this discussion of the “Facebook revolution” has focused on the role social media may have had on mobilizing people into the streets (an important move from information to action, as we’ll see later). Less attention has been paid to the impact of social media in composing a public, especially a transnational one in relation to dispositifs of global control.27 The contagious enthusiasm of the social media spectator was promoted via the breathless reporting of us journalists, gushingly rehashing the technoboosterism previously expressed during the Iranian protests of 2009. Now, however, we had added on-the-ground coverage, including images of journalists literally getting swept up in the crowd (sometimes violently). American subjects underwent a transformation from spectators into sympathetic supporters. Fervor emanated from Tahrir Square via tele-technologies and reporters to us spectator-participators who then radiated revolutionary enthusiasm to other spectators. Applying Lazzarato’s tripartite scheme to the Egypt case, the first corresponds to social networks and attention/memory (friends, p2p exhortations), the second correlates to social media (amplification, acceleration, circulation, affective contagion), and the third is the collective subject mobilized in alignment with the state objectives (a transnational enthusiastic public). Our revolutionary spectator is no longer as separated from the scene as Kant first formulated.28 In an age of social media, we cannot maintain any easy distinction between watching and participating. So, what can we make of these participant-spectator subjects? Global spectators did more than watch; they shared, they posted, the commented, they even joined a virtual march in solidarity. Links to Al-Jazeera, cnn or other media outlets were accompanied by 27
28
See the important work of Zizi Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics, (Oxford University Press, 2015). An added important detail in the us social mediated spectator-public lies in a historical contingency regarding technology. Al-Jazeera (English), a key conveyor of images from Tahrir Square for those seeking nonmainstream coverage, was unavailable as a television channel in the United States. Instead, us residents had to watch its coverage online. Media convergence found its coming-of-age global event, as one’s computer screen would contain windows/tabs with live streaming from AL Jazeera as well as Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms users employed to share information. Thanks to Jayson Harsin for noting that such a distinction may have been overstated by Kant in the first place, given the proximity and variable responses by subjects in the French Revolution.
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exhortations to watch or expressions of passionate support. Given this interactive nature of social media spectatorship, we can ask, are we witnesses or participants? Are we merely watching the crowd, or are we an extension of it? And what does this spectator-participant have to do with Egypt’s crowds: Solidarity? Sympathy? Imitation? If online enthusiasm is the global transmission of affective contagion, then which mechanisms (in Tarde’s sense) coordinated or captured it to produce collectives? The Egyptian uprising produced a communications warfare public formed by dispositifs whose goal was to direct and organize energies to align with particular objectives. Outside of simply adding more eyeballs and clicks, this Lazzaratian update of social networks and social media needs to take into account the organization of the spectator public around objectives. Here the analysis gets murkier, but we can begin by looking at how the crowd-becoming-public entailed the containment, not just spread of enthusiasm. What happened to the social media spectator after the ouster of Mubarak? The dependence on Al Jazeera took an interesting turn on the day after the despot’s removal. Al Jazeera stopped broadcasting live from the square. Instead, on February 5th, an interview was aired in a serene garden setting with a Philippine official about that nation’s tourism. We were transported far from the raucous crowds of the previous night. But was Tahrir inactive? Hardly. Thousands remained in the square, happy to see Mubarak go but eager to get on with further change after this first step. Labor groups and radical critics were met with violence and arrests, as the military conducted a sweep of the square. Meanwhile, the social media gaze of us spectators was drawn to a pleasant afternoon conversation about tourism’s future. All the turbamancy, all the enthusiasm was now to be ceased, even while groups in the square and elsewhere sought to expand the revolutionary process. It’s as though a switch had been flipped and there was no need for further enthusiasm, no need to complicate the easy narrative, just turn off or turn away. Once the transcendent objectives are met, it is time to shut off the incitation. Egypt’s case is not significantly different from other revolutionary spectatorships. The fear of revolt’s contagion has a deep history. Hardt and Negri29 for instance, discuss the rise of the Jacqueries; peasant revolts in the Middle Ages. What was worrisome for the forces of order was not the content of the grievances or even the tactics used, but the spontaneity of revolts. Specifically, the imperceptible yet contagious quality (a central concern for plague ridden forms of life) allowed the revolts to recur and spread.
29
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2009), 236–248.
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Another way to characterize this is to say that the history of dispositifs is not just designed to activate the apathetic (the hand-wringing over a lack of participation), but to defuse and dissuade the hyperpathic.30 The early 20th century work on public-formations through opinion understood this quite well. While a population was persuaded to align with state objectives (like wwi consent) it was also dissuaded from certain kinds of dissent and action. For instance, the Espionage Act, and later its amended version as the Sedition Act, restricted the types of communication for subjects. Arrests were made for speeches, films, newsletters, anti-draft pamphlets, and other media forms. Along with the Palmer Raids, which resulted in mass arrests, Red Scare antidissent mechanisms all worked to ensure that only particular opinions and actions could be included in the public sphere. Similar practices comprised twentieth century domestic enemy production, from immigrant radicals in the 1920s and 1930s to the Red Scare over fifth-column communists in the 1950s to domestic extremists in the 1960s and 1990s (Rogin 1987; Bratich 2008). Egypt was another instance of this century long combination of activation and dissuasion, now organizing the domestic public’s own connection with the trans-local process.
Futurepublics: Affective Facts and Dispositifs
To get closer to the composition and organization of this contemporary spectating public, we can turn to Tiziana Terranova’s concretization of Lazzarato’s third diagrammatic component, the subjectivity produced, in recent modes of control and affectivity.31 She coins the term futurepublic to make sense of these recent collectivity-inducing apparatuses. Terranova develops an understanding of the noopolitical by combining the second and third dimensions of the diagram: “tele-technologies such as television or the Internet are fundamental mechanisms of capture and control of new segmented, undefined subjectivities operating as publics.”32 The futurepublic involves an assemblage of news media, state institutions, and social tele-technologies. She calls these tem porary alliances dispositifs and notes that they’re assembled for a p articular
30
Jack Z Bratich, Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 31 Terranova, “Futurepublic On Information Warfare, Bio-Racism and Hegemony as Noopolitics.” 32 Terranova, “Futurepublic On Information Warfare, Bio-Racism and Hegemony as Noopolitics,” 140.
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objective, primarily war with the goal of inducing ‘its collective individuation to pass from one form of society to another’”.33 Social media does not just spread information. It first stirs up feelings such as outrage, awe, hope, and pity. The public is formed via “the transmission and circulation of affect through virtual networks, media images, screen connectivity.” As Terranova notes, “A public, in fact, as Tarde remarked, is always the result of a certain kind of affective capture” formed through what Brian Massumi calls an affective fact. An affective fact involves “a widespread sensation of immediacy and familiarity with distant events, facts and peoples that does not correspond to any substantial knowledge.” Moreover, the affective fact degrades understanding, since responses are activated before the cognitive evaluation of the issue. It involves “the suspension of logicodiscursive reasoning and narration…allowing for the consolidation of something that…functions as an empirical fact.”34 In other words, affective facts work to disable reasoning in favor of enthusiastic identification and spread. To put it simply, the public is the affective extension of the temporary alliance, the dispositif. But before we return to our case study, we need to remind ourselves that affect is not simply a feeling or an emotion. As a number of affect theorists highlight, drawing primarily from Spinoza’s formulation, affectus involves a body in continuous variation around its increasing or decreasing power to act. External causes constantly produce these bodily states, and passages between states. What is key then about the transmission of affect is precisely how and which actions are encouraged as well as prevented. The political dimension of affect is the translation of feeling to action by an external mechanism. In addition to examining a dispositif’s method of encouraging enthusiastic spectatorship, we also need to examine how it limits or preempts the passage to action. Terranova provides a helpful discussion of information war in this respect. She summarizes John Rothrock’s explanation of 35 infowar as “the degradation of adversaries’ capacity for understanding their own circumstances, but also the capacity to neutralize any effective use of whatever correct understandings they might achieve.”36 The affective fact is inextricably linked to the 33
Brian Massumi, “Fear (The Spectrum Said),” Positions 13, no. 1 (2005): 31–48. Cited in Terranova, “Futurepublic,” 134. 34 Terranova, “Futurepublic,” 133. 35 John Rothrock “Information Warfare : Time for Some Constructive Skepticism?” in eds. John Arquilla and David F Ronfeldt, In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age. (Santa Monica, Calif: Rand, 1997). 36 Terranova, “Futurepublic On Information Warfare, Bio-Racism and Hegemony as Noopolitics,” 132.
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agency of the spectators, here defined as the ability to act on information. Affective mobilization is accompanied by immobilization, and both are dependent on the dispositif, the mechanisms that organize the capacity to act. Futurepublics are thus a combination of collectives that act in accordance with a dispositif’s aims and ones whose potential hyperpathy is curtailed or rechanneled.
The Dispositif around Egypt
As I have argued elsewhere, the emergent dispositif around the Egyptian uprising had two main characteristics, both related to social media’s significance. One is the presence of a key noopolitical figure who embodied the technophilic discourse around Tahrir (Wael Ghonim) and secondly, an organized “mechanism of social invention” for youth-led global regime change (the Alliance of Youth Movements). Wael Ghonim, a Google executive based in Dubai, became an interface between what was happening in Egypt and us spectators. After vanishing in Cairo for almost two weeks during the height of the protests, Ghonim reemerged with a widely seen interview on Egypt’s DreamTV on February 7th, followed quickly by a western media blitz. On Tuesday, February 8th, Time already promoted him as potentially “the leader of the faceless group of young revolutionaries.”37 Foreign Policy claimed Mubarak’s despotism “may have just created an undisputed leader for a movement,” the Wall Street Journal called him a key figure who was “adopted as symbolic leader” by protest organizers, while cnn posed the question “is he not inevitably the spiritual leader”? When he told Wolf Blitzer that “this revolution started online,” specifically “on Facebook,” Ghonim might have been referring to his own “My Name is Khalid Said” Facebook page (in which he shrouded himself in the identity of the actual martyr). A lesser-known reason for Ghonim’s praise for social media revolution was his access to Facebook security administrators during crisis times. A year later, cnn laid out this noopolitician’s special qualities: “The former Google executive who used social media to jump-start social change in Egypt knows the key to leading a grass-roots revolution: Make it leaderless.”38 By being a symbolic, even spiritual figure, Ghonim operates as noopolitician. 37
38
Angela Shah, “Egypt’s New Hero: Can Geek-Activist Wael Ghonim Overthrow Mubarak?” Time Magazine, (Feb. 08, 2011). http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599, 2047006,00.html, accessed September 2013. cnn Wire Staff, Wael Ghonim’s revolution: No leaders, just tweeters (September 6, 2011); http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/09/03/switzerland.ghonim.facebook/.
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Secondly, transnational public-making dispositifs have formal names, such as the Alliance of Youth Movements (aym). Launched in 2008 with a summit in New York City, the aym gathered together an ensemble of media corporations, Obama consultants, social network entrepreneurs, and youth organizations, under the auspices of the State Department. Representatives came from Old Media (mtv, nbc, cnn) and New (Google and Facebook,with Twitter and YouTube joining in subsequent years). The aym created an online Howcast Hub, which “brings together youth leaders from around the world to learn, share and discuss how to change the world by building powerful grassroots movements.”39 Among the series of how-to videos produced for the site included, How to Create a Grassroots Movement Using SocialNetworking Sites, How to Smart Mob, and How to Circumvent an Internet Proxy. Undersecretary James Glassman described the event as “Public Diplomacy 2.0.” What we have here is a mix of networked entities and sovereign concentration, an alliance of corporate bodies, government agencies, and ngos producing training videos to seed emergent movements around the world. The aym was a specific alliance in a broader strategy that involved using Civil Society as a weapon in regime change, a strategy whose tech dimension led it to be called “Civil Society 2.0.”40 aym’s pollination of the Egyptian uprising’s flora (via the April 6th movement and other aym summit attendees) is important to note, but it is not most germane here. Rather, the aym as actor should be viewed as a component of this larger foreign policy dispositif, specifically the fostering of kyber-revolts: steering (in Thrift’s sense of guided of behavior modification) a mix of unpredictable elements via setting its initial conditions (e.g. code of tactics, vectors, emergent leadership).41 39 40
41
Alliance of Youth Movements. http://www.movements.org/, accessed October 2013. “We have a number of specific initiatives, particularly tech camps where we work in concert with actors in the technology sector and also other governments to bring together activists and leaders in the field of social media and other issues who are able to give activists access to tools that will make their work more effective. This is being done under the umbrella of our Civil Society 2.0 program.” Bureau of Public Affairs Department Of State. The Office of Website Management, “Secretary Clinton’s Launch of Strategic Dialo gue with Civil Society,” Press Release|Special Briefing, US Department of State, (February 16, 2011), http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/02/156708.htm. Instead of focusing on the cyber as the electronic or online dimensions of struggle, we can look to its etymological origins in the Greek kyber, meaning to steer or govern. The ‘cyberrevolution’ then refers less to teletechnologies like social media (though they are part of the futurepublic), but as programming.
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One can imagine how a type of militant interactivity could prevent this guided transmission of affect, but the kyber is precisely about managing and steering feedback. Participation is no necessary block for the State-friended transmission of affect. In fact, as sharing, spreading, and amplifying, participation becomes necessary for shaping achieve global public opinion. The enthusiastic spectator is now a planned element in state strategies of regime-change, enhanced especially by social media’s power of circulating affectivity. The spectator-participant is involved in a cybernetic interactivity, a feedback for kyber-war in which participation is mobilized when needed (affectively charged public opinion) and immobilized when unwanted. In sum, the public extension of the crowd needs figures and mechanisms. The noopolitical dispositif of public-making depends on social media to spread participation in the form of sharing and exhorting others to pay attention. However, these media are embodied in figures like Ghonim and embedded in temporary alliances like aym, comprising the mechanisms of the transnational transmission of affect.42
Egypt’s Affective Fact: Hope
We can now ask, what was the affective fact of Egypt’s revolt? There is likely no single one, but we can sketch out three features, two of which have already been explored. First, the temporality of affect is important, namely the offswitching of the us social media spectator’s attention. As Anna Gibbs reminds us (harkening back to Daniel Stern), affects are not just discrete states. In addition, “there are activation contours: surging, fading away, fleeting, explosive, crescendo, decrescendo, bursting, drawn out.”43 The example she notes is the difference between joy arriving and joy departing. In the case of Egypt, the initial surge of crowd power and its enthusiasm suddenly departed, at least when it came to the mediating transmission to the us. Secondly, the allegedly “leaderless” dimension of the Egyptian revolt is relevant here. We can update Anna Gibbs’ summary of early 20th century affective 42
43
Such mechanisms include the US National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. As Charles Hanley in a Washington Post article from March 13, 2011 noted, “The ndi, affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the gop-affiliated International Republican Institute (iri) are links in the nurturing “democratic assistance” web, key conduits for grants from the State Department’s Agency for International Development (usaid) and from the National Endowment for Democracy, a private organization funded by the US Congress.” Anna Gibbs, “After Affect,” in eds. Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2010), 192.
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dispositifs: For her, “it is first of all affect that binds the crowd to a leader, uniting the mass of individual bodies into a force with its own purpose and direction.”44 What changed by the time we get to 2011 is the binding target. The mobilization of transnational spectators via tele-technologies induced alignment with the Tahrir crowds and against Mubarak. Instead of binding people to a leader, here we see the unity of public opinion conforming under the symbol of the crowd, taking the crowd’s side in the narrative of heroic people vs. villainous leader. Such a psychic, turbamantic bond with the crowd also allows for an easier switch-off. Once the protagonists have triumphed over the enemy, the spectator turns attention and sympathy elsewhere to continue bolstering the noopolitical public. We can now talk about binding a public affectively to a leaderless movement (the crowd), maybe even a leaderless leader (e.g. Ghonim), an alignment with an executive action that is occulted and emergent. Third, and most relevant here, we need to specify the affective tonality based on a broader shift in dispositifs. Terranova’s futurepublic underscores the affective fact of fear, which is tied to the Bush era in which her essay was written (as well as Massumi’s original piece). The security apparatus associated with the Bush regime formed mediated publics via widespread anxiety as a mode of governance. In the Obama era, especially with examples such as Tahrir Square, this affective strategy mutates. Governance operates through another affect, namely hope.45 We need to look no further than cnn’s Piers Morgan show which, in February 2011, broadcast an interview segment called “Transmission of Hope” with a tech startup founder Rafat Ali.46 The articulation made in this segment, visually and verbally, was the “hope” that the enthusiasm for regime change would spread to Libya, even to Beijing. Hope was contagiously spread internally in Egypt, as the ability to overcome fear and to participate in the street crowd actions. But hope, finding culmination in Mubarak’s overthrow, was now potentially rerouted to Libya and other sanctioned targets. The transversals of people-power were decomposed in the square (the sweeps) plus repressed in the global media circuits (swept away from cognition) in order to re-orient attention to officially preferred sites. 44 45
46
Gibbs, “Panic! Affect Contagion, Mimesis and Suggestion in the Social Field,” 133. For Sampson, Love is the affect that is tied to the Obama regime, as opposed to Bush-Fear. Given the role of transcendent mediation (aka the State) into the self-organizing composition required for a political love, I would argue hope is the affect that is designed to pre-empt love. It is a sign of these times that a tech entrepreneur (founder of PAIDCONTENT.ORG) was set up as an expert on transnational politics.
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I seek not to diminish the importance of these affective states (as compositional and communication processes of solidarity). However, we need to examine how and why they become contagious, as well as when they’re halted – in other words, their temporality and their mechanisms of transmission. Affect, embedded in the passage from info to action, can be transmitted as inspiration to action or as further dissuasion (e.g. only signal heroes and villains, and stop action when the heroes have won). We could call hope an “infowar affect,” as it is first designed to prevent any understanding (since responses are activated before one cognitively evaluates the issue). However, the second infowar tactic is more relevant here, that even when understanding has been achieved, infowar dispositifs prevent the power of acting from increasing e.g. (what is one to do with the knowledge about the square sweeps)? Hope is marked by a fundamental ambivalence. It is both a mobilizer and immobilizer. The political valence of hope can temporarily activate bodies that then enthusiastically give up power to an external representative body. It can thus result in passivity, a waiting for an other (even a Big Other) to act. Hope is a particular affective capture of potentialities; a pre-emption of action. Only some people act, while others support (thus not developing their own action). Flashpublic Another concept to help think through the above account of the Arab Spring’s transnational affective spectatorship is flashpublics. A flashpublic is a varia tion and extension of Terranova’s futurepublic. From her concept, we bring forward: (1) the public as a noopolitical subject, primarily working via attention-management and memory construction; (2) the prominence of affective facts in this noopolitical subjectivation process; (3) the significance of teletechnologies; (4) the infowar dispositifs that have as their aim to induce a “collective individuation to pass from one form of society to another”.47 I would add to these features the temporality of the public induced, its affective contours (Gibbs), its surge and disappearance. The pubilc appears in or as a flash. The flash of the flashpublic is a quick mobilization of attention and transmission towards a predefined political objective. It can also vanish swiftly. The rapid flood of enthusiasm (affect arriving) and speedy withdrawal (affect departing) are contours that, while enticing in the moment, warrant our reflection 47
Massumi, Fear (The Spectrum Said),” quoted in Terranova, “Futurepublic,” 134.
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post facto. The flash thus fuses the condensed time of transduction (sharing, sending, connecting, composing) with the time of induction (priming, pacing, guiding, binding), all designed to generate mental/bodily states in viewers resulting in increased suggestibility. The flash of the flashpublic is also akin to other flashes. The flashbulb illuminates, but it also temporarily blinds. The flash grenade temporarily stuns, allowing pre-planned action to take place. Gibbs’ analysis of the public-making processes of early 20th century social theorists is again relevant. She situates public-making in a milieu that was also studying and employing techniques of sympathy, suggestion, even mass hypnosis. A public is formed via a combination of suggestion (top-down) and imitation (p2p). Suggestion presupposes an external mechanism, “channelling, monitoring and managing…forms of imitation and contagion”48 that seeks to establish “the necessary mood environments ripe for capturing the accidents of desire in social inventiveness, and making populations readily infectious”.49 For Gibbs, this public is rooted in trance-induction, one that cultivates the nonrational through occulted means. The flashpublic is thus an emergent type of public-making mechanism whose roots are, if not in covert institutions, in practices normally reserved for parapsychologists, stage magicians, and mesmerists. The flash of the flashpublic is also related to affect and power, especially around hope. With its deferral to external mechanisms, hope prevents the emergence of an excess of the passage to action, of hyperpathy. Hyperpathy must be dissuaded. One mode of dissuasion happened noopolitically during the Tahrir uprising. While American eyes were trained on Egypt’s clamoring for democracy vs. tyranny (with an emphasis on online organizing) the us fbi was steadily and stealthily conducting a series of arrests of people associated with the amorphous collective known as Anonymous. Spectatorship can be mobilized (as public opinion) as well as immobilized (when distracted domestically). We should also note here the existence of hybrids of persuasion and dissuasion, such as counter-radicalization. Counter-radicalization is a Terror-War initiative hatched in the sovereign body of, for example, the Presidential Task Force as well as the more dispersed network of experts forming the International Centre for Study of Radicalization and Political Violence. The stated goal is to deter religious fanaticism (Islam, not other monotheisms) while practically it involves the dissuasion of “extremist” uses of digital technologies. Counterradicalization programs aim to rehabilitate former radicals and, ultimately, 48 49
Gibbs, “Panic! Affect Contagion, Mimesis and Suggestion in the Social Field,” 138. Sampson, “Contagion Theory Beyond the Microbe”.
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prevent undesirable dissent through a combination of outreach, engagement, and after-care.50 More recently, the nsa has admitted that it targets key influencers to prevent the spread of radicalizing speech and affect via surveillance and discrediting. Currently, counter-radicalization targets external figures (e.g. those in other nation-states). But if the history of domestic dissent-management is any indicator, counter-radicalization will quickly be shaped by endocolonization, the name Paul Virilio gives to the process whereby apparatuses originally designed for external enemies turn inward.51 Counterinsurgency might not begin at home, but it eventually makes little distinction between domestic and foreign.52 Specifically here we can point to the sovereign’s capacity to distinguish friend from enemy, now updated for times of counterinsurgency: who can be insurgent (Cairo crowds) and who needs to be countered (Anonymous, ows).53 The flashpublic is an also extension of the flashmob, a rapid and fleeting assembly of bodies that comes into being via a call to action. The call for a flashmob has three minimal conditions including a location, a time, and a command. When taken out of the convergence in a physical space, we can apply some of the flashmob’s characteristics to the century-long project of public-making in communications warfare. Today, the flashmob has become noopolitical, mobilizing not full bodies, but attention and cognitive power. This noopolitical project directs attention to a place (Tahrir), for a period of time (Jan–Feb 2011), and with a command (minimally, “pay attention”, but moreover, “support the crowds,” “get excited about people-power,” “watch democracy unfold,” “spread the word,” and finally “turn away”). If flashmobs correlate to crowds as embodied convergences, flashpublics depend on tele-technologies and distance. This determines the kind of contagion as well. In the past, it was bodily proximity (even and especially among strangers) that encouraged contagion. Now, contagion is dispersed, forming 50
51 52
53
For an example of research that attempts to predict the emergence of enemy networked individuation, see Michael Genkin and Alexander Gutfraind, “How Do Terrorist Cells SelfAssemble? Insights from an Agent-Based Model,” ssrn eLibrary, December 20, 2007, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1031521. Cited in Nicholas Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999): 79. See George Ciccariello-Maher, “Counterinsurgency and the Occupy Movement,” in Life during Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency, ed. Kristian Williams, Lara MessersmithGlavin, and William Munger (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013). Kristian Williams, “Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America,” in Life During Wartime, ed. Kristian Williams, Lara Messersmith-Glavin, and William Munger (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013).
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less of an in situ or in tempo assemblage than one that spreads and persists via strong and weak ties in social networks – a communicational rather than physical proximity. Of primary interest for Gibbs is the type of contagion often called panic: Here, affect regulation breaks down; one is swept up in affects that seem beyond oneself. As a result, the capacity for self-reflection and evaluation of alternatives is diminished. For Gibbs, the continuous, pervasive production of anxiety preempts full blown panic. Like Terranova and Massumi, Gibbs is writing during the time of Terror-War, where fear and anxiety comprise the affective atmospheres. But we could also transfer the characteristics of affect-contagion over to the enthusiasm of tele-spectators, of those who “let themselves be dragged along by [the revolution].”54 If continuous anxiety is the affective pre-emption of widespread panic, then what is the analogue for hope? Social networks could be means of connecting spectator-participants as a compositional solidarity in the passage from info to action. Their affective composition could be enhanced via social media in the legacy of Kantian revolutionary spectators, now becoming active.55 But the flashpublic spectators are dissuaded and interrupted in that passage. Much like the infowar model elaborated by Rothrock, when transnational affective publics are considered excessive, the response entails halting that public’s ability to act on what it knows. The state sovereign seeks to usurp the capacities for action, for mobilizing around information. This disruption doesn’t just tactically prevent a local demonstration or particular action, but of the trans-local power to act (in other words, affect). The dispositif belongs to a sovereign that is thus an antagonistic subject, whose interventions depend on the deprivation of powers and the prevention of what a body can do. It remains a “despot,” a figure that relies on the sadness of others.56 The resulting transnational mediated publics are best characterized by what Del Lucchese calls a “collection of disconnected, isolated individuals able to act together”.57 Acting is reduced to public opinion and enthusiastic alignment with transcendent, even occulted, objectives. And with the departure of 54 55 56
57
Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, 93. Stevphen Shukaitis, “Affective Composition and Aesthetics: On Dissolving the Audience and Facilitating The Mob,” Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 5 (2007): 39–42. Gilles Deleuze, On Spinoza. Lecture Transcripts., http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.com/ 2007/02/on-spinoza.html accessed July 2013; Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Appren ticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Filippo Del Lucchese, “Democracy, multitudo and the third kind of knowledge in the works of Spinoza.” European Journal of Political Theory 8, no. 3 (2009): 339–363.
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declared wars in favor of regime changes (now with increasing attention to technological apparatuses a la Civil Society 2.0), executive action works on shaping the emergence of a state rather than being its direct cause. The dispositif prescribes pathways and is predicated on dissuasion of dissenters and hyperpathic affectors. This political organization depends on disaggregating the powers upon which it depends, especially by controlling the passage from information to action. What we are left with is a flashpublic acting as “a dissolved group of separate, isolated individuals, reduced to enslavement by their own passions and, in a way, crushed by a general will that is already the final and transcendental cause of their own decisions”.58 Conclusion Why focus so much on the mechanisms of public-making, on the diagram that organizes the transmission of affect in these transnational processes? Without such knowledge of the sources of affect, we are susceptible to constant excitation and mobiphilic titillation, even even resulting in inter-reactivity – an automatism and suggestibility. We know that Tahrir Square was a crucible for popular uprisings one whose crowds stirred deep feelings of revolutionary enthusiasm locally and transnationally. But the crowd itself was not the cause – a concurrence of factors (bodies, projects, capacities, and the diagrammatic dispositif that managed and conducted them) generated a singular event. Examining the dispositifs which produce futurepublics and flashpublics allows us to understand the conditions of revolt itself; the sources and mechanisms of affective transmission. Ignoring the initial conditions disregards history in favor of an ephemeral and ineffectual collective hope. The antidote to this kind of ignorance is a knowledge that provides a buffer against suggestibility, against being re-activists. As Aurelia Armstrong states, “Only by gaining an understanding of the conditions of our knowledge and our action, that is, an understanding of the interactive networks of relations into which our own relation is inserted and upon which it depends, are we able to come into possession of our powers of acting and knowing”.59 With the knowledge of the diagram of communications warfare, it’s not as though affective contagion disappears. However, the spectator is no longer inter-reactor. Rather, via affect combined with knowledge, one can more 58 Ibid. 59 Aurelia Armstrong, “Some Reflections on Deleuze’s Spinoza,” in Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London; New York: Routledge, 1997), 55.
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e ffectively enact a passage to action via creating common notions with others. The goal here is to compose a more powerful common body by avoiding identification with a people-power that ultimately disempowers action because sovereignty’s work is unacknowledged. Ultimately, this involves understanding affect via a passage from imagination to reason. Bibliography Armstrong, Aurelia. “Some Reflections on Deleuze’s Spinoza.” In Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. London; New York: Routledge, 1997. Arquilla, John, and David F Ronfeldt. Networks and Netwars. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2001. Barry, Andrew, and Nigel Thrift. “Gabriel Tarde: Imitation, Invention and Economy.” Economy and Society 36, no. 4 (November 1, 2007): 509–525. doi:10.1080/ 03085140701589497. Bratich, Jack Z. Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Ciccariello-Maher, George. “Counterinsurgency and the Occupy Movement.” In Life during Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency, edited by Kristian Williams, Lara Messersmith-Glavin, and William Munger. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013. Del Lucchese, Filippo. Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza: Tumult and Indignation. London: Continuum, 2009. Deleuze, Gilles “On Spinoza.” Lecture Transcripts, 2007. Accessed on July 2013, http:// deleuzelectures.blogspot.com/2007/02/on-spinoza.html. Department Of State. The Office of Website Management, Bureau of Public Affairs. “Secretary Clinton’s Launch of Strategic Dialogue with Civil Society.” Press Release|Special Briefing. US Department of State, February 16, 2011. http://www .state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/02/156708.htm. Dyer-Witheford, Nicholas. Cyber-Marx. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Ewen, Stuart. PR!: A Social History of Spin. New York: Basic Books, 1996. Foucault, Michel. The Politics of Truth. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997). Genkin, Michael, and Alexander Gutfraind. “How Do Terrorist Cells Self-Assemble? Insights from an Agent-Based Model.” SSRN eLibrary, December 20, 2007. http:// papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1031521. Gibbs, Anna. “Panic! Affect Contagion, Mimesis and Suggestion in the Social Field.” Cultural Studies Review 14, no. 2 (April 8, 2011): 130. doi:10.5130/csr.v14i2.2076. Gibbs, Anna. “After Affect,” in eds. Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2010).
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Hardt, Michael. Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Declaration. New York, N.Y.: Argo-Navis Author Services, 2012. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2009. Lasswell, Harold Dwight. Propaganda Technique in World War I. Cambridge (Mass.); London: M.I.T., 1971. Lippmann, Walter. Essays in the Public Philosophy,. New York: Mentor Books, 1955. Massumi, Brian (2005) ‘Fear (The Spectrum Said)’, Positions 13(1): 31–48. Mattelart, Armand. Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture. Minnea polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Negri, Antonio. The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005. ———. The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics. Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2008. Ronfeldt, David F, John Arquilla, and John Rothrock, eds. “Information Warfare : Time for Some Constructive Skepticism?” In In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age. Santa Monica, Calif: Rand, 1997. Sampson, Tony. “Contagion Theory Beyond the Microbe,” Ctheory, (January 11, 2011). www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=675. Shukaitis, Stevphen. “Affective Composition and Aesthetics: On Dissolving the Audience and Facilitating The Mob.” Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 5 (2007): 39–42. Simpson, Christopher. Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Terranova, Tiziana. “Futurepublic On Information Warfare, Bio-Racism and Hegemony as Noopolitics.” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (May 1, 2007): 125–45. doi:10.1177/ 0263276407075960. Thrift, Nigel. “I Just Don’t Know What Got Into Me: Where Is The Subject?” Subjectivity 22 (2008): 82–89. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.1. Thrift, Nigel. “Pass It on: Towards a Political Economy of Propensity.” Emotion, Space and Society 1, no. 2 (December 2008): 83–96. doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2009.02.004. Virno, Paolo. Multitude between innovation and negation. Los Angeles, CA; Cambridge, Mass.: Semiotext(e) ; Distributed by the MIT Press, 2007. Williams, Kristian. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Brooklyn, NY; [Berkeley, Calif.]: Soft Skull Press; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2004. ———. “Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America.” In Life During Wartime, edited by Kristian Williams, Lara Messersmith-Glavin, and William Munger. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013.
chapter 9
Transnational Feminist Media Practices: Seeking Alliance against Global Capitalism Marina Vujnovic*
Understanding Transnational Media Contexts
In this chapter, I am primarily concerned with the possibilities of transnational feminist media practices. My discussion is premised on the idea that the current context of global neoliberal, capitalist society is based on the exploitation of women, children and poor; this global society is a vehicle of dehistoricizing and excluding diverse subjectivities that make up the very fabric of our everyday lives including gender and race. Functions of exploitation, dehistorization, and exclusion are propellers of neoliberal capitalist society’s spread and domination worldwide. In this sense, I am interested in alternative transnational media practices that utilize both traditional media platforms and new media technologies. First, I begin by discussing some contemporary debates in international, global and transnational communication. I examine such concepts as transnational media and transnational media practice. Finally, I position transnational feminist media as sites that have potential to offer platforms for alternative voices, alternative gender representations, narratives of diverse feminist experiences, and examples of non-capitalist economic practices, as well as alternative visions of globalization. International media, global media, and transnational media scholars have long debated and disagreed about the possibility of transnational media and about the nature of their impact. Olausson discussed so called sceptics and globalists as two groups of scholars that have divergent views of the impact of transnational media. She argues that sceptics see media globalization as a process that creates inequalities between those who have access or are represented and those who are excluded from both access and representation, while globalists hold a mostly optimistic view, believing that a true transnational public sphere is possible.1 In general, scholarship on transnational media has focused on infrastructure and content through political-economic and cultural * Monmouth University. 1 For discussion see Urlika Olausson, “Theorizing Global Media as a Global Discourse,” International Journal of Communication 7 (2013), 1281–1282.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004272835_011
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studies perspectives. Infrastructure studies include the analysis of the reach and nature of cross-border communication technologies. These include studies of mobile telephony and satellite television, as well as the study of the nature of national and transnational media systems, to argue that dominance of Western conglomerates and their media systems is evident. Content studies, on the other hand, delve into examinations of the types of content that these media systems produce, for example, studies of network journalism and of the role of journalists, as well as of the impact of cross-border communication technologies on migrant groups and of the ways in which transnational media create gendered subjectivities.2 The tension exists within the very definition of transnational media: in terms of their geographical reach or in terms of global discourse that these media deliver. For example, Olausson argues that it is precisely this global discourse that characterizes media as transnational.3 But that thesis begs a question whether all national media that deliver global discourse may be considered transnational and whether such epistemology would yield useful media analysis. Theorizing transnational media as global discourse, as proposed by Olausson, is a compelling thesis, but, upon further examination, such thesis seems inevitably to leave other important elements of transnational communication in the dark. How, then, is transnational media defined? Gher and Bharthapudi define transnational media, “…as communication, information or entertainment that crosses international borders without the regulatory constrains normally associated with electronic media.”4 A prime example is satellite tv, which has revolutionized media communication in large parts of the so called Third World.5 This view of transnational media is dominant, and I would agree with Olausson that a focus on the kinds of discourse and practices that these media deliver is as equally important as is the current concerns about the reach of its infrastructure. However, as it has been argued before, that any examination of transnational media must include all three 2 See Robert McChesney, The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (Monthly Review Press, 2008); Myria Georgiou, “Seeking Ontological Security Beyond the Nation: The Role of Transnational Television,” New Media 14 (2013), 304–321; Jo Bardoel and Mark Deuze,” Network journalism: Converging Competencies of Old and New Media Professionals,” Australian Journalism Review, 23(2001), 91–103; Radha S. Hedge, ed. Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures (New York: nyu Press, 2011). 3 Urlika Olausson, “Theorizing Global Media as a Global Discourse.” 4 Leo Gher and Kiran Bharthapudi, “The Impact of Globalization and Transnational Media in Eastern Europe at the End of the 20th Century: An Attitudinal Study of Five Newly Independent States,” Global Media Journal 3 (2004), n.p., accessed December 4, 2014, http:// lass.purduecal.edu/cca/gmj/sp04/gmj-sp04-gher-bharthapudi.htm. 5 Ibid.
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spheres of transnational practices, the economic, the political, and the cultural-ideological, as parts of the global system.6 Sklair argues that this global system is not synonymous with global capitalism, but that, nevertheless, global capitalism is its dominant force. He argues: …individuals, groups, institutions and even whole communities, local, national or transnational, can exist, perhaps even thrive, as they have always done outside the orbit of the global capitalist system, but that this is becoming increasingly more difficult.7 Two points, that we can derive from Sklair’s writing, are particularly significant for our analysis: first, that any examination of transnational practices, including media, must be considered in the context of the dominant global capitalist system through economic, political, and cultural analyses, and second, that any examination of transnational media must take into account the possibilities of alternative transnational media practices that could exist and that could potentially thrive outside of the global neoliberal, capitalist system. Therefore, transnational media practices should be examined both for their potential for activism and change, and for their potential for radicalization by individuals and institutions, in addition to examination of their role in maintaining the status quo of the neoliberal global capitalist system. Obviously, there is a need for a more in-depth approach to understanding transnational media contexts. In their edited volume that explores the aftermath of the Prophet Mohammed cartoons that had been published in the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper, the question of the transnational flow of discourses, narratives, and images unveils itself as a complex process in need of serious critical analyses.8 Our attention was once again called to the idea of transnational media events, as described by Eide, Kunelis, and Phillips, when gunmen shot four cartoonists and an editor of the French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, for publishing cartoons purporting to portray prophet Mohammad.9 The public 6 Leslie Sklair, “Transnational Practices and the Analysis of the Global System,” Seminar delivered for the Transnational Communities Programme Seminar Series, 22 May 1998, London School of Economics, accessed December 4, 2014 http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working% 20papers/sklair.pdf. 7 Ibid., 3. 8 Elisabeth Eide, Risto Kunelius, and Angela Phillips, eds. Transnational Media Events: The Mohammed Cartoons and the Imagined Clash of Civilizations (Goteborg, Sweden: Nordicom. 2008). 9 “Charlie Hebdo: Gun Attack on French Magazine kills 12,” bbc.com, January 7, 2015, accessed January 10, 2015 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30710883.
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debate in the Western media yet again turned to a discussion of the moral supremacy of Western political liberalism and democracy, in which free speech is a celebrated practice and a guaranteed right.10 These and similar examples, such as the Quran burning threat by the controversial Miami pastor Terry Jones in 2010, after which a number of social disorders broke out throughout the world, seem to pull our attention to both question and to understand international media flow and the workings, as well as the possibilities of transnational media. These kinds of examinations should include a close look into the kind of practices in which transnational media engage. Particularly, what are transnational media practices like and what are the possibilities for transformative, collaborative, and action oriented transnational media practice? Current global news coverage is dominated by mediated violence as ritualized events that are often transnational in nature.11 I am in agreement to a certain extent with Hafez, who argues that, “…many of the deep structures of media systems are national and not transnational.”12 I like that she questions whether media are truly transnational; however, we cannot ignore the transnational nature of mediated information, as Cottle argues, particularly when it comes to images of violence. Local media often mediate these kinds of events.13 Understanding local media’s appropriation and mediation of transnational information and news is still a rather unexplored area in media and communication studies. Hafez further argues that existing literature on media globalization, as well as on international and transnational media, requires more sophistication, with a major critique pointing in the direction of inadequate language and methodologies when media in nonWestern societies are a subject of study. According to Hafez, integration of area studies within transnational media theory development in media studies is necessary if we wish to fully understand the scope and breadth of both. While rejecting some current theories that underpin global media such as the “global public sphere,” or those that describe one world media system, she argues: “What we need are theories that understand the relative shifts in our life worlds that analyze the social fabric and political impact of media changes at various places in 10
11 12 13
The domination of Western media and its pundits over interpretive landscape in the transnational media flow framing such controversies through idea of free speech has been previously established. See Elisabeth Eide, Risto Kunelius, and Angela Phillips, eds. Transnational Media Events: The Mohammed Cartoons and the Imagined Clash of Civilizations. Simon Cottle, “Mediatized Rituals: Beyond Manufacturing Consent,” Media, Culture & Society 28 (2006), 411–432. Kai Hafez, “The Methodology Trap – Why Media and Communication Studies Are Not Really International,” Communications 38 (2013), 324. Simon Cottle, “Mediatized Rituals: Beyond Manufacturing Consent,” 413.
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the world.”14 Better understanding of local media practices, when it comes to international news, could certainly help us better understand transnational media flow as well as better understand which media have the potential to be truly transnational. Here, I would like to call attention to the fact that media play more than just a meditative role when they gather, produce, and disseminate information. They also partake in the political discourse and action. As Nossek and Berkowitz argue, at times when “society’s core values are under threat,” which is often the case in stories on violence, journalists tend to serve as bards whose role is to repair the damage and to bring “the public mind back to the dominant cultural order.”15 Through this assertion, it is not difficult to see how discourse after attacks on newspapers defaults to a moral superiority of the liberal political ideal of free speech. I argue, then, that the media as the authority in the process of storytelling not only tell familiar stories to take us back to the dominant narrative through which they partake in the process of the alienation of certain groups and peoples to create the sense of fear, which functions as an ideological meta-discourse and which is reflective of the psychology of the larger socio-political system, but these media also have the power create new narratives. In other words, as Altheide argues, “fear is a part of our everyday discourse,” whether its focus is on kidnapping, crime, or terrorism.16 We are certainly witnessing an age of the politics of fear that, as Altheide argues, depends on the discourse of fear and that media that use political agents as sources of news have capitalized and continue to capitalize on this agenda.17 Hafez, however, argues that there is no evidence that cross-border communication has impact on the cultural transformation of receiving cultures, and he, therefore, believes that transnational media don’t really exist.18 I am taking somewhat of an issue with the premise that there is no evidence of cultural transformation. Perhaps focusing on slow change, rather than transformation, will allow us to acknowledge the tremendous impact that Western neoliberal global capitalist media have had on the rest of the world, although with some limited reverse impact. This perspective allows us to ask not only whether and 14 15 16 17 18
Kai Hafez, “The Methodology Trap – Why Media and Communication Studies Are Not Really International,” 325. Hillel Nossek and Daniel Berkowitz, “Telling ‘Our’ Story Through News of Terrorism: Mythical Newswork as Journalistic Practice in Crisis,” Journalism Studies 7 (5: 2006), 692. David L. Altheide, “Terrorism and the Politics of Fear,” in Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader, eds. Uli Linke and Danielle Taana Smith (New York: Pluto Press, 2009), 58. Ibid., 55–60. Kai Hafez, The Myth of Media Globalization (Cambridge, uk: Polity Press, 2007), 14.
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how cultures around the world are changing through transnational media practices, but also whether they are resisting and why? If we take an example of the Arab Spring, which some have called the Facebook revolution and the Twitter revolution, while others attribute some of its agency to national television that offers transnational programming,19 people who took on the streets were both inspired by the liberal political ideal of participatory democracy, while at the same time they resisted the perceived neocolonial oppression of global market economy.20 Media, in that sense, serve both as channels of oppression and tools of resistance. In this context, I wish to place my next discussion on transnational feminist media practice.
Transnational Feminist Media Practice
The last two decades of postmodern, critical, postcolonial feminist scholarship have opened up discourses and debates that challenged our very own tendencies to essentialize what feminism is. These debates have also challenged our Western cultural, political, and economic epistemologies that are grounded in what is undoubtedly a result of larger historical narratives in which our understanding of the world is embedded: namely, imperialism and Enlightenment. These debates have tremendously impacted what women around the world saw as the goals of transnational cooperation and transnational, that is, global feminism. Postcolonial and feminist scholars such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have warned against narrow epistemological foundations of the idea of humanist universal rights as they had developed in Western societies, especially when it comes to ways in which these ideas effect colonized societies.21 19
20
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Leo Ghar and Kiran Bharthapudi in “The Impact of Globalization and Transnational Media in Eastern Europe at the End of the 20th Century: An Attitudinal Study of Five Newly Independent States,” estimate that the percentage of American programming aired on national and satellite television globally is close to 85%. In Croatia in 2004, for instance, German and American programming comprised a little bit less than 50% of all programming, which was a violation of European Council mandate for the European Union membership. See also Myria Georgiou, “Seeking Ontological Security beyond the Nation: The Role of Transnational Television,” 304. Ben Manski, “Seattle wto Uprising Still a Force in World Events, 15 Years Later,” Berkley Journal of Sociology, December 1, 2014, accessed December 1 2014 http://berkeleyjournal .org/2014/12/seattle-wto-uprising-still-a-force-in-world-events-15-years-later. Gayatry C. Spivak, “French Feminism Revisited: Ethics and Politics,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (London: Routledge, 1992), 54–85.
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This recognition developed a split among feminists who opt for the sisterhood that is built on universalist and humanist grounds and those who argue that “sisterhood,” in itself, is impossibility due to women’s different positions across the global societies. Hence, Mohanty attempts to theorize solidarity and argues that transnational feminism, or feminism without borders, must attempt to strip itself from the imposed borders on how women around the world could organize around common issues, despite their different histories and social, cultural, political, and economic positions.22 This argument becomes even more important with processes of globalization and with the export of a liberal version of global capitalism that makes gender, class, racial, and ethnic oppression a salient issue today. Economic neo-liberalism, in tandem with rising militarism, terrorism, and political conservatism, impacts women’s lives across the categories of difference such as class, race, or ethnicity. Women across the globe are laborers in a multitude of industries, including media, who often work and live in poverty. Complexities of the relationship between poverty and gender are under-researched and under-theorized, and they deserve much attention from transnational feminist scholars.23 Similarly, through a discussion between transnational feminist practice and its theory, Thayer argues that urban women in Brazil in the 1990s, for instance, with the help from us organizations, have had tremendous success in organizing for activism. However, poverty in rural areas and the proctored lives of women by their husbands, children, and neighbors debilitated their agency and commitment to action.24 Poverty, therefore, and traditional social roles that govern gender and family life stood as barriers for building a larger national and transnational feminist network. She further argues that transnational feminism should be seen as both theory and practice that is committed to activism.25 Considering the constraints of global capitalist society, what is a possibility of a truly transnational feminist movement and global women’s alliance against the oppression that has been created by the conditions of global capitalism? Or, are regional activist organizing that considers very specific local conditions and women’s lives that are occasionally aided by transnational feminist 22
Chandra T. Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (London: Duke University Press, 2003). 23 Sylvia, Chant, “Female headship and the ‘feminisation of poverty,” in Women Worldwide: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Women, eds. Janet Lee and Susan M. Shaw (New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2011), 334–336. 24 Millie Thayer, Making Transnational Feminism: Rural Women, ngo Activists, and Northern Donors in Brazil (London: Routledge, 2009). 25 Ibid.
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organizations as far as we can currently push a transnational feminist agenda? For instance, Schneider argues that the focus is on India’s Islamic feminism is relatively new and has gained much publicity from the media, but that different labels, such as Muslim, Islamic, or Islamist feminism, draws too much attention to discursive ideology and too little on the power that diversity discourse may have on Muslim women’s agency and social change. At the same time, female activists do not want to be labeled as a feminist due to the negative connotation the term has in non-Western countries. In addition, absence of female Muslim historical narratives creates difficulties for the emergence of social movements. As Muslim women become more visible as social activist participants, they are more exposed to danger, preventing a movement from happening.26 This focus on transformative discourse that, in turn, has the ability to impact the larger context of the everyday lives of women, has been argued as political project. Reilly explains: By ‘political project’ in this context, I mean purposive, collaborative, cross-border endeavours, usually involving engagement by women’s movement actors with state/governmental and/or intergovernmental bodies, aimed at transforming discourses, contexts and constraints, which – it can be argued – disadvantage women and girls in various gender-specific ways.27 Her arguments are contextualized within the context of women’s human rights paradigm, its potentials, and its shortcomings. Reilly argues for the emancipatory potential of human-rights oriented transnational feminism that is based on the feminist praxis of solidarity that takes on hegemonic narratives and the practice of human rights that were built on the exclusion of women.28 It can be argued that all of these scholarly examinations are, to a certain degree, contextualized within the larger impact of globalization on the lives of women around the world. Desai argues that globalization has both positive and negative impact on transnational feminist practice. For one, feminist ideologies have been used by corporate agents to appropriate and thwart feminist transnational organizing. At the same time, feminists have used globalization 26
Nadja-Chrisitina Schneider, “Islamic Feminism and Muslim Women’s Rights Activism in India: from Transnational Discourse to Local Movement or Vise Versa?,” Journal of International Women’s Studies, 11 (2009), 56–71. 27 Niamh Reilly, Doing Transnational feminism, Transforming Human Rights: the Emancipatory Possibilities Revisited, Journal of Sociology, 19 (2011), 61. 28 Ibid., 62.
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to advance their agency and to empower themselves in economic, cultural, and political terms. Therefore, she argues, globalization must be understood in plural terms, where feminists both use and resist globalization to further their agenda.29 Similarly, Moghadam theorizes what she calls “transnational feminist networks” within the context of globalization. Her work is particularly useful in theorizing the role of media in transnational feminist practice. Moghadam argues that: “Gender ideologies may shape social movements in profound ways, deeply affecting the discourse, objectives, tactics and outcomes of social movements.”30 According to Moghadam, transnational feminist networks are agents of change that engage their members in information sharing, advocacy, and criticism of policy, while taking an active role in policy change.31 Here I want to argue that shared discourses that are often facilitated by media play a large role in which potential for change is enhanced. However, as Schneider has warned about the potential dangers of exposure of feminists who participate in activism, for example, communities such as that of Islamic feminists in India.32 Media have the potential to play an adverse role on the lives of women and transnational organizing, and these media therefore must show responsibility towards the subjects whom they represent. As a communication scholar, I want to argue that media and journalism have tremendous roles to play as a potential public arenas for alternative multiple voices and subjectivities, and they can provide spaces for policy debate. However, media as sites of cultural production and sites of media labor has been unequal, gendered, and exploitative of women historically, and they continue to be in the context of labor globalization. Particularly important work here is that of Meehan and Riordan33 on the feminist political economy of media, as well as the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham,34 which challenged capitalism and capitalist hegemony that often work with patriarchal forces. These scholars have inspired me to think about whether media and journalism as forms of labor could offer alternative forms of “speech” for multiple groups 29 30 31 32 33 34
Manisha Desai, “The Messy Relationship Between Feminisms and Globalizations” Gender & Society 21 (2007), 798. Valentine M. Moghadam, “Transnational Feminist Networks: Collective Action in the Era of Globalization,” International Sociology 15 (2000), 60. Ibid., 66. Nadja-Chrisitina Schneider, “Islamic Feminism and Muslim Women’s Rights Activism in India: from Transnational Discourse to Local Movement or Vise Versa?”. Eileen R. Meehan and Ellen Riordan, eds. Sex and Money: Feminism and the Political Economy in Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Julie Gibson and Katherine Graham, The End of Capitalism as We Know It: A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
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across the globe and could work as tools for activism and subversion of dominant discourses. Couldry and Curran argue that, “the process we call ‘media’ is the historic result of countless local battles over who has the power to represent the reality of others.”35 This is an exceptionally important definition for the feminist critique of media that are, as McChesney argues, not only an outcome of the ways in which the free market works, but rather are a combined result of policies and subsidies “that are made in our name often without public consent.”36 Media not only produce and re-produce dominant discourses of those who have the technology and means, but also do so from a narrow masculinist and patriarchal vision of the world and reality. Additionally, as McLaughlin argues, feminist media studies offer “few sustained, concentrated analyses of the role of labor in the production of cultural commodities or the cultures and social experiences of persons who are labeled with designations including knowledge worker, information worker, and creative worker,” especially because information workers are crucial in globalizing the economy and because women are preferred employees for the information and communication sector.37 Media as the powerful incorporated structures of communication tend to limit our imaginations of gender, economic, cultural, and social relations. Shome finds that the purpose of transnational feminism as it relates to media is to analyze ways of looking and representations emerging from globalization processes against the backdrop of the possibilities that these may be “post-colonial reversal of the earlier colonial dialectics.”38 In addition, she theorizes media in regards to the representation, body politics, and transnational information technology that challenge discussions on feminization of informational labor and its impact on constructing alternative gendered modernities. For me, mediated transnational spaces are about challenging hegemonic discourses we sometimes deem uncritically as “reality.”39 Con temporary narratives on intimacies of suffering such as sexual violence, terror, and labor exploitation of women around the world are now global issues, much as are war or climate change. But these realities are seldom on the mainstream media agenda, and, when they are, they are seldom told in the way that 35
Nick Couldry and James Curran, Contesting Media Power, Alternative Media in Networked World, (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 6. 36 Robert W. McChesney, Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media. New York, (London: The New Press, 2007), xii. 37 Lisa McLaughlin, “Looking for Labor in Feminist Media Studies,” Television & New Media, 10 (2009), 110. 38 Raka Shome, “Transnational feminism and communication studies,” The Communication Review, 9 (2006), 261. 39 Ibid.
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would challenge dominant discourses. This is the very reason why, as Couldry and Curran argue, we need to work on developing what they call “alternative media” or, in other words, “wider terrain of media production…that challenges…actual concentrations of media power.”40 It is not surprising that new media offer exceptional opportunities for alternative media production for transnational feminist practice. To that point, Desai argues: …women are using new technologies to create cultures of globalization that are both place and cyber based and that enable them to communicate with local, national, and transnational communities working for gender justice. These new cultures of globalization are invented and imagined based on traditions as well as modernities, combine new organizational structures with new forms of communication, circulate transnationally, and illuminate alternative cultural possibilities that blur the distinctions between the aesthetic and everyday sense of culture.41 Desai’s example of web surfers in Guatemala who can sign up for instructional videos from women cooperatives that are facilitated the Centro de Commu nicadoras is a way for Mayan women to learn how to make videos themselves or access and purchase handicrafts.42 In addition, Sarah Lynn Jones writes about the International Women’s Tribune Center (iwtc) in Uganda, which produced the radio drama, The Open Cage, to expose violence against women during war and armed conflicts. This shows that both alternative media work and traditional media work should be the focus of feminist media studies and studies of transnational feminist practices. In fact, here I want to integrate ideas from Moghadam, Desai, Shome, and McLaughlin to argue that transnational media should be theorized and studied as sites of discourse and labor oppression, as well as sites of expression of diverse feminist subjectivities and as agents of activism. Transnational media are both the means of facilitation for transnational feminist networks and can be transnational feminist networks themselves. Hegde reminds us that mobility of capital, people, and flow 40 41 42
Nick Couldry and James Curran, Contesting Media Power, Alternative Media in Networked World, 7. Manisha Desai, “The Messy Relationship Between Feminisms and Globalizations,” 799. Ibid. I don’t wish to engage in a discussion of the ways in which lack of access to basic needs, not to mention electricity and Internet connection, affects great numbers of women globally, but would like to acknowledge that access to cross-border technology is one of many obstacles that women face in creating transnational networks more inclusive of the diverse feminist subjectivities as well as diverse conditions of women’s everyday lives.
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of information and media technologies often work within the context of old forms of domination. In this transnational condition, gender categories are being constantly re-defined. According to her, media technologies information flow and its systems of representation create and transport “modalities of power, producing what Grewal and Kaplan term ‘scattered hegemonies.”43 She further asserts, “transnational media environments serve as a crucial site from which to examine gendered constructions and contradictions that underwrite globalization.”44 However, here I want to assert, once again, that any examination of transnational media environments must take into account, not just gendered representation, but also political and economic conditions under which these representations are produced and re-produced through, as well as take into account of, the unequal flow of information globally. As McLaughlin argues, feminist studies of media often focus on one aspect, gendered representations, and forego deeper examination of political-economic conditions of women’s lives, including labor carried out by women media workers.45 In conclusion, are transnational feminist media networks possible? I would argue yes, they are. For example, The Women’s International Perspective (wip), developed a few years ago in Monterey, California, has grown into a diverse news platform online for women journalists who are underrepresented around the world and whose voices are silenced. Contributors are often women writers or women journalism students from all parts of the world who call attention to issues related to women’s lives. Many might otherwise not be able to express those positions and ideas in their counties, due to repressive political regimes. wip define itself as transnational feminist media network: The wip recognizes our global interconnectedness. Our feature articles offer a more humanistic and contextual view than traditional news stories. They are concerned with the human cost of global policy and the impact of events as they unfold. The wip honors underrepresented voices – we honor women, we honor the indigenous, we honor the poor. We honor the personal and the invisible – the stories that don’t get press.46 43
Radha S Hegde, ed. Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures (nyu Press, 2011), 2. 44 Ibid. 45 Lisa McLaughlin, “Looking for Labor in Feminist Media Studies.” 46 Women’s International Perspective, “About,” accessed January 4, http://thewip.net/ about/.
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This single example and this organization’s mission summarize the goals of transnational feminist practices and testify to the possibilities of media that have the potential to offer platforms for alternative voices, alternative gender representations, narratives of diverse feminist experiences, and examples of non-capitalist economic practices, as well alternative visions of globalization. As a result, feminist media scholars should focus their attention to map, that is, to find out what types of transnational media networks exist, who practices for whom and what their practices are, contextualize, that is, to find out what local, regional, national, and transnational constraints and opportunities exist for transnational media practice, and to link, that is, to connect feminist media studies to other research on transnational feminist practices. Bibliography Altheide, David L. “Terrorism and the Politics of Fear.” In Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader, edited by Uli Linke and Danielle Taana Smith, 54–70. New York: Pluto Press, 2009. Bardoel, Jo and Mark Deuze, “Network Journalism: Converging Competencies of Old and New Media Professionals,” Australian Journalism Review, 23 (2001): 91–103. Chant, Sylvia. “Female Headship and the ‘Feminisation of Poverty,” in Women Worldwide: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Women, edited by Janet Lee and Susan M. Shaw, 334–336. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2011). Charlie Hebdo: Gun Attack on French Magazine kills 12,” BBC.com, January 7, 2015, accessed January 10, 2015 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30710883. Cottle, Simon. “Mediatized Rituals: Beyond Manufacturing Consent,” Media, Culture & Society 28 3(2006): 411–432. Couldry, Nick and James Curran. Contesting Media Power, Alternative Media in Networked World. London: Rowan and Littlefield, 2003. Desai, Manisha. “The Messy Relationship Between Feminisms and Globalizations” Gender & Society 21 (2007): 797–803. Eide, Elisabeth, Risto Kunelius, and Angela Phillips, eds. Transnational Media Events: The Mohammed Cartoons and the Imagined Clash of Civilizations. Goteborg, Sweden: Nordicom. 2008. Georgiou, Myria “Seeking Ontological Security Beyond the Nation: The Role of Transnational Television,” New Media 14 (2013): 304–321. Gher, Leo and Kiran Bharthapudi, “The Impact of Globalization and Transnational Media in Eastern Europe at the End of the 20th Century: An Attitudinal Study of Five Newly Independent States,” Global Media Journal 3 (2004), n.p., accessed December 4, 2014, http://lass.purduecal.edu/cca/gmj/sp04/gmj-sp04-gher-bharthapudi.htm.
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Gibson, Julie and Katherine Graham. The End of Capitalism as We Know It: A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Hafez, Kai. “The Methodology Trap – Why Media and Communication Studies Are Not Really International,” Communications 38 3 (2013): 323–329. ———. The Myth of Media Globalization. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007. Hedge, Radha S. ed. Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures. New York: NYU Press, 2011. Manski, Ben. “Seattle WTO Uprising Still a Force in World Events, 15 Years Later,” Berkley Journal of Sociology, December 1, 2014, accessed December 1 2014 http:// berkeleyjournal.org/2014/12/seattle-wto-uprising-still-a-force-in-world-events -15-years-later. Meehan, Eileen R. and Ellen Riordan, eds. Sex and Money: Feminism and the Political Economy in Media. University of Minnesota Press, 2001. McChesney, Robert. The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dillemmas. Monthly Review Press, 2008. ——— Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media. New York, London: The New Press, 2007. McLaughlin, Lisa “Looking for Labor in Feminist Media Studies,” Television & New Media, 10 (2009): 110–113. Moghadam, Valentine M. “Transnational Feminist Networks: Collective Action in the Era of Globalization,” International Sociology 15 (2000): 57–85. Mohanty, Chandra T. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. London: Duke University Press, 2003. Nossek, Hillel and Daniel Berkowitz, “Telling ‘Our’ Story Through News of Terrorism: Mythical Newswork as Journalistic Practice in Crisis,” Journalism Studies 7 5 (2006): 691–707. Olausson, Urlika “Theorizing Global Media as a Global Discourse,” International Journal of Communication 7 (2013): 1281–1297. Reilly, Niamh. “Doing Transnational Feminism, Transforming Human Rights: the Emancipatory Possibilities Revisited.” Journal of Sociology, 19 (2011): 60–76. Schneider, Nadja-Chrisitina. “Islamic Feminism and Muslim Women’s Rights Activism in India: from Transnational Discourse to Local Movement or Vise Versa?” Journal of International Women’s Studies, 11 (2009): 56–71. Sklair, Leslie. “Transnational Practices and the Analysis of the Global System,” Seminar delivered for the Transnational Communities Programme Seminar Series, 22 May 1998, London School of Economics, accessed December 4, 2014 http://www .transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working%20papers/sklair.pdf. Shome, Raka “Transnational Feminism and Communication Studies,” The Communi cation Review, 9 (2006): 255–267.
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Spivak, Gayatry C. “French Feminism Revisited: Ethics and Politics,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, 54–85. London: Routledge, 1992. Thayer, Millie. Making Transnational Feminism: Rural Women, NGO Activists, and Northern Donors in Brazil. London: Routledge, 2009. Women’s International Perspective, “About,” accessed January 4, http://thewip.net/ about/.
chapter 10
Shifting Contours in Latin American Cultures of Resistance Ricardo A. Dello Buono* Latin America was the first region of the world to experience neoliberalism. Initially installed in Chile at gunpoint, neoliberal restructuration was imposed courtesy of the us-engineered military coup that overthrew the popular unity government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. While the Cold-War era intervention in Chile was ostensibly aimed to thwart a non-violent, constitutional path to democratic socialism, it afforded an early opportunity to experiment with neoliberal economic policies under the political protection of a ruthless dictatorship. Even as Richard Nixon declared that he too was “now a Keynesian,” his relentless campaign to overthrow Latin America’s oldest succeeded in subjecting it to a new, experimental logic of total commodification.1 In what Klein characterized as a “shock doctrine,” the economic wizardry of the “Chicago Boys” probed with Nazi precision the policy forms by which a radical structural adjustment could be imposed upon a developing country.2 The unabashedly clear aim was to eliminate economic sovereignty and restore the right to plunder by transnational capital. In the course of the following decades, virtually no part of the region would prove capable of escaping the neoliberal “development model” as crafted and improved out of its brute form under the Chilean military regime. An entire generation of development policies aimed at balanced industrialization and social development now had to be hastily re-interpreted as misguided in favor of the new mantras extolling the magic of the market. In short order, the transition amount to nothing short of a cultural revolution that would sweep through the region, including among its institutions of higher learning. Looking back, we now know that the structural changes that took place by virtue of neoliberalization in many ways left the region more “underdeveloped” than it was a half century earlier. Global demand for primary commodities, led by China’s steady expansion, in conjunction with periodic hard * Manhattan College, USA. 1 Robert Reich, Aftershock (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 44–45. 2 Naomi Klein,The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007).
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004272835_012
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currency crises and a concomitant commodity speculation during times of global recession would conspire to cement into place an extractivist phase of neoliberalism throughout Latin America. The decline of peasant agriculture and national industries that trademarked neoliberal consolidation was to result in an incessant migration that continues to drain human resources while converting family remittances into a contested prize for parasitic elites and fiscally strained states. The external financial debt has ballooned throughout the region, environmental degradation continues unabated and social inequality remains the highest in the world even as it continues to increase. Neoliberalism’s unchecked extension throughout Latin America was due in no small part to the deep contradictions present in the region’s preceding period of dependent-capitalist development. Intertwined with decades of accumulated policies that were continually contested by workers and peasants organizations, the contradictory overlapping interests of national and foreign elites eventually brought forward the politics of effective stalemate in a global context of declining transnational profits. Coupled with the oil shocks of the 1970s and rising interest rates of the early 1908s, a confluence of regional and global factors contributed to a cascading, epochal debacle of the pre-neoliberal, structuralist development scenario that some analysts have retrospectively termed the statist-national-popular sociopolitical matrix.3 These same contradictions also worked to deflate organized resistance to the installation of neoliberalism, effectively keeping it initially slow in forming. Indeed, one of the great successes of neoliberalism was the speed in which it managed to disarticulate the traditional bases of organized political opposition among the popular sectors. Sharp contractions of public sectors, cutbacks in state subsidies for basic needs and services, notably including higher education, and more flexible labor regimes took square aim at worker, student and peasant organizations, keeping them submerged in an ever more hopeless struggle to keep domestic production afloat at the expense of household incomes. With unemployment quickly becoming rampant, a gigantic growth of the informal sector was observable throughout the entire region as an air of precariousness was felt across all of the popular classes. In Latin America, the growth of transnational consumption became everywhere visible as foreign capital was welcomed in on a red carpet, replacing many iconic symbols of the previous development regime with new logos. Soon, longstanding national airlines were replaced with the largest North American firms, major supermarket and distribution chains like Carrefour and 3 Garretón, Manuel Antonio et al., eds. Latin America in the 21st Century: Toward a New Sociopolitical Matrix (Miami: North–south Center Press at the University of Miami, 2003), 9.
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Walmarts would be serving up imported food products, Chinese and maquila manufactured goods. Transnational communications firms settled in to dominate cell phone, internet and mass media product delivery while Starbucks and digital movie firms busily set up shop to reproduce a North American lifestyle for the emerging sectors tied to newly transnationalized circuits of employment. The great neoliberal “cultural revolution” was awesome in scope and came complete with its own glossy veneer of “progress” even as it produced an unprecedented social polarization of wealth and power. Despite its initial capacity for social fragmentation, resistance to the neoliberal model eventually surfaced by the latter 1990s within the throes of neoliberalism’s peak implementation. An alter-globalizing counter-culture that posited “another possible world” arose to take up the challenge in building an alternative to neoliberal, one-dimensional thinking. The ensuing decade would witness the formation of strong anti-neoliberal movements, punctuated by the emergence of leftist regimes and an incipient regional alliance dedicated to the creation of 21st Century socialism. This consolidation of a Latin American culture of resistance is a testimony to popular mobilization and constitutes an important case study in the contradictory dynamics of a deepening, hegemonic global culture enveloping transnational capitalism. My aim in this discussion is to reflect theoretically and critically on the dynamic aspects of Latin American popular resistance in an era of “late neoliberalism.” I posit an ongoing transition within the regional culture that first begins with the consolidation of neoliberal dogma during the initial heyday of neoliberalism’s installation described above. I argue that a shift began to gather momentum during the 1990s towards a regional integrationist weltanschauung that grew out of the intersectoral social movements that gradually arose in protest of neoliberal penetration. It was this shift, I argue, that later opened the door to an emancipatory, anti-capitalist or post-capitalist cultural imaginary that broke out in some countries and which continues to threaten neoliberalism’s hegemony in the region as a whole.
Medial Portrayal in the Neoliberal “Cultural Revolution”
The cultural factors that promoted deepening expressions of resistance to consolidated neoliberalism as well as those that worked against it are of great relevance both within and beyond the region. One key but often neglected area for study is the role of communications and the mass media. In Latin America, these institutions have tended to be highly elite-controlled and undemocratic in nature. By virtue of the accumulated power of what one Uruguayan analyst
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terms latifundios mediáticos,4 traditional media oligarchies managed to establish a strategic hold in the major print, radio and television media of the region. Critical media analysts have generally established that privately owned media monopolies are instrumental in “framing” social issues through selective reporting and de facto censorship, allowing its elite owners to project their class vision on the larger world. During the installation of neoliberalism, this traditionally undemocratic feature of Latin American societies became further reinforced by the entry of media transnationals who exerted monopolistic control over telecommunications and digital media. In what I have elsewhere referred to as the “cnnization” of the region,5 Latin Americans were increasingly being spoon-fed their news through the filter of transnational capital. This steady diet of foreign ideology was often delivered with a healthy dose of input from elite, Miami exile communities who were warmly welcomed into “Latin market” operations of that industry. In contrast, governments throughout the region frequently came to enjoy ever less access to private media and whenever they enacted measures to establish greater balance, they were inevitably cast as repressive and “dictatorial.” Throughout the region, there is ample evidence of the role played by elite controlled media in extolling the virtues of neoliberalism while opposing the social forces of progressive change. Beginning in Chile itself, for example, it can be seen how the private mass media played an important role in destabilizing the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende, facilitating the military coup that deposed it, and later helping to legitimate the repressive military government that inaugurated neoliberalism. Chile’s powerful El Mercurio network serves as a paradigmatic case, composed of the nation’s largest print media, radio stations, advertisement agencies, and wire services. Declassified US intelligence documents reveal how the Chilean owner of El Mercurio worked closely with top officials of the Nixon Administration during its destabilization of the Allende government. In the early 1970s, the US Central Intelligence Agency (cia) spent at least US$1.5 million on El Mercurio prior to the coup and received almost half of the total cia expenditures in Chile since 1970.6 Official confirmation of this private sector media c ollaboration 4 Aram Aharonian, Vernos con Nuestros Propios Ojos: Apuntes sobre Comunicación y Democracia (Caracas: Fondo Editorial Question, 2007), 133–138. 5 Ricardo A. Dello Buono, Diálogo sudamericano: Otra Integración es posible (Lima: pcs, 2005), 227. 6 Peter Kornbluh, “The El Mercurio file: secret documents shine new light on how the cia used a newspaper to foment a coup,” Columbia Journalism Review 5 (September/October, 2003): 14–19.
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with pro-Coup forces was later made public by a special US Congressional Committee investigation in 1975. The Congressional report indicated that the cia had bankrolled El Mercurio reporters and editors in order to use the paper as “the most important channel for anti-Allende propaganda.”7 For extra measure, the cia purchased its own radio station to place at the disposal of antiAllende forces.8 After the military attack on the Presidential Palace that left President Allende dead with thousands of Allende supporters being rounded up, persecuted and many “disappeared” by the dictatorship, the military junta closed down virtually all independent media, except for El Mercurio. For its part, the cia lobbied hard to justify continued financial support of the newspaper in order to help shape public reactions to the military regime. In a declassified memorandum of early January 1974, an advisor argued to maintain cia funding since “these media outlets have tried to present the Junta in the most positive light for the Chilean public…The project is therefore essential in enabling the Station to help mold Chilean public opinion in support of the new government.” The experience in Chile was not some sort of rare exception but indeed a kind of template for the colorful history of foreign collaboration with elitedominated media. From South America to the Caribbean, it was used to build support for foreign military interventionism. Such efforts have achieved decisive importance in more recent years once any state attempts to break free of neoliberal domination. From the very outset of Venezuela’s revolutionary government, right wing media companies such as the rctv have accused the government of repression against the “free press” while these media latifundios worked incessantly to destabilize the democratically elected government. The 1999 Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is one of the most progressive in the world and Articles 57 and 58 guarantee the right to objective media information, incorporating international standards of freedom of expression and public access to a diverse, democratic media. After a long history of total domination by the private sector, the revolutionary constitution specifically established the right to public access channels and community-based media. Like in many other Latin American countries, Venezuela’s mass media has been dominated for decades by several large media firms. One family dynasty owns Venevisión, the country’s largest station along with various media outlets in foreign countries, including Caracol Television in Colombia, Univision 7 Ibid., 15. 8 Ibid.
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Network in the United States and Playboy Latin America.9 Another conglomerate owns Radio Caracas Televisión (rctv) and Radio Caracas Radio, a pattern of oligarchical media control that similarly characterizes the structure of Venezuela’s newspaper and print media. Just days prior to an attempted Coup d’état in April 2002 aimed at bringing down the revolutionary government of Hugo Chávez, the major television stations suspended all regular programming in order to provide continuous coverage of anti-government demonstrations. In retaliation, the government invoked the Telecommunications Law that obligated major television stations to allow the government access by airing 15–20 minute government statements of its position. The stations partially complied with the law by splitting the screen in half, continuing to broadcast anti-government protests while the government spots were aired.10 On the day before the attempted Coup, a Venezuelan general was provided air time to call on President Chávez to step down from office or suffer removal by the nation’s armed forces. As tanks surrounded the presidential palace, the coup leaders were appearing on all major networks to thank the media for their cooperation in “rescuing the nation.” The next day, a Venezuelan business leader emerged from his base of operations in the corporate media facilities of Venevision to be “sworn in” as one of history’s shortest lived dictators. As the top generals began to experience a mass mutiny of junior level officers who remained loyal to the constitutional government, the major television monopolies continued to take its orders directly from the coup plotters, falsely reporting that President Chávez had resigned his post and was preparing to go into exile. Following the script of the 1973 Chilean Coup, the Venezuelan coup leaders announced that they had suspended Venezuela’s Constitution, dissolved the Congress and Courts, and that the military was in complete control after having detained President Chávez. Ironically, the media coverage resulted in a mass outpouring of the populace into the streets, demanding the restoration of the Venezuelan president. As tens of thousands of Venezuelans surrounded the Presidential Palace, the media then switched to airing cartoons and soap operas to empty homes across Venezuela. Even as government loyalists re-established control in the capital, it was not until the state television station returned to the air that actual news was once again being transmitted.
9
Eva Golinger, “A Case Study of media concentration and power in Venezuela,” Venezuel analysis 25 (2004), accessed May 5 2014, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/710. 10 Ibid.
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President Chávez had been rescued from captivity by lower level military commanders, the Venezuelan people had taken complete control of the streets, and the coup leaders were desperately trying to flee the country. The events of the most important day in Venezuela’s history would only later be televised to Venezuelans, thanks to the concerted duplicity of the privately owned media. In subsequent days, the media owners came forward one by one to publicly confess their “lapse of judgment” in complying with the requests of the coup leaders. Under the acute gaze of the international community, the Venezuelan mass media monopolies were shown considerable tolerance by the government following their betrayal of the public trust. The media giants nevertheless chose to continue to challenge the revolutionary government in every way possible. Just months after the failed coup attempt, the private media relentlessly portrayed a failed mass lockout of workers by the oil industry as a “general strike,” feeding a bogus narrative for replication by the international press. The media companies later turned their attention to support a presidential recall that likewise went down to resounding defeat at the ballot box. Regardless of the strong presence of international observers, the oppositional media insisted that the results were fraudulent, a story widely picked up and transmitted by international press affiliates.11 When President Chávez announced that rctv’s license would not be renewed when it expired in late May, 2007 due to its consistent violations of law, the company launched an international campaign to decry the Vene zuelan government’s “repressive” measures.12 While the station was permitted to continue broadcasting over cable and satellite arrangements, its privileged access to a major vhf frequency was re-allotted to a public television network. In the years that followed, the ongoing offensive of Venezuela’s elite-sponsored private media has increasingly synchronized its efforts with global media giants to provide its signature skewed coverage in the postChávez period. These dynamics of media-sponsored class warfare can be found elsewhere in the region wherever anti-neoliberal regimes have come to power. 11
12
Juan Francisco Alonso,“Sumate: There is a 99% Probability of Fraud in Referendum,” El Universal, September 6, 2004, accessed May 5, 2014, http://www.eluniversal.com/2004/ 09/06/en_pol_art_06A489963.shtml and Michael Barone, “Exit Polls in Venezuela,” US News and World Report, August 20, 2004, accessed May 5, 2014, http://www.usnews.com/ usnews/opinion/baroneweb/mb_040820.htm. Stephen Lendman, “Venezuela’s rctv Acts of Sedition,” Znet, January 25, 2007, accessed May 5, 2014, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11941.
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Social Movement Resistance in Times of Neoliberalism
As in the case of Venezuela, anti-establishment and ultimately anti-systemic movements eventually did break out as Latin America crossed into the 21st Century. Widely referred to as the “pink tide,” it consisted of electoral swings to the left and/or center-left, coming in some cases following the toppling of standing neoliberal presidents such as in Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina. In virtually all of these cases, powerful focus points of protest were brought together into broad, intersectoral coalitions that marched under an antineoliberal banner.13 The meteoric rise of new social movements across the region along with the resurgence of their older counterparts has yet to be fully analyzed. At the peak of the neoliberal wave, mainstream Latin Americanists openly spoke of an “end of politics” in a regional context where class-based social movement resistance appeared to have completely disappeared.14 But the political successes that road on the crest of regional mass movements in countries such as Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador signified a wide ranging challenge to the neoliberal model. The focal points of resistance coalesced around the neuralgic links in the neoliberal project, including reckless privatization, sharp cutbacks of the government subsidies and social services, repression of popular mobilization, and non-transparent incorporation into hegemonic trade agreements with the United States. For much of the preceding century, leftist political parties and trade unions formed the nucleus of oppositional social movements. In many instances, the leaders of these organizations were subjected to brutal repression, reinforced by us-sponsored counter-insurgency efforts aimed at neutralizing all vestiges of radical opposition. Their leading role in galvanizing popular resistance was further weakened due by a generalized ideological fragmentation in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the consolidation of state capitalism in China. These factors left them exceptionally vulnerable to the huge structural shifts and “flexible” labor regimes being installed by neoliberalism all across the region’s economies. In their place, however, new social movements arose within sectors being systematically threatened with heightened social exclusion. These new 13
14
This point is discussed in substantial detail by Ximena de la Barra and R.A. Dello Buono, “Social Movements Take the Offensive,” Latin America after the Neoliberal Debacle: Another Region is Possible (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 53–78. Forrest D. Colburn, Latin America at the End of Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
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movements eventually came into the streets, including “pots and pans” wielding fractions of the middle class who found themselves abruptly thrust into the “newly poor,” embattled workers without benefits or pensions among the swelling informal economy, “cocaleros” (coca leaf producers) being subjected to repression and foreign-imposed aerial fumigation throughout the Andes, and “piqueteros” (marginalized neighborhood organizations who organized street blockages) among just some of the new organizational faces that composed a resurgent resistance to neoliberalism. In many cases, these movements found that they had allies among national and international human rights ngos where former members of leftist political parties had become concentrated. In some cases, they found allies of decisive importance among disaffected elements of the armed forces. The mobilization efforts of social movements eventually tackled neoliberal hegemony from numerous angles, seeking to bring about social and cultural change. Clearly, not all social movements were progressive in nature. Often neglected in academic studies was the presence of right-wing, reactionary social movements that in some cases proved to be easily controlled by conservative state forces and/or foreign governments in their war against popular resistance.15 Yet, these forces invariably seemed to be the darlings of the international press. This has been notably observable in Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia under diverse guises as “self-defense forces,” right-wing Christian evangelical sects with foreign sponsorship, and elite-led movements for “regional autonomy,” most typically in resource-rich areas. In some cases, “leftist” jargon was borrowed by right wing forces seeking to build populist oppositional sentiment such as right-wing “piqueteros” in Argentina demanding the “right to export” in the face of state regulatory policies of the center-left Fernández de Kirchner government. In 2014, this included the “student movement” protesting the Maduro government of revolutionary Venezuela, covered almost daily by the Spanish language subsidiary of cnn, even as evidence surfaced that only a minority of its members were students and its most militant core elements were being paid to engage in street fights.16 What initially helped to unify otherwise disparate anti-neoliberal forces at the regional level was the proliferation of us free trade agreements designed in Washington as part of a campaign to vertically “integrate” Latin American economies. The archetypical model was the North American Free Trade 15 16
Leigh A. Payne, Uncivil Movements: The Armed Right Wing and Democracy in Latin America (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Aram Aharonian, “El diálogo y la violencia en sus respectivos laberintos,” América Latina en Movimiento alai 2015-5-02, 2014, accessed May 3, 2014, http://alainet.org/active/73400.
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Agreement (nafta) that eventually went into force between the United States, Canada and Mexico. It was this pact, imposed against the concerted opposition of the trade union movements in all three member countries that created the template for this campaign. Washington sought to recalibrate its commercial hegemony over a region that had progressively embarked, however unevenly and dependent, on the road of industrial development. Building off the accumulated dynamics of “industrial colonialism”,17 the United States sought to “re-integrate” the hemisphere on its own hierarchical and neocolonial terms, restoring Latin America to its traditionally subordinate position as a provider of essential raw materials and a consumer of technological and capital goods from the north. In the new configuration, a newfound emphasis was placed on opening up access to foreign investment in the most sensitive and formally protected social service markets of the region while Latin America’s peasantries would be rendered redundant by the dumping of agroindustrial goods from the North. In the case of Mexico, the nafta agreement spelled doom and gloom for over one-quarter of the nation’s population engaged in peasant production. Given the high likelihood of peasant resistance, the neoliberal government of Mexico closely collaborated with their us counterparts on phasing in the terms of the agreement in the most sensitive agricultural sectors. The aim was to cushion the effect, particularly upon the displacement of Mexicans to the us which would inevitably result. Ironically, the us public had been “sold” nafta as a means of stemming the migratory flow across the Rio Grande, despite the fact that it was destined to have exactly the opposite effect. The reaction in Mexico foresaw an entire new era of regional resistance. On the day that nafta went into effect in 1994, the Zapatista rebellion in the southern, indigenous region of Chiapas inaugurated a struggle against neoliberalism that inspired popular forces throughout region. It amounted to a social movement watershed by virtue of its linkage of domestic neoliberal policies with global efforts to consolidate the hegemony of transnational capital. The rebellion was also significant in the way that consciously cultivated media attention through the spectacular image of hooded indigenous combatants, including a flamboyant, pipe-smoking “sub-commander Marcos” punctuated with photos of Che Guevara and other icons of the region’s revolutionary history. The Zapatista movement anticipated the beginning of an entire new era in anti-neoliberal, alter-globalization protest and it presaged the intensive use
17
Víctor M. Figueroa Sepúlveda, Industrial Colonialism in Latin America: The Third Stage (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 2013).
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of social media where digital communications would be increasingly socialized by the region’s organized resistance. When the us announced its intentions in 1994 to launch the Free Trade Area of the Americas (ftaa), the region came to view it as a “nafta for all of Latin America.” In essence, the integration scheme more closely resembled a plan for economic “annexation.” A decade after, even as mass protests against nafta were still commonplace in Mexico, Washington was bearing down on its efforts to extend nafta throughout the entire Western Hemisphere. By then, intensified opposition to the ftaa was observable throughout the region, including an impressive range of forms of protests. For example, the Continental Campaign against the ftaa organized popular plebiscites based on a highly successful experience in Brazil in 2002 when millions of Brazilians voted 98% in rejection of the ftaa.18 This transnational social movement alliance would effectively mobilize public opinion in opposition to the us-sponsored initiative, leading right up to the 2005 Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina where the ftaa failed to achieve regional approval and was declared dead. The region-wide rejection led to galvanizing movements seeking more genuine forms of integration as counter-hegemonic resistance. In the end, social movement protest against hegemonic free trade agreements was highly significant in the way it emphasized the negative economic, political, ecological and cultural impacts of these hyper-neoliberal accords. With the support of the leftist regimes, these sentiments would eventually crystalize in new regional entities such as celac.19 In the wake of its defeat, Washington soon resorted to a wave of bilateral and sub-regional free trade accords where it could focus efforts on the “friendliest” and/or most vulnerable nations of the region. Although less ambitious in magnitude, these treaties would similarly attempt to provide a “bill of neoliberal rights” for foreign capital that could be encoded into a regional legal order, rising above the state sovereignty of individual nations and thus diminish the probability of future social reforms in the event of unfavorable regime change.
Theorizing Resistance under Neoliberal Globalization
In my judgment, the cultural dimension of both the neoliberal offensive and the shifting epicenters of social resistance that arose in opposition to it remain 18 19
Ximena de la Barra and R.A. Dello Buono, Latin America after the Neoliberal Debacle: Another Region is Possible (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 72. Ximena de la Barra and R.A. Dello Buono, “From alba to celac: Toward ‘another integration’?” nacla Report on the Americas 45(2012): 32–36.
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to this day largely under-theorized. To some extent, this can be accounted for the ideological trajectory of mainstream development theory. The strong influence of Weberian theory in the sociology of development encouraged a largely conservative posture that lacked a critical vision for analyzing the contradictory development of “emerging nations.” This is precisely what made it so ideal and influential to early development studies, offering an ideological bedrock for mid-20th century “modernization” approaches. It is important to remember that the original Weberian “dialectic” was consumed with creating an alternative to Marxism that was more suitable for a “respectable” German social science. Weber’s nationalistic attempt to resolve and synthesize the raging debates among the principle camps of non-Marxist political economy offered precious little for comprehending the material dialectics of ideological shifts and cultural resistance. Above all, the Nietzschean shadow cast over Weber’s neo-Kantian approach essentially predisposed him to depict any sort of insurgent political project as a gloomy precursor to an incipient tragedy. For the more orthodox Weberian currents, this branded the prevailing structures of domination as “inevitable” and ever deepening. In contrast, the dialectical Hegelian influence found in Marxian theorists such as Lukács established an early critique of Weberian thought, pioneering an alternative vision for addressing the subjective, ideological side of dialectical social transformation.20 These critical sentiments would be echoed by o thers such as Gramsci who focused critical theory on understanding the complex challenges facing anti-capitalist resistance movements in the 20th century European context.21 Much of this sentiment later crystalized in the Frankfurt School whose theorists were influential in further broadening out critical analyses of hegemonic capitalist ideology, incorporating elements of media and the newly emerging agents of change in the dynamics of organized resistance and social praxis. Elsewhere, I have argued how the work of Marcuse and other Frankfurt Criti cal theorists today seem prophetic in their anticipation of a “one-dimensional,” hyper-commodified domination posited by the neoliberal establishment as the most genuine expression of democracy.22 Like Lukács and Gramsci before him, the dialectical reasoning of Marcuse and others did manage to sense, albeit in a “First World” scenario, how domination’s deep cultural roots 20 21 22
Georgy Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, (London: Merlin Press, 1971). Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Trans. and ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971). Ricardo A. Dello Buono, “Latin America and the Collapsing Ideological Supports of Neoliberalism,” Critical Sociology 37(2010): 19–22.
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contained the elements of its own negation. More contemporary strands of thought steeped in Lukács tradition have long since surpassed the limitations of Weberian-Marxist and Frankfurt school varieties of critical theory. The legacy of Lukács is critical in my view because of the pivotal way he confronted the question of social ontology in aiming at a coherent theorizing of emancipation. Any effort at surpassing the Weberian approach to cultural resistance with a more fully dialectical formulation must keep human praxis centered as the sole source of emancipatory social change. Lukács strongly opposed clumsy, stagnant and opportunistic versions of dialectical materialism that thrived under Stalinism and which blunted the critical and dialectical thrust of Marxism. He effectively dedicated a good part of his life work to elaborating an ontology of social being.23 For Lukács, the ontology of contradictory social processes is the salient form of a unified social whole, offering a complexity that lends itself towards critique and social transformation. In his case, the epistemological necessity that emerges is clear. If social reality itself is invariably a result of dynamic process, this reality can only be gasped through an equally dynamic, processual approach. Lukács thus sees in a dialectical approach, the necessity to grasp the objective dynamic of social reality while elucidating the academic path to grasping it, all with the aim of fueling progressive social transformation. The central unifying category remains praxis. As Gramsci put it, praxis is where understanding is inextricably integrated with activism, with politics, and with making history. The political and strategic significance of this approach derives from how human participants can step back, analyze, and re-insert themselves in their own history in a conscious fashion that is more capable of favorably altering its course. Many of the most seminal insights of Lukács have been assimilated into the contemporary work of Hungarian critical theorist István Mészáros. Mészáros, a former student of Lukács, broke new ground in exploring the contours of emancipatory social change while remaining acutely sensitive to the structural limits imposed by global capital. Hugo Chávez cited the work of Mészáros as a major theoretical inspiration for developing a strategy for 21st Century Socialism in which structural analysis shapes the political requirements of revolutionary transformation. In Mészáros, we find prototypes for envisioning how any construction of a counter-hegemonic set of mediations must by real necessity emerge out of ongoing practices of resistance and struggle. Following this analytical lineage 23
Mário Duayer and João Leonardo Medeiros, “Lukács: Critical Ontology and Critical Realism,” Journal of Critical Realism 4 (2005): 395–425.
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from Lukács and Gramsci, the active engagement of practical activity designed to resist, dismantle, and transform exploitative structures requires a unified grasp of objective and subjective dynamics that has invariably proved elusive in popular emancipatory projects. It is here that the Mészáros critique of Lukács is instructive. Lukács aimed to reunite the subjective and objective aspects of capitalist crisis and this meant transcending the subjective alienation of the worker from his objectified conditions in wage-labor. While a total reconciliation of the subject and object may be perpetually elusive, what is both possible and necessary is the re-constitution of the creative human laborer in unity with the objective relations that require the continual exercise of that creativity in production, rather than falling in line with the forces that must suppress it in order to achieve their reproduction.24 The ongoing attempt to unite theory and practice requires continual confrontation with envisioned goals and concrete achievements, theoretically informed strategies and practical results. In a context of consciously intended social transformation, the creative dedication to emancipatory struggle must be continually re-examined, assessed and re-formulated in accordance with the enabling possibility presented by a larger social movement. As Mészáros argues: “Only the historically viable institution and consolidation of the hegemonic alternative to capital’s ever more destructive social reproductive order can offer a way out from our deepening structural crisis.”25 Hence, Mészáros insists on keep present a radically different imaginary of human social relations as the point of reference in dialectical analysis. Seen from this vantage point, emancipation is no longer some future apocalyptic event but instead, as Gramsci argued, a process of struggle where problems are confronted through praxis “at first as difference, then as antagonism and autonomy, and finally through the destruction of the forms and forces which it counters and which counter it.”26 Mészáros echoes and qualifies this insight when he argues that every set of historical social relations establishes certain structural limits by which it is impossible to go beyond without disrupting the ongoing reproduction of those social relations in a “social metabolic,” self-expanding process.27 This effectively anticipates the contemporary drama of mass mobilizations against 24 25 26 27
István Mészáros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness – Vol. ii: The Dialectic of Structure and History (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 312. István Mészáros, The Structural Crisis of Capital (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 270. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 462. István Mészáros, The Structural Crisis of Capital, 270.
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eoliberalism that broke out across Latin America as transnational capital n began to come up against its limits, including its absolute ecological limits. This kind of social resistance emerges out of the interstitial spaces of structural dilemmas that cannot be resolved within capitalist practice. The systemic alternative can only grow out of an empowered praxis that actively engages and defies the structural regime with a strategic and decidedly emancipatory agenda. When looking squarely at the Latin American experience with neoliberal development, my reading is that the accumulating resistance to the neoliberal phase of capitalism has transversed across three broad moments. First, there was a generalized rediscovery of critical thinking aimed at responding to the hegemony of one-dimensional, neoliberal thinking. The general thrust of this response was oriented towards revealing the particularistic character of neoliberal thought by exposing its connections with the “commodification of everyday life,” the privatization of intellectual institutions, and the larger system’s contradictory metabolism and unsustainable character.28 Widespread de-mystification of the neoliberal “model” ultimately required the appropriation of new, alternative media given the ideological role of private media discussed earlier. In many ways, this appropriation of social media was accomplished by transnational social movements that sought to confront incipient forms of transnational capital hegemony. As holes were poked in the “sacred canopy” of neoliberalism’s ideological legitimacy, the constituent power relations of transnational domination in the evolving architecture of the re-assertion of imperial rule became ever more transparent. At the same time, the sense that the neoliberal order was somehow “natural,” “inevitable” or “eternal” began to dissipate. This weakening of neoliberal legitimacy helped bolster a new phase of resistance that actively rode the wave of powerful inter-sectoral alliances of social protest movements. The transnational concertations that emerged out of opposition to hegemonic forms of neoliberal integration contributed to a cultural consolidation of Latin American unity and solidarity. The construction of these broader “unities” included bases in pan-indigenous mobilization, ethnic/racial struggles, nationalist and anti-imperialist sentiments, among other collective demands. The culmination of this second moment in Latin American resistance took the form of an ideological platform for rebuilding resistance via new synergies in
28
Ricardo A. Dello Buono, “Latin America and the Collapsing Ideological Supports of Neoliberalism,” Critical Sociology 37 (2011): 9–25.
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social movement mobilization aimed at regaining sovereignty and regional self-determination. This popular groundswell encouraged a trend in the direction of a regional, integrative weltanschauung that played out in the consolidation of new regional entities such as unasur and celac. The collective examination of popular content as embedded in these “official” institutions of sub-regional and regional integration helped to in turn pave the way to the formulation of popular alternatives for deeper and more genuine institutions of regional integration, i.e., “another possible integration.” These expressions of resistance to foreign and domestic, elite led projects favored reconstitution of the social bonds in resistance so effectively suppressed by neoliberal fragmentation. Once in the hands of popular social movements, regional-integrative thinking promoted consolidated resistances at various levels and favorably expanded the capacity for broader social mobilizations. Official forms of intra-regional cooperation encouraged the formation of new “schools of thought” dedicated to regional development goals and these initiatives, in turn, stimulated discussion among social movements about how to deepen the popular character of existing national and regional institutions. By calling into the question the principles guiding existing regional integration pacts, social movement activists turned towards showing how even regional pacts have generally favored the interests of national elites. In so doing, organized social movements were actively demystifying the ways in which elites more generally portray their class interests as synonymous with the larger national interest. The unfolding of these dynamics during the first decade of the 21st century was a significant development in the shifting contours of Latin American resistance and provided the opening to a subsequent, third moment. Largely still incipient in the region, the third moment involved going beyond social movement driven, regional pushes for popular forms of integration towards the active construction of anti-capitalist/postcapitalist alternatives. This phase of resistance gained traction with the consolidation of leftist regimes, especially in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Each of the countries build upon electoral swings to the left and moved quickly to convene constitutional assemblies that re-wrote the rules of the game so traditionally stacked in favor of preserving the status quo. With new democratic mechanisms and deeper forms of popular participation, historically entrenched elites were deprived of many of their traditional forms of thwarting fundamental social change. At the same time, cooperative relations between these regimes opened the door to the creation of new organizational forms such as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (alba) initiative. alba is the most consolidated,
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alternative scheme of regional integration devised so far and has served as a laboratory for “another possible integration” through its emphasis on increased complementarity and the reduction of developmental asymmetries. Regional media projects like TeleSUR likewise created new mechanisms for combatting the transnationalization of the region’s mass media, reflecting growing consciousness of the need for decolonization and democratization of the region’s mass media. Importantly, all of these developments were creating significant new spaces for cultivating and nurturing Latin American resistance. Projects for alternative forms of regional integration signify construction of a transnational political project that genuinely responds to the interests of the popular sectors within the structures of globalized capitalism. It is a supranational project that signifies a whole arena of struggles and confrontations, one that involves political parties, social movements and other actors in a complex struggle of classes, racially defined and gendered hierarchies, and social sectors of distinct geographical location. The guiding vision of this advanced alternative formula is the eventual consolidation of a regional integration that is based in solidarity and human needs of the vast majority, something that implies a common project for the construction of a post-capitalist future. Conclusion Latin American social movements have increasingly mobilized to confront the failures of neoliberal capitalism, seeking sustainable improvements in the standard of living among the region’s popular sectors. While social resistance has unfolded in an uneven manner, it did eventually succeed in creating broad opposition fronts against neoliberal policies. In some cases, these efforts coincided with successful electoral strategies of leftist, anti-neoliberal candidates. Yet, the potential to forge this resistance into an alternative, popular model of a more emancipatory form of development has remained still largely incipient in regional terms. Opposition to these popular advances has been felt in a renewed emphasis of organized force on the part of the right-wing elites through sponsorship of conservative social movements. Mass media monopolies have played a pivotal supporting role on behalf of the forces of reaction, remaining firmly under the control of embattled elites who seem invariably predisposed to complicity with foreign counterparts once directly confronted with popular demands. On the other hand, the existence of leftist regimes that came to power on the heels of powerful, anti-neoliberal revolts has more generally favored the regional expansion of alternative social movements. These historical actors have forged
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new focal points of struggle and are increasingly armed with new forms of social media. Consistent with the methods of larger transnational global justice networks, they are practicing new forms of protest and gradually consolidating a vision of a post-capitalist future. Theorizing these shifting dynamics requires a critical dialectical approach. In sharp contrast to Weberian theory, theorists beginning with Lukács emphasized Marx’s philosophical encounter with Hegel. The principal defect of the Hegelian mindset, according to Lukács, was Hegel’s own insistence on the “methodological priority of logic in his system,” something that sealed the fate of the “System” that would be so recklessly posed as the “End of Philosophy.” In contemporary terms, this was akin to neoliberal ideologues declaring an “end of history,” precisely at the historical moment when the neoliberal project was beginning to become unglued under the weight of its own structural contradictions. Theoretical insights like these were not lost on Latin American leaders like the late Hugo Chávez who assimilated a dialectical approach in charting out an alternative, Bolivarian socialist approach to combat neoliberalism. Chávez raised the stakes of of confrontation with neoliberalism with the creation of alba. This alternative scheme of Latin American integration informed by a logic of solidarity and reduction of asymmetries forms part of a larger, regional confrontation with neoliberal globalization. Such efforts have earned Venezuela and its closest regional allies the full ire of Washington and their junior domestic transnational elite partners. The continuing struggle for a viable 21st century socialist alternative envisions a favorable reorientation of the region’s development. This requires a more inclusive model for regional integration that challenges neoliberal exclusion with a transformational logic; one that channels national and regional economies towards meeting social needs while effectively cultivating a regional sovereignty. To this end, the revolutionary processes in Venezuela. Bolivia and Ecuador have set the stage for a major confrontation in which their prospects for success will depend on the Bolivarian principle of regional independence qua resistance. If this is to happen, innovative approaches to building a genuine system of Latin American integration, imbued with an emancipatory and transformational character, must continue to expand and deepen. Bibliography Aharonian, Aram. Vernos con Nuestros Propios Ojos: Apuntes sobre Comunicación y Democracia. Caracas: Fondo Editorial Question, 2007.
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Aharonian, Aram. “El diálogo y la violencia en sus respectivos laberintos.” América Latina en Movimiento ALAI 5–02 (2014). Accessed May 3, 2014. http://alainet.org/ active/73400. Alonso, Juan Francisco. “Sumate: There is a 99% Probability of Fraud in Referendum.” El Universal, September 6 (2004). Accessed May 5, 2014. http://www.eluniversal .com/2004/09/06/en_pol_art_06A489963.shtml. Barone, Michael. “Exit Polls in Venezuela.” US News and World Report, August 20, 2004. Accessed May 5, 2014. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/baroneweb/ mb_040820.htm. Colburn, Forrest D. Latin America at the End of Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. De la Barra Ximena and R.A. Dello Buono. Latin America after the Neoliberal Debacle: Another Region is Possible. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009. De la Barra Ximena and R.A. Dello Buono. “From ALBA to CELAC: Toward ‘another integration’?” NACLA Report on the Americas 45 (2012): 32–36. Dello Buono, R.A. Diálogo sudamericano: Otra Integración es possible. Lima: PCS, 2005. ———. “Latin America and the Collapsing Ideological Supports of Neoliberalism.” Critical Sociology 37(2010): 9–25. ———. “Time to Change the Subject: A New Sociology of Praxis.” Critical Sociology 39(2013): 795–799. Duayer, Mário and João Leonardo Medeiros. “Lukács: Critical Ontology and Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism 4 (2005): 395–425. Figueroa Sepúlveda, Víctor M. Industrial Colonialism in Latin America: The Third Stage. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 2013. Garretón, Manuel Antonio, Marcelo Cavararozzi, Peter. S. Cleaves, Gary Gereffi, and Jonathan Hartlyn, eds. Latin America in the 21st Century: Toward a New Sociopolitical Matrix. Miami: North–south Center Press at the University of Miami, 2003. Golinger, Eva. “A Case Study of media concentration and power in Venezuela.” Venezuelanalysis 25 (2004). Accessed May 5, 2014. http://venezuelanalysis.com/ analysis/710. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Trans. and ed. by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007. Kornbluh, Peter. “The El Mercurio file: secret documents shine new light on how the CIA used a newspaper to foment a coup.” Columbia Journalism Review 5(2003): 14–19. Lendman, Stephen. “Venezuela’s RCTV Acts of Sedition.” Znet, January 25, 2007. http:// www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11941.
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Lukács, Georgy. History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin Press, 1971. Lukács, Georgy. The Ontology of Social Being – Volume I Hegel: Hegel’s False and his Genuine Ontology. London: Merlin Press, 1978. Mészáros, István. Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1995. Mészáros, István. The Structural Crisis of Capital. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2010. Mészáros, István. Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness – Vol. II: The Dialectic of Structure and History. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2012. Payne, Leigh A. Uncivil Movements: The Armed Right Wing and Democracy in Latin America. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Reich, Robert. Aftershock. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. US Senate. Covert Action in Chile 1963–1973: The Church Report. 94th Congress 1st Session Committee, Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, US Senate, December 18, 1975. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office: 63–372. Accessed May 5, 2014. http://foia.state .gov/Reports/ChurchReport.asp.
PART 4 Global Consumer Culture: Tourism, Taste, Consumption and Imaginary
∵
chapter 11
Distinction and Social Class in America and Europe: Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Taste in Cross-Cultural Comparison Vincenzo Mele* It’s basically against the American principle to belong to a class. So, naturally Americans have a really hard time talking about the class system, because they really don’t want to admit that the class system exists. But the reality is it does. r. couri hay
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(Auto)ethnographic Premise
The topic of this chapter was inspired by my experience of living and working in the usa. Life experience is particularly important for the social scientist, for whom it is often hard to be a neutral observer of his/her object of study. In interpretative social science and humanities in general, there is no distance, or there are only a few distances between subject and object, because they both belong to the same world. Like Max Weber said, the object of study is always chosen by the sociologist in reference to his/her values – i.e. life experience.1 This was particularly true for me. I had a privilege of nearly five years of “full immersion” in the American society that I intensely observed from the perspective of a (relatively) young, European academic, with a PhD in sociology, trained in Italy and Germany. One of the sociologist in my personal “pantheon” was undoubtedly Pierre Bourdieu, the author of the Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), his best known book. When I studied for my PhD in the late 90’s he was a star of the European sociology, and the concepts of “habitus,” “symbolic violence,” “cultural capital,” were the basic conceptual tools of every sociologist. Additionally, Pierre Bourdieu was not an exponent of the tradition of the “big theory,” but his concepts were rooted in a long and complex ethnographic research. The concept of “distinction” and “cultural/symbolic capital,” for * University of Pisa. 1 Max Weber. Sociological Writings. New York: Continuum, 1994. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004272835_013
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instance, arose from the plurality of needs of some famous empirical research he conducted in Algeria and France: how can we adapt the categories of western economic rationality to a context like Algeria, where ties of kinship and honor play such a crucial role in society? How, yet again, can we define social class divisions in the context of mass education and high cultural consumption? Having studied Pierre Bourdieu, my coming in America was an ideal if not obvious occasion to practice and test some of his basic concepts. One of the main concern of Pierre Bourdieu – as we will see in detail later – is in fact the production and reproduction of inequality through cultural practices of education, consumption, art, language and symbolic power in general. Also the privileged position of professor of social stratification and inequality gave me an arena where to discuss and observe students opinions and reactions, since a relevant part of my job was to discuss with students about inequality and to make them aware about this topic.2 Four and an half years in us and more specifically in nj gave me an opportunity to be first and foremost a ‘spontaneous’ ethnographer, than a more ‘reflexive’ one too. My workplace and my personal lives became inspiring sources of ethnographic research. I took notes, observed, did formal and informal interviews, and all in all this experience seemed similar to the one described by, Bourdieu when he got his first job as assistant in philosophy in Algeria.3 I taught at two different colleges in the us and both times I was asked to teach social stratification and inequality. As Bourdieu’s inspired scholar, I thought about centering the course on his stratification theory, and tried to adapt it to the American society. This was not an easy task for two main r easons. Firstly and strangely enough, Pierre Bourdieu was absent in all the handbooks 2 I have been teaching in two colleges in New Jersey, one public and one private. I arrived in us for the first time in May 2007. Then I started to teach as a visiting professor at the William Paterson University (winter semester 2008). Unwilling to go back to the “old country” after this experience, I started to apply to other colleges, since (in may 2008) I got a position as full time lecturer at Monmouth University, where I stayed until spring semester 2012. 3 After getting his agrégation (a civil service competitive examination), Bourdieu was conscripted into the French Army in 1955. He was deployed to Algeria in October 1955 during its war of independence from France and served in a unit guarding military installations before being transferred to clerical work. After his year long military service, Bourdieu stayed on as lecturer in Algiers. During the Algerian War in 1958–1962, Bourdieu undertook ethnographic research into the clash through a study of the Kabyle peoples, of the Berbers laying the groundwork for his anthropological reputation. The result was his first book, Sociologie de L’Algerie (The Sociology of Algeria), which was an immediate success in France and published in America in 1962 (see Jane E. Goodman and Paul A. Silverstein (ed.), Bourdieu in Algeria, Lincoln ne: University of Nebraska, 2009, 8–9).
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in social stratification I consulted and adopted.4 I managed to partly solve this problem when a colleague suggested to watch the documentary film People like Us: Social Class in America produced by Luis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker. pbs Video, 2001. I was immediately fascinated by this film, which was a refreshing look at the class system in the United States, ranging from wasp elegance to trailer-park desperation, with lots of other stuff in between. Plus, I found that the way this documentary represented social class was very similar to Bourdieu’s idea of social class, as something that includes not just money, but also manners, body, lifestyle, cultural consumption, language. In other words how do income, family background, education, attitudes, aspirations and even appearance mark someone as a member of a particular social class? The second, and more substantial reason, why I had hard time teaching about social class as a form of distinction in Bourdieu’s style, was well expressed by the sentences of the publicist R. Couri Hay who says at the beginning of the film People like Us: “It’s basically against the American principle to belong to a class. So, naturally Americans have a really hard time talking about the class system, because they really don’t want to admit that the class system exists. But the reality is it does.”5 The first time I encountered this statement, I was literally astonished. How can Americans possibly believe that the class system in their society does not exist? For my European sociological imagination this was incomprehensible. America is the main exporter of the capitalist economic system to virtually every corner of the world, and it is the country almost always ranked at the top of inequality classifications, and people still seem to perceive that the class system does not exist? Hay’s opinion was generally confirmed in my social stratification classes. Not only that the students had low interest in discussing class, but it seemed to me they lacked specific sensibility or understanding of it. In order to make them understand class positions and dispositions in the American society, I used often in class exercises, short videos and video games where students where asked to say which product, drink, food or lifestyle was more likely to be upper-middle or low class. A good example of video that well introduce the understanding of social class consumer practices is one episode of the mentioned documentary People Like Us titled “Bud or Bordeaux?” 4 I adopted the following handbooks for social stratification: Robert A. Rothman. Inequality and Stratification: Race, Class, and Gender. 5th ed. Pearson. Prentice Hall. Harold R. Kerbo, Social Stratification and Inequality. 7th ed. McGraw-Hill. Scott Sernau, World Aparts. Social Inequalities in a Global Economy. 2nd ed. (or newer edition) Pine Forge Press. Except for Scott Sernau’s book, which has a chapter on “status prestige” (where the process of “acquiring the marks of distinction” is analyzed), all the books tend to separate the economic, cultural and political aspects of class. 5 Ibid.
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To me as a European this seemed a very neat and clear representation of class distinction practices: Bud (American bier) can be a drink associated to lowermiddle class, whereas Bordeaux (quite sophisticated French wine) could be a typical middle-upper class drink. However, student reaction was surprising to me. None of them could generally identify these two products and associate their consumption to a specific class. Obviously, students might have limited experience with French wine or drink consumption in general, so I often sought different other examples – cars for instance – but with little success. Only after some discussion in the following classes they started to acquire some awareness of the concept of “distinction.”6 In my classes in Italy however, there seemed to be complete complicity and agreement on the topic. Obviously, these results may depend on several factors: my ability as teacher (especially as a foreign teacher in the us) to communicate class materials; the difficulty of the concept and the low curiosity of some students; the cultural and social background of the college where I was teaching Nevertheless, in the nine semesters I have taught in the us (plus six summer sessions), it was in the social stratification class where I had the best course evaluations. My students at the end of the semesters generally wrote good papers, showing their ability to manage the course materials and concepts. So, naturally, I started to think that the sensibility to class distinction was a cultural phenomena, rather than an issue related to my classrooms. This experience determined why I later placed concepts of class and distinction at the center of my scholarly examinations. Social class is without doubt a key concept in social science, but it is not so often associated with the mere economic inequality. Authors like Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as ethnographic research, have taught us to interpret the symbolic aspects of domination and social hierarchy present in every culture. Understanding the concept of social class and how different cultures develop sensibility to it and understand it is of immense importance and necessary undertaking for anyone interested in any analysis of cross- cultural dimensions of globalization. 6 To test my students I used the games proposed by the website People-like-us (now still available on www.cnam.com/people-like-us/games/index.html, accessed October 2014), in particular “Identify this!” and “Name That Class”. The average score was low (around 20% of the questions had a right answers). The students did the game-tests after they were already introduced to the basic concepts of social stratification. I tested undergraduates (freshman, sophomore, senior) of Intro to sociology, Social Problems and Social Stratification classes, with low or no signification variations of the results. Obviously, I cannot consider my a scientific test. Nevertheless, it gave me indications that were confirmed by other studies and experiences during my staying in us.
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The goal of this chapter is 1) firstly reconstruct (Section 2) the concept of “symbolic capital,”, which together with those of habitus and field makes up the “holy trinity” of Bourdieu’s thought, basic loanwords in the lexicon of contemporary sociology. Generally in the secondary literature on the French sociologist there is little or few awareness of the radical rupture of habitus with the scholastic of idealistic action theory. Next in (Section 3) we will see how the unequal distribution of various forms of capital help design social space, on the basis of a renewed “culturalist” theory of social classes. Lastly in (Section 4), I will make some consideration on the difference in the culture of class distinction in us and Europe starting from the American Bourdieu’s reception.
Symbolic Capital and Habitus
The social theory of Pierre Bourdieu7 is based on a few number of basic concepts – such as habitus, social space, field, capital – which aren’t generally defined in an abstract and systematic way, but are rather derived from their application to a single concrete case. This methodological habit is not incidental, since the author himself frequently criticizes in his work the tendency of contemporary social sciences to separate theoretical reflection from empirical research. These generally move on separate and often incommunicable planes, which produce sterility in both areas and the creation of a series of highly artificial diatribes (such as research on the integration of the micro and macro levels in sociology, or the distinction between the methods of sociology and anthropology). Bourdieu tends to dismiss those as devoid of interest and meaning. Conversely, the “point of honor” of his theory is – as he said many times – to be able to create a “toolbox” out of the needs of the concrete practice of research, with a willingness to solve problems as they arise directly in the field.8 Bourdieu’s theoretical thought (even 7 All the most important works of Bourdieu (who died on January 24, 2002) have been translated into English, including the systematization of his “general theory of practice”, in 1980, Le sens pratique (Eng. tr. by Richard Nice. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), or Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, 1972 (En. tr., Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), La distinction, 1979 (Eng. tr., by Richard Nice. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1984). 8 In a book-length interview granted to a German journalist, Bourdieu ironically defines the great theoretical options and the great abstract dilemmas between theory and empiricism as “the thoughts of a general”, preferring the viewpoint of the battlefield, which offers a much
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the most seemingly abstract, such as the critique of scholastic reason elaborated in his Pascalian Meditations, 1997; Eng. tr., 2000) therefore makes no claim to be self-sufficient and an end in itself. It does not move from ‘general’ to ‘specific’ but vice versa. It takes its cue from the latter in order to reflect on the ultimate foundations of a theory of social action. His entire opus is characterized by a refined theoretical elaboration which is extremely well “founded” from a historical-empirical point of view, unlike what we find in other authors.9 Because of this approach most of Bourdieu’s assumptions and theoretical acquisitions are to be deducted from their direct use in his empirical research on the field. One of the few exceptions is that of the concept of symbolic capital. The role of symbolic on Bourdieu cannot be underestimated, since is the key concept to understand his theory of stratification based on taste. Symbolic capital is therefore a concept that we can find explicitly defined and re-refined in most of his works. In Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (1994; It. tr. 1995; Eng. tr., 1998) – an effective compendium of the main issues of his social theory –we find some of his more explicit definitions of symbolic capital, which is the more general type of “cultural” capital:
closer and more concrete perspective: “Theory, of course, remains at the top. Theorein means seeing, seeing the entirety. I always quote a phrase from Virginia Woolf that I like very much: “General ideas are the ideas of a general”. A general stands on high ground, has a panoramic view, sees everything, just as a philosopher, a social philosopher thinks about his battles, describes class struggle. I have taken the point of view of Fabrizio del Dongo at Waterloo, who sees nothing, understands nothing, and notes only the trajectory of the exploding artillery shells. You need to go to the front line, where you will see the social world in a completely different way. It is undoubtedly true that general views can be useful but the ideal is to combine a general view, an overview, a world map, with detailed perspectives”(P. Bourdieu, La responsabilità degli intellettuali, Bari: Laterza 1991, p . 38). 9 In this respect Bourdieu approaches the style of Michel Foucault, who not coincidentally wanted him at the Collège de France. The relationship with Foucault actually was not without conflict: Bourdieu chided the author of the History of Madness mainly for his use of the “symbolic capital” resulting from his status as philosopher to free himself of the necessity of empirical verification of his theses. The use Foucault made of historical-empirical materials was dictated solely by a “negative” philosophy “of history”, which cannot be shared by one who carries on the work of a scientist. Bourdieu acknowledges having an affinity with his colleague at the Collège de France, starting with his microphysical polycentric concept of power, and recognizes the importance of his philosophical development (cfr. P. Bourdieu, La responsabilità degli intellettuali, Bari: Laterza 1991).
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I call symbolic capital any kind of capital (economic, cultural, academic, or social) when it is perceived according to the categories of perception, the principles of vision and division, the systems of classification, the classificatory schemes, the cognitive schemata, which are, at least in part, the product of the embodiment of the objective structures of the field in consideration, that is, of the structure of the distribution of capital in the field being considered. (…) Symbolic capital is capital with a cognitive base, which rests on cognition and recognition.10 According to Bourdieu, the possession of “symbolic capital” “makes one bow before Louis xiv: that makes one court him, that allows him to give orders and have his orders obeyed, that permits him to demean, demote, or consecrate, etc.”11 This capital exists above all “inasmuch as all the small differences, the subtle marks of distinction in etiquette and rank, in practices and in dress, which make up the life of the court, are perceived by people who know and recognize practically (they have embodied it) a principle of differentiation that permits them to recognize all these differences and to give them value, who are ready, in a word, to die over a quarrel of hats”.12 “Symbolic capital” is therefore a property acquired – accumulated, one might say by analogy with the economic field – by social agents through which they are recognized as having a number of features (distinctive signs) considered worthy of value and distributed unevenly in a given social “field”. He uses the example of Louis xiv, but he might also have mentioned the function that honor plays in Kabyle society (and in Mediterranean societies in general), or, in our contemporary consumerist society, the possession of symbolic goods. It is a typical form of “symbolic capital” inasmuch as its possession (or rather, the belief of others regarding its possession by a particular person) enables participation in social life in its entirety: only those who are deemed worthy of honor by the community can participate in political and professional activity, can marry and can carry on a social and relational existence. Honor exists only through reputation, i.e. the representation that others make of it as participants of a set of beliefs that help them perceive and appreciate certain properties and certain conduct as honorable or ignominious. It is therefore a cognitive-based capital: what counts is what others know or think they know, regardless of the existence of certain kinds of behavior or qualities of the social 10
Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 85. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid.
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actor. “Symbolic capital” so described is an objective phenomenon or datum which concerns the social, intersubjective environment. If we shift perspective, taking the viewpoint of the agent subject, we arrive at the other basic concept of Bourdieu’s theory, habitus. The specific possession of a certain quality (and quantity) of “symbolic capital” by a subject determines its habitus. Habitus – from the Latin habeo, what one possesses - is a kind of “practical sense” of individuals who take stock, in an absolutely spontaneous and unconscious way, “of what is to be done in a given situation – what in sports is called a ‘feel’ for the game, that is, the art of anticipating the future of the game, which is inscribed in the present state of play.”13 It is the ability to understand the rules of the game and adapt oneself to them in an entirely spontaneous way, to have the chance to participate in the game and not remain excluded. If we take another look at the example of King Louis xiv, we can see that the environment of the court consists of individuals with a specific social habitus of the court, which is expressed generally in that whole extremely formalized pattern of behavior, also analyzed by Norbert Elias (in his studies The Habits of Good Society and The Court Society), the compliance with which enables one to survive in that particular environment. We are dealing with that set of “unwritten rules” and practical behavior which prescribe what “has to be done” or “is not to be done” on any given occasion, and which each individual learns in a strictly intuitive way through experience with a particular social field. For example, always siding with the King, keeping your mouth shut when he speaks, participating in discussions so as not to annoy him, and so on. At the same time - from an objective viewpoint - habitus involves individuals who share the capacity to rec ognize and give value to all those signs of distinction and practices that characterize that particular environment as a specific the social “field”. It is worthwhile to dwell a bit more on the concept of habitus, given the importance and widespread familiarity with the concept, a true loanword Bourdieu introduced into the contemporary sociological lexicon. Slightly different versions of the word can be found in his work.14 The most articulated one is contained in Le Sens pratique, probably his most important theoretical work: The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, 13 14
Ibid., 25. For a detailed analysis of the genesis and evolution of the concept of habitus see Karl Maton, Habitus, 48–63 in Michael James Grenfell (edited by). Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts: Second Edition. New York: Routledge 2012.
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that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them, objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor.15 Bourdieu himself cautions against the schematism that too casual a use of abstract conceptualizations detached from their empirical origin can lead to. However, even when referring to other works in which he focuses on the explanatory potentialities of the concept, one can see that the core constant of habitus is configured as a coherent set of provisions (or “tendencies”) to perceive, think and act in a certain way, which is embodied by the agent in the course of socialization. It works as a “structured structure” in the sense that it is the result of historical-social conditionings (“history made body”, as Bourdieu also notes), tending to function as a “structuring structure”, namely to influence the behavior and future representations of individuals in a predictable and regulated fashion. The theory of habitus has its conceptual origin and its particular empirical evidence in the area of society in which the juridical codification of social practices is poorly developed (as in the case of the Kabyle societies of Algeria or of court society), but it also applies to highly differentiated societies. In the latter, relatively autonomous social worlds develop – the artistic field, the scientific field, the political field, the economic field, etc. – in which social actors are required to have a practical mastery of the laws (unwritten and uncodified) concerning the functioning of these single universes, that is a habitus acquired through a preliminary socialization which generally is practiced in the field itself. The more specialized fields – in continual growth, given the tendency to continual internal functional differentiation, typical of developed societies – such as that of science or of educational or academic institutions, presuppose and require almost corporal provisions, a practical mastery of the unspoken laws concerning how that field works, and the categories of perception and assessment.16 At the beginning of many actions of daily life in modern society, 15 16
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 53. Bourdieu also analyzed with the same conceptual tools the academic field and the construction of a specific habitus consistent with it (see P. Bourdieu, Homo academicus. Cambridge: Polity, 1990). Frequenters of this environment - and above all those who pursue a career in it - do not take long to learn, most of the time in a completely spontaneous
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including the very action of being in society – which includes the observation of the unspoken laws of good manners, good table manners, etc. – there is habitus, apropos of which Bourdieu uses the same terms Marx adopted in describing the principle of respect for custom, a kind of “instinct almost as blind and unconscious as that which produces some of the movements of our bodies”.17 Breaking with the intellectual tradition of cogito, habitus must be thought of – in opposition to “transcendental consciousness”, though nevertheless performing the functions attributed to it by the classical philosophical tradition – as a “socialized body, a structured body, a body that has embodied into itself the immanent structures of a world or of a particular sector of that world, of a field, and that structures the perception of that world and also the action in that world.”18 Tracing the theoretical origins of this concept, which sums up in a real way Bourdieu’s entire intellectual development, is not an easy task. Given his criticism of the Cartesian tradition and his reference to the body, a reference to Michel Foucault is obligatory. Foucault was among the first, with his studies on madness, punishment and sexuality, to focus on the body - on its discipline and the governing of its manifestations – such as pleasure – as a fundamental subject of historical and social research. In the course of the history of Western civilization, according to Foucault, various forms of “disciplinary techniques” have been developed with the aim of shaping bodies. These techniques (in prisons, hospitals and factories) do not impose themselves on
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way - all the behavior that must be put into practice to adapt to it and pursue a career in it: the assumption of an academic posture (usually characterized by a serious and severe mien, even in circumstances which render it unnecessary), the ostentation of particular signs of distinction (ranging from clothing to the frequent use of foreign languages) to the assumption of rules that govern scientific production (the choice of the subject and how to treat it, understanding which subject is relevant within the scientific community in order to acquire merit in it, how to treat it, scientific rhetoric, the “good manners” to show in making citations, as for example when you cite your own work you must use formulas such as “if I may be allowed to refer…”) and your relationship with academic colleagues and superiors (full professor, academician of repute, whose entourage can easily be compared to the social field of courtly society). Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 153. This is a quote from the “Ethnological Notebooks” of Karl Marx, as yet unpublished in Italian. It comes from the “Conversation on the practice, time and history”, present only in the Italian edition of Raison Pratique (1994). Habitus, Bourdieu once again observes in Pascalian Meditations, is “what enables one to act as he should (os dei, as Aristotle would say) without posing or respecting a “must” (Kant), a rule of conduct” in Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 146. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 81.
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the subject by a merely physical kind of pressure, but tend to produce a consciousness of the body such that the subjects themselves learn to govern themselves according to a particular discipline. Consequently, the practical activity of individuals cannot be conceived solely on the basis of a model which sees the subject as acting on the basis of the conscious representation which he makes for himself of goals and values that orient his action, according to a tradition which in modern philosophy originates with Kant and is taken up by Weber in his famous typology of social action. To understand human experience one must take into account the role of the body as an essential part of the self and of embodiment as a fundamental practice of socialization. The notion of habitus makes it possible to conceive of the corporeal as preceding consciousness without however resorting to biologicistic essentialism, by providing additional conceptual tools for thinking about action. According to Bourdieu, our practical way of approaching the world “is not a state of the soul or, much less, a kind of decisional adhesion to a set of constituted dogmas and doctrines”, but “a state of the body.” It is thus configured as a “social necessity that has become nature, converted into motor patterns and body automatisms.”19 Bourdieu sometimes yields to the temptation of describing habitus as a computer processor, in that it works for the subject constantly as a “matrix of perceptions, judgments and actions that makes it possible to carry out an infinite variety of tasks, thanks to the analogical transfer of patterns that enables the solution of problems which have a similar conformation.”20 This “automatism” which would seem to subsist between the actions and representations of a subject and the field or social space in which he is located and which incorporates his mental and behavioral patterns, earned Bourdieu the classic accusation of a social determinism of structuralist origin. According to this criticism the social actor as represented by Bourdieu would be nothing more than a conformist automaton predisposed to reproduce in his thoughts and actions all the social and historical conditionings that stem from his objective position (class) in the social space.21 These accusations relate mainly to the concept of habitus which often appears as a causal mechanism, fully formed and complete in itself, which produces the individual’s action in the social space. In effect, as we will see later, the individual habitus always exists in a relationship 19 20 21
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 107. Pierre Bourdieu, “Champ intellectuel et projet créateur”, Les Tempes Modernes, 246 (1966), 897. For a critical discussion of the concept of habitus see Jenkins, Richard. Pierre Bourdieu, London: Routledge, 2002, 40–64.
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of homology – that is of diversity within homogeneity – with respect to class habitus as defined by two main forms of capital (economic and cultural) which he himself, creatively, contributes to reproduce. Habitus is nothing more than an “incorporation” (Bourdieu) of class structures and of one of their – more or less direct – expressions even on a symbolic and cultural level.
The Symbolic Structure of the Social Space
If Bourdieu uses the conception of habitus to articulate the theory of social action in an original way, a large area of his research22 is reserved for an analysis of the effects of the possession of cultural capital especially as concerns the theory of class and social stratification, concentrated above all in his ambitious study Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979; Egl. tr. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1984). Here Bourdieu delineates a true “ethnography of contemporary France”, after the example of the research he carried out in the 50’s and 60’s on the Kabyle society of Algeria. As appears from the subtitle, the author’s ambition was (nothing less than) to attempt to respond in a “sociological” key to the problems posed theoretically by Kant’s philosophy of aesthetic judgment. In other words, Bourdieu’s ambitious project was to find a “social stratification of taste” similar to social stratification of money, proving that the judgement of taste is not founded on “disinterested pleasure” which according to Kant is the aim of every man’s aesthetic experience, but reflects – more or less faithfully – people’s class position in society. The fact that the different kinds of capital are expended not generically in society, but in the social space, leads us to reflect on the introduction of this latter concept. In this instance Bourdieu refers to the work of Gaston Bachelard, from which he derives the idea of reality (and therefore also of social reality) not as a fact but as an area of possibility. Every empirical reality of the social world must be understood as “a particular case of the possible”, or as a type of configuration in a finite universe of possible configurations. Of equal importance is the reference to Ernst Cassirer and his distinction between “substantive concepts” and “functional and relational concepts”, the 22
On education and cultural practices, Bourdieu published (with L. Boltanski, R. Castel. J.C. Passeron) from the early 60’s important works like The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Theory, Culture and Society Series). London: Sage, 1990; The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991; Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
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latter intrinsic to modern science.23 By this Bourdieu intends to break with a “substantialist” (or naively realist) interpretation of society which sees it as composed of individuals or groups considered as beings and subjects in their own right. The “social space” is seen therefore as a space of possible relations and differences, a set of distinct and coexistent positions defined with respect to each other by their reciprocal relationships of exteriority and proximity, nearness or farness, as well as of order (such as above, below, between). Dis tribution in the social space takes place according to the two most efficient principles of differentiation in advanced societies: economic capital and cultural capital. If we look at the representation of the social space of the France of the 1970’s, the most striking feature of Bourdieu’s theory lies in the fact that he constructs a multi-dimensional model of social stratification24: position in the social space is not determined exclusively by the role played by the productive process (e.g., worker, employee, merchant), but just as much by the possession of cultural capital, which is manifested for example in the possession of a scholastic degree, but also in a variety of practices, such as involvement in specific sports (golf instead of soccer), consumption of specific goods (champagne instead of red wine), adoption of specific cultural habits (attending museums, sports and recreation facilities, etc). Sports, cuisine, beverages, among others goods and practices are so many distinctive signs that determine the position of an individual in the social space, over and beyond the possession of economic capital. There are classes that are very rich in economic capital (industrialists, wealthy merchants) but poor in cultural capital. Conversely, there are classes that are very rich in cultural capital (such as researchers, expert technicians and intellectuals in general) but relatively poor in economic capital. This is one of the reasons why classes that are generally poor in cultural capital but rich in economic capital go to great lengths to bridge their gap, often vaunting signs of (cultural) distinction in order to reach positions precluded to them in the social space.25 23 24
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Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 5 and ff. Santoro points out that in addition to the distributions of the two forms of capital in the social space, we must also consider as a third element the factor of distribution over time, an element that distinguishes Bourdieu from the structuralist tradition in which he himself was formed (cfr. Introduction to the Italian edition of La distinction, P. Bourdieu. La distinzione. Critica sociale del gusto, Bologna: Il Mulino 2001, p. xii). Marco D’Eramo, who was a student of Bourdieu’s, reports an amusing anecdote that illustrates fully the function of “cultural capital” in attributing a higher or lower position to the individual in the social space. His teacher was once proposed the following essay titles to his students: (1) “Explain why a reasonable person would be willing to do anything, even
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Bourdieu’s theory of social stratification shown as interwoven with a theory of taste is synthesized in Figure 11.1.26 The chart represents the social space as a symbolic space in the sense we have analyzed before: symbolic means objectively and collectively recognized by the social actors through their habitus. In the social/symbolic space we can find lifestyles, characterized by different practices (work or consumption practices). In order to fully understand this chart, we have to do the following considerations: – Every practice cannot but exist in the social space – this is an apriori of social life. This has as consequence the fact that every practice has a symbolic ranking, in the sense that is recognized as higher or lower in the symbolic hierarchy of a given society in a determinate historical moment. The social game of distinction for Bourdieu is a “zero sum game”: there is a looser and a winner in getting a better symbolic position in the social space. This is an assumption by Bourdieu’s theory hasn’t gone uncriticized, as we will see later. – The chart can be read from left to right and from the bottom to the above. If we go from the bottom to the top, following the vertical axe, we increase the possession of all forms of capitals (cultural and economic). On the same time, every lifestyle trait that is at the top of the chart is objectively high in the social symbolic ranking. If we go on the horizontal axe from the left to the right we have a variation of the percentage of the two most important forms of capital: a position on the far left has more cultural capital and few (or no) economic capital; a position on the right tends to be associated with more economic capital and less cultural capital. The dotted line indicates a probable orientation toward the right or the left of the political spectrum. To make an example: horse-riding (as a sport) and Champagne (as a drink) are typical traits of a lifestyle which is high in the symbolic hierarchy, it is characterized by the possession of a consistent volume of both economic and cultural capital, and generally tends to express a vote for the right. On the contrary, belote (a 32-card trick-taking game played in France, one of the most popular card games in that country) and bier (as a drink) are easier to find in a lifestyle with low volume of cultural and economic capital.
26
sell his mother, to become Dean of an Institute of Romance Philology” (2) “Explain why a grocer invests a sufficient amount of money to buy another store just so that his child can learn Greek hexameters by heart” (told in “The pick of reason”, newspaper il Manifesto, 25 January 2002). The chart comes from Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 5, and it is used by Bourdieu to summaries the findings of the Distinction.
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– This map of the French social and symbolic space is not as deterministic as it can seems, but it is a space of possibilities, based on the empirical findings and it represents just a space of possible relations and differences. The fact that Bourdieu in La distinction graphically represents the placement of actors in the social space according to possession of the two main types of capital, “economic” and “cultural” should not suggest a simplistic concept of social stratification. As it has been noted, “symbolic capital” – a kind of capital of capitals, since all forms of capital tend ultimately to manifest themselves in a symbolic way – appears in Bourdieu’s theory in at least three forms distinct among themselves: objectivated forms, which are for example books, paintings, artworks and technical instruments; embodied forms, which in general characterize skills acquired in the context of the academic and scientific structures, as well as any other form of behavior such as education, tastes, styles which are learned in formal and informal educational contexts, and finally institutionalized forms of cultural capital which indicate the acquisition and conferment of degrees, diplomas and licenses. In this case institutionalization indicates the legitimation of practices of the embodiment of cultural capital acquired by virtue of their being conferred in fields considered legitimate: in most cases – as we have already seen – the state field. Further, beside “economic capital” and “symbolic capital” Bourdieu places a no less important type, “social capital”, which functions as an additional resource in the struggle for positioning of the social actor. “Social capital” is manifested by the subject as the use of “a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of knowledge or mutual recognition.”27 It includes what is often called, in everyday language, “knowledge” or “relationships” which in all social contexts – from traditional societies to industrial ones – become fundamental for moving and acquiring resources in the social space.28 No less important for Bourdieu is the possibility of convertibility among the various kinds of capital: cultural capital in particular is subject at any time and 27
28
Cornelia Bohn and Alois Hahn, Pierre Bourdieu, in Dirk Kaesler (edited by), Klassiker der Soziologie, Vol. ii, von Talcott Parsons bis Pierre Bourdieu, München: Beck, 1999, 263–264. There is no denying a certain analogy with the concept of social network, now quite in vogue in the social sciences with the social network analysis. However, it should be noted that in terms of prospects for empirical analysis, Bourdieu’s concept decidedly emphasizes the nature of personal resource (capital) rather than resource linked to group or territorial membership.
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Social Space and symbolic Space CAPITAL VOLUME + (combining all forms of capital) piano chess whisky
golf
bridge
PROFESSIONS
tennis
skiing boat
PRIVATE SECTOR EXECUTIVES
ARTISTS
SECONDARY TEACHERS
mountains
scrabble sailing
ENGINEERS PUBLIC SECTOR EXECUTIVES
SOCIAL AND MEDICAL SERVIES
JUNIOR COMMERCIAL
CULTURAL CAPITAL + EXECUTIVES. SECRETARIES
CULTURAL CAPITAL - –
light opera
ECONOMIC CAPITAL +
JUNIOR ADMINISTRATIVE EXECUTIVES
beer FOREMEN
fishingi
petanque pernod sparkling white wine
FARM LABORERS
COMMERCIAL EMPLOYEES
OFFICE WORKERS
SMALL SHOPKEEPERS CRAFTSMEN
TECHNICIANS
PRIMARY TEACHERS
VOTE FOR THE LEFT
hunting
VOTE FOR THE RIGHT
guitar corporal expression
ECONOMIC CAPITAL-
horse-riding champagne
swimming mineral water
hiking cycling holidays
CULTURAL INTEREMEDIARIES
COMERCIAL EMPLOYERS INDUSTRAIALISTS
HIGHER-ED TEACHERS
SEMI-SKILLED
belote football SKILLED WORKERS
accordion ordinary red wine
UNSKILLED FARMERS
CAPITAL VOLUME-
Figure 11.1 The space of social positions and the space of lifestyles (the dotted line indicates probable orientation toward the right or left). Source: Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Stanford University Press, 1998, p.5.
in all its forms (objectivate, embodied, institutionalized) to being converted into economic capital. The most obvious example of this is the larger income our society guarantees to holders of higher educational degrees, thanks to their value in the labor market . But we must also take into account the more subtle forms of conversion, such as those concerning taste and aesthetic
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judgment. Bourdieu notes that even through the consumption of one type of mineral water rather than another or in the practice of a sport such as golf instead of soccer, the subject can position himself in the social space and, ultimately, acquire shares of symbolic capital that can (possibly) be converted into economic capital. This observation brings us to the core intention of all Bourdieu’s work: social dominance occurs in a cultural and symbolic way no less than in an economic or generally material way. Even on a par excellence personal terrain such as taste, not only does it reveal a precise social genesis but it should be considered for its effects specifically social: that is, as a mode of classification of social practices and their products, as well as of the social groups that express them. Taste in industrial societies – as in previous societies - appears as one of the most effective practices by which social boundaries (i.e., the differences between classes or between the various class “fractions”: lower-middle, middle-middle and upper-middle) are established, delimited or maintained. By means of this eminently symbolic instrument “distinctions” are defined between the various social groups, regardless of the fact that there are differences between them in relation to their “objective” placement in the social space or to their possession of economic capital. Through manifestations of a particular taste or lifestyle a class condition, a class habitus is expressed, and at the same time anyone who manifests different attitudes, cognitive patterns and corporeal signs is excluded. Bourdieu’s theory of social stratification is therefore extremely complex and creative, virtually a harbinger of endless applications to every “field” - in the sense he understood it - of social life. This theory of social classes recoups and combines in an original and creative way contributions by Marx, Durkheim and Weber.29 From Marx he accepts the idea that the structure of positions in 29
Bourdieu thus described his relationship with the founding fathers of sociology, explicitly outlining his epistemological options: “I have often recalled, in particular concerning my relationship with Weber, that you can side with a thinker against that thinker. For example, I elaborated my field concept simultaneously against Weber and with Weber, reflecting on Weber’s analysis of the relationships between priest, prophet and sorcerer. To say that you can think with and, at the same time, against a thinker, is equivalent to radically contradicting the classificatory logic by which you are accustomed to thinking about your relationship with the positions of the past. For Marx, as Althusser said, or against Marx. I think that you can think with Marx against Marx or Durkheim against Durkheim, and also, of course with Marx and Durkheim against Weber, and vice versa. This is how science works. Because of this, being or not being a Marxist is a religious affirmation and not at all a scientific one. (…) By definition, science is made to be surpassed. And the only way to pay homage to Marx, who always claimed to be a scientist, is to make use of what he did and what others have done with what he did to surpass what he thought he had done”,
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the social space predisposes the agents which are situated in those positions to act, by virtue of a common habitus, as a social group characterized by similar objective “interests”. From Weber he takes the analytical distinction between “class” and “status”, between a purely economic dimension of social differences and a dimension inherent to phenomena of honor and prestige, which distinguish individual groups defined by similar opportunities or life chances. Lastly, from Durkheim comes the principle expressed in the Elementary forms of r eligious thought of a substantial correspondence between cognitive structures and social structures, which – according to Bourdieu – can be profitably extended to advanced societies and constitutes a terrain of struggle between individuals and groups. The division into classes of a society presupposes cognitive and identical or similar evaluative structures on the part of indi viduals, inclined to a sort of “logical conformism” and “moral conformism” (in Durkheim’s words), to an agreement on the sense of the world that is tacit, immediate and anterior to all reflection. Now that we have analyzed the essential elements of Bourdieu’s theory of social stratification, we can turn to the discussion on Bourdieu’s reception in United States. This problem is important to be investigated not only for scholarly reasons, but also to try to answer to our initial (auto)ethnographic question: are really Americans less sensible to class culture than Europeans? Is really taste, consumption or aesthetics in general a variable independent from social class in America? To find a partial answer to these very difficult questions it can be of some help to see how Bourdieu’s work was welcomed in the American sociological community.
Distinction and Power in us and eu: Some Considerations Starting from the American Bourdieu’s Reception
As we have already seen, Bourdieu’s has not become a classic in American sociology and social stratification theory, like others contemporary European sociologists (Ralf Dahrendorf and Jürgen Habermas, just to mention two examples). This doesn’t mean that Bourdieu was not present in the American sociology. Sallaz and Zavisca provided a detailed analysis retracing the diffusion of the work of Pierre Bourdieu in the United States, focusing on the period between
Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflective Sociology, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 49.
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1980 and 2004.30 They present graphs showing the growth in number of references to Bourdieu’s work in four leading sociology journals during this period. They find that “capital” (especially cultural capital) dominates as a concept, and that 16–22% of the papers published in these four journals between 2000 and 2004 cited Bourdieu (but only 6% of the 40 articles considered over the 24-year period). Half of the papers extend the work of Bourdieu by asking new theoretical and empirical questions – questions that would have been foreign to Bourdieu’s sociological habitus. However, we want to focus here more specifically to the debate around Bourdieu’s theory on the impact of culture on class stratification, as developed in the Distinction. Bourdieu himself was aware of the difficulty to export overseas his research. In his Chicago seminar – a constructed dialogue between Bourdieu and Wacquant which took place in the context of a graduate research seminar on Bourdieu’s work at the University of Chicago in 1987 – reveals “every time I visit the United States, there is somebody to tell me that ‘in the mass culture of America, taste does not differentiate between class positions’”.31 Since the publication of Distinction in English (1984) an intense debate in the international sociological academic community has taken place, considering many aspects of this major work, but largely on the applicability of the theory outside of France.32 In us it should not surprise that most of the debate was among the cultural sociologists and consisted mainly of survey research between cultural capital and highbrow taste to test whether Bourdieu’s findings for France hold true for the United States.33 Only a few of them consider the consequence of Bourdieu’s study on the social stratification and on the consolidation and maintenance of power hierarchies. A remarkable exception is represented by the study of Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals and Manners (1992), that was the very first qualitative study that took Bourdieu’s work as a point of departure to analyze the impact of culture on class structuration in a global cross-cultural comparative context. Michèle 30 31
32 33
J. Sallaz and J. Zavisca, “Pierre Bourdieu in American Sociology, 1980–2005,” Annual Review of Sociology 33, 2007: 21–41. Pierre Bourdieu and Louis Wacquant Réponses: pour une anthropologie réflexive. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Eng. tr., An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 77. For a debate of Bourdieu’s reception in us see the special section on Bourdieu on “Sociological Forum”, Vol. 27, No. 1, March 2012. For instance DiMaggio, “Cultural capital and school success: the impact of status culture participation on the grades of US high school students”. Am. Sociol. Rev. 47, 1982:189–201; RA Peterson and RM Kern. “Changing highbrow taste: from snob to omnivore”. Am. Sociol. Rev. 61, 1996:900–7; see DB. Holt. “Distinction in America? Recovering Bourdieu’s theory of tastes from his critics”. Poetics 25, 1997:93–120, for a review.
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Lamont’s – a Canadian/American sociologist who studied with Bourdieu in the late 1970s, just when Distinction first came out – book focuses on how upper-middle-class white men in the United States and France draw “symbolic boundaries” to define themselves and classify others.34 The analysis draws primarily on interviews conducted with 160 college-educated, white male professionals, managers, and businessmen who lived in and around Indianapolis, New York, Paris, and Clermont-Ferrand. In her research, Lamont focuses on three standards or types of symbolic boundaries, associated with three modes of symbolic exclusion: cultural boundaries drawn on the basis of education and refined tastes; socioeconomic boundaries rooted in wealth, power, occupation, and race; and moral boundaries valuing qualities such as integrity, work ethic, and egalitarianism. Michele Lamont study on one side clearly adopts the Bourdieuian view that shared cultural style contributes to class reproduction. On the other side she criticizes Bourdieu’s sociological apparatus, on the basis of the patterns uncovered by empirical findings. The general criticism to the French sociologist is that Distinction “relies too heavily not just on French attitudes but on Parisian attitudes, thereby exaggerating the importance of cultural boundaries.”35 Bourdieu is mostly concerned with the status signals that are valued by Parisian intellectuals and by cultural and social specialists generally: “he attributes to the population at large the high level of intolerance and cultural exclusiveness characteristic of intellectuals in general, and of Parisian intellectuals in particular.”36 Some of the survey items used to compare class cultures may be reflexive of the culture of intellectuals and operate as bases for distinction in the Parisian intellectual milieu, but they are unlikely to be relevant for the rest of the French population as a whole. Beyond this general criticism to Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus, there are other blind spots that can be highlighted and that make Bourdieu’s theory of “social stratification of taste” necessary of a revision and improvement in a cross cultural comparison. Firstly, Bourdieu’s model is based on the assumption that “differentiation leads directly to hierarchalization,”37 that “all cultural practices are automatically classified and classifying rank-ordered and 34
35 36 37
A follow-up book, The Dignity of Working Men. Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class and Immigration, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) extends the study to working-class and nonwhite men in both countries. Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals & Manners. The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 181. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 182.
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rank-ordering.”38 This theory necessarily assumes that different preferences and practices negate one another and presumes that social systems (or fields) are relatively closed and involve a stable set of actors. We have to consider that for Bourdieu cultural stratification and economic stratification tends to coincide. In this sense, those who rank high given their resources automatically create low positions for others by the mere fact that they participate within a single social system. This is a zero-sum game, in which participants are condemned to improve their social positions at the risk of being marginalized by the upward mobility of others and compete to maximize their control over valued resources in the field, whether these resources take the form of artistic renown or cash. For Lamont highly mobile societies – where various people are likely to compete for different sets of resources – “generate a more dynamic system made up of a number of partly overlapping spheres of competition and comparison. Given the level of mobility of modern communities and the fact that individuals, and particularly upper-middle-class individuals, are often involved in a wide range of activities, it might be more useful at this point to think of the value of high status signals, and of the relative positions of individuals, as defined by open, changing, and interpenetrating semiotic and social fields rather than by stable and closed ones.”39 Lamont arrived to the conclusion that in the United States, as compared to France, there is a “loosely bounded culture” where cultural practices are not clearly hierarchized, where people consume high and low culture, where distinction does not operate in terms of who is in and out, and where many are tolerant of or indifferent toward those who are different from them. “More particularly, I view symbolic boundaries as a necessary but insufficient condition for the creation of socioeconomic inequality, and I suggest that only strong boundaries can generate inequality and that differentiation does not necessarily lead to hierarchy.”40 Moreover, as similar to structuralist, Marxist, and rational choice approaches, Bourdieu’s theory tends to predefine the resources, or high status signals, that are most valued. In his theory disinterests in general, no matter if aesthetic pleasure, ethical preferences, or moral convictions are generally submitted to socioeconomic achievement and social placement. This let think that Bourdieu – despite he always denies it – shares with rational choice theorists the view that social actors are by definition socioeconomic maximizers who
38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 183. 40 Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals & Manners. The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 178.
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participate in a world of economic exchange in which they act strategically to maximize material and symbolic payoff. Finally, Bourdieu’s idea of habitus is based too exclusively on proximate structural conditions. Lamont argues: “Bourdieu neglects to analyze how people’s preferences are shaped by broader structural features as well as by the cultural resources that are made available to them by the society they live in.”.41 Lamont’s criticism partly catches the point and opens to a broader reflection on a key point of revisiting Bourdieu’s theory in a cross-cultural – globalizing – perspective. Bourdieu repetitively affirms that habitus is “history made body.”42 On the other hand he doesn’t often make explicit reference to the historicity of habitus and sometimes gives the impression of naturalize the concept. In case of a European/American comparison the different historical background needs to be considered, particularly regarding the different roles assumed by the state in the distribution of symbolic capital in the social space. Lamont is obviously aware of it, when she mentions the role played by the educational system in the process of social reproduction in France, but incidentally. The different historical genesis of the statuary institutions in America and France (more generally in Europe) play a big role in shaping the European and American habitus and consequently the national symbolic space. The role played by the state in influencing national social stratification – through distribution of economic and cultural resources, specifically through the Welfare State – in most European countries is obviously much more relevant than in us. Given his style of thought and research, Bourdieu doesn’t have a systematic theory of the state.43 Moreover, he investigated in several works the genesis and structure of what he defines as the “bureaucratic field”. Bourdieu sums up his re-reading of the sociological tradition on the state with Max Weber’s famous definition: the state is an X which successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical and symbolic violence over a definite territory and over the totality of the corresponding population. The state is “the culmination of a process of concentration of 41 42 43
Ibid., 187. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 149. A very recent book edited Bourdieu’s lectures on the State during the years 1989–1992 (Eng. tr., On the State. Lectures at the Collège de France 1989–1992. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015). From this broad materials, assembled and not destined to the publication (even if Bourdieu himself hoped that “something should remain”), it appears that Bourdieu was fully aware that a cross cultural, comparative analysis on the State is necessary to understand mechanisms of social stratification in the singles countries. On the role of the State in current globalizing processes, see Andrea Borghini’s chapter in this volume.
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different species of capital: capital of physical force or instruments of coercion (army, police), economic capital, cultural or (better) informational capital, and symbolic capital.”44 For Bourdieu the state becomes “the holder of a sort of meta capital granting power over other species of capital and over their holders”.45 This concentration leads to the emergence of a “specific, properly statist capital (capital étatique) which enables the state to exercise power over the different fields and over the different particular species of capital, and especially over the rates of conversion between them”.46 Also, a very important point in a cross cultural research agenda on globalizing culture eterodoxically inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu could investigate the role of the state in the distribution of symbolic capital and power in the social space.
Concluding Remarks
In this chapter I had some interrelated goals. Firstly, I attempted to highlight the topic of class distinction as important topic of global capitalistic culture. Even if virtually every society is a part of the global capitalistic system and along with that has a class system, class culture can be experienced in different ways. Teaching social stratification and inequality in American and Italian classes made me aware of the different habitus of American and Italian students regarding taste as a fundamental “weapon” in the game of class distinction. Secondly, I attempted to reconstruct Bourdieu’s theory of social stratification, based on the fundamental concept of habitus and symbolic capital. Bourdieu’s work is often neglected in the most common handbooks and theories of social stratification and inequality, but his contribution to a crosscultural, comparative concept of social class cannot be denied. Finally, by analyzing the work of one of the most prominent Canadian/ American researcher, Michèle Lamont, I’ve shown an interesting research whose goal is to decouple Bourdieu’s theory from the French context in which it has been developed. Bourdieu’s theoretical work – unlike Sartre’s, Althusser’s, Foucault’s, or Habermas’ – produced a collective international workshop. In this sense, Bourdieu’s theory is a “progressive theory” (in the sense of I. Lakatos), as opposed to “degenerative theory” – theories that tends to degenerate into dogmas – since it proposes a research program that asks to be falsified, 44
Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 41. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 41–42.
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proven, and/or enriched.47 As Bourdieu himself stated, “those who dismiss my analyses on account of ‘Frenchness’…fail to see that what is truly important in them is not so much the substantive results themselves as the process through which they are obtained. ‘Theories’ are research programs that call not for ‘theoretical debate’ but for a practical utilization that either refutes or generalizes them or, better, specifies and differentiates their claim to generality.”48 It can easily be inferred that adopting Bourdieu’s modus operandi would require a great amount of time, as well as economic, and human resources. Nevertheless, it is a challenge worthy to be accepted. Bibliography Bohn, Cornelia and Hahn Alois. Pierre Bourdieu, in D. Kaesler (hrsg.), Klassiker der Soziologie, Band II, von Talcott Parsons bis Pierre Bourdieu, München: Beck, 1999. Bourdieu, Pierre. Sociologie de l’Algérie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958. Eng. tr.: The Algerians. Préface by Raymond Aron. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1962. ——— Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique précedé de Trois études d’ethnologie kabyle, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972. Engl. tr., Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. ——— La distinction, Paris, Ed. de Minuit: 1979. Eng. tr. by Richard Nice: Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. ——— Le sens pratique. Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1980. Eng. tr. by Richard Nice. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990a. ——— Homo academicus, Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1984. Eng. tr. Cambridge: Polity, 1990b. ——— Choses dites, Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1987. Eng. tr. In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflective Sociology, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990c. ——— La noblesse d’état: grandes écoles et esprit de corps, Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1989. ——— La responsabilità degli intellettuali, Bari: Laterza, 1991. ——— La misère du monde, Paris: Seuil, 1993. ——— Raison pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Eng. tr. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. ——— Méditations pascaliennes, Paris: Seuil, 1997. Eng. tr. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. 47 48
Imre Lakatos. The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Pierre Bourdieu and Louis Wacquant. Réponses: pour une anthropologie réflexive. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Eng. tr., An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992, 77.
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——— La domination masculine, Paris: Seuil, 1998. Eng. tr., Masculine Domination. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. ———, with Boltranski, Luc, Castel, Robert, Chamborendon, Jean Claude. Un art moyen: essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1965. Eng. tr., Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. ———, with Darbel, Alain. L’amour de l’art: les musées d’art européens et leur public, Éd. De Minuit: Paris, 1969. Eng. tr., The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. ———, with Passeron, Jean Claude. Les héritiers: les étudiants et la culture, Ed. de Minuit: Paris, 1964. Eng. tr., The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1979. ———, with Passeron, Jean Claude. La reproduction. Eléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1970. Eng. tr., Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Theory, Culture and Society Series). London: Sage, 1990. ———, with Wacquant, Louis. Réponses: pour une anthropologie réflexive. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Eng. tr., An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. ——— Sur l’état. Cours au Collège de France 1989–1992. Paris: Seuil, 2012. Eng. tr., On the State. Lectures at the Collège de France 1989–1992. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015. DiMaggio, Paul and Michael Useem. Social class and arts consumption: The origins and consequences of class differences in exposure to the arts in America. Theory and Society 5, 1978, 141–161. ——— Cultural capital and school success: the impact of status culture participation on the grades of US high school students. Am. Sociol. Rev. 47, 1982:189–201 Foucault, Michel. Body/Power, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Goodman, Jane E. and Silverstein Paul A. Bourdieu in Algeria. Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Holt DB. 1997. Distinction in America? Recovering Bourdieu’s theory of tastes from his critics. Poetics 25:93–120. Jenkins, Richard. Pierre Bourdieu, London: Routledge, 2002. Lamont, Michèle, and Annette Lareau. “Cultural Capital: Allusions, Gaps And Glissandos In Recent Theoretical Developments.” Sociological Theory 6, no. 2, 1988: 153–168. Peterson RA, Kern RM. 1996. Changing highbrow taste: from snob to omnivore. Am. Sociol. Rev. 61:900–7 Sallaz, J., and J. Zavisca. 2007. “Pierre Bourdieu in American Sociology, 1980–2005,” Annual Review of Sociology 33: 21–41. www.pbs.org/program/people-like-us/ www.cnam.com/people-like-us/
chapter 12
Consumption, Identity, Space: Shopping Malls in Bogotá Enrico Campo* The centrality of consumerism – and therefore of goods – in our society has become an undisputed fact;1 yet this issue has long been neglected by the aca demic and social sciences, remaining the exclusive domain of market research.2 Far from being a mere consequence of increased production, it is significant for analysis precisely because of its important symbolic function.3 Its role can not be limited to the simple act of buying. One possible theoretical approach for investigating this role is to focus on the spaces designated for the distribu tion of goods, since these gather and express the deeper issues of the social fabric to which they belong. I focus my attention on shopping malls, structures that have always main tained a very close relationship with cities and urban settings; indeed, it may be said that the relationship between shopping malls and cities is fundamental,4 whether we examine their structural aspects or focus on their more properly symbolic ones’.5 I have chosen to investigate the relationship among cities and shopping malls through a case study on Bogotá. I had the opportunity to * University of Pisa. 1 Stefano Cavazza and Emanuela Scarpellini, Il secolo dei consumi: dinamiche sociali nell’Europa del Novecento (Roma: Carocci, 2006). 2 Roberta Sassatelli, Consumer Culture History, Theory and Politics (Los Angeles: sage Publications, 2007); Sharon Zukin and Jennifer Smith Maguire, “Consumers and Consump tion,” Annual review of sociology 30 (2004): 173. 3 For a reconstruction of the theoretical positions in relation to the autonomy of the sphere of consumption, see Roberta Sassatelli, Consumo, cultura e società (Bologna: Il mulino, 2004). 4 This is also true for the suburban malls that take the form of a sort of “surrogate for the city”. A vocation that is clearly expressed through its name and which helps us clarify how “the Square and the Market” are “constant archetypes and reference models” for shopping centers, see Giandomenico Amendola, La città postmoderna: magie e paure della metropoli c ontemporanea (Roma: Laterza, 2008), 167. 5 I am well aware of the variety of commercial forms that meet the definition of shopping malls. This is not the place for reconstructing the historical development of shopping malls. In this work, when not further specified, I will refer to the urban shopping centers with enclosed structures and controlled access.
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complete two periods of fieldwork in Colombia, between 2007 and 2009. The integration into the world market of the metropolises of the southern hemi sphere exposes cities, like Bogota, to the same processes that organize the global economic network. In South America, however, investments are con centrated above all on consumption rather than production.6 In addition, in Colombia, and particularly in Bogotá, shopping malls have spread almost con temporaneously with those in the United States, albeit at very different paces. In fact, since the early nineties, in consequence of the adoption of neolib eral policies, the spread of shopping malls in Bogotá has undergone a marked acceleration.7 More specifically, the spread of shopping malls in Bogotá has found especially fertile ground both because investments in that sector have probably been a good way to launder money from drug trafficking, and because these structures have been used by construction companies to trigger realestate development on lands owned by the companies themselves.8 Starting with the neoliberal trend in economic policy, these endogenous factors have combined with the internationalization of the economy, which has attracted foreign capital even in the construction of shopping malls, further contribut ing to their success. Firstly, the premise of this study is therefore that Bogotá is a part of the global city and hence it is exposed to alterations in flows, while at the same time it acts as an entity that competes and cooperates with other urban nodes to attract capital. Secondly, and consequently, Bogotá is also par ticularly compelling case study in relation to the impact of transnational economic process on their urban surroundings. According to Marc Augé, in contemporary cities there is a significant increase of non-places, spaces that foster neither relationships nor identities nor a sense of the past.9 At the same time cities tend to adopt the same generic forms all over the world, regardless of context, it seems reasonable to assume that in South American cities such phenomena may occur more frequently than in Europe,10 whose older physical 6 7
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Luis Fernando Escobar González, Ciudad y Arquitectura Urbana en Colombia 1980–2010 (Medellín, Colombia: Editorial Universidad de Antioquia, 2010). See, Maurix Augusto Suárez Suárez Rodríguez, “La Proliferación de Centros Comerciales En Bogotá, Colombia,” accessed February 7, 2014, http://egal2009.easyplanners.info/area05/ 5705_Suarez_Maurix.docx. See Jan Marco Müller, “Grandes Centros Comerciales Y Recreacionales En Santafé de Bogota,” Perspectiva Geográfica 3 (1998). The author even asks if shopping malls are the result of urban development in Bogotá or if rather the opposite is true. See Marc Augé, Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity (London; New York: Verso, 1995). See P.J. Taylor, G. Catalano, and D.R.F. Walker, “Exploratory Analysis of the World City Network,” Urban Studies 39, no. 13 (2002): 2377–2394. This is for example the opinion of
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structures and marked historical connotations tend to hinder the spread of this kind of space over the urban territory. I argue that the hierarchical spatial organization which South American cities inherited from the colonial period has given a freer hand to the global processes that govern the structuring of urban space.11 For the same reasons we should expect a significant increase in the production of that part of the city which Koolhaas calls “generic”.12 The concept of generic city, as theorized by the world famous architect Rem Koolhaas,13 makes reference to the fact that the areas most affected by global economic processes tend to take similar shapes, in complete indifference to the history of the contexts they structure. The genericity of cities occurs through a wriggling free of the limitations imposed by the identification and history of the contexts in which it operates. It is designed to respond only to immediately present needs and, precisely because of its being concentrated solely in the present, it flaunts an absolute indifference to history. The forms of the generic city are similar throughout the world; the same model is repro duced everywhere, regardless of what occupied the space previously. Generic cities have no memory. I have alluded in the first paragraph to the relationship between the urban and commercial spaces in a city that is becoming increasingly global. This con text re-proposes the concepts of non-place and generic city, which often come into play in analyzing the malls.14 In the next section I will attempt to recon struct the central role that shopping malls have in Bogotá’s urban social
11
12 13 14
Jordi Borja. See Jordi Borja and Zaida Muxí, El espacio público: ciudad y ciudadanía (Madrid: Electa España, 2003), 319. Here we have mentioned a subject that certainly deserves far more space, namely the existence of points of contact between the model of the colonial city and the concepts of a global and dual city. This model, which entered into crisis in the 80s, has spread in more recent theoretical paradigms. For an in-depth analysis, see Agostino Petrillo, Peripherein: pensare diversamente la periferia (Milano, Italy: FrancoAngeli, 2013), 105–127. See Rem Koolhaas, “La Città Generica,” Domus 791, no. 791 (1997): 4. See also, Michel Agier, “Lo Spettro della Città Nuda,” Africa e Mediterraneo 2 (1998). Koolhaas, “La Città Generica.” Melvin M. Webber was one of the first scholar who used the word nonplace in urban stud ies. See Melvin M Webber, “The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm,” in Explorations into Urban Structure, ed. Melvin M Webber (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). However, I will use the concept of nonplace according to Marc Augé, who explicitly refers to the shopping malls as nonplaces. See Marc Augé, Augé, Nonplaces. About somewhat anticipatory theorizations of Webber’s category of nonplace urban realm, see Maria Grazia Ricci, “Spazio e memoria. Luoghi, non-luoghi, lieux de mémoire,” in Alla ricerca della città futura: l’ambiente nella dimensione urbana, ed. Sonia Paone (Pisa: ets, 2007).
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changes. The importance of the shopping malls is examined in relation to both Bogotá’s urban planning and (the theme of the third section) the symbolic importance they acquire in that context. In the fourth section, I return to the concepts introduced previously in order to verify their legitimacy based on my study of the shopping malls I carried out in the Colombian capital. However, I can anticipate unhesitantly that the association of shopping malls to nonplaces and genericity seems too simplistic; an association which therefore needs to be reinvestigated in depth. Therefore, in the concluding section I allude to theoretical perspectives that, while recognizing the symbolic impor tance of shopping malls, make a non-moralistic critique of them.
Shopping Malls and the Urban Environment
Making a sociological investigation of the relationship between consumer spaces and cities means first of all framing it within a much broader issue of the difficult balance between the public and private sectors in the constitution of the city and the urban environment.15 As Max Weber showed,16 these ele ments cannot be considered to be two mutually exclusive poles, but rather as forming a unity based on historically changing equilibriums. If we focus our attention on the spatial expression of this relationship, we cannot but notice that it is based on a biunivocal relationship: public spaces affect private spaces destined for trade, and vice versa.17 Shopping malls are thus a specific, mutable segment of the dialectic between public spaces and spaces meant for com merce. Interpreting the public and private sectors as two opposing and mutu ally exclusive spheres, hinders us from adequately appreciating the overlaps that continually take place in the urban landscape: private and public spaces emulate each other to the point of blurring and widening the boundaries between the two into thresholds.18 Consequently, analyzing the malls can also 15
16 17
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See Agostino Petrillo, “Ombre del comune: l’urbano tra produzione collettiva e sposses samento,” in Oltre il pubblico e il privato: per un diritto dei beni comuni, ed. Maria Rosaria Marella (Verona: Ombre corte, 2012). Max Weber, The City. (New York, n.y.: Free Press, 1958). Giandomenico Amendola, “La Città Vetrina. Dai Passages Parigini alla Città Griffata,” in La città vetrina: i luoghi del commercio e le nuove forme del consumo, ed. Giandomenico Amendola (Napoli: Liguori, 2006). Anne Bottomley, “A Trip to the Mall. Revisiting the Public/private Divide,” in Feminist Perspectives on Land Law, ed. Hilary Lim and Anne Bottomley (Oxon; New York: RoutledgeCavendish, 2007). See also Mauro Ponzi and Dario Gentili, eds., Soglie: per una nuova teoria dello spazio (Milano: Mimesis, 2012).
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help us to better understand the dynamics that underlie many interventions on a city’s public space.19 To state that the functions and evolution of consumer infrastructures can not be understood except in reference to the city and the urban environment implies that the shopping mall phenomenon in contemporary metropolises must be placed within the broader framework of global cities. The global inte gration of markets is of crucial importance as much to the appearance as to the functions of a city. The city is the privileged place where the phenomena asso ciated with globalization occur, spatially and symbolically.20 Because of the redefinition of the role of the nation-state, and not solely, cities have become the principal agents of a competition between metropolises in the world eco nomic system.21 According to Saskia Sassen, global cities are “places where the work of run ning global systems gets done.”22 More specifically, global cities must be, simul taneously, places in which control of the processes of organization of the world economy is exercised; places for the production of financial services and spe cialized services for businesses; and lastly, a target market for these advanced sectors of production.23 Jordi Borja and Manuel Castells24 have likewise placed the city at the center of their analysis of globalization and informationaliza tion. According to them, “The global city is a network of urban nodes, at differ ing levels and with differing functions, that spreads over the entire planet and functions as the nerve centre of the new economy, in an interactive system of variable geometry to which companies and cities must constantly and flexibly 19
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21 22 23 24
Margaret Crawford, “The World in a Shopping Mall,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). Obviously, the reflection on cities inserted in a planetary economic context is not new. For an in-depth overview see Agostino Petrillo, “Megalopoli,” Treccani, l’Enciclopedia Italiana, Enciclopedia Del Novecento, iii (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2004). See Agostino Petrillo, Villaggi, città, megalopoli (Roma: Carocci, 2006). Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2000), 1. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 115. See also Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, 4. Jordi Borja and Manuel Castells, Local and Global: the Management of Cities in the Information Age (London: Earthscan Publications, 1997). See also Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Oxford; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). John Friedmann, “The World City Hypothesis,” Development and Change 17, no. 1 (1986): 69–83.; in relation to the very important issue of public space in the new configuration of urban power cfr Borja and Muxí, El espacio público.
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adapt.”25 They use the concept of the global city to refer to the reticulated power structures rather than to single urban units. Rather than identify spe cific global cities, and because of the increased attention devoted to flows, Borja and Castells prefer to use the concept of the global city to designate a reticulated configuration based on interconnected urban nodes that exchange flows of information, goods and people.26 This network is the nerve center of the new global economy. However, global economy is not just a world econ omy, nor merely an international economy. By the global economy they mean “an economy in which the strategically dominant activities function as a unit at the planetary level in real or potentially real time”.27 Information technolo gies play a crucial role in this new economic system but, as Borja and Castels clearly state, information technologies are not the cause of the change of the new technological paradigm. They are rather “the infrastructure that is a prerequisite for their existence: if there were no computers and no global telecommunications, for example, there would be no global economy and no world-scale communication”.28 Thus, global economy is also an informational economy, that is an economy in which production and management of infor mation are essential sources of productivity.29 However, the global economic system, in the very moment in which it is connecting entire regions of the world through the integration into the global market, is also being character ized by an absolute indifference to large geographical and social areas, there fore tending to exclude them from the circuits of the transnational economy.30 In other words, this exclusion occurs on three levels: on the global level (e.g. Sub Saharian Africa – with the significant exception of South Africa) on a regional level (e.g. between Brasil’s south east and north east) and on an intrametropolitan level. The systematic social and therefore spatial exclusion of large metropolitan areas is in some ways a new factor in the current economic processes. That is, the typical development of the economic system generates as its normal byproduct a systematic exclusion that leads to a specific configu ration of the metropolitan area. According to Borja and Castells “The global city and the informational city are also the dual city”.31 Thus, the exclusion 25 Borja and Castells, Local and global, 36. 26 Borja and Castells, Local and global. 27 Ibid., 35. 28 Ibid. 29 Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 77. 30 See Sonia Paone, Città in frantumi: sicurezza, emergenza e produzione dello spazio (Milano: F. Angeli, 2008). 31 Borja and Castells, Local and global, 101. See also John H Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells, Dual City: Restructuring New York (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991); Susan
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above all takes the form of an ouster from the distribution (rather than the production) system, and therefore urban dualization does not signify total separation but rather “reflects an urban social structure based on the interac tion between opposite and equally dynamic poles of the new information economy.”32 As should be clear even from these brief considerations, cities are global not only in the sense that they compete with each other to corner shares of global business, but they are also places where transnational processes find their local manifestation and therefore also their space.33 To better understand the relation between local and global, Borja and Castells distinguish between a space of flows and a space of places. The space of place is the space of contigu ity where the majority of people live “so they perceive their space as placebased. A place is a locale whose form, function, and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity.”34 The space of flows is instead the space of simultaneity, “the material support of simultaneous social prac tices communicated at a distance.”35 Space of flows follows the instant time of computerized networks and space of place follow the clock time of everyday life. According to Castells, the space of place is not the dominant logic in pres ent time: the space of flows is replacing the space of place: “One of the essen tial mechanisms for dominance in our historical time is the dominance of flow space over place space.”36 Thus, these two spaces follow different logics and different rhythms. According to Castells, this discrepancy produces a striking contradiction: Although there are places in the space of flows and flows in the space of places, cultural and social meaning is defined in place terms, while func tionality, wealth, and power are defined in terms of flows. And this is the most fundamental contradiction emerging in our globalized, urbanized, S Fainstein, Ian Gordon, and Michael Harloe, Divided Cities: New York & London in the Contemporary World (Oxford, uk; Cambridge, ma: Blackwell, 1992). 32 Borja and Castells, Local and global, 98. 33 The social and spatial effects of the division between global and local, therefore, “vary according to the levels of development of the countries, their urban history, their culture and their institutions. Yet it is in this articulation that the sources of new urban transfor mation processes lie” in Ibid., 48–49. 34 Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 453. 35 Manuel Castells, “Preface to the 2010 Edition of The Rise of the Network Society,” in The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Oxford; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) xxxii. 36 Borja and Castells, Local and global, 102.
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networked world: in a world constructed around the logic of the space of flows, people make their living in the space of places.37 This contradiction is reflected in the problematic relation between architec ture and society. For Castells, architecture has always been the mediated expression of deeper cultural and historical meanings. This relationship has been undermined by space of flow. As Castells note, “Because the spatial mani festation of the dominant interests takes place around the world, and across cultures, the uprooting of experience, history, and specific culture as the back ground of meaning is leading to the generalization of ahistorical, acultural architecture.”38 The architecture of the space of flows is what Castells calls “the architecture of nudity.”39 However, indifference to history and standardization are typical character istic of what Koolhaas calls generic city. The French anthropologist Michel Agier uses the concept of generic city in order to refer to those spaces linked to the global system of communication and consumption.40 Thus, generic city’s dissemination is closely related to the weakening of the place, analyzed by Marc Augé in Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. The concept of non-place – defined in opposition to place – emphasizes the dissemination of spaces that are characterized by non-possession of traits of identity, relationship and history. According to Marc Augé,41 these spaces are produced constantly by a social condition defined by the author as supermo dernity, deriving “from the packaging” of the constituent processes of moder nity.42 The main category that defines supermodernity is excess: we are witnesses of great transformations that involve an overload in the three dimen sions of time, space and individuality.43 Non-places are thus spaces of circula tion, consumption and communication, conceived as ephemeral and passing. They are defined in relation to anthropological place, but it should be stated that it is impossible to encounter them empirically in their pure form; the con ceptual pair is used to measure the distance with respect to the concrete reality of the object under analysis. If then non-places do not exist in their pure form 37 Castells, “Preface to the 2010 Edition of The Rise of the Network Society,” xxxix. 38 Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 449. 39 Ibid., 450. 40 Agier, “Lo Spettro della Città Nuda,” 3; see also Michel Agier, “La Ville Nue. Des Marges de l’Urbain Aux Terrains de l’Humanitaire,” Annales de la Recherche Urbaine 93 (March 1, 2003). 41 See Augé, Non-places. 42 See Marc Augé, The war of dreams: studies in ethno fiction. (London: Pluto, 1999). 43 See Augé, Non-places, 30.
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in reality, the systematic production of spaces that can be likened to nonplaces is representative of the era we live in.44 It is by no accident that shop ping malls are prime examples of both the concept of non-place and that of the generic city.45
Shopping Malls in Bogotá: The Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial
Despite the fact that since the 1940’s Bogotá’s administration has adopted sev eral tools for urban planning, these were not applied until the 1960’s because of the large increase in population that destabilized the previous equilibri um.46 Subsequent legislation that was enforced up to the end of the nineties, comprised several administrative actions that focused attention on the mar ket ability to determine the aggregation of services, and thus affect the urban structure.47 There was no particularly significant role attributed to shopping malls even as they were surveyed and classified in the statistics. This situation changed dramatically with the enforcement of Decree 619 of July 2000 and the approval of the Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial para Santa Fe de Bogotá (pot). Unlike previous interventions, the pot proposed an organic set of actions for both public investments and the private sector investments. It was defined as “the set of goals, guidelines, policies, strategies, programs, actions, and regulations adopted to guide and manage the physical development of the area and land use.”48 With the pot the administration supplied itself with a very sophisticated tool based on a diagnosis of the city’s social, economic and environmental needs, which offered a range of possible interventions. 44
“The same thing applies equally for non-places as for places: they never exist in a pure form […] Place and non-place are rather elusive polarities: the former is never completely oblit erated and the second is never totally complete”. See Ibid., 77. This is a distinction which is particularly dear to the author, since it comes up insistently in his recent preface to the second Italian edition of the text, see Marc Augé, “Preface to Nonluoghi,” in Nonluoghi: introduzione a una antropologia della surmodernità (Milano: Eleuthera, 2009), 8. 45 Augé, Non-places; Koolhaas, “La Città Generica”; Paone, Città in frantumi. 46 See Thierry Lulle, “Bogotá: los costos laissez-faire,” in Metrópolis en Movimiento: una Comparación Internacional, ed. Françoise Dureau et al. (Alfaomega, 2002). 47 Thierry Lulle and Catherine Paquette, “Los Grandes Centros Comerciales Y La Planificación Urbana,” Estudios Demograficos Y Urbanos 22, no. 2 (2007). All translation from Spanish are by the author. 48 See Secreteria Distratal de Planeación, Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, “Abc Del pot de Bogotá,” 2009, http://www.sdp.gov.co/portal/page/portal/PortalSDP/POT accessed May 2013.
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Thus, a specific urban model emerged, that the pot set out to realize, in which the malls had a strategic importance. The idea of a city, to which the plan aspired to, was precisely a city placed within the networks of the global econ omy. In the section devoted to the general objectives of an economic nature, it planned to organize the territory so as to exploit the peculiar advantages it possessed in order to increase competitiveness by attracting foreign capital and boosting exports. The first political action that concretely implemented this goal aimed at “providing space for the rational localization of trade, industry and services, and promoting business service centers with an inter national vocation.”49 Trade, services, and in particular those aimed at transna tional companies, were major components that were essential for increasing the city’s competitiveness. Industrial production, although mentioned, played a marginal role, referring primarily to areas of high-level technology. Lastly, pot insisted on the fact that in recent decades Bogotá’s economy had under gone a marked development of its service sector. The pot’s diagnosis resulted in “a model of a competitive city on an international, national and regional scale, which stressed the necessity for a reorganization of its multiple systems through differentiated hierarchization and articulation.”50 The different parts of the city therefore had to be functionally specialized in relation to market needs in order to take advantage of the benefits associated with the combina tion of services. Next, I will discuss the practical ways by which that urban model was implemented, with special attention to the role played by the shopping malls. The criteria of the functional specialization and hierarchization of space guided the predisposition of institutional action on the urban fabric. Institutional measures were aimed primarily at acting on “centrality” or on specific areas where a number of specialized services were concentrated. The increased rationality in the plan, aimed to further specialize the already existing centrali ties through a clear-cut division of areas in relation to the functions assigned to them. It also hinted at the possibility of establishing new centralities. In com pliance with a traditional collaboration between the public and private sec tors, public sector limited itself to providing infrastructure and regulations for the private’s operation.51 Accordingly, the pot outlined two forms of public investment: in infrastructure and urban redevelopment. Both were closely related to the malls. In regards the first form, the improvement of the road network was considered essential for the development of the centralities, 49 50 51
Decreto Distrital 619/2000, art. 1 as amended by art. 286 Decreto Distrital 469 /2003. Lulle and Paquette, “Los Grandes Centros Comerciales Y La Planificación Urbana,” 354. See Ibid., 358.
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precisely in relation to the diverse specializations to which they had to respond.52 The reinforcement of the existing centralities, born in the wake of the free play of market forces, focused investments in areas where shopping malls were located. Redevelopment aimed especially at creating public spaces for pedestrians in a city like Bogotá that has always suffered from a lack of pedestrian areas.53 In addition, the plan noted how the increasing spread of shopping centers had eroded the existing public space. One of the proposed solutions was to invest in the redevelopment of public spaces adjacent to the shopping centers and to, simultaneously, improve traffic flow through an expansion of public transportation. The malls became not only the central ele ment around which to aggregate other services, public and private, but also a hub that attracted investments in roads and urban redevelopment. So what remained ever paramount was that interventions should be guided by the spe cialization and hierarchization of services. Thus, the greatest investments would be concentrated around the elite malls,54 intended for the middle and upper classes and located in the northern area of the city. That produced a city that was spatially organic and coherent and in keeping with the social order.55 The malls seemed therefore devoted to an “aestheticizing” vision of the urban landscape, which tended to center-stage the official city while relegating its informal lower-class elements to the wings.56 52
53 54 55
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Special mention is due to the huge investment in mobility which is the Transmilenio, a system of buses that functions as an authentic surface metro. Likewise the system of bike paths. See Escobar González, Ciudad y Arquitectura Urbana en Colombia 1980–2010. See Borja and Muxí, El espacio público. See Müller, “Grandes Centros Comerciales Y Recreacionales En Santafé de Bogota.” Of particular interest are, for example, the predispositions of art. 125 concerning to the Santa Barbara area project, where two shopping centers are located, the Centro Comercial Santa Barbara, one of the most luxurious and in colonial style, and the Centro Comercial Unicentro, the oldest and symbolically central for the city. The Operación Santa Barbara “has the purpose – reads the article – of qualifying and integrating the character of the three nodes of activity that make up the main centrality of the residential fabric of the north: Usaquén, the business center of Santa Barbara and Unicentro, through actions on the elements of the existing public space and through the creation of new ones. Its pedes trian scale layout will contribute to the ordering of each node” Distrital Decree 619/2000, Art. 125. See Thierry Lulle, “Los retratos de ciudad y la ‘estetización’ del patrimonio. Bogotá durante la segunda mitad del siglo xx,” in Construcción de lugares-patrimonio: el centro histórico y el humedal de Córdoba en Bogotá, ed. Adriana Párias Durán and Dolly Cristina Palacio Tamayo (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano para el Desarrollo de la Ciencia, COLCIENCIAS : Universidad Externado de Colombia, 2006).; María Clara Van Der Hammen, Thierry Lulle,
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To exemplify, a practical case in point of centralization is the very signifi cant Unicentro mall. The Decree 619 (article 125) identifies a secondary operation: it includes the management of commercial and corporate activity that revolves around the Unicentro Mall and actions for improvement of pub lic space and the transportation system. This actions would allow an intensive, orderly, balanced use with existing residential activities, com plementing its present character as a representative space through the provision of urban facilities and services.57 The mall was therefore able to structure the city’s space both through its ability to attract the neighboring localization of other types of services and through the intervention of the administration, which precisely in order to nurture these dynamics, concentrated its investments in areas relevant to the center. The shopping mall thus became a vector for the construction of the “centralities,” which the pot speaks about through the development of roadway infrastruc ture and services, and the construction or redevelopment of public spaces. The stated goal was to increase the city’s competitiveness at an international level, and shopping malls too seemed to respond to this purpose.
Shopping Malls and Public Space in Bogotá
With the pot analysis I have reconstructed the importance that shopping malls have in structuring the city’s space. What emerged was a certain distinc tion in the level of the shopping centers according to the social class they serve, even though most of them cater to the middle and upper classes and are located to the north or northwest, i.e. the city’s affluent areas.58 Lastly, I have called attention to the fact that these new places of consumption due to their force of attraction, cause a deterioration of the traditional public spaces, while
57 58
and Dolly Cristina Palacio, “La Construcción Del Patrimonio Como Lugar: Un Estudio de Caso En Bogotá,” Antipoda. Revista de Antropología Y Arqueología, no. 8 (2009): 61–85. Distrital Decree 619/2000, Art. 125. Bogotá has a rather marked residential segregation that can be easily deduced from the division into six “estatos” made by the administration and on the basis of which differen tiated utilities and tax payments were instituted, a division which, although it might be justified by principles of social equity, has the effect of contributing to maintain the seg mentation of the metropolis. See Law 142 of 1994 conpes.
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on the other hand they attract investments for those very spaces. Therefore, a joint action of public authorities and private entities over the organization of the urban space is notable. However, there is more. Shopping malls seem to have acquired the functions that were once typically reserved for traditional public places, as squares, parks, etc. From the very start Bogotá’s shopping malls have been developed within the urban fabric as a substitute for a tradi tional public space abandoned due to the widespread climate of insecurity.59 According to Jan Marco Müller, in recent years these new public spaces in Bogotá have taken on an even greater symbolic importance than traditional public places: “in its sociocultural function the squares in the shopping and leisure malls are already of equal importance to the historic city squares, or have even surpassed them.”60 Although, it is explicitly recognized that shop ping malls contribute to increased urban fragmentation and that they are pri vately owned spaces whose access is limited by a marked social homogeneity, there seems to be some consensus, as Thierry Lulle and Catherine Paquette write, about the “function they have nowadays in relation to urban socializing. Frequently based on the idea of the public square (hence their names), these places [shopping malls] devote a major part of their surface to collective use and reproduce a kind of urban environment.”61 In effect, the reproduction of the urban environment has always been identified as an essential component of shopping malls, starting with their names, which obsessively return to the words “mall” and “plaza.” Within a shopping mall therefore, the structure of the city is explicitly reproduced through the pedestrian walkways and plazas often accompanied by such typically urban elements as fountains, flowerbeds, etc.62 Lulle and Paquette argue that the traditional public spaces of the city have lost their attractiveness as places for meeting and socializing because of their lack of security, so they conclude that the malls have replaced the traditional public spaces. In effect, the first major development of shopping malls, from the late eighties to the early nineties, coincided with the “Drug War” between 59 60 61 62
Escobar González, Ciudad y Arquitectura Urbana en Colombia 1980–2010, 124. Müller, “Grandes Centros Comerciales Y Recreacionales En Santafé de Bogota,” 85. Lulle and Paquette, “Los Grandes Centros Comerciales Y La Planificación Urbana,” 341. Guenola Capron and Bruno Sabatier argue that, in the case of Brazil and Mexico, the construction of shopping malls with controlled access that reproduce an open urban environment contributes to the spread of urban culture. See Guénola Capron and Bruno Sabatier, “Identidades Urbanas Y Culturas Públicas En La Globalización: Centros Comerciales Paisajísticos En Río de Janeiro Y México,” Alteridades 17, no. 33 (2007): 87–97. This research data also shows that only 18% of those interviewed think that shopping malls are not public squares.
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the government and the Medellin cartel headed by Pablo Escobar.63 Beyond a longstanding pervasion of petty crime, the increase in violence would further contribute to the sense of insecurity.64 If what emerges from an imposing study by the semiotician Armando Silva is true, namely that the perception of violence in Bogotá is higher than in Caracas, Mexico City, Lima and Sao Paulo, despite the fact that crime statistics indicate lower values, the feeling of lack of security is pervasive.65 All this has apparently helped to increase the attractive ness of monitored shopping malls as places for meeting and socializing.66 The enclosed structure, with its strictly controlled access,67 as a surrogate of the city, allows people to obtain what the public spaces of the city are unable to offer. The shopping malls therefore deposed the public spaces from their tradi tional role in the metropolis to the point that the private mall becomes, accord ing to Thierry Lulle and Catherine Paquette, a new public urban space68 and a “common cultural heritage.”69 The authors take up in this connection Ines Cornéjo Portugal’s analysis on shopping malls in Mexico.70 She focused her attention on how mall habituees appropriate it symbolically in their daily lives. Starting from the consideration that assiduous attendance of shopping malls transcends the mere mercantile use of this space, she reconstructs the importance that mall has for its frequenters through a study of the symbolic 63 64
65 66
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See Müller, “Grandes Centros Comerciales Y Recreacionales En Santafé de Bogota.” On the importance of violence in Colombian life, see Marco Palacios, Entre la legitimidad y la violencia: Colombia 1875–1994 (Santafé de Bogotá, Colombia: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1995). Armando Silva Téllez, Bogotá imaginada (Bogotá: Convenio Andŕes Bello : Universidad Nacional de Colombia : Taurus, 2003), 24. Again Armando Silva in Imaginarios urbanos notes that it is especially the younger gen eration that prefers malls as meeting places. See Armando Silva Téllez, Imaginarios urbanos, 5th ed. (Bogotá: Arango Editores, 2006). Often at the entrance to the parking lots of shopping malls security personnel scrupu lously check every vehicle that enters, often with the help of sniffer dogs. Lulle and Paquette, “Los Grandes Centros Comerciales Y La Planificación Urbana.”; Catherine Paquette, “Comercio y Planificación Urbana. Las Nuevas Grandes Centralidades Comerciales en los Planes de Desarrollo Urbano de la Ciudad de México,” Trace. Travaux et recherches dans les Amériques du Centre, no. 51 (June 30, 2007): 44–55. Lulle and Paquette, “Los Grandes Centros Comerciales Y La Planificación Urbana,” 342. Inés Cornejo Portugal and Elizabeth Bellon Cárdenas, “Prácticas Culturales de Apropiación Simbólica en el Centro Comercial Santa Fe,” Convergencia Revista de Ciencias Sociales 0, no. 24 (January 1, 2001); Inés Cornejo Portugal and Elizabeth Bellon Cárdenas, “Centro Santa Fe: ¿la Nueva Ciudad de México?,” Revista Iberoamericana de Comunicación 1 (2001); Inés Cornejo Portugal, “En Centro Santa Fe: Vitrinear, Olisquear, Toquetear, Fisgonear…,” Alteridades 17, no. 33 (2007): 77–85.
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a ppropriation practices they carry out in this context. Of primary importance are the cultural and communicative operations they utilize to produce and exchange meaning in a shopping mall.71 By adopting this “experiential”72 per spective she is able to identify the meaning that individuals construct in attending these spaces; the shopping mall is transformed from an anonymous place to a “territory” or space constructed by those who frequent and appropri ate it.73 As a meeting place, it cannot help but be symbolized and therefore the relationship with the merchandise is of secondary importance compared to the interaction with other visitors to the mall. She argues: “The shopping mall is a great theatrical stage whose leading actors, the young and the less young, go there with no other purpose than to “hang out” and in which the act of purchasing is only part of a shared experience. As a result, the mall becomes a place for experiencing otherness, that is, of exposure of oneself to the gaze of others to mirror and differentiate oneself.”74 If, therefore, it is in these spaces that people meet, interact and “act out” the city, then, as Ines Cornejo insists, the distinction between public and private is now obsolete because it fails to account for the complexity of a private facility like the mall, which in fact performs a public function. She argues: Thus, the mall is becoming a ‘common cultural heritage’, a public-private space where people come together, communicate, share their experi ences, undertake different cultural exchanges in the same way as in a public square, establishing themselves as a contemporary form, collec tively and individually, for experiencing and imagining the city.75 These assertions lead to another crucial consideration: the Bogotá malls too, considered as elements generating identity, seem to have the force to structure the symbolic representation of the city. So, in addition to being important 71
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Inés Cornejo Portugal, “El Centro Comercial Desde La Comunicación Y La Cultura. Un Modelo Analítico Para Su Estudio,” Convergencia Revista de Ciencias Sociales, no. 40 (2006). Inés Cornejo Portugal, “El Centro Comercial: Un Espacio Simbólico Urbano Más Allá Del Lugar común1,” UNIrevista 1, no. 3 (2006). “The shopping mall is a public/commercial space that can be transformed into a private/ symbolic”, Cornejo Portugal and Bellon Cárdenas, “Prácticas Culturales de Apropiación Simbólica en el Centro Comercial Santa Fe,” 74. Cornejo Portugal, “El Centro Comercial Desde La Comunicación Y La Cultura. Un Modelo Analítico Para Su Estudio,” 31. Cornejo Portugal and Bellon Cárdenas, “Prácticas Culturales de Apropiación Simbólica en el Centro Comercial Santa Fe,” 85.
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meeting places, thanks to their strategic geographical location they become topographical references that are important to citizens. The “historic” malls clearly have much greater representative force as they are already used as a reference for certain macro-areas of the city.76 This is why the Unicentro mall is of the particular interest here being the oldest in the city. It also remained the only shopping mall in the region for many years. Opened in 1976 and fresh from a recent overhaul, notwithstanding the alignment of its prices for products and services with those of the shopping malls catering to the upper classes, it distinguishes itself for its inter-classist vocation.77 Unicentro, as a historic place for socializing, is able to attract peo ple of different social levels and seems to aspire to represent the city as a whole. This is what clearly emerges from Armando Silva’s study of the urban imagi nary. From the interviews he conducted, the shopping malls appear at the top of the preference charts of places to spend one’s leisure time. When respon dents in the study were asked to choose a single identifying element of the city, Unicentro took the second place, surpassed only by Monserrate, the mountain that overlooks the Bogotá plateau and home to the Basilica of Señor caido.78 For Cornéjo Portugal and Bellon, it seems that by now we can only resign ourselves to the fact that in Bogotá, according to Paolo Desideri’s provocative statement, “the new Square is the mall.”79 But is it really? For Paolo Desideri the malls do not qualify as squares because they are not places in the traditional sense of the term, in the sense that they cannot be spaces of identity: “they are not physical spaces where people go to construct their social identity. Indeed, we must now consider that people go to all these places to purchase their care free right to anonymity.”80 Yet, the studies mentioned seem to indicate the exact opposite, namely the possibility that the malls, precisely because they are meeting places for their assiduous habituees. Malls become spaces for socializing with the power to take their place in representations of the urban imaginary. 76
According to Armando Silvia, the Unicentro and the Ciudad Tunal malls already have this function and are recalled to mind respectively for the north and south of Bogotá. See Silva Téllez, Bogotá imaginada, 36. 77 Probably because it is one of the oldest, “this shopping mall – writes Jan Marco Müller – is typically frequented for Sunday promenades, even by lowest-class families”, See Müller, “Grandes Centros Comerciales Y Recreacionales En Santafé de Bogota,” 63. 78 See Silva Téllez, Bogotá imaginada. 79 Paolo Desideri, “Tra Luoghi e Iperluoghi,” in Attraversamenti: i nuovi territori dello spazio pubblico, ed. Paolo Desideri and Massimo Ilardi (Genova: Costa & Nolan, 1997), 20. 80 Ibid.
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Before I return to conclusions emerged in the case study of Bogotá, I would like to provide a summary of what was found so far through the analysis of the shopping malls of Bogotá: • Shopping malls structure urban space both directly, through increasingly international private investment, and indirectly, through the intervention of the public administration (in partnership with the private sector) • They reproduce an exclusionary spatial logic and generate a city based on different segments but homogeneous within itself on the basis of social class; • They simulate an urban space that is characterized by being multifunctional and safe (controlled access and a myriad of active and passive control devices); • They attract investments in the public spaces and aspire to substitute them or join forces with them in some basic functions. They are new places for meeting and socializing, and also influence the urban imagination, repre senting fragments of the city, if not the city as a whole. At this point I wish to return to a discussion of more general theoretical level and, in the wake of the analysis of shopping malls in Bogotá.
Shopping Malls, between Public and Private
In view of the conclusions I reached in the case study on Bogotá, I cannot avoid taking note of the inadequacy of the concept of non-place. According to Augé, non-places are characterized by the absence of identity, relationship and his tory. Further, Bogotá’s shopping malls seem to also function as places for social izing and constructing one’s own identity and individuality in relation to others. For these very reasons, they also seem to have a historical and symbolic importance to the construction of Bogota’s imaginary. In Augé’s terms, the malls are real places.81 Furthermore, according to Augé, the user’s basic need for non-places is freedom of movement; these spaces simply require to be crossed. But this does not seem to be the only need in Bogotá’s malls. My analy sis shows a frequent return to the need to shop in a secure environment and 81
Notwithstanding that Augé takes special care to emphasize, as we saw earlier, that nonplaces cannot be found in reality in their pure form, we cannot help but emphasize that the shopping mall, Augé’s classic example, in Bogotá presents none of the typical features of non-places.
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that therefore it implies monitoring ingress and egress,82 which places a seri ous limit on fully relaxed freedom of movement. As Massimo Ilardi notes, the concept of non-place does not take sufficiently into account the elements that structure urban space, namely the conflict between freedom and security.83 The question of security therefore determines the shift of socializing to moni tored, protected spaces, of which shopping malls are a prime example. The question of the control of space must be noted here. I will come back to it more fully later on because it concerns not only the private spaces of malls but also traditional public spaces.84 In fact, the mall becomes a place of socializing, meeting and representation because it is able to satisfy a social demand for urbanity, which the traditional public space is considered unable to do. As Giandomenico Amendola notes, shopping malls seem to function as a substi tute for the traditional public sphere.85 In addition, because of the centrality of the security issue there is a sort of convergence in the management and con trol of the mall space and the public space.86 As the mall reproduces an ideal 82
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Besides the already mentioned checking of autos as they enter the parking lots, even those who enter on foot are subjected to a check, very similar to the kind carried out in airports, by the security personnel of the shopping malls, who, obviously, also do a “con trol de la cara”, namely a selection based on the outward appearance of the person enter ing and then on the basis of the social class to which he or she seems to belong. We recall in passing that the hypothesis that guides our work is that in Bogotá it is possible to observe more clearly certain phenomena that are nonetheless an integral part of malls. So therefore the perception of insecurity, certainly more marked in Bogotá than in the North America and Europe, requires more stringent controls, but the fact remains that the ele ment of control is an essential component of malls. Massimo Ilardi, Il tramonto dei non luoghi: fronti e frontiere dello spazio metropolitano (Roma: Meltemi, 2007), 42. We must, therefore, always look at the practices permitted in every specific context in order to avoid undue generalizations. Research on malls must always be contextualized in the broader issue of the urban environment. So it may well happen that malls offer greater possibilities of encounter than traditional public spaces do, especially of a romantic nature. In this connection, see M. Abaza, “Shopping Malls, Consumer Culture and the Reshaping of Public Space in Egypt,” Theory, Culture & Society 18, no. 5 (October 1, 2001): 97–122, doi:10.1177/02632760122051986; Feyzan Erkip, “The Shopping Mall as an Emergent Public Space in Turkey,” Environment and Planning A 35, no. 6 (2003): 1073–1093, doi:10.1068/a35167; Deborah Davis and Yunxiang Yan, eds., “Of Hamburger and Social Space: Consuming McDonald’s in Beijing,” in The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Amendola, “La Città Vetrina. Dai Passages Parigini alla Città Griffata,” 13. On control mechanisms see, Jon Goss, “Once-Upon-a-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89, no. 1 (March 1, 1999): 45–75.
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city purified of unwanted elements, so it attempts to expunge disorder and conflict from the urban space. Both in its constant control of public space and in its design,87 the mall seems to impose its logic of order even beyond its borders. The non-place concept is therefore inadequate for understanding the spread of shopping malls, both because it underestimates their symbolic importance and because it does not take into account the structural element of control and security. A further question should be addressed at this point: if the shopping mall reproduces an ideal city, how is it that it takes on similar forms all over the world? That is: if the malls reproduce an ideal city, what kind of city is this ideal city? The issue of the generic city returns here once again, i.e. the issue of architectural uniformity across the world. In both the products they sell and the layout of their structures, there is an obvious reference to an international paradigm.88 Therefore, we must bear in mind the overall size which the malls make reference to, since these seem to play a central role in constructing the symbolic environment of the global cities.89 First of all, it is the very competition among cities that somehow favors the spread of models considered successful to differentiate each city from the oth ers in the international context. Moreover, a basic tendency “of cultural dis tinctiveness of the elites – Manuel Castells writes – in the information society is to create a lifestyle and to design spatial forms whose aim is to unify the symbolic environment of the elite around the world, thus superseding the his torical specificity of each locale.”90 The genericity of forms thus appears to be an expression of the logic of the space of flows, the dominant spatial logic of in present time. It presupposes a historical abstractness since it implies the reproducibility and applicability of the same architectural model anywhere on the globe and therefore regardless of historical and cultural specificities. Though it may seem hard to recognize, this historical abstractness is symboli cally permeated and follows the spatial logic of the space of flows. Its serves to indicate, for example, that that portion of city is plugged into the networks of the international economy. Yet, as we noted in the study of Bogotá, a shopping 87 88
See Nan Ellin, Architecture of Fear (New York: Princeton architectural press, 1997). See Abaza, “Shopping Malls, Consumer Culture and the Reshaping of Public Space in Egypt”; Erkip, “The Shopping Mall as an Emergent Public Space in Turkey”; Capron and Sabatier, “Identidades Urbanas Y Culturas Públicas En La Globalización.” 89 We can not help but be reminded that the reference to the transnational magnitude of trade is a common thread in the history of the new retail spaces. But while it is certainly true that this reference is a constant, it obviously does not mean that has the same impor tance in different periods and in relation to different sales areas. 90 Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 447.
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mall may also refer, either in its overall structure or in its internal environment, to the local context in which it is inserted. To the extent that the Koolhaas’ theorization of the generic city does not recognize its symbolic importance and limits itself to noting its morphological uniformity, it ends up becoming the apology of the socially dominant spatial logic. We must bear in mind the relationship between the space of flows and the generic city in order to recognize how its forms refer to the life, work and consumption of the dominant global elites.91 The driving force of this logic is derived in fact, from the world market, as well as from the need for distinctive ness that it expresses: the consequences on the space of global economic pro cesses are certainly not neutral. As representation, architecture is therefore not impartial, not just generic, but carries with it an idea of the city. Architecture “gives form to an idea of habitable space, and is therefore the representation of a political idea of the city.”92 It is also and always urban ideology,93 and not recognizing this leads to theorizing an apology for what exists as the only via ble option. Ilardi argues: “Thus what Koolhaas expresses is the new dominant ideology: the end of history, the subsumption of places in the space of flows, flight from historically rooted societies.”94 So what does it mean to say that malls in part express the generic city? It means first of all that they adopt the same forms all over the world, but also that these forms have a specific meaning and function. Therefore, in shopping malls the reference to the global environment, obtained through goods and services in addition to its external and internal form socializes the consumer to the new economic world order.95 The socializing and meeting in the malls, which the South American authors speak of, take place in this configured set ting, and to ignore it leads to an underestimation of its real symbolic impact. The genericity of forms and the correlated irrelevance of context convey the idea that the only valid symbolic reference must be consistent with the market. It is particularly useful to re-examine, in this regard, the concept of common cultural good. Precisely because shopping malls become a space also devoted to meeting and socializing, they can be defined as a common cultural good.96 91 Paone, Città in frantumi, 47. 92 Pier Vittorio Aureli and Gabriele Mastrigli, “Con Le Armi Della Teoria. Architettura Come Progetto Politico,” Gomorra 12 (2007). 93 Ibid. 94 Ilardi, Il tramonto dei non luoghi, 108. 95 Massimo Ilardi, “La politica, il mercato, l’individuo ovvero la chiacchiera, l’ordine, la dis truzione,” in Attraversamenti: i nuovi territori dello spazio pubblico, ed. Paolo Desideri and Massimo Ilardi (Genova: Costa & Nolan, 1997), 11. 96 See above.
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This association seems at the very least superficial. Yet it is from this position that we can identify the theoretical elements which indicate shopping malls as a natural replacement for the city square in contemporary society. Under the name of the common good a wide range of goods may be included, both tan gible and intangible, to the point that there is no agreement on the same defi nition of the common good.97 What is of particular interest, of course, is the definition of urban space as a common good, an issue closely linked to the metropolis. Without going into the details of a still open debate I wish to sim ply point out that the legal status of a common good is constructed indiffer ently to membership type, based on whether a member is an individual or a public institution. Indeed, “commons” have been defined precisely as “the opposite of property.”98 Consequently, a space can in principle be considered a common good regardless of property ownership, whether private or public. What defines it, is its end use, and therefore its common purpose. It seems, therefore, that it is precisely in disregard of property that Ines Cornejo Portugal gives the mall the status of a common good. Her argument, even if she does not put it in these terms, seems to be based on the idea that the mere collective, public use of malls, or the practices of appropriation of that space, are suffi cient to connote them as a common good regardless of their private owner ship. I wish to note, however, that mere collective use and irrelevance in regard to property ownership are not enough to connote them as a common good. Following Maria Rosaria Marella’s proposal,99 we can identify other essential features besides indifference to the legal regime of property: first, the removal of that good from the mechanisms of the competitive market; second, a circular, constitutive relationship between the good and the community to which it refers; third, a good in order to be labeled “common” must be said to entail some form of collective, participatory management. It seems evident at this point that malls cannot in any way possess all these features. Although, as 97
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See Maria Rosaria Marella, ed., Oltre il pubblico e il privato: per un diritto dei beni comuni (Verona: Ombre corte, 2012); Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Ugo Mattei, Beni comuni: un manifesto (Roma: Laterza, 2011); Stefano Rodotà, Il diritto di avere diritti (Roma: Laterza, 2012); Stefano Rodotà, Il terribile diritto: studi sulla proprietà privata (Bologna: Il mulino, 1990); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). Stefano Rodotà, “Beni comuni: una strategia globale contro lo human divide,” in Oltre il pubblico e il privato: per un diritto dei beni comuni, ed. Maria Rosaria Marella (Verona: Ombre corte, 2012), 319. Maria Rosaria Marella, “La Difesa dell’Urban Commons,” in Oltre il pubblico e il privato: per un diritto dei beni comuni, ed. Maria Rosaria Marella (Verona: Ombre corte, 2012), 188.
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e vident in my analysis of malls in Bogotá, malls play a key role in socialization and in the formation of collective representations, they not only are profit- making but they also have a markedly problematic relationship with their social groups of reference. They cannot be managed collectively and in a participatory manner. Any theorization that sees in malls the new public square of postmod ern society cannot ignore the fact that these spaces, are private and therefore, “have the power of jus exludendi alios,”100 which in most cases is exercised pas sively through the indirect exclusion of persons who are marginal or perceived as undesirable (as much by the mall’s owners as by its users). Introducing the problem of space as a common good has, however, served to frame the issue of privatization of urban space in a broader context. Thinking of the urban space as commons enables us to get beyond the question of their personal ownership in order to focus on local government policies, whether these policies are imple mented by a private entity or a public body, or, as it is increasingly the case, in partnership between the two.101 Bogotá’s pot survey revealed the existence of a coordinated action between the public and private entities in structuring the space. Therefore, the issue of the privatization of urban space in relation to the malls does not concern just the fact that functions which once were the respon sibility of traditional public spaces, are now being transferred to spaces of con sumption but what appears much more worrisome, the tendency to regulate public space according to the same logic of the spaces of consumption. For this very reason, dwelling on assigned use of space enables us to focus on the control practices over an area regardless of the authority that exercises them. Leonardo Chiesi and Paolo Costa suggest a particularly interesting interpre tation of malls.102 They attempt to identify what specific kinds of shopping malls exhibit the substantial traits of a public space. A perspective which cir cumvents the problem of the ownership of these spaces to verify instead the effective compliance with certain criteria, and which for this reason can be compared to the study of space as a common good. Chielsi and Costa identify two essential elements a space must have in order to be defined as public: open access and indeterminacy.103 A space so configured must therefore be freely accessible by all and, simultaneously, its structure must be the result of the sedimentation of past interactions and the free play of present ones. This 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., 187. 102 Leonardo Chiesi and Paolo Costa, “La rivincita dello spazio pubblico. Scenari delle nuove forme del commercio urbano,” in La città vetrina: i luoghi del commercio e le nuove forme del consumo, ed. Giandomenico Amendola (Napoli: Liguori, 2006). 103 Ibid., 84.
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subdivision makes it possible to identify two intermediate forms with respect to private and public spaces: a pseudo-public space, which in its forms repro duces urban spaces but which allows neither free access nor indeterminacy (typically the enclosed space of a shopping mall) and a controlled public space, which must be open and integrated with the surrounding urban fabric, but which limits eligible actions through control by an authority.104 The use of these categories explains more incisively the total convergence of the practices of territorial management by public authorities and by the private sector. A management of the space that may be identical irrespective of whether the owner is individual or institutional.105 I am not, however, in agreement with Leonardo Chiesi and Paolo Costa when they see in the shopping malls’ renewed interest in the public sector a kind of return of the centrality of public space. The results of their analysis show in fact that the maximum of indeterminacy that a shopping mall106 can offer is a controlled public space, which by the authors’ own admission does not allow any practice that may inhibits consumption.107 In this regard it seems very useful to briefly recall Anne Bottompley’s108 reflections on shopping malls. Even in this case, the definition of a space as “public” disregards legal ownership and is based instead on the practices (and therefore the use) that are possible in that space. Her reflection follows the definition of commons, by which an urban space, in order to be termed common, must guarantee public access and indeterminacy of practices. But 104 See, Ibid., 90. 105 A particularly significant case in point is provided by the festival marketplace, special urban redevelopment operations through commerce of depressed areas. The area of the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, for example, although formally publicly owned, is managed by the company that financed the renovation. A company that not only takes care of organizing a series of events designed to restore the life of the metropolis, and produce a sort of controlled improvisation within these spaces, but that also guarantees the security of the area through a private police force with the power to stop and arrest. See Chiesi and Costa, “La rivincita dello spazio pubblico. Scenari delle nuove forme del commercio urbano.” 106 The authors refer to the stealth malls, actual malls which however do not appear as such because they have broken down the barriers that separate them from the urban fabric on which they sit. They are called stealth because their integration in the urban space is so carefully contrived that it is difficult for its patrons to recognize it as a single commercial structure. The space between the shops is freely accessible, even in the closing hours of the center, and allows pathways independent of consumption, and yet it is a controlled public space (in this case on privately owned property). See Ibid. 107 Ibid., 91. 108 Bottomley, “A Trip to the Mall. Revisiting the Public/private Divide.”
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not only that as she argues, since “it is not only access to streets and squares which is important, but specifically access to significant sites, often ones which symbolically represent government or are centrally located.”109 Therefore, the author points out, it is not only access to a certain place that is relevant, but also the possibility of free circulation and association in spaces that are some how symbolically central, for their political or more generally social signifi cance. Hence, in order for a space to be thought of as commons it must be, at least potentially, a place for the expression of dissent even in its most confron tational forms. She argues: I mean this in two ways. First, that they may provide the space (literally and figuratively) for active political dissent and second, rather differently, they may represent (literally and figuratively) activities viewed by the establishment as irresponsible and disorderly.110 By means of these reflections both the issue of the privatization of public space and that of the domestication of spaces can be addressed from a single perspective.111 Again, control practices that ensure safety and order are imple mented in a sort of partnership between the public authorities and the private sector. Shopping malls are seen, from a symbolic rather than a chronological point of view, as the first quasi-public space that has dictated expectations and organizational arrangements to public spaces, a kind of hinge between private and public space.112 In this sense, Anne Bottompley refers to the “figure” of the mall not only in relation to shopping malls but also as vector of a change in the attitudes and expectations that occur in public spaces. Conclusion Let’s briefly summarize the route taken so far. The concepts of non-place and generic city have proven unsatisfactory for understanding the importance that 109 Ibid., 69. 110 Ibid., 72. 111 Peter Jackson, “Domesticating the Street: The Contested Spaces of the High Street and the Mall,” in Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space, ed. Nicholas Fyfe (London ; New York: Routledge, 1998); Sonia Paone, Città nel disordine: marginalità, sorveglianza, controllo (Pisa: ets, 2012). 112 “the mall operated as a kind of ‘hinge’ between ‘public’ and ‘private’ space, an historical and geographical ‘threshold’ between the two terrains, the first ‘quasi- public’ space”, Bottomley, “A Trip to the Mall. Revisiting the Public/private Divide,” 91.
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malls have assumed in Bogota. The first ignores the symbolic dimension of these commercial spaces and underestimates the needs of safety and control that should be responded to. The second assumes a historical abstraction and refers to the world market as the only valid symbolic point of contact. Must we therefore resign ourselves to the idea that the shopping mall is the public square of contemporary society? To problematize this assumption I decided to examine those theoretical directions that look to urban space as a whole and to realized and realizable concrete practices. Examination of urban space through the perspective of common goods concedes undeniable theoretical advantages because in doing so one avoids seeing the private and the public as two separate and opposite spheres. Irrespective of property rights, it helps obviate two opposite dangers. On the one hand, there is always the risk of mak ing a sort of apology for shopping malls and so declaring these areas as natural substitutes for the public square, considered by now as unlivable, unsafe and unglamorous. On the other hand – and here we come to the second risk – malls cannot be criticized on the basis of an idealized view of traditional public spaces, an approach which does not grasp the symbolic significance of the malls and ends up by labeling them as inhuman spaces where one cannot lead an authentic life. This criticism also does not allow us to see that the methods of management of public and private spaces are gradually converging. Thus this analysis enabled me to focus on what distinguishes the mall space from urban areas. As David Harvey says, the central issue is not the commons in themselves but the mode of production, management and control of the com mons: the issue, that is, of who appropriates them and for what purpose.113 Malls can also perform social functions, such as socializing, or functions of cultural promotion, but only to the extent that they do not enter into conflict with profit making. While it is true that shopping malls are also meeting spaces, it is also true that these cannot but produce a form of relating that never becomes political; that is they host a collective subject that recalls the image of the swarm.114 According to Bauman, in our society of consumers the swarm is replacing the group. In a swarm there is no cooperation. “The seductive power of shifting targets”115 is a sufficient rule to coordinate its movements: “Theirs is (to continue revising Durkheim) but a ‘mechanical solidarity’ – each unit 113 David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (New York: Verso, 2012). 114 Zygmunt Bauman, “Exit Homo Politicus, Enter Homo Consumens,” in Citizenship and Consumption, ed. Kate Soper and Frank Trentmann (Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 115 Ibid., 150.
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re-enacting the moves made by any other while performing the whole of the job, from beginning to end and in all its parts, alone (in the case of consuming swarms, the job so performed is the job of consuming).”116 Regardless of whether the title of ownership of a space is public or private, to the extent that the aim of the space is profit making, all activities and persons that impede its realization are bound to be excluded from that space. Bibliography Abaza, M. “Shopping Malls, Consumer Culture and the Reshaping of Public Space in Egypt.” Theory, Culture & Society 18, no. 5 (October 1, 2001): 97–122. doi:10.1177/ 02632760122051986. Agier, Michel. “La Ville Nue. Des Marges de l’Urbain Aux Terrains de l’Humanitaire.” Annales de la Recherche Urbaine 93 (March 1, 2003). ———. “Lo Spettro della Città Nuda.” Africa e Mediterraneo 2 (1998). Amendola, Giandomenico. La città postmoderna: magie e paure della metropoli con temporanea. Roma: Laterza, 2008. ———. “La Città Vetrina. Dai Passages Parigini alla Città Griffata.” In La città vetrina: i luoghi del commercio e le nuove forme del consumo, edited by Giandomenico Amendola. Napoli: Liguori, 2006. Augé, Marc. Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London; New York: Verso, 1995. ———. “Preface to Nonluoghi.” In Nonluoghi: introduzione a una antropologia della surmodernità. Milano: Eleuthera, 2009. ———. The war of dreams: studies in ethno fiction. London: Pluto, 1999. Aureli, Pier Vittorio, and Gabriele Mastrigli. “Con Le Armi Della Teoria. Architettura Come Progetto Politico.” Gomorra 12 (2007). Bauman, Zygmunt. “Exit Homo Politicus, Enter Homo Consumens.” In Citizenship and Consumption, edited by Kate Soper and Frank Trentmann. Basingstoke [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Borja, Jordi, and Manuel Castells. Local and Global: the Management of Cities in the Information Age. London: Earthscan Publications, 1997. Borja, Jordi, and Zaida Muxí. El espacio público: ciudad y ciudadanía. Madrid: Electa España, 2003. Bottomley, Anne. “A Trip to the Mall. Revisiting the Public/private Divide.” In Feminist Perspectives on Land Law, edited by Hilary Lim and Anne Bottomley. Oxon; New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007. 116 Ibid.
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Capron, Guénola, and Bruno Sabatier. “Identidades Urbanas Y Culturas Públicas En La Globalización: Centros Comerciales Paisajísticos En Río de Janeiro Y México.” Alteridades 17, no. 33 (2007): 87–97. Castells, Manuel. “Preface to the 2010 Edition of The Rise of the Network Society.” In The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. Oxford; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000a. ———. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000b. Cavazza, Stefano, and Emanuela Scarpellini. Il secolo dei consumi: dinamiche sociali nell’Europa del Novecento. Roma: Carocci, 2006. Chiesi, Leonardo, and Paolo Costa. “La rivincita dello spazio pubblico. Scenari delle nuove forme del commercio urbano.” In La città vetrina: i luoghi del commercio e le nuove forme del consumo, edited by Giandomenico Amendola. Napoli: Liguori, 2006. Cornejo Portugal, Inés. “El Centro Comercial Desde La Comunicación Y La Cultura. Un Modelo Analítico Para Su Estudio.” Convergencia Revista de Ciencias Sociales, no. 40 (2006a). ———. “El Centro Comercial: Un Espacio Simbólico Urbano Más Allá Del Lugar común1.” UNIrevista 1, no. 3 (2006b). ———. “En Centro Santa Fe: Vitrinear, Olisquear, Toquetear, Fisgonear…” Alteridades 17, no. 33 (2007): 77–85. Cornejo Portugal Inés, and Elizabeth Bellon Cárdenas. “Centro Santa Fe: ¿la Nueva Ciudad de México?” Revista Iberoamericana de Comunicación 1 (2001). ———. “Prácticas Culturales de Apropiación Simbólica en el Centro Comercial Santa Fe.” Convergencia Revista de Ciencias Sociales 0, no. 24 (January 1, 2001). Crawford, Margaret. “The World in a Shopping Mall.” In Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, edited by Michael Sorkin. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. Davis, Deborah, and Yunxiang Yan, eds. “Of Hamburger and Social Space: Consuming McDonald’s in Beijing.” In The Consumer Revolution in Urban China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Desideri, Paolo. “Tra Luoghi e Iperluoghi.” In Attraversamenti: i nuovi territori dello spazio pubblico, edited by Paolo Desideri and Massimo Ilardi. Genova: Costa & Nolan, 1997. Distrital Decree, 2000. Decreto 619 de 2000, Régimen Legal de Bogotá, D.C., accessed October 22, 2014, www.alcaldiabogota.gov.co/sisjur/normas/Norma1 .jsp?i=3769. Ellin, Nan. Architecture of Fear. New York: Princeton architectural press, 1997. Erkip, Feyzan. “The Shopping Mall as an Emergent Public Space in Turkey.” Environment and Planning A 35, no. 6 (2003): 1073–1093. doi:10.1068/a35167. Escobar González, Luis Fernando. Ciudad y Arquitectura Urbana en Colombia 1980–2010. Medellín, Colombia: Editorial Universidad de Antioquia, 2010.
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Fainstein, Susan S, Ian Gordon, and Michael Harloe. Divided Cities: New York & London in the Contemporary World. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992. Friedmann, John. “The World City Hypothesis.” Development and Change 17, no. 1 (1986): 69–83. Goss, Jon. “Once-Upon-a-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89, no. 1 (March 1, 1999): 45–75. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New York: Verso, 2012. Ilardi, Massimo. Il tramonto dei non luoghi: fronti e frontiere dello spazio metropoli tano. Roma: Meltemi, 2007. ———. “La politica, il mercato, l’individuo ovvero la chiacchiera, l’ordine, la distruzi one.” In Attraversamenti: i nuovi territori dello spazio pubblico, edited by Paolo Desideri and Massimo Ilardi. Genova: Costa & Nolan, 1997. Jackson, Peter. “Domesticating the Street: The Contested Spaces of the High Street and the Mall.” In Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space, edited by Nicholas Fyfe. London ; New York: Routledge, 1998. Koolhaas, Rem. “La Città Generica.” Domus 791, no. 791 (1997). Lulle, Thierry. “Bogotá: los costos laissez-faire.” In Metrópolis en Movimiento: una Comparación Internacional, edited by Françoise Dureau, Véronique Dupont, Éva Lelièvre, Jean-Pierre Lévy, and Thierry Lulle. Alfaomega, 2002. ———. “Los retratos de ciudad y la ‘estetización’ del patrimonio. Bogotá durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX.” In Construcción de lugares-patrimonio: el centro histórico y el humedal de Córdoba en Bogotá, edited by Adriana Párias Durán and Dolly Cristina Palacio Tamayo. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano para el Desarrollo de la Ciencia, COLCIENCIAS : Universidad Externado de Colombia, 2006. Lulle, Thierry, and Catherine Paquette. “Los Grandes Centros Comerciales Y La Planificación Urbana.” Estudios Demograficos Y Urbanos 22, no. 2 (2007). Marella, Maria Rosaria. “La Difesa dell’Urban Commons.” In Oltre il pubblico e il privato: per un diritto dei beni comuni, edited by Maria Rosaria Marella. Verona: Ombre corte, 2012a. ———., ed. Oltre il pubblico e il privato: per un diritto dei beni comuni. Verona: Ombre corte, 2012b. Mattei, Ugo. Beni comuni: un manifesto. Roma: Laterza, 2011. Mollenkopf, John H, and Manuel Castells. Dual City: Restructuring New York. New York: Russell Sage, 1991. Müller, Jan Marco. “Grandes Centros Comerciales Y Recreacionales En Santafé de Bogota.” Perspectiva Geográfica 3 (1998).
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Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Palacios, Marco. Entre la legitimidad y la violencia: Colombia 1875–1994. Santafé de Bogotá, Colombia: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1995. Paone, Sonia. Città in frantumi: sicurezza, emergenza e produzione dello spazio. Milano: F. Angeli, 2008. ———. Città nel disordine: marginalità, sorveglianza, controllo. Pisa: ETS, 2012. Paquette, Catherine. “Comercio y Planificación Urbana. Las Nuevas Grandes Centralidades Comerciales en los Planes de Desarrollo Urbano de la Ciudad de México.” Trace. Travaux et recherches dans les Amériques du Centre, no. 51 (June 30, 2007): 44–55. Petrillo, Agostino. “Megalopoli.” Treccani, l’Enciclopedia Italiana. Enciclopedia Del Novecento, III. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2004. ———. “Ombre del comune: l’urbano tra produzione collettiva e spossessamento.” In Oltre il pubblico e il privato: per un diritto dei beni comuni, edited by Maria Rosaria Marella. Verona: Ombre corte, 2012. ———. Peripherein: pensare diversamente la periferia. Milano, Italy: FrancoAngeli, 2013. ———. Villaggi, città, megalopoli. Roma: Carocci, 2006. P.J. Taylor, G. Catalano, and D.R.F. Walker. “Exploratory Analysis of the World City Network.” Urban Studies 39, no. 13 (2002): 2377–2394. Ponzi, Mauro, and Dario Gentili, eds. Soglie: per una nuova teoria dello spazio. Milano: Mimesis, 2012. Ricci, Maria Grazia. “Spazio e memoria. Luoghi, non-luoghi, lieux de mémoire.” In Alla ricerca della città futura: l’ambiente nella dimensione urbana, edited by Sonia Paone. Pisa: ETS, 2007. Rodotà, Stefano. “Beni comuni: una strategia globale contro lo human divide.” In Oltre il pubblico e il privato: per un diritto dei beni comuni, edited by Maria Rosaria Marella. Verona: Ombre corte, 2012a. ———. Il diritto di avere diritti. Roma: Laterza, 2012b. ———. Il terribile diritto: studi sulla proprietà privata. Bologna: Il mulino, 1990. Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture History, Theory and Politics. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2007. ———. Consumo, cultura e società. Bologna: Il mulino, 2004. Sassen, Saskia. Cities in a World Economy. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2000. ———. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. Secreteria Distratal de Planeación, Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá. “Abc Del POT de Bogotá,” 2009. http://www.sdp.gov.co/portal/page/portal/PortalSDP/POT.
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Silva Téllez Armando. Bogotá imaginada. Bogotá: Convenio Andŕes Bello : Universidad Nacional de Colombia : Taurus, 2003. ———. Imaginarios urbanos. 5th ed. Bogotá: Arango Editores, 2006. Suárez Rodríguez, Maurix Augusto Suárez. “La Proliferación de Centros Comerciales En Bogotá, Colombia.” Accessed February 7, 2014. http://egal2009.easyplanners .info/area05/5705_Suarez_Maurix.docx. Van Der Hammen, María Clara, Thierry Lulle, and Dolly Cristina Palacio. “La Construcción Del Patrimonio Como Lugar: Un Estudio de Caso En Bogotá.” Antipoda. Revista de Antropología Y Arqueología, no. 8 (2009): 61–85. Webber, Melvin M. “The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm.” In Explorations into Urban Structure, edited by Melvin M Webber. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964. Weber, Max. The City. New York, N.Y.: Free Press, 1958. Zukin, Sharon, and Jennifer Smith Maguire. “Consumers and Consumption.” Annual review of sociology 30 (2004): 173.
chapter 13
Trafficking Gypsiness in the 21st Century Mihaela Moscaliuc* They make for good chills and thrills in movies and romance novels, easy morals in children’s literature, and for quick affairs with the exotic in music and poetry. We live vicariously through the dramas of their presumed uprootedness, subversive lawlessness, and communion with the spirits, and we envy their presumed nonchalance and non-normative sexuality. They fascinate us, they intrigue us, they unsettle us, and they sublimate our fears; they feed our romantic reveries as well as our personal and national fantasies, and they have been doing it for hundreds of years, across cultures and continents. They enter our consciousness when we are swindled or gypped, gypsy cabs are illegal, the gypsy moth is parasitical, and “Spiteful Gypsy” is expected to tap into its magical powers at the Monmouth Racetrack (in New Jersey) and make a fortune for his owner. Gypsies and their culture have been reduced to metaphor, punch-line, or easy moral. Centuries of commodification of the culture associated with the Roma (the name by which people generally known as “Gypsies” prefer to be called) has widened the gap between the realities of their historical presence and their presence in the Western imaginary. Exonymic constructions of their identity via exoticization, mystification, and reification have engendered a fairly unique, albeit disturbing situation; while the opening of borders and markets in Europe has faced Roma, who remain the most impoverished minority in Europe (despite the recent emergence of a fairly small class of nouveau rich), with new sets of challenges and discriminatory practices, the expedient circulation, via social media and other global means of dissemination of cultural tropes associated with “gypsiness,” has turned them into a global commodity and brand name. The relentless exploitation of this culture, primarily via projective identification, has been made possible in large part by this minority’s lack of political and social agency and their position of marginality within various host countries or nation states and, more recently, within a Europe that that has reframed its p olitics and policies on borders in ways that would make Roma, in theory alone, unfortunately, a perfect contender to transnational status. Common imputations against Roma are rooted in the very conditions of marginality to which they have been relegated for centuries, which are also the conditions of marginality that have made them easy fodder for our fantasies. * Monmouth University, usa. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004272835_015
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In Peter Boyer’s 2006 New Yorker article “Hollywood Heresy,” Gypsy women make the list of “assertive women,” among other professionals and hobbyists. “Assertive women are female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers.”1 In music, literature, and journalism, the “Gypsy” is transmogrified into “gypsy eyes,” “gypsy heart,” “gypsy desire,” and an abundance of other reductive modifiers that pepper high and low discourses in metonymic or adjectival form. Most often, such expressions are employed by non-Roma speakers as self-descriptors; the appropriation of “gypsyness” means to endow the appropriators with some aura of mystery, non-conformity, and alluring “otherness.” In The New York Times (December 15, 2013), in an op-ed essay, “First Encounter with the Enemy,” prose writer Edith Pearlman describes a double date from her college years. In Pearlman’s words, Mara, the other girl, “was beautiful, I allowed, in a dark-browed way. To me she looked like a Gypsy thief, and she wore a cape to complete the image. Her abundant hair took up more room than it seemed legal.”2 Post-communist Romanian Prime Minister Petre Roman’s denigration of Roma, on prime time television, as “leaders of prostitutes, and the world of the underground”3 and former Romanian President Băsescu’s use of “stinking gypsy” to refer to a journalist from an oppositional tv channel might be more shocking yet less surprising than Pearlman’s remark, given the institutionalized pervasiveness of anti-Roma sentiments in Eastern Europe but the cautious politics Americans in general and reputable magazines such as the New York Times in particular exercise when referencing race and ethnicity. Replace the adjectival “gypsy” with an adjective derived from the name of any other ethnic group, and the discomfort will be obvious. Perlman’s image of a “Gypsy thief” seems to be rooted in outdated book illustrations and cinematic representations of robbers (“a cape to complete the image”?); in fact, as the further description of Mara intimates, what Perlman identifies with “gypsiness” is at once more complicated and more simple, a mélange of nonconformism, mysteriousness, and discreet “otherness.” The August 1996 issue of Disney Adventures, Magazine for Kids, warns of a condition called “gypsy-itis,” described as “an urge to run away from it all and dance among the dandelions,” and choosing to be “footloose and fancy-free”
1 Peter Boyer, “Hollywood Heresy.” The New Yorker, May 22, 2006, 34. 2 Edith Pearlman, “First Encounter with the Enemy.” New York Times, December 15 (2013): sr 9. 3 Dan Pavel “Wanderers: Romani’s Hidden Victims.” Diane Tong, Ed. Gypsies. An Inter disciplinary Reader (New York: Garland, 1998), 72.
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instead of a normal “buckle-down, rules-and-regulations kinda person.”4 The “disease” is rooted in the convenient and widely disseminated assumption that duty and responsibility are absent from the Romani character, just as they are absent from Romani language, a myth dispelled with linguistic evidence by Roma scholars, including Ian Hancock.5 Another form of anthimeria is the verbification of the word “gypsy,” as illustrated, for instance, in “Varadero en Alba,” a poem from City of a Hundred Fires (1998), by 2013 inaugural poet Richard Blanco, “We gypsy through the island’s north ridge.”6 Interestingly, “gypsy” appears also in poet Virgil Suarez’s endorsement of Blanco’s collection. He writes, “[T]ese poems are more than gems, they are the truth not only about the Cuban-American experience, but of our collective experience in the United States, a beautiful land of gypsies,” and though the use of “gypsies” means to be complimentary (despite the de-capitalization) and draw on shared assumptions about Roma’s migratory experiences to underscore the universality of the immigration experience in the United States and to iterate the notion of America as a nation of immigrants, the collocation of “gypsies” and “America” does little more than exoticize the American psychic landscape and (figuratively) divest a people (Roma) of the ownership of their own name. Does the logic of the metaphor by which Gypsies and Americans become interchangeable warrant the reversal? In this case, the people known as “Gypsies” (the tenor of the metaphor) could be explained or defined by comparing them to Americans (the vehicle of the metaphor). However, the comparison stops short. Beyond the poetry of migration and reinvention lie two irreconcilable realities. If such realities intersect, it is because Roma’s current situation in Europe recalls that of African Americans in 19th and early 20th century America, when conceiving of them as infantile in character and intellect, wired toward violence and sexual proclivity, and idle, helped justify oppression and discrimination. In recent years, the fashion industry too has made “gypsiness” integral to its visions, capitalizing on its evocative associations with nomadism, bordercrossing, and other tropes that signify the movement toward globalization and the emergence of identities dressed to fit and embody its spirit. Many top designers (see, for instance, Prada, Ralph Lauren, Emilio Pucci, Salvadore Ferragamo, Rina Dhaka, Miki Fukai, John Galliano, Barbara Fialho) have ‘incorporated’ 4 Ian Hancock, “Duty and Beauty, Possession and Truth: ‘Lexical Impoverishment’ as Control” in Gypsies. An Interdisciplinary Reader, Diane Tong, Ed. (New York: Garland, 1998), 117. 5 Ibid. 6 Richard Blanco, “Varadero en Alba” in City of a Hundred Fires (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 39.
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them into their 2011–2013 collections, in looks that boast garish colors and expensive fabrics and exude faux disinterest and casualness. Fashion royalties themselves – such as the Italian Margherita Missoni – have used them as inspiration for their own wedding gowns. However, fashion industry’s interest in “gypsiness” is nothing new. The 1960s counter-culture co-opted it by mythologizing its power and seeking identification with it. In 1969, Diana Vreeland, the legendary Vogue editor, wrote in a memo: “I think that we can consider that the gypsy look has now gotten into the bloodstream of most people who are interested in fashion. The look has languor. The hair is crazily wonderful. The girls and boys of today really are gypsies. They are not competitive. They amuse themselves in their own way and believe in the physical beauty of each other. Let us keep at this gypsy theme and carry it on into 1970.”7 And so they did. Almost three and a half decades later, the “gypsy theme” is still in vogue, if slightly “re-purposed.” “Find out what it takes to be a true gypsy,” urges a 2012 Bloomingdale’s advertisement in the New York Times, followed by “Are you a gypset? Part Gypsy, part Jet Set, all chic?” Bloomingdale’s invites us to “become a devotee of nomadic elegance” and learn how to become gypsetters by purchasing Julia Chaplin’s guide, Gypset Style. According to Chaplin, “gypset” is a portmanteau word: “the wiles of a gypsy mixed with the sophistication of the jet set”; as an adjective, it means, “characterized by a fashionable exoticism and down to earth ease.”8 I cannot help but wonder if a gypsetter happening to prowl the beach of Torregaveta, north of Naples, on July 20, 2008, would have responded differently to the drowning of the two Roma children (an eleven and a twelve-year-old) whose bodies were subsequently left lying on the beach just meters away from sunbathers relaxing or playing ball, unperturbed. However, if doing gypsyness in style is not our cup of tea, we can always get a hefty dose of lowly gypsyness through the The Learning Channel’s reality shows “My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding” and its spin-off “Gypsy Sisters,” whose grotesque characters offer a most entertaining encounter with irresistible abjection in the form of hyperbolic gaudiness, violence, ignorance, and corroboration of every imaginable Gypsy stereotype and cliché. It is not that the characters who populate these shows or the immensely popular British “Big Fat Gypsy Weddings,” on which the American one was modeled, do not have counterparts in real life; they surely do, just as Sue Ellen of Dallas must have had sources of inspirations on the ranches of Texas, though the Romanian communist regime’s ban on other shows depicting American life turned her, 7 Diana Vreeland, “Memos from d.v.” The New Yorker, September 17, 2001, 74. 8 See publisher’s website for Julia Chaplin’s Gypset Style (Assouline Publishing, 2009), www .assouline.com/9781614280620, accessed October 2013.
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in the minds of millions of Romanians (including myself), into a prototype of American-ness. Similarly, it is the lack of alternative representations of Roma that makes these shows particularly harmful. We give ourselves permission to laugh at a reality show such as “Jersey Shore” because we recognize in it, at least at some level, the parodic mode, the distorted or truncated reality it concerns itself with. As Aniko Imre points out in “Race Without Empire: PostSocialist Neoliberalism on Reality tv,” “reality formats provide the rawest and most unabashed outlet for racist and sexist views, precisely because they are not deemed worthy of critical and political attention.”9 “American Gypsies,” another show that aired in 2012, this time on the National Geographic Channel, did little to educate or counter the cheap thrills of the tlc shows. The American Roma family it featured, the Johns, owned, not surprisingly, a chain of psychic healing shops, engaged in much yelling, obsessed over their teenage daughters’ virginity, and distrusted outsiders. To the extent to which popular shows pro duce culture, their proliferation and amplification of stereotypes, when such stereotypes are historically de-contextualized, can be particularly damaging. As consumers of culture, we customarily cannibalize the narratives we are served without questioning why and how they are produced, what purpose they serve, and how we might find ourselves replicating them in non-representational situations (i.e. in the context of real life). In a brief examination of Roma media celebrity in the New Europe, Imre notes that commercial television networks have been quick to cash in on Roma star power. On talk shows they are featured as representatives of the poor, uneducated underclass, while their stardom is exploited for national interests. Here, reality shows home in on an aspect of Roma culture that has functioned, for centuries, as cultural capital: their music. Take, for instance, reality shows featuring Roma musicians Vali Vijeile (originally, Valentin Rusu), a popular Romanian manele singer whose “The Adventures of the Vijelie Family” aired on the Romanian channel Prima tv, or Győző Gáspár and “The Győzike Show,” aired by Hungary’s most successful commercial channel, rtl Klub. The Bulgarian chalga/pop-folk singer Vasil Troyanov Boyanov, known as Azis, a memorable contender of Eurovision 2006, is a case in point. He is a gay Roma drag queen with trans-Balkan appeal, famed among gay and straight, and Roma and non-Roma alike, and whose stardom was augmented by his political visibility. His participation in the Bulgarian vip Big Brother, alongside his husband, received much play, as did his 2005 running for Parliament as a 9 Aniko Imre, “Race Without Empire: Post-Socialist Neoliberalism on Reality tv.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2014.
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representative of the Evroroma (Euroroma) party.”10 Imre points out that responses to these shows reveal profound anxieties about what constitutes the national family and its allegorical extension, the post-socialist nation. The love-hate, or, rather, love-to-hate relationship that audiences express toward these shows indicates that Roma celebrity exposes the decline of long-held distinctions between high and popular culture, the national majority and the Roma, as well as national and global cultures in the New Europe. At the same time, the Roma remain suspended in political ambivalence on the shared turf between transnational media corporations and the nation-state, poised between empowerment and exploitation by both sides.11 Though such popular and official visibility could eventually lead to other means of providing political representation and agency to the Roma, this commodification of culture recalls old communist practices that kept the Roma locked in a position of subalternity while capitalizing on the artistic potential to showcase tolerance toward such a “problematic” minority. In the case of Romania, for instance, Roma were cast as representatives of some intrinsic spirituality, some quintessentially Romanian version of the Spanish duende,12 though they remained outsiders to the nation’s imagined community and discursive identity. Forced socio-economic assimilation was conducted with complete disregard for the cultural traditions and customs of the Roma, who were denounced as parasitic, recalcitrant, and uneducable. At the same time, their musical talent featured prominently in the regime’s attempts to promote Romania’s image abroad. Furthermore, many Roma musicians were co-opted by the regime to play in national ensembles and “contribute” their virtuosity to Romanian popular/folk music. Nowadays, with the emergence of a tourism industry that caters unabashedly to foreigners’ desire for experiences that provide quick immersions into the national culture and its exotic otherness (seen, for instance, in the “Dracula-zation” of Romania), Gypsy music has become an important staple. No organized tour is complete without at least 10 Aniko Imre, “Gypsy Stars in the New Europe.” June 12, 2009. Flow tv. 11 Ibid. 12 In his “Theory and Play of Duende,” Frederico García Lorca cites Goethe’s comment on Paganini to convey the essence of duende: “A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.” (tr. A.S. Kline, 2007, www.poetryintranlsation.com/PITBR /SpanishLorcaDuende.htm).
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one “romantic” dinner that features a band of Roma musicians. It does not surprise that music is the most commodified and most trafficked “ingredient” of Roma culture, since the most enduring stereotypes and the most common cultural representations (in art, literature, cinematography) center around the figure of Roma musicians and (accompanying) dancers, and given the enormous influence their music has exercised over classical and contemporary musicians and genres, from Liszt, Bizet, Brahms, Dvořák, Verdi, Rachmaninov, and BartÓk, to flamenco, klezmer, jazz, and punk rock. In his introduction to The Roads of the Roma (1998), a volume of poetry and prose written by Roma, many of them of East-Central European origin, Hancock quotes from an advertisement that proudly announces a Roma dance and music show in New York: the Gypsies “constitute a people with no written history, whose roots are shrouded in mystery and yet whose culture has had a profound effect throughout the world.”13 While we have been ready to acknowledge the “profound effect” Gypsy music has had on the world, one question we seem to keep evading is the effect mythologizing this people’s historical presence (by glamorizing, for instance, the mysterious roots), no matter how well intended, has had upon the Roma. In a 2001 New York Times review of a “Gypsy music” concert, Michael Beckerman warns against the “slippery and even dangerous problems that arise when we begin to articulate issues of ethnicity” and suggests that promoting “Gypsy music” as “free-spirited and darkly passionate” is not only an example of using “dismissive ethnic labels” but also a way of selling “an imaginary Gypsiness.”14 Mystification and stereotyping notwithstanding (with positive stereotyping particularly hard to debunk and eradicate), music has played a crucial role in providing a fairly (though not entirely) universally translatable “language” or discourse and in connecting cultures that seem otherwise intent on preserving distance. Moreover, as cultural currency, Gypsy music has benefitted the Roma more than any other aspect of their culture, providing them with the social and economic opportunities otherwise denied to them. It not surprising, therefore, that Roma themselves have often reinforced or advanced romanticized views of the culture and have encouraged perceptions of their musical gifts as both inherited and germane to the culture.
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Ian Hancock, Introduction to The Roads of the Roma: a pen Anthology of Gypsy Writers, Ian Hancock, Siobhan Dowd, and Rajko Djuric, Eds. (Hertfordshire, uk: Hertfordshire P, 1998), 9. Michael Beckerman, “Pushing Gypsiness, Roma, or Otherwise.” The New York Times, April 1, 2001, 32.
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A more recent phenomenon, which I observed in my hometown (Suceava, Romania), and which seems to have become increasingly common in other parts of the country, is the view of Roma musicians as prized commodity among the nouveau rich, expatriates, and transnationals. Ten years ago, most Romanians in my town would have wanted the most westernized dj for their weddings; now, the trend calls for the best band of Roma musicians (taraf), especially among Romanians for whom the country’s accession to the European Union (in 2007) provided economic opportunities in the West and who have been living for part or most of the time abroad or travelling. How does one account for that? It is impossible to pinpoint a single line of reasoning or a particular psychology. The mere desire to be fashionable might be the most plausible explanation. However, status appears to factor in quite significantly, in the form of a combination of socio-economics and newly acquired forms of identification. This is not just a matter of capital, but of capital earned abroad, in non-local currency, itself a reflection of a European, or transnational, identity. One Romanian couple who has been working and living in Italy for the last 5 years mentioned, during their return to Romania to get married, that they wanted a “real” wedding, with Gypsy musicians, “something to remember and take back to Italy.” I asked them if they had always wanted a Gypsy band at their wedding, even before they went away; they looked at each other and shook their head, suspecting a trick question; they provided no further comments and I did not prod. It is impossible to say, of course, if it is primarily nostalgia and the attending impulse toward romanticization, a renewed appreciation for Roma culture brought about by the migratory movement and exposure to other cultures, the need to flaunt one’s newly attained economic status by “renting” and thus living the illusion of temporarily possessing authentic “gypsiness” (in all its longstanding associations with passion and freedom), or something else. One thing remains sure: the meaning of a “real” wedding has been altered by the transnational context in which this couple, and others like them, place themselves, consciously or not, as they become part of the migratory movement. Roma musicians have become indispensable to the discursive narrative through which the couple envisions the reconnection with the homeland (a metaphorical re-tying of the “knot”) and through which they envision their future (“something to remember and take back to Italy”). In a New Europe strife with political and ethnic tensions that often involve the Roma, various countries are starting to look at Spain for a model of possible integration. Spain, where Roma culture has infused – and fused with – the dominant one to produce, over the years, a unique cultural amalgamate, is somewhat singular among the European nations. As Bernard Leblon points out,
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[t]he fact that Andalusians have come to recognize themselves in ‘Gypsy’ music, once universally rejected, but which they have so taken to heart that they now dispute the ancestry of their Caló compatriots, reveals a great deal about a collusion which has been going on for centuries, and which no one can really disavow. Through the songs they perform (especially those known as the ‘basic’ songs), the words they sing (often composed by celebrated Gypsy artists, studded with Calo, and loaded with allusions to the “Gypsy” way of living), and their constant reference to a ‘flamenco’ (which is to say ‘Gypsy-Andalusian.’) way of thinking and behaving, Andalusians identify with a hybrid culture they can well feel proud of.15 Roma artists and entertainers have become an integral part of Spain’s tourism industry and of essentialist views of Spain as the locus of passion, sensuality, and duende. Jazz players around the world are indebted to Gitano guitarist Django Reinhard, and appraisals of Spanish national poet Frederico García Lorca often start with an acknowledgment of his Gypsy Ballads and the inspiration he drew from the Gypsy culture. As Lou Charnon-Deutsch suggests in his The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession, for centuries, Europe “turned to [the Gypsies of] southern Spain to fulfill its desire for an exotic other,” and Spain itself, over time, “participated in its self-exoticization via the figure of the Andalusian Gypsy,”16 especially through the absorption or appropriation of their culture, especially music and flamenco. Music identified as “Gypsy” or as having Gypsy roots remains important currency for dominant cultures which often exploit it for economic gain or to propagandistic purposes. Such practices also mean to divert attention from the realities of Roma life, particularly the cycle of poverty and discrimination that has marked their history in Europe. What we witness, therefore, is the trafficking of certain aspects of the culture whose universal appeal makes them an easy global commodity. According to Jochen Blaschke, since the emergence of a strong Gitano middle class in the 1990s, Spain has witnessed the development of a cultural selfconsciousness among Roma artists and, with it, an increased resistance to the institutionalization of their culture by Spain’s official policies on tourism.17 15 16 17
Bernard Leblon, Gypsies and Flamenco. The Emergence of the Art of Flamenco in Andalucia (Hatfield: Interface Collection 6, 1995), 78. Lou Charnon-Deutsch. The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession. (University Park: Penn State up, 2004), 15. Jochen Blaschke.The Roma. A Transnational European Population (Berlin: Edition Parabolis, 2004), 27.
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Similar phenomena have been observed in post-communist Eastern Europe, where a number of Roma musicians have taken charge of their careers and entered the global markets. A perfect example is Taraf de Haïdouks (Romanian: Taraful Haiducilor), from Clejani, Romania, the most prominent and internationally renowned group of Romanian Roma musicians in the post-Communist era, who have produced records and have been touring, to much acclaim, all over the world. The band has counted, among its fans, the late Yehudi Menuhin, the Kronos Quartet (with whom it has recorded and performed), actor Johnny Depp (alongside whom the group appeared in the film “The Man Who Cried”), and fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto (for whose Paris and Tokyo shows the band performed as models-cum-musicians). Though residing still in the small village of Clejani, the band members have contributed to the global dissemination of music that remains deeply rooted in its traditions. Another way in which Gypsy music, while still engaging in cultural reification, has played an affirmative role, is through its contribution to the emergence of hybrid genres that draw attention to the changing realities of the world, and especially to social and political issues concerning migration and immigration, new-imperialism and neo-colonialism. The band Gogol Bordello is one of the best illustrations of this phenomenon. Formed in New York in 1999, it has achieved much acclaim in the United States, where it has come to be credited with the propagation of “gypsy punk,” but also abroad, especially in Europe and Central America. The band cites Gypsy music from the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine, homeland of the lead singer Eugene Hutz (of Roma ancestry) as one of its main sources of inspiration, with ska, punk, metal, rap, flamenco, roots reggae, and dub contributing their share. The charismatic Hutz, who seems to be a dramatization of the “wanderlust king” of his songs, has secured roles in the movies Everything is Illuminated (an adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel by the same name, directed by Liev Schreiber) and Filth and Wisdom (directed by Madonna), has been the subject of a documentary, The Pied Piper of Hutzovina and, rumor has it, inspiration for the Fall 2008 Gucci menswear line. The make-up of the band, with members from Russia, Ecuador, Israel, Ukraine and the United States, some of whom have been residing in Brazil over the last few years, is a reflection of its cosmopolitism, generative creativity, and ethno-politics. What differentiates Gogol Bordello from other “Gypsy” bands is the transparency as well as the political and social consciousness it brings to the processes of appropriating, altering, and fusing various traditions. In its revamping of punk rock in the image of the 21st century global village – a post-national Babel, shambolic, hyperbolic, rife with potential but marred by injustice – Gogol Bordello performs a version of
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the global that accommodates self-referential critique and a parody of cultural reification, but also points to ways in which disparate cultures can evade political collisions, co-exist, and amalgamate. In this configuration, elements of Gypsy music become integral to the world “citizenship” toward which Gogol Bodello’s music aspires. In literature, from where we decant much of our understanding of “gypsiness,” representations draw on categories of familiar stereotypes that have informed centuries of prejudice and mystification: Gypsies are secretive, rootless, cunning, irresponsible, seductive, immune to time’s ravages, a-historical, and “demonically” talented in their music and fortune-telling, moving through life with “unclouded joy” and in “outlandish garb[s].”18 Such thinking suggests, almost invariably, the presence of some innate excess, an “abundance” of joie vivre or jouissance or temper or, in its more banal translations, an exaggerated feature – as suggested by Veerland’s and Pearlman’s focus on the “crazily wonderful,” “abundant” hair that, as Pearlman’s attempted humor has it, “took up more room than it seemed legal.”19 It is not difficult to see how such excesses or/and other extra-ordinary or abnormal features (such as their presumed prescience, magical powers, or irresistible sensuality) would turn Gypsies simultaneously into objects of abjection and desire. As Homi Bhabha suggests in The Location of Culture, dominant powers’ concept of Otherness emerges from two opposed impulses: to construct an Other that is radically different from oneself, and to ascribe to this Other something of oneself that enables judgment and justifies control.20 The impulse of othering derives also from the sublimated desire to give ourselves permission to recognize ourselves in the image of the other. As Julia Kristeva points out, abjection is a manifestation of our response to that which unsettles our “identity, system, and order,” and to “[w]hat does not respect borders, positions, rules.”21 In her article on “The Gypsy as Trope in Victorian and Modern British Literature,” Abby Bardi shows how [i]f we unravel the complex constructions of Gypsies in British literature as a familiar trope that acts upon texts in multiple ways to destabilize the status quo, we may gain insight into the nature of the powerful anxieties 18 19 20 21
Matthew Arnold, “The Scholar-Gipsy.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 9th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), 1384. Edith Pearlman, “First Encounter with the Enemy,” sr 9. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.
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projected onto them, the ‘repressed fantasies’ and ‘longings for disorder,’ as Okely has put it (1983:232), that inform these representations.22 Though Victorian and Modern texts are particularly illustrative in that regard, diachronic and synchronic surveys of literature will reveal the unsurprising fact that, from the very beginning and into the 21st century, Gypsies’ presence in various national literatures has been largely functional – in other words, they have been used primarily as strategies and devices to build conflict, embody certain ideas, construct or deconstruct romance, and provide contrast. They have played a particularly important role in the psychological processes of the Western collective imaginary, especially by providing opportunities for self-interrogation and self-definition. In literature produced in the West, they often function as disruptive markers of otherness that produce anxiety but also trigger, in non-Roma characters, a re-framing of desire and introspective re-considerations of one’s identity in relation to various communal and national discourses. While gypsiness is not entirely a Western invention, the West has been its main producer and curator. The most obvious explanation relates to the powers of distance: the more removed we are from the realities of a people, the easier it is to engage in the process of Orientalizing their culture; the more distant and “other” they are, the more titillating the prospect of projecting ourselves onto them. Sustaining a strong belief in the elusive, mysterious nature of the Gypsy, which is something that distance permits, enables us to traffic artificially sustained notions of gypsyness and keep Roma in a position of subalternity. This is further facilitated by the fact the Roma, who generally lack political representation and social agency and whose culture remains primarily oral, cannot easily intervene in non-Roma’s commodification of Roma culture. Thus, they have become an easy victim of appropriation and of what Benedict Anderson has called Print-capitalism,23 an issue masterly addressed in Zoli (2008) by Irish American writer Colum McCann, a novel that is fairly singular in its realistic approach and complex, historically accurate depiction of Roma life. Generally, Gypsy characters are little more than derivations of each other, though the norms and conventions they counter, the fantasies they fulfill, the types of foils they represent have varied slightly, depending on historical 22
23
Abby Bardi, “The Gypsy As Trope In Victorian And Modern British Literature.” Romani Studies 16.1 (2006): 42. Bardi references Judith Okely’s The Traveller-Gypsies. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 224.
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c ontexts and needs.24 Many literalizations of the Gypsy seem to have been modeled on well-known early characters (some ‘Gypsy” by heredity, and some by upbringing), such as Miguel de Cervantes’s Preciosa in “La Gitanilla,” one of the Novelas Ejemplares (1613), Meg Merrilies in Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815) and John Keats’s “Old Meg” (1838), Alexander Pushkin’s Zemfira in “Tsygany” (1826), Victor Hugo’s Esmeralda in Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen in the eponymous tale (1845), and Matthew Arnold’s Gipsy-Scholar in the eponymous poem (1853). Gypsies also appear in works by George Borrow, Henry Fielding, John Clare, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Mircea Eliade, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alice Walker, Ana Castillo, I.B. Singer, Joanne Harris, and Anita Desai, and in hundreds of poems, in the latter often in the form of metaphor (ex.: gypsy as science, history, authority, or fame) or other literary tropes. 25 Remarking upon the tragic consequences of projective identification, Bardi notes that, [t]he abjection, in Kristeva’s term, of the figure of the Gypsy over the centuries, the projection of a sexually-charged Other whose very presence challenged increasingly repressive codifications of social conventions, appears to have fueled centuries of legislation designed to repress, control, and even extinguish the Romani community; there is nothing charming about this.26 As Paloma Gay y Blasco reminds us too, “artistic representations [of Gypsies] often draw from and hence reinforce popular representations that place Roma outside the boundaries of normal society.” He aptly goes on to underscore the much-ignored connection between art (especially literature) and historical
24
25
26
Deborah Epstein Nord’s “Marks of Race: Gypsy figures and eccentric femininity in nineteenth-century women’s writing” and Abby Bardi’s “The Gypsy As Trope In Victorian And Modern British Literature” provide invaluable analyses of the roles Gypsies play in challenging and destabilizing dominant social mores concerning sexuality, gender roles, and ownership of capital in 19th and early 20th century British writings. Mihaela Moscaliuc’s “Killing with Metaphors: Romani in the Literary Imagination of East-Central Europe” discusses constructions of gypsiness in literature written by non-Roma Eastern Europeans. I have been collecting international poetry in which the Gypsy appears as speaker, character, or trope. Currently, the manuscript contains poems by one hundred and thirty-two poets, only a handful of whom are Roma or of Roma descent. Bardi, Ibid.
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reality, remarking that “the ludic, wandering Gypsy is all too easily transformed into the work-shy, thieving, rapacious economic migrant.”27 Little has been done to address the disparity between the actual, historical presence of this people and the constructed “gypsiness” non-Roma across times and cultures have so assiduously pursued. The next section of the chapter will provide a brief summary of historical facts that point to such disparities and will address Roma’s precarious situation in the New Europe, a situation which, I argue, correlates with the position Gypsies occupy in the global imaginary.
Roma in Historical Context28
Sinti, Manouches, Calo, Kalderash, Gitanos, Tsigani, Valachs are some of the names used to designate various communities belonging to the people commonly known as “Gypsies.” Because of the pejorative connotations associated with the word “Gypsy,” many people of this culture have adopted the name “Rom(a),” a derivation of “man” in Sanskrit, or “Romani.” “Gypsy” is an exonym – i.e. a name given to a group by outsiders, rather than a self-designation; it is also a misnomer and it presumes, wrongly, that Gypsies originated in Egypt, a theory held for a couple of centuries, till genetic and linguistic evidence located their place of origin in northern India (Rajput clan), which they left sometime between the 4th and the 11th centuries. The reasons for their departure and their patterns of dissemination throughout the world have been subject to much speculation and controversy, and documents attesting to their presence in various parts of Eastern Europe and in the British Isles before the end of the fifteenth century do not provide specifics. Throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, documents from Eastern Europe center around transactions involving Romani slaves (referred to as “Gypsy slaves”), efforts to restrict nomadism and enforce a sedentary lifestyle, and the constant relegation of this ethnicity to each nation’s lowest socioeconomic rung. 27 28
Paloma Gay y Blasco. “Picturing ‘Gypsies’.” Third Text 22.3 (2008): 301. Some of the historical data used in this section has been used also in my article “Roma: Carving a Niche in the Theory and Practice of Democracy.” Soundings. An Interdisciplinary Journal lxxxvii (Spring/Summer 2004): 97–129. The sources most useful in shaping this contextualization have been Thomas Acton’s Gypsy Politics and Social Change. (London: Routledge, 1974), David M. Crowe’s A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia. (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1994), and Ian Hancock’s We Are the Romani People (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002).
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Imputations against them included accusations that they were heathens and/ or the forces of devils, spies for one power or another, innately criminal, and that they brought about infertility and natural catastrophes. By the time they were emancipated, in 1863, Roma had already settled in the Eastern European imagination not only as the quintessential outsiders, but also as a social class that often included other – non-Roma – groups or individuals who had fallen from social grace. Although the Roma living throughout the Austrian Habsburg domains and the Russian Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth century experienced more tolerance than those under Ottoman control, they too were forced to shed nomadism and assimilate. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Romani language had hybridized with the countless languages with which it had come into contact, branching into over a hundred dialects. During the nineteenth century, unique handyman skills and a need for seasonal workers secured many Roma a certain amount of economic security, while artistic competency gained others genuine, even if reluctantly bestowed, appreciation; and yet, their social station remained affixed to the lowly while the emergence of scientifically legitimated racism spurred new types of stigmatizations and new discriminatory policies. In late 19th century, many English-speaking countries outside Europe outlawed Roma’s entry into the country, with the United States adopting this policy in 1885. In the 20th century, persecution took various forms, including forced assimilation (which generally had catastrophic results) and extermination. The 1933–1945 Poŕajmos, or Gypsy Holocaust, led by Hitler and fueled by nationalistic tendencies already at work within most East European states, led to the death of between a quarter of a million and one and a half million Roma. Until very recently, this page in their history constituted no more than an almost forgotten appendix to the history of the Nazi genocide. The Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe in the years after the end of World War ii turned Roma’s dreams of healing into new nightmares. Intent on settling the “nationality question,” for the next half century the Communist governments resorted to policies of cultural and socio-economic assimilation that disregarded the culture’s particularities and made no genuine attempt to ease their socio-economic plight. Gypsies were perceived as social parasites and cultural anomalies in need of reformation. Consequently, they were moved into ghettoes and provided with jobs on which they could not subsist; children were either placed in schools for students with special needs or segregated in the regular schools; women were sometimes sterilized without their knowledge while seeking medical assistance for various conditions, and “excess” children were taken away and placed in orphanages. Refusal to comply with the party’s directives would lead
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to imprisonment or systematic persecution. As Crowe points out, the communist leaders saw the “gypsy problem” as a test of “the nation’s commitment to bring the fruits of socialist transformation to all segments of society.”29 The 1980s, marked by a tightening of state control and severe deprivation (that affected all aspects of daily life), revealed the Roma as the most vulnerable and thus easiest group to victimize. There was a noticeable shift in Roma – non-Roma relations during this time, which became tense, fraught with paranoia and hostility; however, the repressiveness of the communist apparatus inhibited the expression of such tension, for the most part. The demise of communism, in the 1980s–1990s, and the advent of democracy seemed to promise a change in the situation of the Roma, including better interethnic relations. However, what followed was a rash of nationalism that in turn ignited latent prejudices. As the work force lost its guaranteed employment after the fall of communism, Roma were among the first fired as part of “restructurings” (leaving 80% to 90% of Roma in most Eastern European nation states unemployed). The chances of a new generation of Roma breaking the cycle of poverty, isolation and systematic discrimination looked dismal, especially since children continued to be shunted into special schools and left lagging behind at the first opportunity,30 and the harsh realities of post- communist economies and institutionalized corruption created the need for easy scapegoats. The number of skinhead attacks and incidents of arson against Romani settlements, as well as cases of police aggression and of discrimination in the labor market, in mass media, and in almost every public place, escalated. Perhaps one of the most ironic tragedies in Roma’s post-communist history is that of Kosovo, where Roma lost a war they did not even fight. Virtually, the entire region’s one hundred thousand Roma were driven out of their homes and hundreds were killed by Serbs during the war and by ethnic Albanians afterwards. There is an estimated population of 12.000.000 people in Europe who have identified or have been identified as Gypsy/Roma, though national statistics vary greatly, with the official ones leaning toward the lows (5 million). Many Roma do not register their children’s births, refuse to take part in the census, or have no fixed residence. In addition, since the fall of communism, dismantling of borders, and the inclusion in the European Union of countries such as 29 30
David M. Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994), iv. Research conducted by eerc shows that in 1998-1999 Romani children constituted over 50% of the children in special schools in the Czech Republic, over 90% in Hungary, and over 70% in Romania (“Barriers to the Education of Roma in Europe: A Position Paper by the errc” May 5, 2002. www.errc.org/publications/position).
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Romania and Bulgaria, many Roma who have migrated and temporarily settled in the West have destroyed their official documents in an attempt to reduce the possibility of deportation. In the 21st century, they remain the one people in the democratic, post- communist Europe whom even some of the most tolerant find acceptable to disparage and vilify. By defining them by deviant life-style (“stateless persons,” “nomads,” “rootless migrants,” “beggars,” “squatters,” “destabilizing elements”) rather than ethnicity, state apparatuses have been largely able to ignore their status of ethnic minority in their own right and deny them human rights. Using similar views of cultural deviancy and socio-economics as defining of Roma, non-Roma will persistently remind you that if only Roma could stop behaving and living like “gypsies” and abide by the dominant culture’s traditions, laws and civic codes, they would not be harassed the way they are. No longer biologically determined, this new type of racism, which Etienne Balibar has coined “meta-racism,”31 makes cultural differences grounds for discrimination, without directly postulating the superiority of certain groups or peoples. One manifestation of meta-racism in the Roma case comes in the form of arguments that use certain presumed particularities of their culture, among the most summoned ones being disinterest in work, disloyalty, distrust of non-Roma and of any official institutions (including education systems and medical care), and delight in filth and ignorance, to explain the high rates of unemployment and law-breaking incidents rather than connecting them logically to centuries of persecution and lack of opportunities. Before Romania and Bulgaria were admitted into the European Union, Roma’s attempts to migrate to Western countries, in search of slightly better living conditions and tolerance, often resulted in deportation, deterritorialization, and/or loss of citizenship. Austria deported thousands back to their Eastern Europeans “homes,” along with a “financial compensation” made to the respective governments. Germany signed an accord that gave the Romanian government about $20 million to reintegrate Romanian citizens being deported from Germany, 50.000 of which were estimated to be Roma.32 The Czech Republic adopted a less obtrusive way of “scanning” for one’s nationality: it required Romanian citizens (among whom close to three million, out of the twenty three million, are of Romani “nationality”) to secure visas in order to visit the country.
31 32
Etienne Balibar. “Is there a Neo-racism?” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. E. Balibar and E. Wallerstein, (London: Verso, 1991) David M. Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia, 147.
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The situation has changed slightly over the last several years, since the launching of the European Union’s 2005 awareness campaign called “Decade of Roma Inclusion,” but not enough. In some respects, things seem to have worsened, with racism and xenophobia undergoing a significant resurgence. This might be in part because changes have been imposed from the top down, as a result of pressures from the European Union and various Human Rights organizations, who made, for instance, Romania and Bulgaria’s admission into the European Union contingent upon a demonstrable investment in the Roma cause (through observance of human rights and integration programs). Very little has been done to change the thinking about Roma, to look at the history of deep-seated resentment and suspicion that has fueled conflicts on all sides, and to start envisioning ways in which Roma could be made an integral part of the New Europe without being stripped of their culture. The different organizations formed to assist Roma in claiming their rights after the fall of communism have ended up devoting most of their time and energy to solving immediate, stringent problems that threatened to evolve into national conflicts. Their primary aim has been, and remains, the ending of the host societies’ acts of injustice toward Roma, and not the education of these societies toward exerting understanding, compassion, respect, and civility toward this minority group. Programs aimed at empowering a minority that has been forced into seeing itself as a social class (of the lowest rank), rather than as a culture, are doomed to failure until Roma are helped to recuperate their sense of ethnic identity and dignity. Protected by European Union rules guaranteeing the free circulation of individuals, thousands of Roma have migrated West over the last several years, mostly to France, Italy, Spain, and Germany, settling at the outskirts of cities, often in makeshift camps, surviving mostly by performing odd jobs, doing seasonal work, or gathering and selling scrap metal. They have not been welcomed anywhere. In 2008, Roma camps came under attack in Italy; in September 2012, thousands of Bulgarians took to the streets to chant slogans reminiscent of Jews’ situation during the War: “Turn the gypsies into soap,” and in the Czech Republic, ultra-right parties organized, in 2013, about 30 anti-Roma marches, where some chanted, “Gypsies to the gas chambers.”33 In Hungary, the far-right Jobbik party gained great popularity when it called for the forced segregation of Roma, and came in third in the 2010 elections. The largest number of Roma (close to 20.000) settled in France, where they met much popular and official antipathy. They have been accused of being a burden on the economy and a 33
Dan Bilefsky, “Roma, Feared as Kidnappers, See Their Own Children at Risk.” The New York Times, October 26, 2013, A1, A8.
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health hazard. Some Roma communities have been accused of running gangs involved in petty crime, preying mostly on tourists.34 In 2013, they were accused of depleting France of its mushrooms, which, in the French psyche, function, apparently, as the equivalent of the national patrimony.35 The incident seems to be taken right out of the literature mentioned earlier in the chapter, the mushrooms as metonymy for the French national identity, and the Roma/ Gypsies as invasive bodies threatening to divest the nation of its wholeness, its purity, its ability to think of itself as one (through the metaphor of its muchprized mushrooms). In literature, the gadje’s fear of Roma is often connected to the latter’s presumed virility and uncontained sexuality. Hence, the common scenario in which the Gypsy man seduces, corrupts, or steals away virginal wives, sisters, daughters; in 2013 France, the dispossession has extended to wild mushrooms. The seriousness of such allegations notwithstanding, the situation is darkly humorous: “50 tons of mushrooms in just the southeastern Drome and Ardèche regions.”36 Given the common accusations of laziness, such intrepidness must come as pleasantly surprising. One would think that the story of a minority group’s choice to hunt for 50 tons of wild mushrooms in the chill and dampness of the night might say something worth paying attention to about their struggle to survive. Other recent (2013) imputations of thievery have (re-)connected the Roma to another well-trafficked stereotype: the kidnapping of children, a common motif in fiction (see Cervantes’s “La Gitanilla,”), children’s literature and film, as well as the folklore of many cultures. In the fall of 2013, a Roma couple in Greece were jailed on accusations of abducting a blond, green-eyed girl called Maria, whom the Greek press dubbed “the blond angel,” a rhetorical choice that automatically pitted purity against its opposite, in this case the allegorically dark forces embodied by the Roma parents/“abductors.” The incident triggered a chain of horrific events across Europe that targeted Roma families whose children looked a-stereotypically pale, despite common knowledge that intermarriage is by no means rare among Roma. Following the event, the Italian anti-immigrant Northern League demanded inspections of all Roma communities and identification of all camp occupants; in Serbia, a gang of skinheads tried to abduct a Roma child who had skin fairer than his parents,’ and in Ireland Roma children were taken away from their families for dna 34
Alissa J. Rubin, “Protests After France Expels 2 Immigrant Students.” The New York Times, October 18, 2013, 40. 35 Alissa J. Rubin, “Mystery of Missing Mushrooms Leaves French Blaming Roma.” The New York Times, November 28, 2013, A 12. 36 Ibid.
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testing.37 It is hard to imagine any comparable situation, involving a different ethnicity, especially in a supposedly civilized, Western country: officials snatching children away for dna testing for looking paler than their parents–in other words, for not fitting ossified stereotypes of “gypsiness.” Interestingly, what we see at work is the same process of generalizing about and homogenizing a culture by conflating the individual and communal, and transferring individual responsibility onto an entire group, community, or ethnic minority, that we see in literary colonialization of Gypsies. Since 2009, under Sarkozy’s, and now under Hollande’s presidency, France has razed hundreds of illegal encampments, and over 12.000 Roma have been sent back to Bulgaria and Romania, often “under a so-called voluntary scheme of Humanitarian Aid Returns.” The European Committee of Social Rights, in a collective complaint against France, noted that so-called voluntary returns were actually disguised forms of forced collective expulsions, as the Roma (who were paid 300 euros and bought a plane ticket) typically accepted the offer following forced eviction and under the threat of expulsion from France. In the summer of 2013, a Roma camp was dismantled in London, and most residents sent back to Romania.38 According to a 2004 eu directive, every citizen of the Union has the right “to move and reside freely within the territory of the 27 Member States, subject to the limi tations and conditions laid down in the Treaty” (my emphasis). As Romania and Bulgaria will not be members of the Schengen agreement until 2014, their citizens are subject to certain limitations in 10 of the 27 member states. In France, they must have work or residency permits if they wish to stay longer than three months, employment is limited to certain industries and, until a few weeks ago, employers were required to pay a tax of about $900 for each person hired. Therefore, one may argue that, since the deportees have extended their stay, the measures are justified. However, under European Union laws, and according to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (Article 9), collective expulsions are prohibited since they amount to discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity. In order for deportations to be legal, each case needs to be considered individually. Moreover, the Charter stipulates that “no one may be removed, expelled, or extradited to a State where there is a serious risk that he or she would be subjected to…torture or other inhuman or degrading
37 38
Dan Bilefsky, “Roma, Feared as Kidnappers, See Their Own Children at Risk,” A1. “Scapegoating the Roma, Again.” The New York, Times October 18, 2013, 18.
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treatment or punishment.”39 The extraditions do put the Roma at “serious risk,” if not for torture, then for “other inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” According to a 2012 Human Rights First Hate Crime Survey, cases of ethnically/racially motivated violence against Eastern European Roma have escalated. Roma routinely suffer assaults in city streets and other public places as they travel to and from homes, workplaces, and markets. In a number of cases, attackers have also sought out whole families in their homes, or whole communities in settlements predominantly housing Roma.40 Surveys conducted regularly by the Institute of Public Affairs in Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary show that 65%–80% of those interviewed said they would object to having Roma neighbors. Official discourses such as the one advanced by the French Interior Minister, Manuel Valls, who has explicitly deemed Roma unassimilable and unfit to live side-by-side with the dominant culture, illustrate Balibar’s notion of metaracism and an implicit sanctioning of discrimination. In 2010, a 500-foot-long, seven-foot high concrete wall was erected in Ostrovany, Slovakia, to separate the 1200 Roma from the 586 non-Roma inhabitants. The municipality (all nonRoma) spent $17,500 of public money on the construction of the wall, while its Roma lived in makeshift shacks with no running water and an 80% unemployment rate. The Ostrovany wall captures the paradox of Roma’s current situation: the Roma are free to migrate but have nowhere to go. Stateless, impoverished, uneducated, disowned, de-territorialized, they will not be able to break the circle of poverty and the circumstances that often place them in conflict with the dominant cultures and with the law without concerted efforts from both sides – Roma and non-Roma. The wall of Ostrovany is real, a concrete attempt to deny their existence and to forestall “contamination,” but so are many of the other, less visible walls (including those erected by the Roma themselves) that seek to preserve Roma’s status of undesirable outsiders and/ or to isolate and commodify those aspects of their culture that are profitable. Speaking in 1993, Vaclav Havel prophetically remarked that “the treatment of the Roma is a litmus test for democracy.” In the 21st century, the treatment of Roma has become Europe’s litmus test for an integrated, democratic European Union. This is a time for us to reconsider the relationship between the cultural simulacra we crave, in the form of constructed “gypsiness,” and the people whose reality such constructions replace. Much emphasis has been placed in global cultural studies on the emergence of identities that reflect the fluidity of 39 40
EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, Article 19. www.eurocharter.org/home.php?page _id=26, accessed November 2013. “Human Rights First Report on Roma,” Humanrightsfirst.org. Retrieved 17 May 2012.
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the global culture: multinational, hybrid, transnational, diasporic, cosmopolitan identities, none of which are ever employed to account for or investigate the Roma situation. In theory, they fit many of these reconfigured identities; in practice, however, they are cast primarily as an “issue” no one knows how to grapple with. We sanction and perpetuate rhetoric that dubs them “dark” and “primitive,” and continue to polarize their presence, just as we have, for centuries: we sell haute couture gypsiness and bulldoze their makeshift shacks. Maybe a simple place to start change is by thinking of them as an ethno-global minority whose struggle implicates all of us, locally and globally. Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London; New York: Verso, 1991. Arnold, Matthew. “The Scholar-Gipsy,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 9th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 1381–1385. Bardi, Abby. “The Gypsy As Trope In Victorian And Modern British Literature,” Romani Studies 16.1 (2006): 31–42. Beckerman, Michael. “Pushing Gypsiness, Roma, or Otherwise.” The New York Times. April 1, 2001. 32–4. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London; New York: Routledge, 1994. Bilefsky, Dan. “Roma, Feared as Kidnappers, See Their Own Children at Risk.” The New York Times, October 26, 2013. A1, A8. Blanco, Richard. City of a Hundred Fires. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. Blaschke, Jochen, and William Hiscott. The Roma: A Transnational European Population. Berlin: Edition Parabolis, 2004. Boyer, Peter. “Hollywood Heresy.” May 22, New Yorker, the 2006. Charnon-Deutsch, Lou. The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, Article 1 www.eurocharter.org/home.php?page_id=26 Gay y Blasco, Paloma. “Picturing ‘Gypsies’,” Third Text 22.3 (2008): 297–303. Hancock, Ian. “Duty and Beauty, Possession and Truth: ‘Lexical Impoverishment’ as Control,” in Diane Tong, Ed. Gypsies. An Interdisciplinary Reader. 115–129, (New York: Garland, 1998). Imre, Aniko. “Race Without Empire: Post-Socialist Neoliberalism on Reality TV,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2014-01-03. http://citation.allacademic.com/meta /p568533_index.html
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Imre, Aniko. “Gypsy Stars in the New Europe,” June 12, 2009, Flow TV. gypsystars-in-the-new-europe-aniko-imre-university-of-southern-california-los-angeles Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Leblon, Bernard. Gypsies and Flamenco. The Emergence of the Art of Flamenco in Andalucia. Hatfield: Interface Collection 6, 1995. Moscaliuc, Mihaela. “Killing with Metaphors: Literary Representations of Romani in the East-Central European Imagination,” History of the Literary Cultures in EastCentral Europe. Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Vol. IV., Eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer. 378–390. (New York: John Benjamins, 2010). Nord, Deborah Epstein “Marks of Race: Gypsy Figures and Eccentric Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing,” Victorian Studies 41 (1998): 189–210. Okely, Prof Judith. The Traveller-Gypsies. Reprinted Edition edition. Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Pavel, Dan. “Wanderers: Romani’s Hidden Victims.” Diane Tong, Ed. Gypsies. An Interdisciplinary Reader. 67–5. New York: Garland, 1998. Pearlman, Edith. “First Encounter with the Enemy.” The New York Times, December 15, 2013. Pisa, Nick. “Chilling Indifference of Italians Sunbathing Just Yards from the Covered Bodies of Two Drowned Roma Children,” July 20, 2008. http://www.dailymail.co.uk /news/article-1036760/Pictured-Chilling-indifference-Italians-sunbathing-just -yards-covered-bodies-drowned-Roma-children.html. Rubin, Alissa J. “Mystery of Missing Mushrooms Leaves French Blaming Roma.” The New York Times, November 28, 2013a. A 12. ——— “Protests After France Expels 2 Immigrant Students.” The New York Times, October 18, 2013b. 40. ——— “Scapegoating the Roma, Again.” The New York Times, October 18, 2013c. 18. Suarez, Virgil. Blurb on back cover of Richard Blanco’s City of a Hundred Fires. (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998). Vreeland, Diana. “Memos from D.V.” The New Yorker, September 19, 2001, 74.
chapter 14
Tourism, Expatriates, and Power Relations in Vieques, Puerto Rico Karen Schmelzkopf * Geographers study place and spatial interaction: flows of people, goods, ideas, services, capital, and power between and within places. In the last two decades, with increased mobility resulting from technological, political, and financial transformations, this basic concept has been repackaged and adopted by other disciplines as “the spatial turn” and “the new mobilities paradigm.” In particular, tourism has been identified as “a significant modality through which transnational modern life is organized.”1 Tourist destinations are “situated at the interface of a transnational web of flows in which tourists, workers, migrants, and residents intersect.”2 Thus, tourism is a crucial element of globalization. Most tourism occurs where people already live. The impacts on residents and places are countless, and marginalized local residents may experience immobility and disenfranchisement.3 A solution – particularly in the developing world – has been to increase local participation in tourism development and control. However, as George Taylor4 argues, this assumes a cohesive and romanticized view of local community. Not only are community elites known to take charge,5 transnational migration makes the situation increasingly problematic. In many places, migrants from developed countries, whether retirees, backpackers, or “laid back entrepreneurs” who come to surf or for other amenities,6 live in the area before wholesale tourism arrives. As with other instances of disparate * Monmouth University, usa. 1 Adrian Franklin, and Mike Crang. “The Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory?” Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 7. 2 Bianchi, Raoul V. Place and power in tourism development: tracing the complex articulations of com munity and locality. 1st ed. Vol. 1. 13–32: pasos:Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural, 2003. 3 Raoul V Bianchi and Marcus L. Stephenson. “Deciphering Tourism and Citizenship in a Globalized World.” Tourism Management 39 (December 2013): 19. 4 George Taylor. “The Community Approach: Does It Really Work?” Tourism Management 16, no. 7 (November 1995): 487–489. 5 John Brohman. “New Directions in Tourism for Third World Development.” Annals of Tourism Research 23, no. 1 (1996): 9. 6 Katherine T. McCaffrey. Military Power and Popular Protest the us Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico. New Brunswick, n.j.: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
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power relations, an exact equivalence does not exist between migrants from less developed regions who settle in developed regions and migrants from developed regions who settle in less developed regions. While the former usually have to fight to obtain even basic rights, the latter often assume the rights and entitlements once attached only to citizenship, often at the expense of the citizens.7 It is relatively easy for migrants from developed regions to take control. First, regardless of their interactions with indigenous residents, they often assume they are members of the local community and entitled to make decisions. Second, many already own establishments catering to other expatriates that can be expanded to encompass tourists. And third, even when they have little economic capital, migrants from developed countries have the advantage of cultural capital with respect to tourists from developed regions.8 Therefore, while tourism is a crucial part of the globalization of culture, often what tourists experience in tourist locations is at best a neocolonial appropriation of local culture and at worst a standardized corporate tourist enclave separated from the location and its residents. In this paper I examine a place, Vieques, Puerto Rico, where the future of tourism is being contested within the context of struggles over rights to decision-making and ownership, as well as environmental contamination and governmental responsibilities. Like the rest of the Caribbean, globalization in Puerto Rico through migration and exploitation can be traced back for generations: the takeover of the island and the decimation of Tainos Indians by the Spanish in the sixteenth century; Spanish resistance to English, French, and Danish attempts at colonization during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the introduction of slavery in the eighteenth century and its abolishment in the mid-nineteenth century; and its appropriation by the United States in 1898. Vieques itself has had a double colonial relationship with both the United States mainland and the Puerto Rican mainland, which Viequenses describe as “colonia de la colonia [the colony of a colony].”9 In particular, Vieques had a neocolonial relationship with us sugar corporations until 1941, when the sugar plantations were supplanted by a us Naval base and test bombing site until 2003. I begin with a history the role of the us Navy on Vieques and
7 Aihwa Ong. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. 8 Raoul V Bianchi, Raoul V. “Migrant Tourist-Workers: Exploring the ‘Contact Zones’ of PostIndustrial Tourism.” Current Issues in Tourism 3, no. 2 (2000): 130. 9 Amilcar Barreto. Vieques, the Navy, and Puerto Rican Politics. Gainesville, Fl: University of Florida Press, 2002.
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the problems and opportunities left behind when the Naval base was closed in 2003. I then discuss the conflicts between Viequenses and North Americans with respect to the nascent tourist industry. I conclude by noting that while disparate forces in Vieques make it difficult to change power relations, these same forces may act to deter the development of a large-scale, foreign-owned tourism industry.
Vieques, the Navy, and Contamination
Vieques is a small island, 21 miles long and 3 miles wide, east of the main island of Puerto Rico (see Fig. 14.1). From the early twentieth century through 1941, two us sugar corporations owned 30,000 acres (eighty percent of the island), employing and housing most of the 12,000 residents on the sugar plantations.10 In 1941, the us Navy appropriated 26,000 acres of this land for bombing practice and ammunition storage, resulting in the loss of jobs and homes for most of the Viequenses. 3,000 residents left the island, while the rest were crowded into the remaining 7,000 acres. The Navy did not house military personnel on the island, precluding the typical legal and illegal local employment opportunities that surround military bases. What establishments did exist were owned by expatriates from the mainland us (including retired military and their families), mainland Puerto Rico, and Western Europe. Consequently, with no employment 0pportunities to replace work on the sugar plantations, more than 75% of the Viequenses were forced to live below the poverty level, trying to survive through fishing and agriculture.11 Even though 9,000 people continued to live in Vieques, the Navy used the island for ordnance storage and test bombing until 2003. They also tested chemical and biological weapons in the 1960’s, experimented with napalm in 1993, and dropped uranium shells on the island in 1999. Responding to years of international protests, the Navy finally closed the base in May 2003.12 Left behind were discharged chemicals, missile propellants, metal debris, unexploded ordnance, and fourteen inadequately prepared 10 11 12
César J Ayala. “From sugar plantations to military bases: the us navy’s expropriations in vieques, Puerto Rico, 1940–45.” Centro Journal xiii, no. 1 (2001): 23–43. David Griffith. Fishers At Work, Workers At Sea: Puerto Rican Journey Thru Labor & Refuge. Temple University Press, 2011: 166. Karen Schmelzkopf. “Scale and Narrative in the Struggle for Environment and Livelihood in Vieques Puerto Rico.” In Contentious Geographies: Environmental Knowledge Meaning Scale, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2008.
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Figure 14.1 a) Location of Vieques with regard to Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. b) Map of Vieques.
dump sites for solvents, solid waste, and diesel fuel. In the surrounding waters were two submarine disposal areas and unexploded ordnance.13 The 980 acres of the actual bombing site were declared uninhabitable, meaning there would be no cleanup. Instead of giving the other 22,000 acres to the municipality, the us government returned 4,000 acres and turned the rest over to the Department 13
United States Environmental Protection Agency. “epa Proposes the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Area in Vieques and Culebra for Inclusion on the Superfund National Priorities List.” August 13, 2004.
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of Interior for wildlife preserves. Because residents cannot live on or use the latter, only moderate cleanup is required. After the us Environmental Protection Agency (epa) finally declared the island a Superfund site in 2005, the government began exploding ordnance in the open air instead of building a bomb explosion chamber on the island. Between 2005 and 2011, 17 million pounds of scrap metal and more than 38,000 live munitions had been exploded.14 Cleanup is expected to continue till at least 2025. In 2007, some 80 percent of the residents sued the us government in order to get cleanup, health care on the island, and monetary compensation. The cancer rate in Vieques is 31 percent higher than on the Puerto Rican mainland, heart disease is 50 percent higher, hypertension is 381 percent higher, and diabetes is 41 percent higher. There are 25 percent more stillbirths and miscarriages than on the mainland, with an overall mortality rate of 10.8 percent.15 Arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, and aluminum have been found in hair samples of 80 percent of the residents, and 60 percent have heavy metal poisoning.16 Yet there is no hospital on the island and people must travel by ferry to the mainland for care. In 2010, cnn reported on the health crisis and lack of us government cleanup, which lead to public outcries for action. The Puerto Rican government finally responded, urging the epa and the Navy to expedite cleanup. However, rather than focusing on the health of the people, the Puerto Rican government argued that cleanup was necessary so that Vieques could become a “world class” tourism destination.17 In May 2013, the us Supreme Court refused to hear the residents’ suit on the basis of sovereign immunity. Since then the residents of Vieques have been working to admit a petition before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, arguing that there have been human rights violations in Vieques that have never been addressed.
14 15
16 17
César J. Ayala and José L Bolívar. Battleship Vieques: Puerto Rico from World War ii to the Korean War. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2011. Carmen Ortiz-Roque and Yadiris López-Rivera. “Mercury Contamination in Reproductive Age Women in a Caribbean Island: Vieques.” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 58, no. 9 (September 1, 2004): 756–757; J. Wilcox. “Vieques, Puerto Rico: An Island under Siege.” American Journal of Public Health 91, no. 5 (May 2001): 695–698. Ayala and Bolívar op. cit, 164–165. Gay Nagle Myer. “P.R. Tourism in Damage-Control Mode after cnn’s Vieques Report.” Travel Weekly, February 5, 2010.
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Identity and Power
When the Navy pulled out of Vieques, fears of land speculation became rampant. In 2003 in the Vieques Times, Mayor Damaso Serrano, then mayor of Vieques, quoted the poet Virgilio Davila, saying: “Don’t sell your land to the foreigner…whoever sells his home is selling his homeland.”18 The question arises, however, as to who is a foreigner. Citizenship and ethnicity in Vieques is convoluted. A simple definition of ‘Viequense’ is a person who speaks Spanish and is ethnically and historically Puerto Rican. This, of course, disregards the complex heritage of Puerto Ricans themselves. Viequenses also distinguish themselves from the residents of mainland Puerto Rico. Politically, because Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the us, all Puerto Ricans, including Viequenses, have automatic us citizenship. While they cannot vote in us presidential elections and do not pay federal income tax, they do pay certain us taxes and can serve in the military (and were subject to the draft when it was still in effect). Many spend their lives on the us mainland, visiting or living on the Puerto Rican mainland or Vieques sporadically, if at all. Questions arise as to whether Viequenses who move to the us or the Puerto Rican mainland have as much right to decision-making as those who live on the island. What about those who come back as adults, often with more money and education? Or mainland Puerto Ricans who move to Vieques? Or their children? Or the children of retired us military who grew up in Vieques but are not of Puerto Rican heritage? What about non-Puerto Rican migrants from the us mainland who have spent thirty or more years of their adult lives in Vieques? How about twenty years on the island? Ten? Five? Two? Those who have married Viequenses? Those who have had children with Viequenses? United States mainlanders are attracted to Puerto Rico for many reasons. There is no need for a passport, many people speak English, and the currency is the us dollar. Non-Puerto Ricans from the us mainland are expatriates: they do not have automatic citizenship but must live in Puerto Rico for a year and not claim legal residency anywhere else – including the us mainland.19 Taken together, these factors not only motivate migration, but also often give us mainlanders a strong sense of entitlement. Expatriates number around 1000 in Vieques.20 Some have lived there since the late 1950’s, some are new arrivals, most are somewhere in between. In the 18 19 20
Damaso Serrano. “Editorial.” Vieques Times, Number 5, 2003 Jennifer Conlin. “Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico Remind Travelers: No Passports Needed.” The New York Times, January 28, 2007, Travel: 1. Deborah Berman Santana. La Lucha Continúa: Challenges for a Post-Navy Vieques. City University of New York. Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, 2006.
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1960’s, Cohen’s “drifter” tourists21 from mainland us and Europe started coming to Vieques. Some become what Bianchi22 calls ‘migrant tourism workers’, not strictly tourists or workers, but instead they “constitute an emergent segment of tourist-workers who engage in periods of work within tourism destinations as an integral part of the touristic experience.” Some stay only temporarily, others become expatriates. They work in the bars, restaurants, shops, and inns owned by expatriates and live in the English-speaking expatriate enclave of Esperanza on the Caribbean side of the island. Their wages tend not to filter down to Viequenses since they frequent the same expatriate establishments within which they work. There are a small number of expatriates who immerse themselves in the culture and larger community and who tend to live in Isabel Segunda, on the Atlantic side of the island, where most Viequenses live. Indeed, a former teacher from Boston named Robert Rabin has lived on the island since 1980, is married to Viequense activist Nilda Medina, and is Coordinator of the Fort Mirasol Museum, which is part of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. He is also one of the major forces behind the community activist group, Comite Pro Rescate y Desarrollo de Vieques [Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques], or cprdv, which effectively organized the protests against the Navy and is now active in developing Viequense-controlled sustainable tourism and development. Many Viequenses accept him and consider him one of them; others resent him. Some appreciate his hard work and successes but wish that he would step back and let Viequenses be the spokespersons for the group (personal conversations, August 2003, March 2010). The attitudes of expatriates toward Rabin range from admiration to ambivalence to disdain (personal conversations, August 2003, February 2011). Rabin brushes off criticism, arguing that he is a local resident and a member of the Viequense community, that he has learned the culture and always speaks Spanish, and that when he saw the conditions in Vieques, he tapped into organizing skills he had learned in college in order to help make positive changes in his new homeland (personal communications, August 2006, June 2012, March 2013). Some expatriates and Viequenses work with and socialize with each other, yet many expatriates maintain a distinct separateness.23 James Weis, an e xpatriate 21 22 23
Erik Cohen. “Toward a Sociology of International Tourism,” Social Research 39, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 164–182. Raoul V. Bianchi. “Migrant Tourist-Workers: Exploring the ‘Contact Zones’ of PostIndustrial Tourism.” Current Issues in Tourism 3, no. 2 (2000): 107–137. Ivis Garcia Zambrana. “From Bomb Zone to Boom Town: Real Estate Trends and Community Based Practice in Vieques, Puerto Rico.” ma Thesis, The University of New Mexico, 2009.
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from the mainland us who has owned the Blue Horizon Inn since the mid-1990’s and now heads the Puerto Rico Hotel & Tourism Association Small Hotels Committee, is representative of this attitude. When he was accused of dominating the Vieques tourist industry without trying to help the island or its residents fight against the Navy and the contamination, he responded that local concerns were not the business of expatriates since they were not the ones who lost their lands or were lied to or deprived of a livelihood.24 Sheila Levin, Vieques realtor and expatriate, summarized the situation in the blog she writes for expatriates: In Vieques, however, people are not all the same. There are differences, significant differences political and economic amongst the indigenous population. Some Viequense see the expatriate community as helpful to the island, others see it as malignant. Amongst the expatriate community there are differences also. Some identify more closely with the Vieques left; others deplore the actions that deface the road and private property.25 Although there are different members of the population, Vieques has community organizations that give voice to both the Viequenses and the expatriate business owners. While the latter have the Vieques Chamber of Commerce and Vieques Business Organization, politically active Viequenses and expatriates who have immersed themselves into the Viequense community have the cprdv, which has proven to be instrumental in developing a sustainable tourism plan for the island.
Vieques and Tourism
Vieques is located within one of the world’s most profitable tourist areas, with spectacular natural resources, including 42 beaches and one of the few remaining unpolluted bioluminescent bays, yet it has had very little tourism. In 1999, the director of the Navy’s Department of Environmental Protection, Safety and Occupational Health said, “Vieques is as unique and beautiful as it is today because of the environmental stewardship of the Navy.”26 This is true. During its occupation of the island, the Navy opposed large-scale tourism, arguing 24 25 26
M. Martinez. “Where Is Vieques’ Tourism Industry Headed?” Caribbean Business, April 22, 2004. Sheila Levin. So, You Want to Live and Work in Vieques. April 2007. http://www.enchantedisle.com/enchanted/letters/lv0407.htm. Last accessed, September 14, 2015. Navy Environmental News. “radm Granuzzo Testifies to Rush Panel.” August 16, 1999.
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that it was incompatible with training activities, and they successfully thwarted proposals throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, including a Club Med-style project and a multimillion-dollar hotel resort.27 In the early 1960’s, after refusing to allow the extension of an airport runway that would have enabled commercial airlines to land on the island, the Assistant Chief of Staff for Naval Operations said: “The federal government has spent more than $100 million in developing Vieques and Roosevelt Roads. We’re not going to throw away such an investment so that Vieques should be converted into a mecca for tourism.”28 The Navy changed its position on large-scale tourism in the mid-1990’s, when it allowed the Wyndham Corporation to build an enclave tourist resort, Martineau Bay, on prime property along the beach away from the bombing sites. Wyndham received $40 million in tax credits from Puerto Rico, along with permission to wall off part of the public beach. They hired very few Viequenses, arguing that most did not speak English or have the necessary skills. Never very successful due to its inaccessibility, the resort was taken over by W Hotels in 2009 and was re-opened as an exclusive five-star hotel in 2010. Today, along with W Hotel, expatriates own over 90 percent of the tourist establishments.29 Some expatriates, including members of the Vieques Chamber of Commerce and the Vieques Business Organization, claim that the reason they own most of the businesses is because they have the entrepreneurial initiative – conveniently ignoring the fact that it takes more than initiative. For instance, Viequenses have a median household income of $5,900, an unemployment rate of 22 percent, a low high school completion rate, and no collateral assets. Puerto Rico’s small business loan program only lends to people with established credit and business development training is offered only to those that receive the loans.30 As is common with “lifestyle migrants,”31 expatriates want the island to maintain its charm and some accuse Viequenses of wanting more commercial tourism development on the island in order to generate jobs, in spite of what happened with Martineau Bay.32 Local guesthouse owner Wanda Bermúdez, who grew up in Vieques but lived in Orlando before moving back, exemplifies 27 28 29 30 31 32
Katherine McCaffrey. The Battle for Vieques’ Future. City University of New York. Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, 2006: 145. Ivan Roman. “Vieques’ Anger At Navy Dates To 1940s.” Orlando Sentinel, July 16, 2001: A1. Jacob Wheeler. “Hasta La Victoria Siempre.” Earth Island Journal, 2011. T. Carpenter. Vieques: Pathways Forward. Graduate Policy Workshop Final Report. Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs: Princeton, Fall 2010: 83 Allan M. Williams and C. Michael Hall. “Tourism and Migration: New Relationships between Production and Consumption.” Tourism Geographies 2, no. 1 (2000): 5–27. Michael Mastroianni, op. cit.
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this position, arguing that the future of Vieques depends on large-scale tourism and more residents; that a golf course, marina, hotels, and nice restaurants would also benefit residents and lead to improved infrastructure and services.33 She asks, “Where does it say in the Guides or the Master Plan that foreigners should be kicked out, or that development applies only to the Spanish-speaking-born-in-Vieques-from-Spanish-speaking-parents-born-inVieques?”34 Yet the construction of Martineau Bay motivated the cprdv to create a Master Plan for Sustainable Development in conjunction with Columbia University’s Urban Technical Assistance Project, focusing on locally owned small-scale ecotourism and cultural tourism based upon archaeological resources, fishing, and local artisans. The goal was to “make sure the people of Vieques are the managers, directors and owners of future economic entities – and not, as is the case today, the lowest paid employees in the local tourist economy.”35 No construction would be allowed on the beach, and instead of large hotels and casinos, the emphasis would be on “paradores” – small inns – managed by Viequense families. The Master Plan was completed in 2004, the same year that the Puerto Rican government implemented a new strategic plan calling for tourism expansion in the form of large resorts on the coasts of all three islands: the mainland, Culebra, and Vieques. cprdv and other groups challenged the strategic plan, and finally, with a change in government in 2013, a special commissioner was appointed to administer the Master Plan in Vieques and Culebra.36 Robert Rabin maintains that the goal of cprdv and the Master Plan is not to appropriate businesses currently owned by expatriates but to prevent large private corporations from developing resorts. The group does insist, however, that Viequenses control any new tourist development, and they acknowledge that in many cases the goals may entail significant changes from the way the tourism industry in Vieques currently operates (Rabin, personal communication, February, 2011). Rabin points to two examples: the first occurred in 2005 when Italian developers wanted to convert La Casa del Frances, a colonial mansion built at the 33 34 35 36
V. Bauzá. “Some Vieques Residents Protest Development.” South Florida Sun-Sentinel, November 19, 2006. Wanda Bermúdez. “What’s Happening to Us, Vieques? What Changed?” Playa Cofi, October 5, 2006. Robert Rabin. “Development of a Free Vieques.” Vieques-Island.com, 2000. http://www .vieques-island.com/navy/freevqs.html, accessed September 2013. Caribbean Journal Staff. “Puerto Rico Names Special Commissioner For Development of Culebra, Vieques.” Caribbean Journal, June 28, 2013.
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turn of the 20th century by a French sugar planter, into the main hall for a new ecotourism resort. Many Viequenses were upset because they considered the mansion to be part of their heritage, in spite of its origins. Even with the announcement that there would be a few hundreds jobs available for Viequenses as a result of building the resort, cprdv petitioned the government to appropriate the mansion and the surrounding area from the Italian owner so they could turn it into a locally-controlled heritage tourism site. cprdv won. Soon after, however, arsons burned the mansion to the ground.37 Since then, there has been no move to build the resort: apparently the arsonist scuttled the plans of both cprdv and the developers. The second example concerns Sharon Grasso and Frank Celeste, organizers of the Bio-Bay Conservation Group and owners of Island Adventures, which provides boat tours on Vieques’ bioluminescent bay on the nights when it glows due to shimmering microscopic plankton. They have been residents since 1986 and 1974 respectively. Grasso researched how to maintain the bay’s ecosystem, became certified to run the tours, and went through a long process of getting permits before starting the business.38 While some activists accuse them of stealing the economic rights to the bay from the Viequenses, there were no tours before Island Adventures was established and the bay was in danger of getting polluted until the conservation group set up protective measures. Rabin argues that cprdv does not want Viequenses to take over the business; rather, they want to have it shut down and have a bridge built so that all people can walk out over the bay for free. When the bay went dark for six months in 2014 for reasons still unexplained39 cprdv put the blame on the tour owners. When the bay spontaneously began to glow again in August 2014, cprdv was not able to stop the tour owners from resuming their activities. There has been significant increase in tourists to Vieques since the Navy left in 2004, some of it due to increased air transportation from San Juan Airport on the Puerto Rican mainland. However, the large-scale tourism many feared would run rampant in Vieques within ten years has not happened. In fact, only limited tourist and or commercial development on the island. Including some improvement in roads and other infrastructure, a few new modest tourist
37 McCaffrey, op. cit., 141–142. 38 M. Martinez, op. cit. 39 Lizette Alvarez. “Puerto Rico Debates Who Put Out the Lights in Mosquito Bay.” The New York Times, June 4, 2014.
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facilities, a co-op movie theater, and a pre-Colombian archaeological cultural tourist site.40 But as of yet there are no chain stores or fast food restaurants.41 Conclusion For the five years prior to the Navy leaving the island, protests against the Navy bombing had received major attention in the international press and had attracted famous celebrities and politicians. However, as soon as the Navy closed the base, instead of the media focusing on the contamination, drugs, crime, and health problems, “Vieques slid seamlessly from social justice talking point to hot tourist destination.”42 Davis, Hayes-Conroy, and Jones43 note that many visitors to Vieques are not even aware of the past Navy occupation or the problems that were left behind. Using newspaper articles about Vieques since 2004, they point to four common themes: 1) Vieques has a pristine physical landscape (contamination is invisible, military detritus is limited to certain areas, and the island is relatively uninhibited); 2) if local people had been left to their own devices they would have turned Vieques into a slum; 3) the Navy should be thanked for keeping Vieques a place of “uncorrupted nature”; 4) somehow the protest movements are to blame if the island becomes a tourist trap. Davis et al argue: “The natural landscape, through its labeling, becomes a primordial place that must be protected from the local population rather than a place where they belong.”44 This is reaffirmed by the fact that although the media often commodifies indigenous populations for the tourist gaze, Viequenses are rarely seen in tourist promotional materials and websites. There is no call for ritual dance or local foods, just for absence. Vieques as a tourist destination is based on the segregation and invisibility of both the Viequenses and the contaminated land. The disparity between the lives of most Viequenses, expatriate residents, and tourists is considerable. Yet there are also differences among expatriates. 40 41 42 43
44
Sherri Baver. “Environmental Politics in Paradise: Resistance to the Selling of Vieques.” North American Congress of Latin American Studies, August 21, 2009. Leigh Anne Henion. “Puerto Rico Holds One of the Planet’s Last Bright Spots.” Washington Post Magazine, September 15, 2011 Liz Gold. “In Vieques, Puerto Rico, La Lucha Sigue.” North American Congress on Latin America, January 15, 2007. Jeffrey Sasha Davis, Jessica S. Hayes-Conroy, and Victoria M. Jones. “Military Pollution and Natural Purity: Seeing Nature and Knowing Contamination in Vieques, Puerto Rico.” GeoJournal 69, no. 3 (August 3, 2007): 165–179 Ibid, 173.
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Most longtime expatriates consider themselves to be locals of Vieques, regardless of their relationship to the Viequense community. They point to their Puerto Rican citizenship as evidence of their commitment to the island. Yet most do not have children in the local schools and they have no immediate interest in the problematic educational system. While some have gotten cancer or other contamination-related illnesses, unlike Viequenses, they generally go to the us mainland for treatment. Moreover many want to protect the island from land speculators unless they are the ones buying the properties. Most entrepreneurial migrants would not identify themselves with neocolonialism, a term they use for big corporations who want to build hotels and restaurants on “their” island, particularly because the majority of these migrants were motivated initially by lifestyle rather than by business opportunities.45 Yet neocolonialism is present; expatriates control the tourism industry. As Sheller argues, “Such a structure of legitimation echoes the original us self-legitimation of its role in Puerto Rico as a whole – industrious capitalist gringos saving Puerto Ricans from their own failings, backwardness, and racial degeneracy.”46 There are expatriates who have settled in Vieques who find a way to exist within the two worlds. While Rabin and others have become completely immersed in Viequense life, some expatriates live in Esperanza but have Viequense friends, shop at Viequense stores, are involved in local Viequense organizations, including cprdv, and participate in local traditions. They also exhibit the most discomfort about the extreme poverty of the Viequenses, noting that it is easier for many people to deal with it by ignoring the Viequenses (personal conversations, February 2011). Vieques is a remarkable example of a small island struggling over the control of tourism. Most of the usual problems related to tourism exist: the hiring of non-locals, seasonal work, low pay, leakage, reverse multiplier effect, commodification of public space, pollution from vehicles. However, Vieques is also an island damaged by 60 years of environmental abuse and many of its residents must contend with brutal health issues within the midst of extreme poverty. Yet Vieques also has something that many other tourist sites in less developed areas do not have: a powerful organizational voice for its indigenous residents. It may be that the very complicated circumstances of Vieques – its contaminated land, the cprdv’s Master Plan, expatriate control over the existing tourist industry – will help subvert the threat of large-scale foreign owned tourism…for a while, anyway. Yet the forces of globalization will continue. 45 46
Williams & Hall, op. cit. Mimi Sheller. “Retouching the ‘Untouched Island’. Post-Military Tourism in Vieques, Puerto Rico.” Teoros: Revue de Recherche En Tourisme 26, no. 1 (2007): 26.
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The island has a geographic location that makes it perfect for tourism, the island’s contamination is invisible and has none of the ‘tourist trap’ infrastructure and activities of the typical Caribbean tourist locale. In the meantime, even though the Navy was forced off the land and there is now a Master Plan for Sustainable Development, a description of Vieques written in 1984 cruelly remains true for far too many of the population: “Along with the expatriates there was the perverse attraction of a heritage of colonialism: the bottomless sadness of a native population condemned to food stamps, w elfare payments, unemployment – to uselessness, as if the sometime Spanish name for Vieques, Las Islas Inutiles, applied to the people as well as the island.”47 Bibliography Alvarez, Lizette. “Puerto Rico Debates Who Put Out the Lights in Mosquito Bay.” The New York Times, June 4, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/us/puerto -rico-debates-who-put-out-the-lights-in-a-bay.html. Ayala, César J. “From sugar plantations to military bases: the US navy’s expropriations in vieques, Puerto Rico, 1940–45.” Centro Journal XIII, no. 1 (2001): 23–43. Ayala, César J, and José L Bolívar. Battleship Vieques: Puerto Rico from World War II to the Korean War. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2011. Barreto, Amilcar. Vieques, the Navy, and Puerto Rican Politics. Gainesville, Fl: University of Florida Press, 2002. Bauzá, V. “Some Vieques Residents Protest Development.” South Florida Sun-Sentinel, November 19, 2006. Baver, Sherri. “Environmental Politics in Paradise: Resistance to the Selling of Vieques.” North American Congress of Latin American Studies, August 21, 2009. https://nacla .org/node/6074. Bermúdez, Wanda. “What’s Happening to Us, Vieques? What Changed?” Playa Cofi, October 5, 2006. http://www.playacofi.net/NewFiles/Landuse.html. Bianchi, Raoul. Place and power in tourism development: tracing the complex articula tions of community and locality. 1st ed. Vol. 1. 13–32: PASOS:Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural, 2003. Bianchi, Raoul V. “Migrant Tourist-Workers: Exploring the ‘Contact Zones’ of PostIndustrial Tourism.” Current Issues in Tourism 3, no. 2 (2000): 107–137.
47
David Binder. “Vieques: Island of Slower Rhythms.” The New York Times, January 15, 1984, sec. Travel: 37.
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Bianchi, Raoul V. “The ‘Critical Turn’ in Tourism Studies: A Radical Critique.” Tourism Geographies 11, no. 4 (November 5, 2009): 484–504. doi:10.1080/14616680903262653. Binder, David. “Vieques: Island of Slower Rhythms.” The New York Times, January 15, 1984, sec. Travel. http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/15/travel/vieques-island-of-slower -rhythms.html. Brohman, John. “New Directions in Tourism for Third World Development.” Annals of Tourism Research 23, no. 1 (1996): 48–70. doi:10.1016/0160-7383(95)00043-7. Caribbean Journal Staff. “Puerto Rico Names Special Commissioner For Development of Culebra, Vieques.” Caribbean Journal, June 28, 2013. http://www.caribjournal .com/2013/06/28/puerto-rico-names-special-commissioner-for-development-of -culebra-vieques/. Carpenter, T. et al. Vieques: Pathways Forward. Graduate Policy Workshop Final Reports Fall 2010. Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs: Princeton, Fall 2010. Cohen, Erik. “Toward a Sociology of International Tourism,” Social Research 39, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 164–182 Conlin, Jennifer. “Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico Remind Travelers: No Passports Needed.” The New York Times, January 28, 2007, sec. Travel. http://www.nytimes .com/2007/01/28/travel/28transpassport.html. Davis, Jeffrey Sasha, Jessica S. Hayes-Conroy, and Victoria M. Jones. “Military Pollution and Natural Purity: Seeing Nature and Knowing Contamination in Vieques, Puerto Rico.” GeoJournal 69, no. 3 (August 3, 2007): 165–179. doi:10.1007/ s10708-007-9095-7. Franklin, Adrian, and Mike Crang. “The Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory?” Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 5–22. Gold, Liz. “In Vieques, Puerto Rico, La Lucha Sigue.” North American Congress on Latin America, January 15, 2007. http://nacla.org/news/vieques-puerto-rico-la-lucha-sigue. Griffith, David. Fishers At Work, Workers At Sea: Puerto Rican Journey Thru Labor & Refuge. Temple University Press, 2011. Henion, Leigh Anne. “Puerto Rico Holds One of the Planet’s Last Bright Spots.” Washington Post Magazine, September 15, 2011. http://articles.washingtonpost .com/2011-09-15/lifestyle/35275899_1_isabel-segunda-vieques-bioluminescent-bay. Sheila Levin. “So, You Want to Live and Work in Vieques.” April 2007. http://www .enchanted-isle.com/enchanted/letters/lv0407.htm. Martinez, M. “Where Is Vieques’ Tourism Industry Headed?” Caribbean Business, April 22, 2004. Mastroianni, Michael. “Vieques Retains Marks of Navy.” The Pitt News, April 2, 2004. http://www.pittnews.com/news/article_ffaa26db-618a-52b6-b736-b6d340d24b7b .html.
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McCaffrey, Katherine T. The Battle for Vieques’ Future. City University of New York. Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, 2006. http://redalyc.uaemex.mx/redalyc/src/ inicio/ArtPdfRed.jsp?iCve=37718108. McCaffrey, Katherine T. Military Power and Popular Protest the US Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Myer, Gay Nagle. “P.R. Tourism in Damage-Control Mode after CNN’s Vieques Report.” Travel Weekly, February 5, 2010. http://www.travelweekly.com/Caribbean-Travel/ P-R--tourism-in-damage-control-mode-after-CNN-s-Vieques-report/. Navy Environmental News. “RADM Granuzzo Testifies to Rush Panel.” Navy Environmental News, August 16, 1999. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Ortiz-Roque, Carmen, and Yadiris López-Rivera. “Mercury Contamination in Reproductive Age Women in a Caribbean Island: Vieques.” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 58, no. 9 (September 1, 2004): 756–57. Rabin, Robert. “Development of a Free Vieques.” Vieques-Island.com, 2000. http://www .vieques-island.com/navy/freevqs.html. Roman, Ivan. “Vieques’ Anger At Navy Dates To 1940s.” Orlando Sentinel, July 16, 2001, sec. A. Santana, Deborah Berman. La Lucha Continúa: Challenges for a Post-Navy Vieques. City University of New York. Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, 2006. http://redalyc .uaemex.mx/redalyc/src/inicio/ArtPdfRed.jsp?iCve=37718107. Serrano, Damaso. “Editorial.” Vieques Times, Winter 2003, 5. Schmelzkopf, Karen. “Scale and Narrative in the Struggle for Environment and Livelihood in Vieques Puerto Rico.” In Contentious Geographies: Environmental Knowledge Meaning Scale, 131–146. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2008. Sheller, Mimi. “Retouching the ‘Untouched Island’. Post-Military Tourism in Vieques, Puerto Rico.” Teoros: Revue de Recherche En Tourisme 26, no. 1 (2007): 21–28. Simmons, David G. “Community Participation in Tourism Planning.” Tourism Manage ment 15, no. 2 (April 1994): 98–108. doi:10.1016/0261-5177(94)90003-5. Taylor, George. “The Community Approach: Does It Really Work?” Tourism Management 16, no. 7 (November 1995): 487–89. doi:10.1016/0261-5177(95)00078-3. United States Environmental Protection Agency. “EPA Proposes the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Area in Vieques and Culebra for Inclusion on the Superfund National Priorities List.” August 13, 2004 http://www.epa.gov/superfund/news/ npl_081304.htm. Wheeler, Jacob. “Hasta La Victoria Siempre.” Earth Island Journal, 2011. Wilcox, J. “Vieques, Puerto Rico: An Island under Siege.” American Journal of Public Health 91, no. 5 (May 2001): 695–98.
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Williams, Allan M, and C. Michael Hall. “Tourism and Migration: New Relationships between Production and Consumption.” Tourism Geographies 2, no. 1 (2000): 5–27. Zambrana, Ivis Garcia. “From Bomb Zone to Boom Town: Real Estate Trends and Community Based Practice in Vieques, Puerto Rico.” MA thesis, The University of New Mexico, 2009.
PART 5 Human Rights, Equality and Culture of Empowerment
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chapter 15
Overcoming the Divide: Arab Women between Traditional Life and a Globalizing Culture Saliba Sarsar and Manal Stephan* The Middle East in general and the Arab region in particular are undergoing transformations, mainly from traditionalism to modernism, which are producing uncertainty but also some hope about the future. Many factors played and still are playing an important role in deciding the nature and extent of these transformations. Among them are neo-colonization, globalization, technological innovation, and most recently, what is commonly called “the Arab Spring.” The last two decades especially have been influential in the process of expediting transformations in Arab countries, as expressed by the increased power of globalization and rapid advancement of information and telecommunication technology. The challenge today is how to balance the multiple experiences emanating from tradition and the globalizing world, with its multiculturalism, transnationalism, and modern technology, among others. A central argument is that transformation in the Arab region is occurring in a dynamic environment, involving the power of globalization and modern technology as the main “actor” on the one hand and the power of traditionalism as the key “re-actor” on the other. Traditionalism, in this context, relates to various aspects of life, including social, religious, cultural, economic, and political. The status of women as one of the most sensitive and controversial dimensions of this transformation is also influenced by the aforementioned interactions. Arab women and their roles in society are actually oscillating between these two powers. Hence, it is essential for women and societies as a whole to learn how to modify these powers towards achieving some kind of equilibrium where women can enjoy all the positive aspects of globalization and modern technology without having to compromise the core of their cultural and religious identity. Two main challenges stand in the way of achieving this equilibrium. First are the growing numbers of traditionalists and the rigidity of their positions towards all aspects of globalization. Second is the overwhelming power of globalization and modern technology, which acts as one package invading * Monmouth University, usa.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004272835_017
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s ocieties and human lives without being sensitive to the local culture or the specific social needs of people. It is important to point out that the Arab region has a lot of commonalities in terms of language, culture, history, and religion, as it has many differences in terms of ethnicity, geography, religious minorities, wealth, and resources. These commonalities and differences often impact the nature and extent of transformation from traditionalism to modernism. Hence, it is important to keep in mind that any perceived generalizations always have an exception. Moreover, women’s rights advocates and activists in the Arab region are not all unified around a common perspective and vision. Two major paradigms present themselves: secular feminism and Islamic feminism.1 The process of transformation is not only influenced by these two paradigms, but it is also influencing the interaction between them. This chapter will first review the Arab perceptions and main reactions to globalization. The status of women and how women are empowered (or not empowered) to actualize their potential in the new globalizing culture will be discussed second. Special attention will be paid to the marginalization of women in Arab society, mainly in health, education, economic activity, and politics. Third, the impact of modern technology is explored as a way to mobilize Arab women. But is that sufficient to produce the desired goal of women empowerment? Key conclusions are that the empowerment of women is a collective responsibility and that empowered women are capable of modifying the powers of globalization and traditionalism towards an equilibrium that fosters gender equality in their societies.
Arab Perceptions and Reactions to Globalization
What is the impact of globalization on the Arab region? How Arabs perceive globalization is of great importance to understanding the process and end results of any occurring transformation. Because of the complex and multidimensional nature of globalization, it is hard to find for it a universal definition. In the Arab region, most scholars define globalization in terms of its source, impact, and goal, and most believe that globalization has negative economic and social consequences. Mubarak Amer Beqenah defines globalization as “the advocacy and orientation towards formulating human lives in different countries and nations 1 Margot Badran, “Between Secular and Islamic Feminisms: Reflections on the Middle East and Beyond,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 1, 1 (2005): 6–28.
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according to unified styles and methodologies with the aim of mainstreaming the ideological, political, economic, and cultural patterns of Western civilization – especially the American – in the world.”2 In his article “The Arabs, Islam, and Globalization,” Fauzi Najjar highlights the Arab concern over maintaining cultural identity and independence in the face of the West’s superiority and its pervading globalization.3 In his view, the Arab intelligentsia is divided into three different attitudes toward globalization.4 • The first group rejects it as the “highest stage of imperialism” and a “cultural invasion,” threatening to dominate people, undermine their distinctive “cultural personality,” and destroy their “heritage,” “authenticity,” “beliefs,” and “national identity.” • The second group of Arab thinkers, secularist by inclination, welcomes globalization as the age of modern science, advanced technology, global communications, and knowledge-based information. It calls for interacting with globalization and for benefiting from its “positive opportunities” in knowledge, science, and technology, without necessarily losing their Arab-Islamic cultural individuality. • The third group calls for finding an appropriate form of globalization that is compatible with the national and cultural interests of the people. Globali zation cannot be wholly accepted or rejected, it argues. This group’s attitude has been described as “positive neutrality,” a self-interested pragmatic outlook, seeking a middle ground since globalization is an inevitable historical phenomenon with which the Arabs will have to interact. Najjar also notes that there is a general consensus among Arabs – both who oppose globalization and those who favor it – that it is identical with Americanization. He adds that political considerations, such as the unqualified American support of Israel and the invasion of two Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, have conditioned Arab attitudes toward American culture as well as toward globalization.5 The perspective of Abu Sadat Nurullah, in “Globalization as a Challenge to Islamic Cultural Identity,” is an example of the Arab concern about globalization. Nurullah argues that globalization poses a challenge to Islamic cultural 2 Mubarak Amer Beqenah, “Globalization and Its Evolution,” http://www.saaid.net/Doat/ mubarak/5.htm. 3 Fauzi Najjar, “The Arabs, Islam, and Globalization,” Middle East Policy 12, 3 (2005): 91–106. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.
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identity. He calls Muslims around the world to be aware of the dreadful consequences of cultural globalization, and to have the strength to retain the absolute Islamic cultural traits prescribed by God.6 In “Contemporary Arab Views on Globalization,” Mohammed Abed Al-Jabiri also notes that it is at present quite difficult to find an Arab perspective that welcomes globalization, defend it, or stress its advantages.7 Despite the fact that globalization has many negative economic consequences on the region, most of the views of Arab intellectuals are driven by their fear of losing the Arab Islamic identity and heritage rather than the economic consequences. Al-Jabiri addresses this issue by advocating an open-minded approach to the Arab-Islamic heritage, arguing that in the age of global consciousness, deepened by the communication revolution, Arabs and Muslims can no longer remain attached to the past. He further concluded that just as in certain periods in the past their heritage assimilated elements from different cultures and was enriched by them, without losing its fundamental constituents, there is no reason why it cannot do the same in the age of globalization.8 Najjar supports this view by stating that no one denies the importance of heritage in the life of individuals and the history of nations; it is essential for development, stability, and prosperity. But, with the passage of time, heritage has to be reinterpreted to accommodate advances in knowledge and changes in lifestyle. Blind attachment to one’s heritage is a recipe for stagnation. He further warned that the Salafi retreat (i.e., the call of fundamentalists for turning back to the past) would threaten society with fragmentation, introversion, and perdition.9 Therefore, in spite of the voices among Arab scholars calling for more openness and tolerance for some of the positive changes brought to Arab society and culture through globalization, the prevailing attitude towards globalization and its transforming power is still a negative one. Obviously, this attitude has serious implications for women and their status in society.
Globalization and the Status of Arab Women
An optimistic view of the status of Arab women is portrayed in some parts of the Arab world through some local and international media outlets, such as 6 Abu Sadat Nurullah, “Globalization as a Challenge to Islamic Cultural Identity,” The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 3, 6 (2008): 45–52. 7 Mohammed Abed Al-Jabiri, “Contemporary Arab Views on Globalization,” http://www .aljabriabed.net/t7_globalization.pdf. 8 Ibid. 9 Fauzi Najjar, “The Arabs, Islam, and Globalization,” Middle East Policy 12, 3 (2005): 91–106.
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the list of the 100 most powerful Arab women for 2012, published in Arabian Business.10 At the same time, another less optimistic view and in many cases a gloomy view of the status of Arab women is portrayed through other sources such as the undp-sponsored 2005 Arab Human Development Report, “Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World.”11 It is not easy to make broad generalizations about the status of Arab women. While some Arab countries are progressing at a faster pace than others in taking measures to improve women’s status and rights in their society, others are still lagging behind. The following provides some of the social, political, and economic indicators of gender equality in Arab countries, as portrayed in the undp’s 2013 Human Development Report:12 • The Gender Inequality Index (gii) for the Arab states is 0.555, compared to 0.280 in Europe and Central Asia. Arab states vary with their gii, ranging from 0.747 in Yemen to 0.241 in United Arab Emirates and 0.261 in Tunisia. • The maternal mortality rate is 176 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 28 deaths per 100,000 in Europe and Central Asia and this is considered very high in comparison to other regions with similar gdps. • The adolescent fertility rate is 39.2 births per 1000 women ages 15–19. The fertility rate is 3.9 births per woman, making the Arab states and SubSaharan Africa (5.6 births per women) the highest in fertility in the world. • Female participation in the labor force in the Arab states is 22.8%, making it the lowest in the world. • Arab women occupy 13% of seats in national parliaments making the Arab states the lowest in the world in the percentage of women representation in national parliaments. Furthermore, in some Arab countries, women do not have equal citizenship and/or legal entitlements. The Inter-Parliamentary Union reports that women’s political participation remains undervalued, with the regional percentage in the lower houses amounting to 17.8 and in the upper houses 7.6, for a total of 15.9. In contrast, as indicated in Table 15.1 the regional average in the Americas
10 11 12
Arabian Business, “Revealed: 100 Most Powerful Arab Women 2012.” http://www .arabianbusiness.com/revealed-100-most-powerful-arab-women-2012-448489.html. “Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World.” undp’s 2005 Arab Human Development Reports, http://www.arab-hdr.org/publications/contents/2005/ch10-e.pdf. “The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World,” undp’s 2013 Human Development Report, http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR2013_EN_Statistics.pdf.
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Table 15.1 Women in National Parliaments: Regional averages. Single house or Upper house or Both houses lower house (%) senate (%) combined (%)
Nordic countries Americas Europe – osce member countries including Nordic countries Europe – osce member countries excluding Nordic countries Sub-Saharan Africa Asia Arab States Pacific
42.0 24.8 24.5
– 25.0 22.6
– 24.9 24.1
22.8
22.6
22.8
21.1 19.1 17.8 13.1
18.8 13.8 7.6 39.8
21.7 18.5 15.9 15.9
Regions are classified by descending order of the percentage of women in the lower or single house. Source: “Women in National Parliaments,” Inter-Parliamentary Union at http://www.ipu.org/ wmn-e/classif.htm.
is 24.9 percent, Europe (including Nordic countries) 24.1 percent, and SubSaharan Africa 21.7 percent.13 While literacy rates are much improved for young females in Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Tunisia, female adult illiteracy rates are in the double digits in all Arab countries except Kuwait, Qatar, and Palestine. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, “on average, 77% of the adult population is literate in the region (85% of male adults and 68% of female adults). This varies from 59% in Mauritania to 96% in Qatar.” As for youth literacy rates, “[o]n average, 90% of the youth population is literate in the region (93% of male youths and 87% of female youths). This varies from 69% in Mauritania to 100% in Libya.”14 Despite the fact that Arab women are gaining better access to education, they still do not have equal access to knowledge opportunities as men. Moreover, the 13
“Women in National Parliaments,” Inter-Parliamentary Union, accessed http://www.ipu .org/wmn-e/classif.htm. 14 “uis Statistics in Brief, Regional Literacy Profile – Arab States,” unesco Institute for Statistics, http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/TableViewer/document.aspx?ReportId=367& IF_Language=engBR_Region=40525.
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impact of the improvement in education is not fully reflected on their participation in the economic, social, and political life in their countries. In politics, even though Arab women have occupied important positions, they remain weak and underrepresented compared to men. There is even the suggestion that “[w]omen in power are often selected from the ranks of the elite or appointed from the ruling party as window dressing for the ruling regimes.”15 The social and family conditions of women in Arab countries have not improved either. A pew Forum has found,16 • “[A] majority of Muslims say that a wife should always obey her husband.” The average percentage is 86, with Tunisia scoring the highest (93%), Morocco (92%), Iraq (92%), Palestine (87%), Egypt (85%), Jordan (80%), and Lebanon (74%). • While more than eight-in-ten Muslims in Tunisia (89%) and Morocco (85%) say women should have the right to choose whether they wear a veil, fewer than half in Egypt (46%), Jordan (45%), and Iraq (45%) say the same. • While divorce rights are equal in Libya and Tunisia, they favor men in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. In Saudi Arabia, women normally cannot initiate divorce procedures. • While large majorities affirm women’s right to divorce in Tunisia (81%) and Morocco (73%), a quarter or fewer say the same in Egypt (22%), Jordan (22%) and Iraq (14%). The average is 43%. • As for inheritance rights, women receive half their brother’s share in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Tunisia. Their share is even less in Yemen. Across the Middle East and North Africa, fewer than half of Muslims say sons and daughters should receive the same inheritance shares. Palestinian Muslims (43%) are most supportive of equal inheritance rights, while support is low among Muslims in Morocco and Tunisia (15% each).” The average is 25.8%. According to a recent International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/ World Bank study, “[m]any laws still make it difficult for women to fully parti cipate in economic life – whether by getting jobs or starting businesses. 15 16
“Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World,” undp’s 2005 Arab Human Development Report, http://www.arab-hdr.org/publications/contents/2005/ch10-e.pdf. “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics, and Society. Chapter 4: Women in Society,” Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds -muslims-religion-politics-society-women-in-society.
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Discriminatory rules bar women from certain jobs, restrict access to capital for women-owned firms, and limit women’s capacity to make legal decisions.”17 Table 15.2 shows how married women in many Arab economies do not take some actions the same way as married men. The previous data and statistics reveal that conditions for women are far from perfect. In 2005, the fourth issue in the undp-sponsored series of Arab Human Development Reports gave “a comprehensive analysis of development Table 15.2 In many Arab economies married women do not take some actions the same way as married men. Action
Arab economies where married women do not perform the action the same way as married men
Be head of household
Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, United Arab Emirates, West Bank and Gaza, and Yemen Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, United Arab Emirates, West Bank and Gaza Jordan, Kuwait, Sudan, Syria, United Arab Emirates, West Bank and Gaza Egypt, Oman, and Saudi Arabia Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Sudan, Syria, West bank and Gaza, and Yemen Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria
Choose where to live
Apply for a passport Confer citizenship on her children
Get a job without permission Obtain a national identity card Travel outside the home Travel outside the country
Source: Excerpted from International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank. “Women, Business, and the Law 2014: Removing Restrictions to Enhance Gender Equality – Key Findings,” http://wbl.worldbank.org/~/media/FPDKM/WBL/Documents/Reports/2014/ Women-Business-and-the-Law-2014-Key-Findings.pdf, p. 16.
17
“Women, Business, and the Law 2014: Removing Restrictions to Enhance Gender Equality – Key Findings,” International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, http://wbl.worldbank.org/~/media/FPDKM/WBL/Documents/Reports/2014/ Women-Business-and-the-Law-2014-Key-Findings.pdf.
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deficits affecting the [Arab] region by examining shortfalls in women’s empowerment.”18 Considering that “women and men have an innate and equal right to achieve a life of material and moral dignity,”19 the report stressed that in terms of human development, the rise of women involves: • Complete equality of opportunity between women and men in the acquisition and employment of human capabilities; • Guaranteed rights of citizenship for all women on an equal footing with men; • Acknowledgement of, and respect for differences between the sexes…. Under no conditions is it acceptable to use gender differences to support theories of inequality between the sexes or any form of sexual discrimination. The report further explained the historical prejudice of the undervaluation of women’s participation, stating Arab society does not acknowledge the true extent of women’s participation in social and economic activities and in the production of the components of human wellbeing, and it does not reward them adequately for such participation.20 Questions remain: How the 100 women mentioned earlier managed to break all of the barriers and restrictions imposed on Arab women to be listed as most powerful? Do globalization and the globalizing culture have any role in empowering these women? An analysis of the list reveals that more than half of women listed are from the Gulf oil-producing countries. Sheikha Lubna Al Qasimi, the uae’s minister of foreign trade and a member of the ruling family of Sharjah, landed the number one spot, based on the number of people touched and influenced. The others include 40 who are involved in culture and society, 14 in media, 13 in banking and finance, 11 in construction and industry, 7 in retail, 4 in transport, 3 in science, 2 in government, 2 in sport, 2 in information technology and telecommunications, and 1 in retail. Obviously, success in most of the above professions requires accessibility to big capital and a strong international network, basically available to women with pull. Moreover, the majority of these 18 19 20
“Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World,” undp’s 2005 Arab Human Development Report, http://www.arab-hdr.org/publications/contents/2005/ch10-e.pdf. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 6.
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prominent women originate from the uae (24%), as well as each of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Lebanon (12%), where wealth abounds and where entertainment is high.21 A deeper analysis reveals that the majority of these women were handed high-rank government positions either through their kinship to the ruling families or through their access to big inherited capital. This accessibility is usually not available to the majority of Arab women. Thus, this list cannot be seen as a reflection of an improvement in the status of Arab women. On the contrary, it proves that any positive impact of economic globalization in the region is highly selective where only certain social strata within a country are benefiting from its consequences. At the economic level, globalization seems to affect the majority of Arab women adversely. While it is creating new opportunities for the elites and improving economic status of women who are close to the ruling regimes, it is not bringing the needed economic opportunities for the majority of Arab women. There is a shortage of women participation in economic activities, as reflected in the aforementioned data and statistics, and this is one of the major obstacles preventing the empowerment of women. Among the causes for this weak participation are “the prevailing male culture where some employees prefer to employ men, the scarcity of jobs in general, employment and wage discrimination between the sexes, and high reproductive rates.”22 Commenting on what assists or obstructs development in the Arab region, Paul Salem states, Economic restructuring, rising oil prices, and increasing globalization have limited wealth distribution and increased income disparities, particularly in oil-importing countries. The State has gradually withdrawn from providing welfare and wealth distribution, leaving citizens more vulnerable to market forces. In the rentier economies of the region, economic growth has translated into more benefits for those closest to power, not large-scale employment. Some well-placed and highly skilled elites have benefited from investment and trade opportunities that emerged through globalization, but the bulk of the population was either
21 22
Arabian Business, “Revealed: 100 Most Powerful Arab Women 2012,” accessed http://www .arabianbusiness.com/revealed-100-most-powerful-arab-women-2012-448489.html. “Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World,” undp’s 2005 Arab Human Development Reports, http://www.arab-hdr.org/publications/contents/2005/ch10-e.pdf.
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left out or offered low-skill, low-paid jobs. The gap between the incomes of the “best and the rest” has been growing ostentatiously.23 This inequality of wealth distribution leads to the impoverishment of 60% of the Arab population, of which 50% are women.24 Moreover, the economic restructuring measures adopted by Arab countries to accommodate the requirements of globalization are not gender sensitive, making women more vulnerable to the negative consequences of these measures.25 In addition, women are deprived from the already scarce resources and from any opportunities created to fix the problem of economic inequality. At the social and cultural levels, globalization and the globalizing culture are bringing women some opportunities to improve their social status but, at the same time, they are also creating challenges for implementing the legal, political, and cultural changes needed to promote their status in the society. An example of the opportunities brought in by the globalizing culture is the proliferation of women’s movements at the local and regional levels, the emergence of transnational feminist networks at the global level, and the adoption of the international conventions such as the convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (cedaw) and the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action. These are considered among the most important positive impacts of globalization on women status in the world, including Arab women.26 It is also believed that globalization is helping Arab women in terms of keeping a close eye on the region and the treatment of women there.27 Women activists, mostly supported by the international community organizations, especially have seized these opportunities to establish organizations that advance women’s empowerment and gender equality in the Arab region.
23 24 25
26 27
Paul Salem, “The Arab States: Assisting or Obstructing Development”, Carnegie Papers (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), 21 (2010). M. Abdel-Fadil, “Differential Impact of Globalization on Labor in the mena Region,” Working Paper Series (Economic Research Forum), 9816 (1998). “Globalization, Arab Women, and Gender Equality,” World Forum for Alternatives, accessed November 2003, http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/docs/caracas/es/Shahida_El_Baz -Globalization,_Arab_Women_and_Gender_Equality%7Bi%7D.pdf. Val Moghadam, “Globalization and Women in the Middle East,” Middle East Women’s Studies Review 16 (2002). “Women and the Favoritism of Globalization,” Association of Young Journalists and Writers Universal Journal, www.AYJW.org.
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• The Center of Arab Women for Training and Research (cawtar), based in Tunisia, continues to achieve strides in the domain of training, documentation, and research to support policy formulation through the engagement of civil society organizations. It supports pilot projects on gender-sensitive budgeting, working with civil society and governments to identify opportunities and allocate fiscal resources for women’s empowerment.28 • The undp’s Program on Governance in the Arab Region (pogar) has launched a Gender & Citizenship Initiative to increase women’s political participation and raise public awareness about gender inequalities inherent in government legislation. pogar works in partnership with key governance institutions in the Arab region, including legislatures, judiciaries, and civil society organizations to identify needs and solutions. It delivers a wide range of services and activities to further the triple pillars of good governance: participation, rule of law, and transparency and accountability.29 • The undp’s Information and Communication Technology for Development in the Arab Region (ictdar) program has established the promotion of Women and Children’s Rights through Access to Information (wracti) project, to empower women through comprehensively compiling and sharing with them information on their rights and the rights of their children within their communities.30 • The hiv/aids Program in the Arab States (harpas) works with a broad range of partners to heighten awareness and build commitment to scale-up prevention measures to the spread of hiv/aids in the region, with much of the programming focused on women’s perspectives.31 While these civil society initiatives are important, the level and extent of their utilization are dependent on many factors. The first factor is the extent of cultural acceptance and adaptation of Arabs and Muslims to the global values and principles pertaining to women’s human rights and gender equality. The resistance and negative attitudes of conservative Arab Muslim societies towards the globalizing culture and its transforming powers have been translated to resisting and rejecting any global calls or guidelines for cultural, social, legal, and political change aiming at achieving gender equality and improving the status of women in society and public life. It is believed that Islamic feminism is a manifestation of this resistance, where some women activists 28 See http://www.cawtar.org/. 29 See http://www.undp-aciac.org/governance/anticorruption.aspx. 30 See http://ictdar.pogar.org/English.htm. 31 See http://www.harpas.org/.
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realized the problem of social, political, and economic marginalization of Muslim women and the discrimination they face in their daily lives. In response, they addressed this problem from a progressive Islamic viewpoint rather than a Western viewpoint, believing that this approach will improve women’s status without jeopardizing their Muslim faith and identity. Some scholars believe that Islamic feminism, despite its reluctance to fully embrace global values and principles of gender equality, is not necessarily harmful for women’s rights and gender equality, and they call for a tolerant approach toward Muslim feminists who are trying to bring change and improve the status of women through “modern” progressive interpretations of the Shari’a or Islamic law. In her book, Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women Are Transforming the Middle East, Isobel Coleman believes that reform within an Islamic framework is the most promising avenue toward women’s advancement in the Middle East region.32 Accessibility of women to global opportunities and networks is a second factor playing a major role in achieving gender equality and improvement in the status of women. This accessibility is typically granted to the elite women who are tied to the governing authorities. These elite women are normally distant from the real interests or the actual needs of regular women in the Arab region, and often use the cause of women’s rights and gender equality to gain personal fame and recognition at the state, regional, and global levels. A good example of these misrepresentations is the women’s rights initiatives in preArab Spring Egypt and Tunisia where women’s issues were handled by some nongovernmental organizations, headed and controlled by the wives of the authoritarian rulers and a narrow circle of elite women close to the ruling regime. The lack of democracy and independent civil society organizations in these countries hindered the establishment of a dynamic and representative movement for Arab women. Thus, the legal and political gains for promoting gender equality, achieved by these elite women, were not deeply rooted within the social and cultural fabric of Arab societies. After the “Arab Spring” revolutions in 2011, the elected Islamic parties that later governed these countries viewed these achievements as changes imposed by the West through their loyal allies in the fallen regimes. These are now considered a threat to the society’s Arab and Islamic identity rather than a response to the requirements of human development, or as a natural adaptation to the requirement of the current modern era, or as a healthy cultural synthesis. After the winning of the fundamental Islamic parties and the decline in the number 32
Isobel Coleman. Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East (New York: Random House, 2013).
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of secular representation in the elected parliaments, many achievements serving the cause of gender equality at the constitutional and legislative levels were reversed. However, these are being reviewed again as the Arab region goes through further political changes, supported by military and security forces. At this time, the Arab Spring is more like a winter freeze. Conditions have not significantly for women. Some have even wondered, “[w]hether women have become the losers of [the 2011] Arab revolts.”33 In November 2013, a Thomson Reuters Foundation poll of gender experts concluded that contrary to expectations, women are the losers, not the beneficiaries, of the Arab Spring.34 Covering the poll results, the Chicago Tribune stated, “[s]exual harassment, high rates of female genital cutting, and a surge in violence and Islamist feeling after the Arab Spring uprisings have made Egypt the worst country in the Arab world to be a woman….”35 At the “International Forum on the Rights of Women in the Aftermath of the ‘Arab Spring’” in Fez, Morocco in June 2013, the delegates from the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, United States, and Canada agreed that “the aftermath of the revolutions has brought backlash against the rights of citizens, particularly women.”36 The same can be said of female representation in parliaments and cabinets, which has been radically reduced. In Egypt, the number of women in the elected parliament dropped from 12 percent to 2 percent or 8 out of 498 seats. The current Islamist-led Moroccan cabinet has one woman at a time when there were eight in the previous cabinet. In Libya, the quota in the first draft of the electoral law reserving ten percent of seats in the constituent assembly for women was discarded. The 2011 Tunisia election brought 49 women into the 217-seat Constituent Assembly but 42 of them happen to be members of the Islamist Ennahdha Party.37
33
Quoted in Mounira Chaieb, “The Precarious State of Women’s Rights after the Arab Spring.” Tunisia Live, July 10, 2013. http://www.tunisia-live.net/2013/07/10/the-precarious -state-of-womens-rights-after-the-arab-spring/. 34 “Full Poll Results: Women’s rights in the Arab world,” Thomson Reuters Foundation, November 12, 2011, http://www.trust.org/item/20131108160435-v2nm4/. 35 Crina Boros, “Egypt is Worst Arab State for Women, Comoros Best: Survey.” Chicago Tribune. November 12, 2013, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-arab-women -20131111,0,4066564.story. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid.
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Arab Women, Globalization, and Modern Technology
In the era of globalization, electronic social media and modern technology should have been among the best means available for Arab women to become mobilized and gain accessibility to resources at the local, regional, and international levels. The undp’s 2013 Human Development Report reveals that some of the Arab states still lag behind many regions of the world in terms of their adoption of technology. An average of 10.8 computers are available in the Arab region per 100 people; 27.2 percent of the people have access to the worldwide network; 2 percent have access to the Internet at speeds equal to or greater than 256 kilobits per second; and 99.6 percent of the people are subscribed to telephone lines and mobile phones. Looking at the same data at the individualistic level of each country reveals a huge disparity among countries, as appears in Table 15.3. Again, the Gulf oil-producing countries have the highest level of adoption of technology, with Saudi Arabia at the top of the list in all indicators. Iraq, Yemen, and Sudan occupy the bottom of the list. There is no
Table 15.3 Arab internet users and Facebook statistics Country
Population
Users (Dec. 2000)
Internet usage % Population Internet Facebook (June 2012) (penetration) (% users) (Dec. 2012)
Bahrain Iraq Jordan Kuwait Lebanon Oman Palestine (West Bank) Qatar Saudi Arabia Syria uae Yemen
1,248,348 31,129,225 6,508,887 2,646,314 4,140,289 3,090,150 2,622,544
40,000 12,500 127,300 150,000 300,000 90,000 35,000
961,228 2,211,860 2,481,940 1,963,565 2,152,950 2,101,302 1,512,273
77 7.1 38.1 74.2 52.0 68.8 57.7
1.1 2.4 2.8 2.2 2.4 2.3 1.7
413,200 2,555,140 2,558,140 890,780 1,587,060 584,900 966,960
1,951,591 26,534,504 22,530,746 8,264,070 24,771,809
30,000 200,000 30,000 735,000 15,000
1,682,271 13,000,000 5,069,418 5,859,118 3,691,000
86.2 49.0 22.5 70.9 14.9
1.9 14.4 5.6 6.5 4.1
671,720 5,852,520 n/a 3,442,940 495,440
Source: Excerpted from “Middle East Internet Users, Population, and Facebook Statistics,” http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats5.htm.
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data on the distribution of technology adoption between urban and rural regions within the same country.38 An extension of technology adoption is social media, which is increasingly being viewed as a key instrument for the empowerment of Arab women. As the Arab Spring has shown, women have gone beyond socio-cultural norms and expectations by using social media to document, mobilize, and even lead protests. Examples abound. • Lina Ben Mhenni, a prominent Tunisian blogger and cyber activist, addresses freedom of speech, human rights, social problems, and organ donation awareness in her important blog, “A Tunisian Girl.” When the unrest in Tunisia began during the latter half of December 2010, Ben Mhenni traveled across Tunisia to document the people’s protests and the government’s armed crackdowns. The images she generated became evidence of the brutality of the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali regime.39 • Israa Abdel-Fattah, also known as “Facebook Girl,” is a co-founder of Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement of 2008, which formed on Facebook to back strikes against the Mubarak regime, and became a top online activist in the January 25, 2011 revolution.40 • Asmaa Mahfouz, called the “leader of the revolution,” received the European Parliament Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2011. She organized strikes for basic rights as part of the Egyptian April 6 Youth Movement. Mahfouz’s YouTube videos, Facebook, and Twitter posts helped propel the Tahrir Square demonstrations.41 • Salwa Bugaighis, a lawyer, started the Libyan Revolution by calling for legal reforms and having a sit-in in the office of the attorney general.42 Part of her strategy is to use the media in order to advocate for human rights and 38 39
40
41 42
“The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World,” undp’s 2013 Human Development Report, http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR2013_EN_Statistics.pdf. “Lina Ben Mhenni – The blogger of the Jasmine revolution,” Human Dignity Forum, accessed November 12, 2011, http://www.human-dignity-forum.org/2011/11/lina-ben -mhenni-the-blogger-of-the-jasmine-revolution/. See the interview of Esraa Abdel Fattah by Lauren E. Bohn, “I want a Democratic Egypt.” The Cairo Review of Global Affairs. School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, American University of Cairo. February 27, 2011. “The Female Factor – Equal Rights Takes to the Barricades,” The New York Times, http:// www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/world/middleeast/02iht-letter02.html?_r=0. “The women fighting, organizing, feeding and healing Libya’s revolution,” The National, March 25, 2011, http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/africa/the-women-fighting-organising -feeding-and-healing-libya-s-revolution.
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“to raise awareness of women’s rights, to change the stereotypes of women,”43 not only under the old regime but today as well. • Tawakkol Karman, chair of the organization “Women Journalists without Chains,” won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. As the Nobel Peace Prize Committee stated, “We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society.”44 She has used Facebook and other social media to urge citizens, especially the young, to protest.45 • Razan Zaitouneh is a human rights lawyer who created the Syrian Human Rights Information Link blog (ShRIL) that reports on current atrocities in Syria. Her posts have become an important source of information for the Arab and international media. She is currently in hiding – the Bashar Assad regime has accused her of being a foreign agent, and has arrested members of her family.46 Although social media is now enabling women to engage in political and civic affairs as well as in social change and entrepreneurial endeavors, a recent study has found that there are “new-found concerns surrounding issues of security, privacy, freedom of expression, and the disruptive uses of social media on foreign policy making and diplomacy.”47 Moreover, while social media can be a key agent of women’s empowerment and can engender wider participation in civic, economic, legal, public, and social affairs, the effects of social media can be limited “in the absence of actual changes in gender equality legislation and rights on the ground.”48 Saudi Arabia is a case in point. Data from the undp’s 2013 Human Development Report ranks Saudi Arabia higher than most Arab countries in 43
Warren Hoge, Interview with Salwa Bugaighis, Libyan Human Rights Lawyer. March 27, 2012 http://www.theglobalobservatory.org/interviews/248-interview-with-salwa-bugaighis -prominent-libyan-human-rights-lawyer.html. 44 “Nobel Peace Prize for 2011,” Nobel Peace Prize, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ peace/laureates/2011/press.html. 45 “Tawakkol Karman – The Face of the Yemeni Eevolution,” Human Dignity Forum, http://www.human-dignity-forum.org/2011/11/tawakkol-karman-the-face-of-the -yemeni-revolution/. 46 “Syrians Want Freedom,” The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ razan-zaitouneh. 47 Racha Mourtada and Fadi Salem, “The Role of Social Media in Arab Women’s Empowerment,” Arab Social Media Report 1, 3 (2011). http://www.ArabSocialMediaReport .com. 48 Ibid., p. 4.
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terms of technology adoption. If we assume that the adoption of technology and social media in Arab countries is helping women to be empowered, then Saudi Arabian women should be the most mobilized and empowered among Arab women. Facts on the ground and news from Saudi Arabia concerning women’s status and level of empowerment do not support this assumption. The latest news on the “Women Driving Campaign” launched on October 27, 2011 to protest the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia49 shows that social media is being utilized for mobilization purposes. Despite the fact that this campaign received attention at the global level and the voices of Saudi women were heard in many parts of the world, they were silenced and threatened at the local level. Some of the extremists among religious leaders intimidated activists and several journalists and activists were detained and interrogated by the authorities. So far, 60 women posted their photos or videos of themselves driving in the streets of Saudi Arabia.50 The campaign has a Facebook page that is still ongoing and a heated debate on the issue is building up in different social media outlets.51 Conservatives and extremist religious preachers and their followers are also utilizing modern technology and social media to promote their traditional views of women as housewives only.52 The Uprising of Women in the Arab World is another example of Arab women’s utilization of social media to promote gender equality and women’s human rights. Its Facebook page53 currently has around 120,000 likes and it is attracting mostly Arab youth, 18–24 years old. The following statement is posted on its page: It is time for women and men to unite against the oppression of women in the Arab world. To say no to violence against women, no to their allegiance to men, no to repression and abuse, no to their treatment as second-class citizens…. We demand the full application of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for Arab women just as for men. This chart comes before any state, any culture, any tradition, and any mentality…. 49
“Saudi Arabia Women Defy Authorities over Female Driving Ban,” Cable News Network, http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/26/world/meast/saudi-arabia-women-drivers/. 50 “60 Saudi Women Protest Driving Ban without Incident in Latest Push for Easing Restrictions in Kingdom,” The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/ 10/26/saudi-women-driving-protest_n_4166555.html. 51 See https://www.facebook.com/pages/Saudi-Women-Driving-Campaign-حملة-لقيادة-المر�أة /215739848446522. 52 See https://www.facebook.com/intifadat.almar2a. 53 See https://www.facebook.com/intifadat.almar2a.
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Let’s spread the word and create a strong solidarity network, share our views, denounce the absurd laws of our respective countries, and share updates about the progress and changes that we are working on…. TOGETHER FOR FEARLESS, FREE, INDEPENDENT WOMEN IN THE ARAB WORLD. Conclusion The apparent progress in some Arab countries promoted by globalization and the spread of some aspects of Western culture within Arab societies (e.g., high rise buildings, chain restaurants and stores, high spending on cosmetics and brand name clothes and cars, expanding use of the electronic social media, and modern technologies) cannot be considered a measure of modernization. True modernization should be measured in relationship to the required social, political, legal, economic, and cultural change designed to enhance the overall welfare of the populations in the Arab countries regardless of their gender, ethnicity, social status, religion, and place of residency (i.e., urban versus rural). Even though Arab societies are adopting aspects of globalization, the impact is not reaching deep into the fabric of Arab cultural and social life. Arab culture is a culture of men. Arab women are generally appreciated as grandmothers, mothers, sisters, homemakers, but not as equal partners, important for building society and the future. Women’s aspirations, ideas, and plans usually go through male filters – be they of the father, brother, religious leader, community elder, or country ruler. With all the globalization and modern technology impacting the world of men and women alike, Arab women still face not only a glass ceiling, as in the West, but a cement one behind it as well. Their talents and skills are not fully recognized and valued. What they are achieving in education and employment, for example, falls off as it comes in contact with the gender gap. Exceptions relate to a few women, capable in their own right, who have been fortunate to break the ceiling and the cement wall behind it in some professions, sometimes with the help of the perceived or real power of one or more influential male figures. Globalization has brought many substantive changes to the Arab region. Whether positive or negative, these have not substantially advanced gender equality. If the status of Arab women is to improve, governments, civil society organizations, and international community development actors are advised to give priority to the vigorous empowerment of women in all aspects of their lives.
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Women, like men, need to be given better opportunities and provided with the necessary skills to utilize modern technology for the purpose of achieving gender equality through mobilization, advocacy, job creation, and accessibility to resources and transnational networking. This necessitates of Arab women to be proactive and work not only individually, but also in groups, and to take the lead, as appropriate, in order to influence policies and decision-making in their communities, countries, region, and beyond. One approach of joint action is Islamic feminism that uses faith as a source of economic, political, and social rights. Another is the secular approach that places pluralism and the respect for law at the heart of political change. Regardless, Arab women should not be held back by the rigidities created by social structures, including tribalism and patriarchy, cultural boundaries, and discriminatory legal structures. Their future should not be jeopardized by traditionalists and fundamentalists who eschew most aspects of globalization, and the overwhelming power of economic globalization and modern technology, which is invading societies, cultures, and human lives without being sensitive to their local culture or specific social needs. They should not allow themselves to be lost in extremes but instead insist on the middle ground. Empowering women is empowering a whole society. Advancing gender equality and the wellbeing of women is not solely the responsibility of women. An Arab society that is capable of balancing the powers of globalization and traditionalism will engender the necessary environment that would empower women to honor their cultural and religious heritage, while they seize simultaneously the positive opportunities provided by the globalizing culture. Bibliography “Middle East Internet Users, Population, and Facebook Statistics,” http://www.internet worldstats.com/stats5.htm. “Syrians Want Freedom,” The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ razan-zaitouneh. “The Female Factor – Equal Rights Takes to the Barricades,” The New York Times, http:// www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/world/middleeast/02iht-letter02.html?_r=0. “The women fighting, organizing, feeding and healing Libya’s revolution,” The National, March 25, 2011, http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/africa/the-women-fighting -organising-feeding-and-healing-libya-s-revolution. “Women and the Favoritism of Globalization,” Association of Young Journalists and Writers Universal Journal, www.AYJW.org. Abdel-Fadil, M. “Differential Impact of Globalization on Labor in the MENA Region,” Working Paper Series (Economic Research Forum), 9816 (1998).
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Al Shihiru, Abdullah Aya Batrawy. “60 Saudi Women Protest Driving Ban without Incident in Latest Push for Easing Restrictions in Kingdom,” The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/26/saudi-women-driving-protest_n _4166555.html. Al-Jabiri, Mohammed Abed. “Contemporary Arab Views on Globalization,” http:// www.aljabriabed.net/t7_globalization.pdf. Arabian Business, “Revealed: 100 Most Powerful Arab Women 2012,” accessed http:// www.arabianbusiness.com/revealed-100-most-powerful-arab-women-2012-448489 .html. Arabian Business, “Revealed: 100 Most Powerful Arab Women 2012,” http://www.arabian business.com/revealed-100-most-powerful-arab-women-2012-448489.html. Badran, Margot. “Between Secular and Islamic Feminisms: Reflections on the Middle East and Beyond,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 1, 1 (2005): 6–28. Beqenah, Mubarak Amer. “Globalization and Its Evolution,” http://www.saaid.net/ Doat/mubarak/5.htm. Boros, Crina. “Egypt is Worst Arab State for Women, Comoros Best: Survey,” Chicago Tribune. November 12, 2013, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-arab -women-20131111,0,4066564.story. Cable News Network. “Saudi Arabia Women Defy Authorities over Female Driving Ban,” http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/26/world/meast/saudi-arabia-women-drivers/. Chaieb, Mounira. “The Precarious State of Women’s Rights after the Arab Spring,” Tunisia Live, July 10, 2013. http://www.tunisia-live.net/2013/07/10/the-precarious -state-of-womens-rights-after-the-arab-spring/. Coleman, Isobel. Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East. New York: Random House, 2013. Fattah, Esraa Abdel by Lauren E. Bohn. “I want a Democratic Egypt,” The Cairo Review of Global Affairs. School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, American University of Cairo. February 27, 2011. Hoge, Warren. “Interview with Salwa Bugaighis, Libyan Human Rights Lawyer,” March 27, 2012, http://www.theglobalobservatory.org/interviews/248-interview-with-salwa -bugaighis-prominent-libyan-human-rights-lawyer.html. http://ictdar.pogar.org/English.htm. http://www.cawtar.org/. http://www.harpas.org/. http://www.undp-aciac.org/governance/anticorruption.aspx. https://www.facebook.com/intifadat.almar2a. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Saudi-Women-Driving-Campaign-حملة-لقيادة-المر�أة/ 215739848446522. Human Dignity Forum. “Lina Ben Mhenni – The Blogger of the Jasmine Revolution,” accessed November 12, 2011, http://www.human-dignity-forum.org/2011/11/lina-ben -mhenni-the-blogger-of-the-jasmine-revolution/.
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Human Dignity Forum. “Tawakkol Karman – The Face of the Yemeni Revolution,” http://www.human-dignity-forum.org/2011/11/tawakkol-karman-the-face -of-the-yemeni-revolution/. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank. “Women, Business, and the Law 2014: Removing Restrictions to Enhance Gender Equality – Key Findings,” http://wbl.worldbank.org/~/media/FPDKM/WBL/Documents/Reports /2014/Women-Business-and-the-Law-2014-Key-Findings.pdf. Inter-Parliamentary Union. “Women in National Parliaments,” accessed http://www .ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm. Inter-Parliamentary Union. “Women in National Parliaments,” http://www.ipu.org/ wmn-e/classif.htm. Moghadam, Val. “Globalization and Women in the Middle East,” Middle East Women’s Studies Review 16 (2002). Mourtada, Racha and Fadi Salem, “The Role of Social Media in Arab Women’s Empowerment,” Arab Social Media Report 1, 3 (2011). http://www.ArabSocialMedia Report.com. Najjar, Fauzi. “The Arabs, Islam, and Globalization,” Middle East Policy 12, 3 (2005): 91–106. Nobel Peace Prize. “Nobel Peace Prize for 2011,” http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel _prizes/peace/laureates/2011/press.html. Nurullah, Abu Sadat. “Globalization as a Challenge to Islamic Cultural Identity,” The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 3, 6 (2008): 45–52 Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics, and Society. Chapter 4: Women in Society,” http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/ the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-women-in-society. Salem, Paul. “The Arab States: Assisting or Obstructing Development,” Carnegie Papers (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), 21 (2010). Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Full Poll Results: Women’s Rights in the Arab World,” November 12, 2011, http://www.trust.org/item/20131108160435-v2nm4/. UNDP’s 2005 Arab Human Development Reports. “Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World,” http://www.arab-hdr.org/publications/contents/2005/ch10-e.pdf. UNDP’s 2013 Human Development Report. “The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World,” http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR2013_EN_Statistics.pdf. UNESCO Institute for Statistics. “UIS Statistics in Brief, Regional Literacy Profile – Arab States,” http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/TableViewer/document.aspx?ReportId =367&IF_Language=engBR_Region=40525. World Forum for Alternatives. “Globalization, Arab Women, and Gender Equality,” accessed November 2003, http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/docs/caracas/es/ Shahida_El_Baz-Globalization,_Arab_Women_and_Gender_Equality%7Bi%7D.pdf.
chapter 16
The Millennium Development Goals, Gender Equality, and Empowerment in India Rekha Datta* More than two of the seven billion people that inhabit the world live in China and India. Human resources form a fundamental asset to both countries, which are vying for world status through their respective markets, services, trade, and labor. Their success toward achieving greater human development lies in how they are channeling their human resources. A fundamental aspect of realizing the human resource capacity of a nation lies in its promotion of gender equity. Especially for a rapidly developing country such as India, which is also dealing with some pulls from traditional and social conservatism that imposes certain restraints on women’s full and equal participation in educational and economic enterprises, it is a challenge to assess the country’s progress toward gender equity. Given the complexity of the phenomenon, this chapter uses the template provided by the indicators set by the Millennium Development Goals (mdgs) to examine India’s progress toward achieving gender equity. In 2000, under the leadership of Secretary General Kofi Anan, the United Nations launched the Millennium Development Goals (mdgs). At that time, all 192 countries agreed upon the mdgs by 2015. The mdgs, as outlined by the United Nations, are: 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. 2. Achieve universal primary education. 3. Promote gender equality and empower women. 4. Reduce child mortality. 5. Improve maternal health. 6. Combat hiv/aids, malaria, and other diseases. 7. Ensure environmental sustainability. 8. Develop a global partnership for development.
* Monmouth University. I wish to thank Jessica Moise for research assistance, and volume editor Vincenzo Mele and Marina Vujnovic for their guidance in the course of writing this chapter.
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Each of these overall goals also identifies specific targets to be achieved by nation states, with the cooperation of international agencies and other actors.1 As is evident from these goals, the primary purpose is to alleviate extreme poverty and the ancillary challenges that are embedded within the challenge of such poverty. The mdgs also recognize that many, in fact all, of these issues are interconnected; hence the need for a global partnership to combat the challenges. Another important aspect of these goals is the role and place of gender equity. At first glance, it seems that only two of the eight goals are geared toward the development of the capacity of women to combat issues pertaining to health, poverty, and so on. However, a more careful examination of the two goals reveals the entire panorama of challenges that women face, especially in developing and poor countries. Since gender empowerment is a holistic process that covers much more than gender equality and maternal health, and since the achievement of these are also immersed in the other mdgs and other social policies, this chapter will attempt to cover them as they pertain. Furthermore, gender equality itself can only be assessed through some specific yardsticks, which in turn may be more manifest in ancillary aspects of empowerment such as equal access to education, work, health benefits, family status, etc. Therein lies the difficulty in assessing gender equality – where should we focus? Recognizing the gender disparities that continue to challenge many parts of the world despite more than a decade of the implementation of mdgs, several attempts are being made to alleviate such inequalities. unesco, for example, has launched a new global initiative to target education of girls and adult literacy. This initiative, titled, “Better Life, Better Future”, calls for a new partnership to ensure that more girls have access to education. In assessing the need for the partnership, the initiative outlines the following reasons: • 39 million girls of lower secondary age are currently not enrolled in either primary or secondary education, or 26% of the 11–15 age group. • Only about one third of countries have achieved gender parity at the secondary level. In some instances, the dropout rate of girls from school has increased in the past decade.
1 http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/bkgd.shtml, accessed 9/19/2011.
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• Adolescents who fall behind, due to late entry into primary school or grade repetition (or both), are at a significant risk of dropping out of school. • Many girls of primary school age are excluded from education because they never had a chance to enter primary education at all. • Lack of education for girls translates into the disproportionate number of adult women without literacy skills. • Two-thirds of the world’s 796 million illiterate adults are women. • It has been estimated that universal secondary education for girls in sub Saharan Africa could save as many as 1.8 million lives annually.2 This chapter surmises that gender equality and empowerment are achievable through equity in education and equal access to work. Even though gender equality and empowerment constitute the third mdg, neither of the concepts is easy to define. Kabeer (2005) includes the following indicators to signify gender equality and empowerment: “losing the gender gap in education at all levels; increasing women’s share of wage employment in the non-agricultural sector; and increasing the proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments.” Kabeer goes on to considering education, employment, and political participation to be essential to achieving gender equality and empowerment.3 Modifying this framework slightly, this chapter considers equity in access to education and work to be key in ensuring gender equality and empowerment. This is not to downplay the impact of political participation, but to focus on these two aspects specifically. Addressing poverty is a fundamental part of this issue as everything else, most importantly, access to education beyond the primary level and being able to continue in school, require access to financial resources for basic education and a healthy lifestyle. In terms of conceptual clarity, the chapter examines empowerment as both a process and a product. Feminist scholars as well as development analysts have demonstrated the overlap between the processes of change that result in empowerment, or for that matter, disempowerment of women. Social and economic systemic changes surrounding development policies and strategies have led to changes in women’s status and capacity. Even as agencies and processes implement such changes, women also have to overcome limitations
2 http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/, accessed 9/14/2011. Full report on the initiative is a pdf file listed on this site. 3 Naila Kabeer, “Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment: A Critical Analysis of the Third Millennium Development Goal,” Gender and Development, Vol. 13, No. 2, March 2005, p. 13.
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imposed by power relations, particularly in patriarchal systems. Such control over resources as well as relations will result in empowerment.4 As already mentioned, this chapter looks at gender equity and empowerment and mdgs in India. The chapter on China in this volume will help provide a comparative assessment with India. Beyond the statement at the outset of the population strength of the two countries, most of the studies comparing these two countries have focused on security relationships and political and economic aspects of such cooperation. Mired in historical similarities and differences, China and India have some shared experience of exploitation by external powers, traditional hierarchies determining social structure, as well as political issues that led to border war (1962), and power play involving the super power rivalry during the cold war and regional tussle over territory surrounding Kashmir, and ping pong shuttling of positions in regional and global political issues.5 Studies of cooperation and conflict between these two countries highlight political and economic sources of tension and potential cooperation that could lead to benefit both sides as well as the region. Surprisingly, the interest in studying the social and cultural comparisons of the two countries has been scant by comparison. Taken together, these chapters and the comparative statuses of the two countries make for interesting analyses. Beyond their comparative geographical expanse, both countries took off the development phase from relative deprivation and poverty. In trade and commerce, they both have significant potential, as well as the ability to play an important role in international commercial and economic transactions.6 Even scarce, are studies examining the status of women in the two countries in a comparative context. It is not only interesting, but also almost imperative that we study it, for various reasons. Both these countries have a rich past and civilization, but also that is marked by subversion of women in many respects. This range from traditional perspective of keeping women within the household, keeping them as second-class citizens, subjecting them to cultural practices such as ‘Sati’ or ‘foot binding’, which were demeaning, hurtful, even causing death in certain circumstances. Notwithstanding such cruelty and demeaning of women, China’s post 1949 government and various reforms have elevated the status of women to one of 4 R. Datta and J. Kornberg, Eds. Women in Developing Countries: Assessing Strategies of Empowerment (Boulder, co: Lynne Rienner, 2002), Introduction. 5 Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu and Jing-dong Yuan, China and India (Boulder, co: Lynne Rienner, 2003), Chapter 1. 6 Amartya Sen, “Radical Needs and Moderate Reforms,” in Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, eds., Indian Development (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 10.
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equality, fowling egalitarian communist philosophy. Some of these reforms have ushered in economic freedoms, others, social. It is therefore fruitful to examine these two chapters in a complementary manner in this volume, so that interesting contrasts between India and China can be drawn from these two chapters. Similar to China’s post-1949 initiatives, India’s post independence constitution also grants many freedoms to women, geared toward equality of opportunity to work and study. India has had women leaders, including a woman Prime Minister and a President. Granted, such token women leadership is not adequate indicators for women’s freedom and equality. So, we need to take a closer look at some of the more recent attempts through mdgs and how they fare in terms of gender equality and empowerment. Once clear indication that girls and boys are not seen as equals is partly socio-cultural. But it is more complex than merely depicting it in broad hues of ‘eastern’ and western’ cultures and as the latter being more sensitive to gender equality. More than two decades ago Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen reminded us that in most western countries, despite different kinds of biases against women such as in education, career promotion, and the like, ‘women suffer little discrimination in basic nutrition and healthcare.’ The fact that along with Europe and the us, Japan also falls in this category belies the categorization of such discrimination on the basis of ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ cultural perspective. “In India, …except in the period immediately following birth, the death rate is higher for women than for men fairly consistently in all age groups until the late thirties.” Much of this is due to the ‘relative neglect of females, especially in health care and medical attention.’ This kind of neglect results in lower ratios of women to men than in other parts of the world. In South Asia, the ratio is 0.94, compared to the worldwide ratio of approximately 1.05. A similar situation is true of China, which alone, as of 1990, accounted for half of the 100 million women ‘missing’.7
Women, Education, and Work in India 1950–2000 – An Overview
Like many other contradictions embedded within the Indian society, the place and role of women seem enigmatic and paradoxical. On the one hand, women’s subordination through social and cultural norms is historical and 7 Amartya Sen, “More Than 100 Million Women are Missing,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 37, No. 20, December 20, 1990. Available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/dec/20, accessed 9/12/2011.
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legendary. On the other, women have historically played a significant role in the Indian economy, whether it is in the textile related industry, in construction or mining sites, or in other rural agricultural practices. The cultural bias against equality of education among the sexes in India is well established. Boys receive preference over girls when it comes for a family to send their children to school. Even if boys and girls both have improved chances of being enrolled in primary schools, as they get older, girls tend to be held back, do housework, and get ready for marriage. What is lost is this traditional normative set up is the tremendous potential of a girl to use her education to bring about a much larger, positive impact on her family and community. A recent study asked if these norms get challenged if the mothers tend to be educated. It demonstrated that women who are educated and enjoy autonomy in the household tend not to discriminate between girls and boys when it comes to educating them. “While educational level determines women’s ability to access market opportunities outside the household, the extent of her autonomy reflects the social and cultural institutions that determine her control over the use of her own or other household members’ resources within the family. The analysis established the existence of a robust, positive relationship between mother’s empowerment and a smaller sex difference in household investments in children’s schooling. The results show that, in contrast to the findings reported from some countries, in India increasing both father’s and mother’s education is associated with greater educational attainment of daughters than of sons.”8 The study also demonstrated that even if father and mother both received equal education, the mother would have more of an influence in empowering children to get equal access to education, and overall provide a source of inspiration to the family and community. Even having a primary education empowers mothers to reduce gender inequality in education. Article 14 of the Constitution of India guarantees equality before the law. Article 15 prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth, and so on. It goes even further in guaranteeing special provision to advance the status of women. According to Article 15, clause 3, “Nothing in this article shall prevent the State from making any special provision for women and children.”9 So, has the Government of India ensured equal access for girls and women to education, work, and health benefits? 8 Farzana Afridi, “Women’s empowerment and the goal of parity between the sexes in schooling in India,” Population Studies, Vol. 64, No. 2, 2010, pp. 131–145. 9 http://india.gov.in/my-government/constitution-india, accessed 2/24/2015.
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Constitutional provisions aside, the government also realized early on that women’s education would need special emphasis, and appointed several commissions to ensure it. Since the 1970s, despite efforts for over two decades, women’s education remained a problem. While both still appallingly low, women’s literacy rate in the 1970s was 18.7% compared to men’s 39.5%. The enrolment rates for girls fell as they reached high school, from 62.4% to 10.9%. Those of boys also fell, from 77.6% to 30.1%. When taken into perspective that many of the these boys and girls, between the ages of 10 and 14 (more girls than boys) made up the workforce, it becomes clear how the issue of girls’ education is a more complex problem than merely ensuring they are enrolled in primary schools.10 According to another estimate, despite an overall increase in school enrollment for girls (all ages) between 1950–51 and 2006–07 from 25.6% to 45.54%, it still did not reach 50% of the share of enrollment (Joshi: 2010, 549).11 Like education and other aspects of any discussion on gender disparities in India, it is perplexing to analyze the status of women and work in India. On the one hand, there is the cultural perception of the place of the woman being at home. In the agricultural sector, women have always played an active role. “In the traditional Indian society it was not considered respectable for a middle or upper class woman, particularly for a married woman, to seek a career or to accept service outside the home.”12 Early estimates demonstrate that in the first few decades after independence, more women joined the workforce, and economic necessity was the most important reason cited by women to take up and continue in jobs.13 Despite the increase of economic activity among women, the literature also shows some vagaries in that picture. Ester Boserup’s findings are now well established in the field. Her seminal work, Woman’s Role in Economic Develop ment, was first published in 1970, heralding a worldwide emphasis on dissecting the gender impact behind economic development.14 It presented a comprehensive and global account of how positive trends and growth obfuscated the variegated sources of, with a prime place for gender inequality, in development strategies and policies. Boserup’s findings showed that in 1927, 10 11 12 13 14
Tara Ali Baig, India’s Woman Power (New Delhi: S. Chand & Company, 1976), p. 184. K.M. Joshi, “Indigenous children of India: enrolment, gender parity and dropout in school education”, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Vol. 30, Nos. 9/10, p. 549. Promilla Kapur, The Changing Status of the Working Woman in India (New Delhi: Vikas, 1974), p. 19. Kapur, 1974, p. 57. Ester Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development, with a new Introduction by Naznin Kanji, Su Fei Tan, Camilla Toulmin (uk: Earthscan, 2007).
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there were 17% women in India’s industrial workforce. In 1990, it fell to 11. Despite this early decline, worldwide, as in India, women’s role in the economy has increased as a result of feminization of labor, or the entry of more women in a variety of jobs in the formal and informal sectors. Moreover, Boserup’s fundamental premise, that with development, women’s share of employment would largely be in unskilled or low wage positions has not only borne out, but also made it more complex for countries to acquire gender parity in the workforce (Boserup, 2007).15 Another perplexing aspect of women’s work is what constitutes economic activity. According to one source, in 1990, 29% of women were considered economically active in India. When the International Labour Organization (ilo) redefined economic activity to include women’s work at home, that number rose to more than 80%. Worldwide, more women also entered the formal labor force.16 In India, “In every form of activity, be it agriculture, fishing, construction, women contribute substantially to value addition of the final product. Yet invariably their work is conveniently perceived by all, state employers and unions, as unskilled and often as a skill only of domestic value.”17 This study also shows the trickle down effect of this in that women are also not included in decision-making processes. And, in a striking continuity with the status of women two decades ago, women are not included in skill acquisition training programs, resulting is a process of de-skilling of women. It will be interesting to analyze whether mdgs have made a difference to gender equity in education and work.
mdgs on Women’s Education and Work: Examining the Challenges and Opportunities between 2000 and 2010
Goal #2 of the mdgs calls for achieving universal primary education by 2015. This is one challenge that India continues to face. For decades, the Directive Principles of State Policy had mandated free and compulsory education, but it did not have the power of law behind it, it was a ‘directive’ of state policy. A significant development in this area came with the 86th Constitutional Amendment Act, 2002. It ensures free and compulsory education to children in the age group of 6 to 14 years. A government report on Women and Children 15 16 17
Boserup, 2007, Introduction. Women: Looking Beyond 2000, United Nations, New York, 1995, p. 42. Cherian Joseph and K.V. Eswara Prasad, Eds. Women, Work, and Inequity: The Reality of Gender, National Labour Institute, Noida, 1995, p. 12.
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in 2007 comes up with the dismal conclusions “Despite these provisions the country has not been able to achieve the target of universal elementary education.”18 Ensuring universal primary education is a fundamental step before gender equity can be ensured. The 2001 Census of India outlines some of the areas pertaining to gender empowerment. Between 1991 and 2001, for the age group of 7+ years, overall literacy rates have increased from 52.1% to 65.4%. Whereas male literacy rates have increased at the rate of 11.9%, female literacy rates have gone up by 14.9%. This however, is only part of the story. One study finds that “the gender gap continues to be more than 20%, with male literacy rate at 75.26% and female literacy rate at 53.67%.”19 Five years later, a Provisional Report indicated that the status of women’s literacy showed signs of improvement, with a slight decline for the men. Literacy rate among females was 65.5%, and for males it was 74%. 20 The drop in the latter notwithstanding, the rise in female literacy could be a result of the various initiatives and programs, including legislation geared to securing gender parity in education. In 2001, a comprehensive centrally sponsored programme called Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan was launched. The goal of this campaign was to achieve the Universalization of Elementary Education and pave the way for realization of the right to free and compulsory education for 6 to 14 years old children, the 86th amendment to the Constitution of India mandated. An ancillary to this campaign is the National Programme for Education of Girls at Elementary Level, which started in 2003. This program offers various opportunities “… through more intense community mobilization, the development of model schools in clusters, gender sensitization of teachers, development of gender sensitive learning materials, early child care and education facilities and provisions of need based incentives like escorts, stationery, workbooks and uniform etc. for girls. For 2006–07coverage has been expanded to 38748 clusters in 3122 blocks. All educationally backward blocks have been included under the programme.”21
18 19 20 21
Government of India, Ministry of Women and Child Development, A World Fit for Children, 2007, p. 4. Malini Ghose, “Gender, Literacy and Women’s Empowerment in India,” Convergence, Vol. xl, Nos. 3–4, 2007, Proquest Central, p. 195. “Status of Literacy,” Provisional Population Totals, Indian Government, http://censusindia .gov.in/2011-prov-results/data_files/mp/07Literacy.pdf, accessed February 2014. Government of India, Ministry of Women and Child Development, A World Fit For Children, 2007, p. 5.
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Summarizing some key realities of the Indian education scene, as outlined in a unesco Report, an oxfam Report of 2005 states that, India has the highest number of illiterate people in the world, and about 40% of its population is under 18. There are 36 million children with disabilities, and 90% of them are out of school. Overall, the dropout rates of have increased 50% between 2000 and 2005. Despite working under these challenges, on some account, it seems that India is making attempts to attain mdg #2.22 As already inferred, assessing outcomes of these and other policies and programs in terms of progress toward achieving the mdgs is a complex task. For one, the indicators themselves are intertwined in a multilayered social- political-economic backdrop. For example, we find that the mdg calls for achieving universal primary education by 2015 is by itself not a guarantee or sufficient condition for gender parity. It is undoubtedly an important step, but as the National Family and Health Survey Report of 2009 (analyzing data for 2005–06) indicates, there are various aspects to this overall goal.23 The summary of the findings on education bears testimony to the need for a multifaceted analysis of the progress toward this goal. The excerpt below from the survey report highlights the major issues in educational disparity for primary school age and adults. Among the primary school age children, gender disparity in school attendance as well as differences in rural and urban areas is clear. • Only two-thirds of girls and three-fourths of boys age 6–17 years are attending school. • The sex ratio of children attending school is 889 girls per 1,000 boys. • There is gender equality in school attendance in urban areas; but, in rural areas, the female disadvantage in education is marked and increases with age. • School dropout beyond primary school is a major problem for both girls and boys. The Report summarizes that the disparity was present distinctly among rural and urban adult population, in wealth distribution, and gender inequality. The gender disparity in school attendance for men and women is very striking, and multifaceted, as the numbers below indicate:
22 23
“Reaching the mdgs in India,” oxfam India, Centre for Legislative Research and Advocacy, New Delhi, 2010, p. 4. Sunita Kishor and Kamla Gupta, Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in India, National Family Health Survey (nfhs3), India, 2005−06 (Mumbai: International Institute for Population Sciences; Calverton, Maryland, usa: icf Macro, 2009).
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• The percentage of adults who are literate is much lower in rural than in urban areas; nonetheless, even in urban areas one-fourth of women and more than one-tenth of men are not literate. Gender disparity in literacy is much greater in rural than in urban areas and declines sharply with household wealth. • Forty-one percent of women and 18% of men age 15–49 have never been to school. • Educational attainment remains very low: even among the 20–29 age group, only 27% of women and 39% of men have 10 or more years of education. • The percentage of evermarried women with 10 or more years of education has risen very slowly from 11% in nfhs-1 to 17% in nfhs-3. The 2011 Millennium Development Goals Report also underscores the various aspects of disparity in access to and benefits from education. Among the highlights, the Report finds that overall the news about reaching this goal is grim. “Being poor, female or living in a conflict zone increases the probability that a child will be out of school. The net enrolment ratio of children in primary school has only gone up by 7 percentage points since 1999, reaching 89 per cent in 2009. More recently, progress has actually slowed, dimming prospects for reaching the mdg target of universal primary education by 2015. Children from the poorest households, those living in rural areas and girls are the most likely to be out of school. Worldwide, among children of primary school age not enrolled in school, 42 per cent – 28 million – live in poor countries affected by conflict.”24 The same report shows that even though overall, literacy has risen in the primary levels and Southern Asia has shown good progress among 15 to 24 year olds, a rise from 60 to 80% between 1990 and 2009, access by gender, poverty level, and geography, all remain challenges in this and other developing regions.25 Aside from education, women’s access to work is another intrinsic element of gender equality. It is integrally connected to literacy in that education opens avenues for work which is in the formal economic structure, and empowers women to better control their economic futures. Women are no strangers to work in India, as in most other countries, developed and developing alike. Yet women’s work often goes unrecorded, unrecognized, and unrewarded. Recent assessments show that “Three fourths of all Indian women workers today are
24 25
Millennium Development Goals, 2011 Report (Hereafter mdg Report) United Nations Development Program (undp), United Nations, New York, 2011, p. 5. mdg Report 2011, p. 19.
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estimated to work as low-wage workers in the unorganized sector in extremely insecure working conditions.”26 Recent studies have shown that even though globally there has been a rise in women’s participation in the economy, for India, that picture is quite distorted and; the conclusions, contradictory. “The female labour force participation rate in India is not only low, but also has remained near-stagnant over the past several decades. Moreover, there still exists a large difference between the work participation rates of males and females, which is an important aspect of gender inequality. Besides, differences in the nature of work performed, it also bears evidence to gender inequality. Women are largely confined to unpaid work (at home or in the field) and as casual labour, while men concentrate on more valued forms of remunerative work…”27 These assessments are based on National Surveys, with the understandable shortcomings therein. Surveys are the only reliable tools in this case, given that almost 90% of the employment is in the informal sector or unorganized labor market. Assessing accurate patterns of women’s work status and impact of new reforms is difficult, but some recent attempts help shed some light to key indicators. In 2007, the Government of India published the Handbook of Statistical Indicators on Indian Women. The Report outlines several important indicators. Some of the ones related to women and work are summarized as follows: • In the organized sector (Organized sector consists of all public sector establishments and private non-agricultural establishments employing 10 or more workers), in 1999–2000, the share of women in wage employment in non-agricultural sector was 16%. In 2004–05, it was 20.23%. • Between 2004 and 2005, in the public and private sectors, women’s employment in the organized sector rose from 49.34% to 50.16%. While the above figures show some positive signs of women’s economic participation, the outcome does not always result in net gains for women across the board. In 1999–2000, these discrepancies were clear in income earnings, and the disparity in urban areas was larger than in rural areas, as Table 16.1 demonstrates. 26
Nazmul Hussain and Maryam Kirmani, “Gender Differences, A Case Study of Malda District of West Bengal, India,” Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies: Alam-e Niswan, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2010, p. 78. 27 Manoj Kumar Dash, Ajay Singh, Gaurav Kabra, “Government Reforms Economic Restructuring and the Employment of Women in India,” European Journal of Social Science, August 2010, Vol. 15, No. 3, p. 412. Ebscohost, accessed 9/27/2011.
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Table 16.1 Gender gap in wage earnings in 1999–2000 (rupees)
Rural Urban
Female
Male
Gender-gap
29.01 37.71
44.84 62.26
15.83 24.55
Table 16.2 Gender gap in wage earnings in 2004–05 (rupees)
Rural Urban
Female
Male
Gender-gap
36.15 44.28
56.53 75.51
20.38 31.23
Table 16.2 shows that in 2004, the average wage earning received per day by female casual laborers is Rs. 36.15 in rural areas (Rs. 29.01 in 1999–2000) and Rs. 44.28 in urban areas (Rs. 37.71 in 1999–2000). Even though average wage earnings received per day by female casual laborers increased, both in rural and urban areas, the gender gap also increased from Rs. 15.83 to Rs. 20.38 in rural areas and from Rs. 24.55 to Rs. 31.23 in urban areas in 2004–05 compared to 1999–2000 (nsso surveys). To reiterate, the progress toward gender equity in terms of providing equitable access for women to work, is confusing and mixed. Continuing the historical trend of declining female work participation since 1921, female work participation rate (fwpr) has fallen drastically in recent years. Globalization, and India’s new economic policies and structural adjustment (Special Assistance Programme) have not helped women either. “…Privatization of public sector enterprises, reduction in public sector investment and lower government expenditure on poverty eradication programs have not served the interests of women.”28 Coupled with this trend is the reality that even though women contribute significantly to the Gross Domestic Product (gdp), large numbers of women continue to work in the informal sectors, which provide for low productivity and income. Women also do not have the same access to
28
Reena Kumari and Aviral Pandey, “Women’s Work Participation in Labour Market in Contemporary India,” Journal of Community Positive Practices, Vol. 1, 2012, p. 20.
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job opportunities than men. It is therefore difficult to assess women’s progress to equity in economic activity on a macro scale.
What Lies Ahead? The Continuing Challenges
Gender equality is a complex issue and is often nestled within complex sociopolitical and economic intersections. mdgs addressing gender issues are also interspersed with overlapping complexities stemming from poverty lack of access to healthcare, and adequate nutrition. It is most clearly seen in the areas of reduction of maternal and childhood mortality. “Low incomes, relatively higher prices, bad healthcare and neglect of basic education can all be influential in causing and sustaining the extraordinary level of under-nutrition in India.”29 Some telling revelations from recent studies on ngos and women’s empowerment groups bring home the reality in which mdgs can become achievable in India. While this chapter has focused primarily on government initiatives, non-governmental organizations and community groups also play a significant role in this effort. 90% of the close to 7 million self-help groups in India are women’s groups. Almost 70% of the women who comprised the leadership were literate. Literate members also participated more, and were active in seeking proper assessments of their group’s work and accounting practices. Literacy is an imperative stepping-stone to equality and empowerment. It “… enables access to leadership, which in turn leads to access to other opportunities, such as credit and capacity building. …literacy is a critical ingredient in ensuring and sustaining women’s empowerment.”30 To be sure, there is no dearth of legislation, policy initiatives, and government programs to increase literacy among women. These need to be appended with significant funding and resources to make them effective. A fundamental aspect of any literacy program, as well as the heart of mdgs, is sustainability. Women’s groups have validated their success through microcredit and selfhelp enterprises. Literacy campaigns will be more effective if they partner with such groups; allocate appropriate adequate resources, and engage members in assessment of programs, retention, and other data that is necessary to evaluate the sustainability of such programs.31
29
30 31
G.M. Anthony and A. Laxmaiah, “Human Development, Poverty, Health & Nutrition Situation in India,” Indian Journal of Medical Research, August 2008; 128, p. 199; Pro Quest Central, accessed 9/13/2011. Malini Ghose, “Gender, Literacy” (2007), p. 198. Malini Ghose, “Gender, Literacy” (2007), p. 200.
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The universal education Act of 2008, eventually establishing education as a fundamental right, the Mid-day Meals Scheme, which seeks to provide a 450 calorie mid day meal to malnourished children, as well as other well intentioned policies often fail because of lack of resource allocations. In the 2009–10 budget, only 2% of the gdp is allocated toward education. The oxfam Report (See Table 16.3) on India and the mdgs show mixed results; the conclusions are not clear. The target to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015 seems to be off track. This chapter has surmised that along with access to education, fair and equitable jobs are also critical to the empowerment of women. Recognizing this, the government has launched several programs backed by policies and legislation that seek to sustain such efforts. Reflecting on the 2009 mdg Report, Patrice Coeur-Bizot, undp Resident Representative and un Resident Coordinator also recognized that India was making good faith efforts to achieve the targets. According to him, “The government recognizes these challenges. Its commitment is evident from the various rights-based laws in place – to guarantee work, through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the right to information, the right to education and the right to food that is currently on the anvil. For instance India’s Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Programme is cited in the undp report as an example of a robust social protection and employment programme that has benefitted 46 million households.”32 But the same un assessment also notes that ‘India’s Table 16.3 mdgs and India – A selected target report Indicator
Value – according to United Nations data
2015 target
Status (bases on un projected values)
Ratio of girls to boys in primary, secondary, and tertiary education Women in waged employment in non-agricultural sector Proportion of seats held by women in national parliament
Primary: 91% (2005) Sec: 70% (2003) Ter: 66% (2003) 18% (2004)
Primary: 100% Sec. 100%
Off Track
N/A
N/A
Lok Sabha: 59/543 (2009) N/A Rajya Sabha 25/245 (2007)
N/A
Source: oxfam India and the mdgs (2010). 32
undp Update, http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/presscenter/articles/2010/ 09/08/achieving-mdgs-in-india.html.
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march towards the mdgs is however, hampered by persistent inequalities, particularly gender inequality. This has resulted in inadequate access to basic services for the vulnerable groups such as scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and minorities, and particularly the women among these groups.’ This has been exacerbated by regional disparities ensuing from cultural practices. Gender inequality is further enhanced by social conservatism. Traditionally, in North India, there have been more restrictions on women’s access to education and work, compared to South India. Even as cultural restrictions are changing, and women are gaining more access to newer opportunities, violence against women has also been on the rise. It seems that globalization has ushered in not only economic changes and challenges for women in India, but waves of cultural discontent as well. Whether it is easier and faster access to the media, including social media, and cultural change in which women are coming forward in larger numbers to report such abuses at the hands of men, is debatable. The sheer brutality and rise of gang rapes in recent years, dowry deaths, and other forms of continued violence toward women lead one to wonder whether some of this is retaliatory in terms of disgruntled men resenting the progress of women, prompting them to channel deep misogyny with such behavior. Some of this is also attributed to globalization, the rise of the number of women seeking and obtaining educational degrees, and eventually employment in the informational technology sector. Many of them, especially those who work late hours synchronized with time zones in other parts of the world, often have to learn western modes of behavior and conversation techniques. This training overflows to a change in their dress patterns, and their need to be in the workplace for longer hours. All of this, in addition to the lack of jobs in the national economic scene, further feeds into and entrenches some men’s hatred toward women. Therefore, in order to address women’s access to education and work, a fuller examination of India’s cultural changes, especially in the context of the pull of globalization and traditional social conservatism, is needed. Such challenges will continue to provide roadblocks to India’s attainment of the mdgs overall, and gender equity in particular. Bibliography Amartya Sen, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 37, No. 20, December 20, 1990. Available at http://www.nybooks.com/ articles/archives/1990/dec/20/more-than-100-million-women-are-missing/.
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Amartya Sen, “Radical Needs and Moderate Reforms,” in Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Indian Development (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). Centre for Legislative Research and Advocacy, “Reaching the mdgs in India,” OXFAM India, Centre for Legislative Research and Advocacy, New Delhi, 2010. Cherian Joseph and K.V. Eswara Prasad Eds., Women, Work, and Inequity: The Reality of Gender, National Labour Institute, Noida, 1995. Ester Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development, with a new Introduction by Naznin Kanji, Su Fei Tan, Camilla Toulmin (UK: Earthscan, 2007). Farzana Afridi, “Women’s Empowerment and the Goal of Parity between the Sexes in Schooling in India,” Population Studies, Vol. 64, No. 2, 2010, pp. 131–145. G.M. Anthony and A. Laxmaiah, “Human Development, Poverty, Health & Nutrition Situation in India,” Indian Journal of Medical Research, August 2008; 128. Pro Quest Central, accessed 9/13/2011. Government of India, Ministry of Women and Child Development, A World Fit for Children, 2007. Indian Government, “Status of Literacy,” Provisional Population Totals, Indian Government, http://censusindia.gov.in/2011-prov-results/data_files/mp/07Literacy .pdf, accessed February 2014. K.M. Joshi, “Indigenous Children of India: Enrolment, Gender Parity and Dropout in School Education,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Vol. 30 No. 9/10, 2010. Malini Ghose, “Gender, Literacy and Women’s Empowerment in India,” Convergence, Vol. xl, Nos. 3–4, 2007. Manoj Kumar Dash, Ajay Singh, and Gaurav Kabra, “Government Refroms Economic Restructuring and the Employment of Women in India,” European Journal of Social Science, August 2010, Vol. 15, No. 3. Ebscohost, accessed 9/27/2011. Millennium Development Goals, 2011 Report (Hereafter MDG Report) United Nations Development Program (UNDP), United Nations, New York, 2011. Naila Kabeer, “Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment: A Critical Analysis of the Third Millennium Development Goal,” Gender and Development, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2005. Nazmul Hussain and Maryam Kirmani, “Gender Differences, A Case Study of Malda District of West Bengal,” India, Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies: Alam-e Niswan, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2010. Promilla Kapur, The Changing Status of the Working Woman in India (New Delhi: Vikas, 1974). R. Datta and J. Kornberg, Eds. Women in Developing Countries: Assessing Strategies of Empowerment (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), Introduction. Reena Kumari and Aviral Pandey, “Women’s Work Participation in Labour Market in Contemporary India,” Journal of Community Positive Practices, Vol. 1, 2012.
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Sunita Kishor and Kamla Gupta, Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in India, National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3), India, 2005–06 (Mumbai: International Institute for Population Sciences; Calverton, Maryland, USA: ICF Macro, 2009). Tara Ali Baig, India’s Woman Power (New Delhi: S. Chand & Company, 1976), p. 184. The Constitution of India, available at: http://india.gov.in/my-government/constitution -india, accessed 2/24/2015. UNDP Update. United Nations Development Programme. “Achieving MDGs in India.” United Nations, New York, September, 2011. United Nations, Millennium Development Goals, http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/, accessed 9/14/2011. United Nations, Women: Looking beyond 2000, United Nations, New York, 1995. Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu and Jing-dong Yuan, China and India (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003).
Author Index Adorno, Theodor W. 49, 50, 51 Afridi, Farzana 358 Agier, Michel 265 Alexander, Jacqui 143, 144, 165 Alexander, Jeffrey C. 11, 66–72 Al-Jabiri 334 Altheide, David L. 200 Anderson, Benedict 5, 8, 113, 114, 299 Appadurai, Arjun 1, 8, 42, 92 Augé, Marc 259, 260, 265, 266, 274 Bachelard, Gaston 244 Bardi, Abby 298, 299 Barrow, Clyde 119 Bauman, Zygmunt 52, 59, 92,