Globalization and Culture (kiso enshû III) course page

The Globalization and Culture course description is here.

July 13: Seminar party.

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July 6: The thoughtful final presentation by Marina Kinjyou, notes for which will be posted by July 22, brought the work of the seminar to a close. Our final meeting will be next week at a nice restaurant in Tama Center, where we will probably not discuss globalization.

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June 29: Thoughtful presentation on “Women and Globalization” by Emilie Didier, notes for which will be posted by July 22.

Bibliography

Bhagwati, Jagdish. In Defense of Globalization. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

International Development Research Centre. “Gender Responsive Budget Initiatives: Kenya.” IDRC, here.

McMichael, Phillip. Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, 3rd ed. London: Pine Forge Press, 2004.

Moghadan, Valentine M. “Transnational Feminist Networks: Collective Action in the Era of Globalization.” In Globalization and Social Movements, edited by Pierre Hamel, et al. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

Osava, Mario. “NGOs Want Bigger Role in a Stronger UNCTAD.” Inter Press Service News Agency, here.

Homework: Continue reading. We’ll have the last of the second-round presentations, by Marina Kinjyou, in the July 6 seminar. If time permits we’ll also have a close look at the written student notes from previous presentations.

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June 22: Thoughtful presentation by Kanae Shiraishi, “Globalization and Culture.”

Kanae Shiraishi’s Abstract: I will introduce definitions of globalization by Philip McMichael, Professor of Rural and Development Sociology at Cornell University, Anthony Giddens, former director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Gerardo Mosquera, curator and historian at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

McMichael argues in Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective that the image of globalization comes from “the image of a world unified by global technology and products and their universal appeal” (xxxvi). In Runaway World: How Globalization is Shaping Our Lives, Giddens also argues that global technologies such as television and the Internet change our everyday experience (11-12). For example, Giddens suggests that now many of us know Nelson Mandela, the former President of South Africa, more than we know our own neighbors (11-12). For Giddens, globalization is a phenomenon that changes our everyday lives. On the one hand, we can connect to the global technology and products, we know distant people, or “otherness,” more than we know our own neighbors, and we can purchase goods not made in Japan. On the other hand, there are those who cannot afford to connect to what we can connect with easily, McMichael says (xxxviii). McMichael writes that while 75 percent of people in the world have access to daily television reception, only 20 percent have access to consumer credit. Also, according to McMichael, 20 percent of people in the world consume 86 percent of all goods and services (xxxviii). Therefore, there is a huge inequality in the world.

In terms of its cultural aspect, globalization is a kind of contradiction. McMichael argues that the “conflict between profit and meaning” is the key source of tension attached to globalization (xxx). He also describes the “conflict between profit and meaning” as the conflict between “the market cultures that would unify the world” and “the popular cultures that differentiate the world as a mosaic of lifestyles” (xxx). He writes that “the survival of each increasingly depends on limiting the autonomy (or power) of the other” (xxx). He takes Disney films as an example of cultural tension. “Disney films . . . attempt to appeal to consumers’ multicultural impulses,” he writes, but via Westernized cultural image[s].” Critics charge that characters such as Aladdin, Pocahontas, or Mulan “reproduce ethnic stereotypes,” McMichael notes, and that these stereotypes hide the diversity and complexity of culture (xxxi).

Like McMichael, Anthony Giddens notes that “a pessimistic view of globalization would consider it largely an affair of industrial North, in which the developing societies of the South play little or no active part” (15). In addition, Giddens says the most visible cultural expressions of globalization are American, such as Coca-Cola, McDonalds and CNN. On the other hand, he also mentions the emergence of local nationalisms and the revival of local cultural identities, such as in Scotland (15).

In “Alien-Own/ Own-Alien: Globalization and Cultural Difference” Gerardo Mosquera argues that so-called globalization has two tendencies, homogenization and diversification. Mosquera mentions that globalization has imposed a homogenized international culture; however, paradoxically, globalization also has dynamized and pluralized cultural circulation and has aided the development of a more pluralist consciousness because of the improvement of communication and exchange (163-68). Mosquera suggests the use of homogenized culture to promote cultural diversification. For example, the use of languages such as French and Spanish has spread and informed the characteristics and identity of South Americans with African ancestry (168-173).

Professor Ewick has suggested that culture is a process, and is always already mixed from the beginning, and we can see this in some ways in the spread of Disney films, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, CNN, and languages such as French and English. However, I wonder why these predominantly American values spread so widely. Including me, people love to see Hollywood movies more than Japanese movies, love Starbucks coffee, McDonalds, Disney, and other such cultural artifacts.

I think that power is related to other powers, as Professor Ewick said in the Discovering Others seminar, and hegemonic structure is also related to other hegemonic structures, as I heard from Mitsugu Maekawa and Hiroshi Usui’s presentation on September 11 and the movie Fahrenheit 911. Kaku Yoshun, Professor at the Faculty of Economics of Rikkyo University, and Tosaki Jun, Professor at Tokyo Metropolitan College, argue that globalization is a project. Globalization has been a factor in the colonial era and the development era because of the collective human will. Therefore, I think the Western (American?) cultural power is strong. However, I still wonder why people accept “Western [American?] values” more than others.

Bibliography

Giddens, Anthony. Runaway World: How Globalization is Shaping Our Lives, 2nd ed. London: Profile Books, 2002.

Kaku, Yanchun and Jun Tosaki. “Konnichi no grobarizeshon no kigen to honshitsu” [The origin and nature of today’s globalization]. Pp. 90-100 in Datsu “kaihatsu” e no sabushisutensu-ron [Subsistence theory for climbing out of “development”], edited by Yanchun Kaku, Jun Tosaki, and Masaki Yokoyama. Kyoto: Horitsu Bunkasha, 2004.

McMichael, Phillip. Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, 3rd ed. London: Pine Forge Press, 2004.

Mosquera, Gerardo. “Alien-Own/Own-Alien: Globalization and Cultural Difference.” Boundary 2 29.3 (2004): 163-173.

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June 15: Discussion turned (again) to the degree to which a real and external other, as opposed to a distorted fantasy other constructed internally and for internal consumption, may find voice in Japan.

We’ll return to the presentations in the June 22 seminar.

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June 8: Two excellent student presentations. The first drew upon several sources, most importantly perhaps Maggie Black’s No-Nonsense Guide to International Development (Verso, 2002) and Jeremy Seabrook’s No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty (Verso, 2004), to raise difficult but important questions about the relation of globalization to “development,” and about the nature of this “development” itself. The second presentation focused on a summary of Ryuko Kubota’s “Impact of Globalization on Language Teaching in Japan” (in Globalization and Language Teaching, edited by David Block and Deborah Cameron [Routledge, 2002]), and will continue in coming weeks. Many thanks to both students for the conscientious preparation and clear presentation of the material.

We’ll continue with the second student presentations, as outlined below, in the June 15 seminar meeting.

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June 1: Successful student presentations on Toshio Iyotani, Globalization towa nanika? [What is Globalization?] (Heibonsha, 2002), and Gerardo Mosquera, “Alien-Own / Own-Alien: Globalization and Cultural Difference” (Boundary 2 29.3 [2002]: 163-73).

Homework for students who have not given the first presentation: See the homework assignment below at May 25.

Homework for students who have given the first presentation: Prepare a second presentation, 10-15 minutes, in which you provide at least three definitions of globalization that you have found in secondary sources. Following this please offer your own definition of globalization as you presently understand the term, and comment upon, take a stand toward, the major disputes about the nature of globalization that you have encountered in your reading or in our seminar discussions.

The secondary sources from which you draw the three or more definitions of globalization may be any of the works we have read in the seminar or any others. As always, prepare a typed handout that includes at the least a full and accurate bibliographical citation for any work discussed or drawn upon in the presentation.

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May 25: Good student summary of Grimes, “Japan and Globalization,” followed by further discussion of issues raised in the May 18 seminar. Beginning in the June 1 seminar meeting we shall shift focus from discussion of assigned texts read together to discussions that will grow from individual student presentations on understandings of globalization. Please note that this is not an invitation to stop reading for the seminar, but rather a turn toward student-selected texts that will aid in the weekly student presentations. A standard resource for finding these texts is, of course, CHOIS, although I would like students also to become familiar with the NACSIS Webcat and to have a close look at my note on the location of sources: online resources.

Homework: Prepare a five- to fifteen-minute formal presentation on some part of your understanding of globalization. The presentation may be in either English or Japanese, but in either case should include as a handout (proper manuscript form, please) an English summary, and a complete and scrupulously accurate bibliographical citation for any text or texts upon which you have drawn in preparing the presentation.

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May 18: Brief but in my view satisfactory discussion of Samuel S. Kim’s “East Asia and Globalization: Challenges and Responses,” followed by a discussion of Arjun Appadurai’s “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination.” The discussion of Appadurai turned into a discussion in part of the nature of dissent. Difficulties students had with the text were not linguistic but rather conceptual, a failure to understand the ontological and epistemological ground upon which Appadurai is standing. We’ll need to return to this. How is it that in Japan—this is among the questions that arose—university students, for example, have such a highly refined ethical sensibility about distant otherness, the poor in the developing world, for example, but are so thoroughly anesthetized by the orthodoxies within which they live that they can only with extreme difficulty imagine even the possibility that something unethical might have happened to an otherness sitting next to them at a seminar table?

Why is a writer such as Appadurai interested in either “grassroots globalization” or “the research imagination”? Why would anyone care if no one is responsible for anything? Are the poor in the situation they are in because of their own failures, or might we be able to imagine, as does Appadurai, the possibility of an unethical distortion in the field of power?

What to do then?

Homework: William W. Grimes, “Japan and Globalization: From Opportunity to Restraint,” in East Asia and Globalization, edited by Samuel S. Kim (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

Image from focsle.org.uk.

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May 11: Good student overview of the Nederveen Pieterse text assigned April 20, and discussion of the major meanings of the term “globalization.” We’ve fallen a week behind in our reading but shall try to catch up in the May 18 seminar, with a student-led discussion of the Appadurai text assigned April 27 and also discussion of the homework noted below.

In response to a student question about writing on globalization in Japanese, let me call your attention to the NACSIS Webcat, by far the most powerful tool for discovering what books are available in Japanese about globalization or any other topic.

Homework: Samuel S. Kim, “East Asia and Globalization: Challenges and Responses,” in East Asia and Globalization, edited by Samuel S. Kim (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

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April 27: Our wide-ranging discussion of “internationalism” in Japan was unplanned but not unrelated to the topics of the seminar. We’ll get more directly on track in the seminar meeting following Golden Week, in discussion of the Nederveen Pieterse and Wikipedia texts assigned April 20 and the Appadurai text assigned below. I shall also provide students the full reading list for the seminar in the next seminar meeting, May 11.

Homework: Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” from Globalization, edited by Arjun Appadurai (Duke University Press, 2001).

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April 20: Introductory overview of the course and discussion of the various meanings of “globalization,” including “technological globalization,” “cultural globalization,” and “economic globalization.” Introductory discussion also of the nature and meaning of so-called “anti-globalization” or alter mondialisation.

Homework: Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Globalization: Consensus and Controversies,” chapter 1 of Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); also, have a look at these Wikipedia entries and bring any questions you might have about them to the April 27 seminar: Globalization, Anti-globalization, Neoliberalism, Privatization.