Reading 2 : What is the relation between culture and globalization? / Lee Jiyeon

 1)

One simple way to define globalization is to say that it is a complex and accelerated integration process of global connectivity. Understood in this rather abstract and general way, globalization means a fast-developing and ever-dense network of interconnections and interdependencies that characterize the material, social, economic, and cultural lives of the modern world. You cannot escape the global dominance of the capitalist system, and little can be gained by cultural analysts underestimating its enormous importance. But in saying this, we must resist the temptation to attribute it to a causal advantage in the process of globalization. Let me just say two things. First, because we deal with questions about the construction of analytical categories without addressing direct empirical judgments about which practices drive all the others. The second reason is that it distorts our understanding of the realm of culture. This is actually the key to interpreting cultural globalization as 'cultural imperialism', 'Americanization' or 'Americanization'. Clifford Geertz says, 'Culture is not power, and social events can be attributed causally,' to the extent that we should think of cultural processes as directed mainly toward the construction of socially shared meanings. If you ask a cold functional question, "What is culture for?" the most satisfactory answer is to create the meaning of life. A shared story that makes our existence meaningful, or 'narrative', is, so to speak, the purpose of culture. And this was shaped by the way in which culture was generally studied: living experiences, reproductions, texts, and contexts. The concept of causality has become awkward with this conceptualization. But this does not mean that culture is not consequential. The practice and process of semantic construction is certainly so in that it informs, inspires, and directs the resulting individual and collective behavior in itself. Not only is it a context in which [an event] can be meaningfully interpreted, but it is also a primitive context in which human actors occur and occur. One common speculation about the globalization process is that it will lead to a single global culture. This is only speculation, but the reason why it is possible is that the 'unification' effect of connectivity can be seen in other areas, especially in the economic areas where tightly integrated systems of global markets provide models. A unified world of economic prosperity and social and technological development. So we have to define the concept of globalization as an unequal process. Despite all this, at least among some Western critics, there continues to be a tendency to imagine globalization pushing us toward a 'world culture' that encompasses everything. Another way to approach these issues is to look at modern globalization in the context of a much longer historical context in which society and culture imagine the world as a place and center their own culture. The 1284 Ebstorf Mappa Mundi was made by British cartographer Tilbury Gervase. It's typical of early medieval European maps of the world in terms of a mixture of topography and theology. The world is known as a round, known physical world, but elements of Christian theology completely dominate expression. Jerusalem is located in the center, the direction of the map is in the east, and the Garden of Eden, the scene where the Christian God created mankind. The three sections of the map were inspired by the biblical story that the Earth flourished again after the Great Flood by Noah's three sons Ham, Sem, and Jabet. What I would like to emphasize, however, is the rationality of the European Enlightenment, not limited to religious worldviews or 'pre-modern' cultures, which we can call a particular culture that we pretend to be universal. One clear implication of what we discussed in the previous section is that both utopian and dystopian assumptions about a single integrated global culture are of generally self-centered origin, and partly because of this, predictions of real cultural development are poor. But there is another more promising way to approach cultural globalization. This is not through a macroscopic analysis of 'globality', but by understanding the impact of globalization within a particular region in exactly the opposite way. Most of us live in the region, but globalization is rapidly changing our experience of this "region," and one way to grasp this change is the concept of "de-territorialization." As Nestor García Canclini explained, the concept of de-territorialization refers to the 'loss of culture's "natural" relationship to geographical and social domains. Thus, de-territorialization implies a weakening of the importance of a culture's geographical location, such as physical, environmental, and climatic locations, as well as all self-justification, ethnic boundaries, and distinction practices occurring around them. Culture is no longer 'bound' by the constraints of local circumstances. In the most primitive explanation, if globalization is the proliferation of complex socioeconomic connections over long distances, de-territorialization represents the extent of connections to areas where everyday life is performed and experienced. De-territorialization occurs in a complex set of economic, political, and technological factors and is not, in fact, a phenomenon that can be usefully bound to one analytical dimension, just like globalization itself. However, as I have said, there is one element worthy of closer scrutiny, as it opens up a connection area that is historically unprecedented and can be said to justly define trends in our time. This is due to the growing daily dependence on electronic media and communication technologies and systems. The 'identity' that is considered formally rather than psychologically is an aspect of differentiation, institutionalization, and social regulation of modern life. Indeed, modernity is the very tendency to form institutions and create social regulators, which can be considered at a higher level of abstraction than the definitive set of social institutions (capitalism, technology and industrialism, urbanism, and national state systems). Thus, the cultural identity of this essentially modern 'regulatory' category consists of self- and community definitions based on specific and generally politically reflected differentiation, such as gender, sexuality, class, religion, race and ethnicity, and nationality. But the decisive mistake of those who regard globalization as a threat to cultural identity is to confuse these Western modern forms of cultural imagination with universal human experience. Every culture constructs meaning through the practice of collective symbolism. This is probably more of a cultural universality that we can get. Being 'human' without contradiction in terms of the rich pluralistic acceptance of preserving cultural differences and being 'human' in terms of legal generalization is a trick precisely derived from a framework institutionalizing identity repertoire that is typical of modernity. The key here is pluralism of identity position. We urgently need to present cultural concepts that are much more agile and flexible than we have ever had.

 

2)

It was interesting that culture could spread and be recognized as a culture of other countries. It is not just the creation and extinction of culture, but a new culture is created by being influenced by many countries. In modern society, I think I can sympathize with 'remoteization' the most. In the case of Korea, various cultures such as k-drama and k-movie are attracting attention around the world through the culture of k-pop. Rather than insisting on only one culture, I think I can feel cultural globalization in the process of accepting a new culture.

 

3)

How is culture created and how is it spread? It would be good to talk about the representative culture of each country as an example.