Folklore and Theories of Globalization
Kimberly J. Lau
Because the study of folklore has been-and continues to be--organized
around relationships of cultural production to local community, nationality,
diaspora, ethnicity, identity, and power differentials, theories of globalization
are fundamental to both the history and the future of the discipline.
This essay will outline some of the diverse ways in which the world
has been constructed, problematized, and theorized as a single place,
particularly from the disciplinary perspectives of anthropology (Appadurai
1996; Hannerz 1996), sociology (Wallerstein 1974; Pieterse 1995; Robertson
1992), and cultural studies (Hall 1991a, 1991b; Friedman 1990, 1995).
Together, this range of disciplinary perspectives helps address the
interdisciplinary nature of folklore's organizing concerns, listed above, while
also providing some general background to the contemporary theoretical
dialogues about globalization.
In addition, I will summarize the debates around two of the theoretical
questions most relevant to considerations of folklore and globalization: (1)
Does globalization lead to increased cultural homogenization? and (2) How
does the local factor into theories of the global? I focus specifically on these
two questions because they address folklorists' concerns with the local
production of culture and the ways in which shifting notions of community,
nationality, and locality impact those productions. Lastly, I will propose ways
in which folklorists can elaborate on and further contribute to globalization
discourse by drawing on the discipline's theoretical positions and
methodological practices.
Theorizing the Global
Globalization is not a new phenomenon, though much of the rhetoricboth
popular and academic-would seem to suggest that it grows out of the
late-twentieth century technologies, lifestyles, and capitalism. Religious
movements-particularly Christianity and Islam-provide some of the earliest
examples of globalization (Beckford and Luckrnann 1989; Robertson 1989;
Ahmed and Donnan 1994; Halliday 1994). Colonialism and imperialism also
56 Folklore Forum 30: 112 ( 1 999) Kimberly J. Lau
provide similar examples of early global interconnectedness, and in many cases
colonialism and religious evangelism collaborated in their attempts at cultural
conversion (Sen 1989). Both religious studies and post-colonial studies offer an
important historical depth to contemporary understandings of globalization and
transculturation; however, they have been excluded from this consideration of
globalization due to space limitations.
Theories of the global range far and wide, both disciplinarily and
conceptually, and this section is intended as an overview to some of the
most salient and frequently cited meditations on globalization.
Immanuel Wallerstein: The Modern World-System and the World-
Economy
Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World Systenz (1974) is one of
the earliest attempts to theorize globalization. As suggested by the title to
his four-volume tome, Wallerstein perceives the world in terms of a social
system with distinct "boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of
legitimation, and coherence" (1974:347). The modern world-system can be
divided into four major stages of development-the origins of the system as
a European world-system (1450-1640), the consolidation of the system
(1640-1 8 15), the "conversion of the world-economy into a global enterprise"
(18 15-1917), and then the present stage (1974: 10-1 1).
In addition to the four stages of development, Wallerstein identifies
two types of world-systems: world empires, which are marked by a single
political system, and world-economies, which do not share a single political
system. The modern world-system is, of course, a world-economy. For
Wallerstein, the modern world-economy is peculiar because of its stability
and longevity, traits that he attributes to the political and economic
interrelationship of capitalism. Consequently, Wallerstein's world-economy
also entails a global division of labor, organized both by function and by
geography. While this division of labor results partly from ecological
considerations, Wallerstein is quick to point out that "for the most part, it [uneven
distribution of economic tasks] is a function of the social organization of work,
one which magnifies and legitimizes the ability of some groups within the system
to exploit the labor of others" (1974:349). In introducing the power differentials
which characterize the modern world-economy, he also draws the distinction
between "core states" and "peripheral areas" (349-50).
In more recent works on the modern world-economy, Wallerstein
engages questions of "culture" (1991a, 1991b). For Wallerstein, the "cultural
framework" within which the modern world-economy operates is a
"geoculture" which remains largely "hidden from view and therefore more
FOLKLORE AND THEORIES OF GLOBALIZATION 57
difficult to assess" (199 1b: 11). Moreover, Wallerstein contends that the recent
(since 1968) intellectual emphasis on "culture" as opposed to "politics" or
the "economy" as the focus of globalization discourse has to do with the
political implications of the various approaches. He believes that culture,
and the agency it grants people, allows for a certain activist optimism about
changing the world, an optimism which he feels does not exist in the realm
of politics and economics (12).
Roland Robertson: A Global Systems Approach
Roland Robertson insists that a "systematic comprehension of the
structuration of the world order" (199255) must inform any theory of
globalization and any discussion of globality, and he posits three overlapping
models for doing so. His first model is for what he terms "the global field
which consists of four major aspects: national societies, individuals, relationships
between national societies, and mankind (25). Through this model for the global
field, or what he later refers to as the global-human condition, Robertson addresses
what he perceives to be the problem of increasing global complexity and the
simultaneous need for each of these four fields to remain relatively autonomous
despite the fact that each is also constrained by the other three (2628). His
second model of globalization is the sequential phase model, a five-stage
diachronic overview of globalization as a deeply historical process leading up to
the current "high degree of global density and complexity" (58). The five phases
begin in Europe in the early 1Sh century and end in the present global situation.
Robertson's first two models, the global field or global-human
condition model and the sequential phase model, overlap in his discussion
and conceptualization of globality as an increased consciousness of the world
as a whole. He describes the interaction of the two models by drawing four
possible orientations toward world order, what he calls Global Gemeinschaft
1, Global Gemeinschaft 2, Global Gesellschaft I , and Global Gesellschaft
2. Each possible orientation also has two versions, a "symmetrical" version
which leans toward equality and an "asymmetrical" version leaning towards
inequality (1 992:78-79).
Robertson's third model of globalization is much less schematic. In
this model, he attempts to join universalism and particularity. One way in
which Robertson has described this interplay of the universal and the
particular is in his discussion of glocalization, a term and an idea which
derives from the Japanese word dochakuku, meaning "living in one's own
land" (1995:28). In the traditional Japanese agricultural sense, dochakuku is
the principle of adapting one's farming techniques to the local conditions;
more recently, the term has been given a business context in which it equates
58 Folklore Forum 30: 112 (1999) Kimberly J. Lau
loosely with the idea of micromarketing (i.e., developing local market
strategies for transnational products). Robertson contends that any model of
globalization must consider the fact that the local is a fundamental part of
the global, both in imagination and in practice (1995).
Ulf Hannerz: Globalization as Creolization and Cultural Flows
The emphasis on the local in theories of the global is the basis of Ulf
Hannerz's model for the global ecumene. Hannerz centers his theory on the
increased (and increasing) interconnectedness of various localities, and this notion
of interconnectedness is fundamental to his definition of globalization. Yet,
Hannerz is careful to avoid the hyperbole of globalization discourse that presents
dramatic pictures of the "before" and "after" type. His depiction of global
interconnectedness is historically informed, and he shatters the image of the
world as a cultural mosaic with sharp distinctions and clear edges (1996: 18).
Discarding the image of the world as a mosaic is only the beginning of Hannerz's
reflexivity. His own investigation into the global distribution of meanings and
meaningful forms reminds us that "the world is now so complicated that any
social units we work with in cultural studies must be more or less arbi~ary,
artifacts of particular analytical objectives" (23).
Hannerz's emphasis on global interconnectedness leads to creolization
as the dominant metaphor for his model of the global ecumene. For Hannerz,
much of the appeal of creolization as an organizing metaphor stems from
the perception that creolization points to cultural mixture, "creativity and
richness of expression" without the baggage of cultural "purity, homogeneity,
and boundedness" and without the implications of "devian[ce]" (1996:66).
At the core of his concept of creole culture, Hannerz sees "a combination of
diversity, interconnectedness, and innovation, in the context of global centerperiphery
relationships" (67). Yet, as Barbara Abou-el-Haj (1991) points
out, the term "creolization" still carries with it racist and colonialist
associations, implicit in the linguistic idea of a "standard" and "superstratum,"