Cosmopolitanism: How To Be a Citizen of the World
Page 4 of 4
|
|
MJ: You argue in the book that one of the standard criticisms of economic globalization—that it threatens the survival of "authentic" local culture—is misplaced, precisely because such a view implicitly sets a higher value on the group (the cultural community) than the individual.
KAA: Well, first of all, once you start out on the cosmopolitan exploration, one of the things that's bound to strike you is that among the most interesting civilizations that the planet has produced, hardly any have produced what's interesting about them by themselves. Think of the places we think of historically as great centers of civilization—Mogul India, Venice in the Renaissance, Greece in the 5th Century BC, London in the 19th Century—they all borrow; and this is what people do, they borrow, they exchange, that's how cultures work. Often when people talk about things that are supposedly "authentically" this or that—what could be more authentically Italian than spaghetti, say; except that the Chinese invented it. What could be more authentically American than jazz, which in fact comes out of a city that was black and Irish and Latin and French? You can go on all day. So the first thing to say about the apostles of purity is—what are they talking about?
Now, the people who make these arguments are responding to a genuine problem, which is that there are places where people who want to go on with certain practices are prevented from doing so by force. Tibet is a perfect contemporary example. A historical example is the eradication the traditional religions of Latin America by the Spanish. That's terrible. And yet, if everyone in Latin America had consented to become a Catholic, then who would be against it?
The other genuine problem is that there's often a kind of crowding out because the things some people would like to continue with become expensive relative to things from other places. The proportion of people in my home town in Ghana who still wear what we call a cloth, which is a sort of toga, has noticeably declined in my lifetime, and it's because t-shirts and shorts are cheaper. We're not a particularly poor place, so there are people who still wear the cloth, particularly on certain formal occasions, because they can afford it. If they stopped wearing it because they couldn't afford it, that would be very sad, because they wouldn't be able to do what they wanted to do, not—again—because the culture was changing. But even then, the solution isn't to force them to wear the cloth no matter what, but to change the world economy so that they can afford to wear it.
MJ: Isn't another problem that the global cultural exchange is lopsided—that the rest of the world gets American cultural products, but the US doesn't get much of anyone else's
Well, that's a problem for us—that's to say, we miss out. Remember, though, that, if you take the example of movies, while it's true that not many movies from elsewhere gain real traction in the United States, especially if they're not in English, nevertheless more movies from India, or Turkey, or Hong Kong are watched in much of Asia and Africa than are movies from Hollywood. Nigerian films--they call it "Nollywood"—are very big in West Africa. Because of new technology it's much cheaper than it used to be to make and distribute films. So there are lots of exciting things happening in the world that the United States is depriving itself of, and it does so at its own cost.
The cost to other people is that because of the great penetration of especially American culture, they have a little bit better sense of what we're like than they do of what we're like. That's a problem for them, because we're busy reshaping the world. And if you're doing that the very least you ought to do is know the contours of what you're reshaping, and we don't. It's also a problem for us, because they notice our lack of interest and they resent it, and that's the kind of attitude that, at the extreme, turns Osama bin Laden into somebody's hero.
MJ: You also argue in the book that when people complain about American-led globalization making the world "homogenous" they're overstating things.
KAA: Yes. The world is full of people consuming things we know nothing about here. And anyway, even if they were (God forbid) force-fed a diet of American television they'd interpret it in their own context. They literally wouldn't see what you see. There are famous studies—I mention two of them in my book—that show this. People tend to borrow the things they find useful and ignore the rest. They interpret and respond; they're not a wax on which you're imprinting an image. People even interpret plot in their own cultural context. There are these famous studies of the reception of the American television series Dallas in Israel and Palestine. They talk about a moment when a female character leaves her home and goes to stay with an older man. They saw her going back to her father. In fact he's her boyfriend, but in that world that would never be. They saw her doing what they would do in like circumstances. When you send a television series to Ghana or Mexico or South Africa you don't send a guy with it to interpret it; people interpret it for themselves.
Julian Brookes is the editor of MotherJones.com
