Tap dance locally, globally

http://www.colostate-pueblo.edu/today/live_viewStory.asp?documentID=922
“New life for old shoes.” Colorado State University-Pueblo.

I came across this article online about a new instance of Nike’s Reuse-A-Shoe program (begun 1993). Since we’d focused on Nike a lot, and are talking about resistance globally and locally to global giants like Nike, I wanted to see what this particular project was about. And here it is: people donate their shoes and Nike will recycle them “to make soccer fields, basketball courts, and playground surfaces around the world.”

Here’s the key passage that I wanted to focus on in terms of Esteva and Prakash: “Because of the amount of landfill waste prevented from the program, and the global effort put forth by Nike in donating the playing surfaces, Gonzales said he thinks the program satisfies the service project theme of ‘Think globally, act locally’”.

Esteva and Prakash would cringe reading this because they adamantly reject the bumper sticker slogan: “Think globally, act locally.” They would rather us think locally, because “Those who think locally do not twist the humble satisfaction of belonging to the cosmos into the arrogance of pretending to know what is good for everyone and to attempt to control the world” (415). Yet, despite this nice idea, it seems as shaky to me as Nike’s professed help with the Reuse-A-Shoe program.

First of all, they bring up Native Americans’ conception of territory - but to what end? To impose THAT view back on those whose culture is based on ownership of territory? If part of their point is that no is right when making choices for others, then surely trying to un-territorize the entire world would be just as problematic as anything going on right now. Many Americans won’t give up their private healthcare much less their physical private properties. And who says who is wrong or right?

Esteva and Prakash don’t like the notion of imposing idealistically normative ways of doing things to various people around the globe. And that’s awesome. But this piece of rhetoric isn’t doing justice to their own hopes. I wanted to yell “Who are they kidding?” sometimes: it can’t be easy “Saying no to Wal-Mart” when you can’t afford anything else and “saying no to mindless jobs” when you are unemployed. I think they’ve gotten carried away on what would be nice versus what is feasible. More specifically, they do not offer explicit ways to make changes towards the desired goal and seem to get as caught up in their speech as the bumper sticker people.

Their point seems to be that “what is needed is…people thinking and acting locally, while forging solidarity with other local forces that share this opposition to the ‘global thinking’ and ‘global forces’ threatening local spaces” (416). I am trying to figure out if they would agree with the idea that if everyone looks out for themselves locally rather than interfering globally then things would be better globally. That sounds suspiciously like how capitalism is supposed to work in the first place, which is “to blame” for much of globalization’s problems according to many. Their example of when people do need to work with “outsiders” – the Austrians banning nuclear plants but having foreign nuclear plants right outside their borders – makes we wonder how they overcome this very example without thinking globally. How are the Austrians going to get outside allies if those allies don’t have some investment themselves in banning nuclear plants. And then, what is that investment? Are they interefering in the local affairs of Austrains or do they have some menacing global-thinking plan to ban all nuclear plants everywhere? Is it really a bad thing to globally organize around something that does seem basic – like banning nuclear testing? People who are concerned about global issues are not necessarily as bad as they make it out: I think environmentalists especially realize that it is one world that we live in so we have a right to have everyone’s voices heard on what they think is best. Countries, if not people, cannot remain isolated, so how can they restrict themselves to thinking locally? I guess I think this article was too busy playing with words to accomplish anything especially useful. Thinking and acting locally while sometimes forming outside allies seems so compartmentalized. I’m not convinced and would need to hear more from them with concrete examples.

Language Policy Outside the US – what I didn’t say

Based on Heller, M. 1982. Negotiations of language choice in Montreal. In J. Gumperz (ed.). Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Multiethnic/multilingual Quebec (as opposed to Miami):
Canada’s French/English uses reveal a lot about language’s symbolic role in political life. While the negotiation of language has to do with judgments of personal treatment, Heller points out that those judgments are dependent on social knowledge, like status difference. Between any two strangers anywhere around the world, encounters “are now political acts of choosing the right language.”

What does it matter what language you use as long as you’re polite or say what you mean?
A lot, apparently. Negotiation of language choice is vital. Take the English hospitals in Quebec, for example, where the clerks are supposed to be bilingual. The clerk tries to adapt to French or English for the patient who calls, but it’s hard to tell which is supposed to be used. It’s become conventionalized to start off a conversation by directly asking on the meta-level which language should be used, but that turns out to be awkward and unwanted. Thus, the fact that some people support bilingualism and others oppose it “has led to a strange dance in which code switching has multiple interpretations.” Selecting the wrong one can be bad and offend. What’s particularly interesting here is that the attempt by speakers in Quebec to conventionalize the negotiating strategies between the two languages reveals the way people make up norms where they are absent. It helps us know how to speak to each other without uh, feeling, um, awkward.

Does Quidditch Explain the (Harry Potter) World?

Last quarter, the Undergraduate English Association sponsored a Harry Potter speaker panel on campus. One of the things that came up was the role of the sport, Quidditch, in the fictional world. Why am I mentioning this? In class, Edwards brought up that Foer in “How Soccer Explains the World” did not really delve into any real-time, experiential study/explanation of playing soccer. Foer made claims to its socialist themes, but did not specify how this would be evident in the game itself. Now, one of the professors in the Harry Potter forum raised the question of why Rowling bothered to spend so much time writing about Quidditch. The professor wondered if going on and on about the kids and teachers discussing the sport, and also detailed accounts of practicing and playing it, was necessary at all to the story. Was it a distraction from the magical education or the plot with the bad guy? The responses to this proposal and the discussion that followed were interesting and in some way relate to question of whether an experiential account of a sport is crucial to understanding its importance.

One student actually responded that not only is Quidditch not a distraction in the HP world, but it actually quite central in a “Quidditch explains the HP world” kind of way. From a Foer approach, Quidditch is the sport that the magical folk of every nation compete in. It is analogous to soccer, with its Word Cup tournament that nearly every wizard and witch (no matter how rich or poor) wants to (and mostly does) attend and its hooligans from each team.
And in fact when the ‘bad guys’ wanted to harm wizards, they attacked the Word Cup because of its significance to the spirit of the wizarding world.

Anyway, people have forums and forums of analyzing Quidditch I know, and I’m not going to go on with this. But I do want to make my point. While was I wasn’t originally convinced in class, comparing soccer to Quidditch and the world to the HP world, I do think Foer’s accont would have greatly benefited from a greater focus on the sport. While I’m often bored reading the Quidditch scenes and want to hurry up and get to the plot in HP, Quidditch is part of the plot and always is so – even in its importance to the main character when he is banned from it, a true exile from what it is to be a wizard in the wizarding world.

social capital, information restrictions, and swarming

Hardt and Negri’s study of the Multitude on the abstract level made me think of community development in a global world. Some of what I got out of H&N was a sense of people coming together to achieve things in the face of adverse pressures brought on the assymetrical power relations in a global world. I am especially thinking of their discussion of resistance, at least as much as was mentioned in the “Multitude” section.

It brings to my mind the notion of “social capital” from Jodie Kressman and others who investigate community development: what it is and how it can be harnessed by the multitude.

Often the strongest barrier to people coming together to use their individual and group social capital is information – particularly lack thereof. If the voices of the multitude are going to communicate with each other, they need to understand what there is to resist.

I was drawn to this opinion column in the New York Sun regarding Google’s agreement to abide by Chinese government censors on searches by Chinese Google users.

“Googling the Great Firewall: Googe Kowtowed to Communist Censorship”
Erping Zhang, Jan 31
http://www.nysun.com/article/26791?page_no=1

The columnist was particularly upset by what the inequality Google is showing between its American users and its Chinese users: “In this instance, it appears that Google lawyers will go to bat to defend the right to privacy of Americans doing searches for child pornography, but they deem it less important to defend the rights of Chinese citizens to learn more about religious freedom and democracy.” Indeed, Google refused the US Government access, but has agreed to the Chinese government’s demands in order to have Google used in China.

The columnist also expresses concern over access to information. We’ve talked in class about whether there is any such thing as unrestricted access to information, if not in so many words. Some people can’t access the internet to search. And even when you can access the internet, who is writing what. Who runs the media if you watch TV? Who is the radio talk show host? Information seems always to be imperfect. But, on the other hand, the case here with China is fairly straightforward…and deliberate.

“The top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party writes a list of the topics it deems threatening to its complete control over political and social capital within the country. It hands that list to Google executives, who proceed to build their China search engines with filters installed.”

And what is being restricted? While this is only one person’s opinion, I think it is very revealing: “Recent studies from the OpenNet Initiative show that while Chinese Internet filters block about 7% of the top 100 search results for pornography, more than 70% percent of the top 100 results were blocked in searches on the Falun Gong movement, outlawed in China in 1999. More than 80% were blocked in searches for the China Democracy Party. Now searches on www.google.cn will yield similar results.” To draw this distinction even more clearly, consider that “Chinese Internet users log on and search for information on Falun Gong and they receive results of sites for Chinese propaganda of an "evil cult." They receive no information regarding the imprisonment of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners in Chinese reeducation through labor camps.”

At issue is who is in charge of the information, and what information do they allow versus what they restrict? Preventing people from drawing on resources that may unite them against those in authority would clearly be against the plans H&N would like to foresee for the multitude.

In some ways, this is not to be taken as the ultimate example. After all, most agree today that 1984’s NewSpeak that didn’t have a word for “freedom” so that people wouldn’t be able to conceive of freedom would be fallible. On the other hand, in the case of restricting information, H&N’s swarm intelligence will have to do the work for the multitude of resistors in China.

Ford cuts thousands of workers in response to global economic pressure

This week both class and my google.news searching made me consider global pressures on the business front. In particular, I am thinking of the huge job cuts by Ford.

Perhaps some young Japanese males are separating themselves from the national stereotype (see hikikomori blog) but Japan’s economic bid into the global market remains strong. Just look at how the country’s car manufacturing has affected US business and market strategies.

According to USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2006-01-24-ford-cover-usat_x.htm, “Together, the downsizing of Detroit's Big Two automakers is evidence of how dramatically foreign rivals, mainly the Japanese, have expanded in the USA. It means that the two automakers that once dominated the U.S. car market like schoolyard bullies will shrink into companies that will scrap for buyers on the same footing as many others.” In this view of the global market, nations are competitors fighting for a piece of a pie that is global-size rather than nation-size. But as the cuts by Ford shows, supersizing your business can be risky. Ford just made “a stunning 26% cut that will eliminate 25,000 to 30,000 hourly jobs, in addition to 4,000 white-collar jobs Ford previously said it would ax” (USA Today). But Ford itself feel it is just responding to global pressures in the market: “What gives us confidence is that it has worked in Ford of Europe. It's worked in Mazda. It's worked in South America," said Bill Ford. "We have turned around our major operations. We know what to do.”” (USA Today).

And what are they doing? According to the San Diego Tribune, http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20060124-1325-automakers-restructuring.html, “GM and Ford say they're going to the very core of their businesses to turn things around. They're vowing to work more closely with suppliers to cut costs, a tactic borrowed from Japanese rivals. They expect to save billions in development costs by sharing components globally and making plants more flexible, and they're promising to rely less on costly incentives. ‘At both companies, they're very much attacking the culture of the organization,’ said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor.” Still, this shows that America is not exempt from feeling global pressure itself, despite how much pressure it exerts on others. The job loss reflects the agonies of workers in capitalist systems around the world in down times. American workers do not have some special protection to the forces of globalization on the economic front.

Resistance through Withdrawal, an extreme response

In a fascinating New York Times Magazine article by Maggie Jones called “Shutting Themselves In” (mid-January), Jones explores why thousands of boys and young men are “retreating” to their bedrooms and secluding themselves there for many years.

http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?frow=0&n=10&srcht=a&query=&srchst=nyt&hdlquery=&bylquery=Maggie+Jones&daterange=period&mon1=01&day1=01&year1=1981&mon2=02&day2=26&year2=2006&submit.x=23&submit.y=11
I have a paper copy, but here is the link. Select the first article.

The “problem is known in Japan as hikikomori, which translates as ‘withdrawal’ and refers to a person sequestered in his room for six months or longer with no social life beyond his home” (48). How many are living this way in Japan? Some claim as many as one million (1% of population), while others claim between 100,000 and 320,000. It’s overwhelmingly a male phenomenon, and hikikiomori can hide away for years and even decades. And the after they leave the world, the longer they’re gone the less likely they’ll ever reenter it.

It is only in the last decade that it has become a social phenomenon, Jones says. People can compare it to largely Western-bound anorexia in that it is considered by many to be a “culturebound syndrome that thrives in one particular country during a particular moment in its history” (48). This description of it as a culture-bound syndrome is somewhat odd to me, since it’s not a communicable disease that manifests in specific physical environments. I didn’t even realize people consider anorexia to be only a Western phenomenon. I am sure dancers, at least, around the world all regulate their eating habits and risk anorexia or bulimia. What does it mean for there to exist syndromes that are culturally locatable?

Another question is what does this mean for the level of the individual in a global world. Is this one kind of response to globalization factors? And what does it mean? “One result is a new underclass of young men who can’t or won’t join the full-time working world and who are a stark counterpoint to Japan’s long-running image as a country bursting with industrious salarymen” (48). Says the founder of one of the programs to help hikikomori and their families, “I suspect there will be a bipolarization of this society. There will be people who can be in the global world. And then there will be others, like the hikikomori. The ones who cannot be in that world” (48).

Is this the extreme case of what happens to the individual who cannot function in a global world? Is being able to live in the world as it is becoming increasingly difficult on levels beyond the physical but into the psychological?

On Robertston's global field chart

In Roland Robertson’s “Globalization as Problem,” his model of the global field (p95) leaves something to be desired in my opinion. Namely, it seems to gloss over some things by setting equal culture and nationalism. There is more than selves, national societies, world societies, and humankind. Many nations are more heterogeneous than homogenous, and while he identifies “individual-society problematic”, there is also problems between local groups within a given society. And I don’t even mean ones like a globalized religion that arguably could fit into a “world system of societies” perhaps. I think the chart does not depict the plurality of societies beyond the individual level but under the national level.

Other commodifications

Has race become a commodified object?
When is adopting a different cultural practice offensive and when is it welcomed? Who draws the line?

The "truth" according to some

A lot of people in my family read SciFi books and/or alternative history books. When I talked to them about globalization and pessimistic views like Huntington’s class of civilizations or optimistic plans for a global word ethic, one of their answers always stands out: that the only way to have a real, peace-based global humanity fully realized would be if aliens attacked the planet. Then, differences would have to be swept aside and suddenly there would be something to contrast to “human” – whereby all distinctions among humans which seem so important now would no longer be categorically relevant. It’s the us-vs.-them scenario – the banding together against a common enemy. Since, as to my knowledge there are no aliens here or arriving any time soon, I’m going to say this plays into the pessimistic view of globalization that no natural means will bring about a global sense of humanity without outside pressure (and there is no outside pressure to ‘humanity’).

Global/Local Particular/Universal

I would like to draw attention to political theorist Ernesto Laclau (side note: isn’t he teaching a seminar on NU campus this very quarter?) and the multiculturalism debate - - - especially universalism vs. particularism

(link to a useful page about him) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/v028/28.2er_laclau.html
From “The Universalism that is Not One.” Linda Zerilli (via MUSE, so you must be on NU-VPN to access)

As a lot of people in the class expressed interest in learning about “identity” in a globalized world, I found myself turning to some of the writings/thinking of Ernesto Laclau.

It is possible to conceive of globalization and localization in parallel to universalism and particularism. And this would play a role in the multiculturalism debate that Laclau addresses, that relates to our class but thus far has not been brought up directly. Laclau, in looking at this, is referring to the struggle to particularize yourself (or your group) and make yourself (or your group) special and unique. I.e., think of the American melting pot in which everyone conforms to “Americanism” (whatever that may be) versus all the multicultural fairs that, on the other end of the spectrum, celebrate the differences between different cultures within the country.

It’s an interesting and important dichotomy to desire, on the one hand, a world without difference or at least a world in which we overcome differences to work together, while at the same time to desire, on the other hand, a recognition of those qualities which make us stand apart so that we don’t get lost in a whitewashing of cultural heritages.

Where does the struggle between particularism and universalism come into play? Laclau argues that those who are aiming for the latter – to celebrate their particularity – cannot help but by default mean that they’re unique compared to something else, that something else being the universal. I.e., whenever you try to define yourself, you are defining yourself against something else. (Example: women are women, not men – male historically being by default the ‘universal’ human.) Laclau focuses on marginalized groups that in identifying themselves find commonalities which make them, as a group, distinct from whatever is the reigning universal. So, even as feminism, for example, struggles to identify women as women, it unavoidably plays into the schema of the universal male that it is fighting against.

Looking at the Civil Rights in the US, there is also the struggle of a group to show how indeed they DO fit into the universal that they had to first acknowledge before inserting themselves within it. Breaking that down, just as African Americans celebrated their identity apart from the imperialist Eurocentric identity, they simultaneously desired acceptance into the given system. In this way, they made claims to particularism and to universalism at the same time.

This is all quite relevant to globalization and identity because often local groups do not want to lose their special identity to a ‘whitewashing’ universal pushed by globalization. They make up the resistance. At the same time, some groups want to participate in globalization but in a way that preserves their local identity - - which makes me then think of the “glocal” which I’ve heard of. This struggle between particularism and universalism addresses identity fears that exist in the face of globalization and its possible consequences for individuals and groups.