TRANS Nr. 16: Roy Bendor (Simon Fraser University Vancouver, Canada): Digesting globalization: Demarcation, hybridization and power

In recent debates over the course and nature of globalization the notion of hybridization is predominantly used to highlight the essentialist, simplistic, or one-dimensional nature of the ‘globalization as Westernization’ argument (Pieterse, 2004; Tomlinson, 2003).(1) In contrast to theories of cultural imperialism that associate globalization with unidirectional regimes of Western domination, ‘globalization as hybridization’ offers a more nuanced explanation of globalization as an open-ended, nondeterministic process in which social and political modes of organization are reshaped to form new cultural hybridities, or mélanges (Pieterse, 1995; 2004). However, despite its important introduction of pluralist notions of culture and identity into the globalization debate, the ‘globalization as hybridization’ theory does little to challenge the power-saturated contexts in which many globalizing processes take place. In fact, between the lines of the ‘globalization as hybridization’ theory we may find a naïve conceptualization of global cultural exchanges that in essence naturalizes existing hegemonic powers. In an attempt to rectify this apparent blind-spot, this paper argues that the key to using hybridization in a manner sensitive to the ubiquitous power dynamics that imbue the world system is located in the identification of potential avenues to enact subject agency within hybridizing processes. In this context, the choice to engage in cultural exchanges and the capacity to influence the conditions in which these exchanges take place emerge as key elements in theorizing counter-hegemonic resistance to the darker aspects of globalization.

Although it is not my intention to offer a modern/postmodern classification of globalizing cultural exchanges, insofar as modernity can be seen as the "disembedding […] of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space" (Giddens, 1990:21), we can identify in the dynamics of globalization the dialectic of disembedment and (counter) re-production of localities that marks contemporary understandings of modernity.(2) Furthermore, if we accept Jonathan Friedman’s (2003:67) assertion that "many of the categories of globalization discourse are ideological products of a specific form of identity space, often referred to as ‘modernity’", then it becomes clear that globalization’s epistemological foundations can be identified with the same modernist tradition that fueled European scientific discovery and colonial expansion. From this perspective, the question of whether contemporary (postmodern?) epistemologies have transmutated and ruptured with previous, more easily identifiable ‘modern’ mindsets becomes immaterial to our discussion. With no doubt the fingerprints of modernity as discourse of power can still be found all over current global politics whether we believe that our subjectivities have undergone a radical transformation or not.

The critique of hybridization theory carried out in this paper presupposes the conceptual and practical grounding of politics in cultural identities, values and epistemologies. Appropriately, it begins by discussing the epistemological foundations of current globalizing dynamics vis-à-vis a modern Western cultural identity that was constructed through cultural demarcation. It then proceeds to explore an alternative conception of identity that employs cultural hybridization to combat the lingering effects of the postcolonial legacy. My hope is that by outlining the existing and desired conditions in which cultural exchanges - often catalyzed by accelerated globalization - take place, We may conceive of modes of cultural hybridization that maintain subject agency in face of what at times may seem as the cultural and political transmogrification of local identities, practices and institutions.

2. Cannibalism and incorporation

The analysis of cultural identity and political agency in this paper is centered on the contrastive use of cannibalism as a cultural category, trope, or metaphor in Western and non-Western (Brazilian) cultures. As metaphors both embody and shape our relationship with the world, their analysis offers us a glimpse of both existing and desired modes for social organization. In the case of cannibalism, its tremendous ability to simultaneously entice and repel, make it a telling cultural signifier, regardless of whether it is used to support the foundations of cultural bulwarks or to inspire the struggle to dismantle them. Both the European and Brazilian notions of the cannibal were underlined by the capacity of cannibalism to evoke primal fears and aggression. These intertwine and give rise to a dialectic of attraction and repulsion manifested in the great fascination with which cannibalism is met by Westerners and non-Westerners alike.(3)

The power of the ‘cannibalism effect’ resides in the act of incorporation, on which, as Maggie Kilgour notes, the relation between inside and outside is premised:

As Freud has shown, the act of oral incorporation serves to create boundaries that construct a coherent sense of self through its differentiation from ‘other’.(4) Intriguingly, the very same act also operates to dissolve these newly drawn boundaries as subject and incorporated object become one. These two inverse aspects of incorporation - demarcation and dissolution - suggest a plethora of meanings that lend themselves to opposing readings and applications. Indeed, it is the richness and complexity of cannibalism that make it a fruitful point of departure to rethink cultural boundaries and deconstruct positions of dominance that are structured along the inside/outside binary opposition.

3. Cultural demarcation and the Western self

It should not come as much of a surprise that the first appearances of cannibalism in modern Western literature roughly correspond to Columbus’s "discovery" of the "new world."(5) In 1493, Dr. Diego Alvarez Chanca, a member of Columbus’s second voyage to the Caribbean, wrote in his diary:

As Peter Hulme points out, this depiction of alleged cannibalism is emblematic to many modern appearances of cannibalism in Western literature where "the primal scene of ‘cannibalism’ as ‘witnessed’ by Westerners is of its aftermath rather than its performance" (1998:2). Although suspiciously absent from documented acts of cannibalistic consumption, in subsequent decades cannibals were increasingly present in Western consciousness, leading to what Priscilla Walton (2004:3) observes as the virtual littering of nineteenth-century texts with cannibalism.

The function of the cannibal in Western thought vis-à-vis Western literature, art and even philosophy was to establish and sustain a cultural category that signified the ‘other,’ to the extent that it can be argued that "Modernity enter[ed] the world’s stage attached to its cannibal shadow" (Hulme, 1998:6). As the modern Cartesian subject "depends for its sense of self as independent entity on an image of a clearly differentiated ‘other’ " (Hulme, 1998:5-6), the cannibal became an active cultural signifier of tyranny, brutality and excess, clearly marking the ‘civilized’ from the ‘savage,’ and thus functioning to contain and distance the worst ‘barbarians at the gate.’(6) In essence, cannibalism marked the creation of a distinct European cultural identity through practices of discursive demarcation, segregation and marginalization that sustained European cultural autonomy and domination.

As ethnographic inquiries of cannibalism moved from the gustatory to the symbolic, the analysis of cannibalism in literature followed, opening avenues of inquiry that explored its function within the discourse of postcolonialism.(7) Hulme attributes this shift in the analysis of cannibalism to William Arens’s polemic, The Man-Eating Myth (1979). Based on his investigation of documented cases of alleged cannibalism, Arens accused anthropologists of intellectual conjuring, consequently stirring an emotional debate that spilled over the anthropological community.(8) Arens argued that in its crusade to concretize cannibalism empirically, anthropology has in fact abandoned objective scientific methodology to advance a Eurocentric view of the ‘other,’ revealing in the process none other than its own biases towards the subject of its scientific inquiries:

Arens described the relationship between cannibalism and anthropology as "comfortable and supportive" (1979:162), a mutually constitutive project that sustained anthropology by nurturing an exoticised other as its raison d’être. The perpetuation of the image of "cannibal hordes lurking on the borders" attained through pseudo-scientific research, operated not only to legitimize anthropology as a social science discipline but also to justify European colonialism through scientifically backed claims of cultural and moral superiority (Arens, 1998). Arens’s conclusions shed light on Western conceptions of self and otherness and their reliance on cultural demarcation. His indictment of anthropology reveals the mechanism through which Western culture, in its quest for cultural coherence, defines itself negatively by differentiation from other cultures. From this perspective, the empirical existence of cannibalism as a practice is secondary to its function as a cultural category, for as Hulme (1998:4) notes, "even the most fervent believer in cannibal rites would have to acknowledge that cannibalism is now primarily a linguistic phenomenon, a trope of exceptional power."

The function of Cannibalism in cultural demarcation as "a trope of exceptional power" is a manifestation of a deeper structure that is premised on what Kilgour (1990) identifies as the foundation of all binary oppositions: the inside/outside dichotomy. Following Freud’s description of the oral stage, Kilgour explains that the inside/outside opposition is based on bodily experience which creates the sense that "what is ‘inside’ one’s own body is a coherent structure that can be defined against what lies ‘outside’ of it" (Kilgour, 1990:4). This sense of coherence constructs "a crude system of values in which what is ‘outside’ the territory of the self is bad, and what is ‘inside’ is good, a schematization that underlies many more sophisticated notions of individual and corporate bodies" (ibid).

Although the inside/outside opposition might only offer the "illusion of stability and substance" since as a spatial metaphor it is entirely dependent on one’s position, it is nonetheless an archetype for a series of dichotomies that crisscross Western thought. A partial inventory may include such binary oppositions as center/periphery, spirit/flesh, culture/nature, male/female, content/form and autonomy/relatedness (Kilgour, 1990:3). As Kilgour further explains, these pairs are similarly structured to constitute a coherent yet hierarchical order which represents "experience as a concordia discors where extremes meet, although not in an equal relation but in an identity achieved through the subordination, even annihilation, of one of the terms" (ibid; italics in original text).(9)

The introduction of the inherent hierarchy that characterizes all pairs of binary oppositions is pertinent to our discussion of cannibalism as cultural category. It implies that cultural labeling that follows the binary logic of oppositions does more than contain cultural identities; it upholds a relation of dominance and subordination. This pattern of differentiation and demarcation as apparatuses of domination lies in the very foundation of modern Western epistemology vis-à-vis technological rationality and the scientific method.

4. The scientific method of domination

From Bacon and Descartes, through Newton and Comte, the Western scientific method enshrined what Bruce Rich (1994:204) identifies as a process of abstraction, analysis, synthesis and control. Descartes’s systematic doubt initiated a rationality-guided process of breaking down phenomena to their smallest describable components, classifying and categorizing them according to trusted taxonomies, and articulating them as applicable rules. With Descartes’s ‘dualism of dualisms’ - featuring the dichotomous relation of mind and body - a form of instrumental or technological rationality became the epistemological and metaphysical foundation of the modern project.(10) Within the perimeters of technological rationality, taxonomy took a central role in the scientific process from observation to explanation. The ability to categorize and further classify phenomena into well-defined groups made possible a common scientific language and a persistent knowledge base transferable from one generation of scientists to the next. But as Vandana Shiva so poignantly argues, it also provided a mechanism of domination as the power to signify through categorization, classification and representation (or ‘naming’) of natural phenomena was assumed through an exclusive Eurocentric enterprise :

In a variation of the inside/outside binary opposition, the location of the scientist/observer outside of the phenomenon he is observing added another layer to the impenetrability of Western scientific discourse. This distancing effect was to ensure the scientist’s so-called objective account of phenomena, substantiating science’s claim to value-neutrality and impartiality through the idealized separation of human subjective frailty from the objective realm of natural occurrences. That position, of course, was shown to be inconsistent with the reality of science in which, as we now know, there is no credible way to ensure - or to demand - neither the value-neutrality of the scientist nor the sterile and unobtrusive environment of non-affective observation.(11) However, the epistemological and methodological segregation of man from nature and the incommensurability of observer and observed supported an impermeable scientific discourse that precluded all bearers of alternative knowledge systems from taking an active part in the construction of scientific objectives and their resulting agendas (Shiva, 1989). As consequence, a value-based hierarchy masked by scientific terminology was in fact introduced into the core of scientific methodology, enabling mass acts of colonial domination by formulating the equation of knowledge with utility and power (Rich, 1994:209). From this perspective, the scientific method was only as valuable as the potential of its products to maintain control over nature and other humans.

The inside/outside binary opposition that underlies both cultural and scientific practices of domination through differentiation seems to be a fundamental aspect of modern Western epistemology. The practice of boundary creation through classification and categorization reproduces our primal creation of self through its differentiation from ‘other,’ replicating our own mental structure the world over. In the process of understanding the world we also attain control over it, instilling hierarchies and relations of domination in discourses of both social and natural phenomena. This practice, in essence, illustrates an impediment of Western thought as our ineluctable understanding of the world through dichotomies reflects the imposition of our limited powers of comprehension on a complex world that is not reducible to palpable and distinct pairs.

An alternative to this dichotomous mode of reckoning the world is offered by an inverse application of cannibalism. Although it too is predicated on the primacy of the act of incorporation to the establishment of a coherent self, it does so while foregrounding the unifying, hybridizing dimensions of incorporation.

5. Cultural hybridity and the Brazilian cannibal

These passages from Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto (originally published in 1928) resonate with the delicate dialectic of longing for an idealized past and aspiring for a modern cultural identity. Although his manifesto is a unique blend of distinctively European style with native objects and symbolism, the theme - laying the foundations of a new national and cultural identity - is not uncommon to postcolonial discourse.(12) Andrade’s Brazilian flavoured rendition of Shakespearian existentialism - Tupi (or Tupinambá) being the dominant Amazonian tribe in pre-colonial Brazil - exemplifies the type of identity formulation sought by the Brazilian Antropofagia (‘cannibalism’) movement of the late 1920s. In its quest for a unique identity that is forged through cultural dialog, indeed, "Tupi or not Tupi" was to be a key question.(13)

As part of Brazilian Modernismo - a far-reaching modernist heterogeneous literary and cultural movement, Antropofagia has played a significant role in the modern moulding of Brazilian identity.(14) Sergio Luiz Prado Bellei (1988) locates Modernismo’s origins in a host of social and political changes that took place in Brazil toward the end of the Old Republic (1894-1930). Although Brazil gained its independence from Portugal as early as 1822, a quasi-colonial status-quo was kept alive by the politics and economics of the Brazilian landed-bourgeoisie who maintained a suffocating monopoly over Brazil’s natural resources, export crops and political system. By the early 1920s, the decline of the power of the hegemonic class of rural landowners and the rise of new social elements such as the army, the industrial bourgeoisie, and liberal professionals in the large urban centers of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo led to new social and political dynamics that resulted in cultural flux. This realignment of the domestic power constellation coincided with a vibrant European post-WWI cultural and nationalist scene, prompting Brazilian intellectual elites who felt simultaneously part of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ worlds to perceive their cultural task as an exploration of "European intellectual and social life and their possible relevance to a problematic underdeveloped area in which diverse social groups experienced a profoundly uneven situation of power distribution" (Bellei, 1998:88).

Against this backdrop of deep social and cultural transformation, Antropofagia has taken upon itself to define "the meaning of being modern in a peripheral country" (Bellei, 1998:88), using its "avant-garde posture to address the question of Latin American cultural autonomy in dialogue with the primitivism then attracting attention in Europe. Vitally preoccupied with the question of Latin American cultural autonomy, Antropofagia was a bold, provocative, if also ambiguous, attempt to respond to the conflicting imperatives of cultural nationalism and pluralist cosmopolitanism in a post-colonial context" (Jackson, 1994:90). Indeed, operating in the gap between Brazil’s political marginalization and its cultural romanticization evident in the wave of primitivism that swept European art circles, Antropofagia, operating almost as a revolutionary bourgeoisie, sought to destabilize the domestic social and political hegemony by injecting the spirit and symbolism of pre-colonial Brazil into its postcolonial present. In the process, it would also pour new meaning into the native symbolism that was used in a decontextualized, and perhaps even exploitative manner by the prophets of primitivism in Europe. Spearheaded by the polemics and poems of Oswald de Andrade in the movement’s publication, Revista de Antropofagia (published 1928-9), and the ‘innocent primitivist’ paintings of his wife, Tarsila do Amaral, Antropofagia sought to "reaffirm the radical break with the past," promote an "aesthetic revolution commensurate with modernity," and reconsider "primitivism in both the national and the international, especially European, contexts" (Bellei, 1998:91).

Finding inspiration in pre-colonial culture, the figure of the cannibal as a "cultural metaphor attuned to historical contingency and change" (Dunn, 2001:19) offered Antropofagia a fertile field of imagery. The cannibal’s ability to digest his enemies and absorb their power while remaining distinctively autonomous serves as a potent allegory to what Antropofagia sought to accomplish: absorb European contemporary culture while remaining distinctively Brazilian; resist European cultural imperialism while maintaining the ability to borrow from its ideas, motifs and styles.

Seamlessly blending European and native cultures, cannibalism was employed in constructive and deconstructiveways that simultaneously accounted to the past while breaking away from it. In this process, the characteristics of the cannibalistic act were transposed into the realm of culture, replicating the act of ingestion’s physical unification of the cannibal and his enemies in a metaphoric creation of a new cultural space in which Western and native epistemologies become one. As previous cultural distinctions fall prey to the ability of the "stomach without ideas" to digest diverse cultural conceptions without prejudice, a utopian agenda materializes through the marrying of "native wisdom" with "modern technology" and the folding of irrationality and primitive aesthetics into an original and powerful arsenal of artistic expression (Bellei, 1998:88-91).(15)

Projecting corporal incorporation onto a cultural realm, the act of cultural cannibalism clearly dissolves existing cultural differentiations, giving way to a multitude of new hybrid cultural forms. However, what makes this specific mode of hybridization pertinent to our discussion is the fact that the act of cannibalistic incorporation takes place in a power-saturated context, where by initiating, and influencing the conditions in which the act of incorporation takes place, the cannibal holds symbolic power over the incorporated object and the act of incorporation itself. Kilgour notes the connection between choice and the creation of an autonomous self when she explains that, "The emphasis on choice and discrimination creates the effect that the body, though admittedly vulnerable in the act of reception, is a solid and stable structure that controls its exchanges with the world beyond itself and monitors strictly what it admits into itself" (1990:10). But while her analysis focuses on the arbitrariness of the hierarchies involved in the act of incorporation, I would argue that as a unique instance of incorporation, cannibalism’s strength is revealed precisely in its foregrounding of hierarchies, regardless of their arbitrariness. From this perspective, it is the initiation of cannibalistic incorporation that materializes subject agency over the act of incorporation and its hybridized outcomes, unleashing new forms of cultural and political agency, empowerment and resistance.

6. Globalization and agency

The choice outlined in this paper is not between maintaining a ‘pure’ cultural identity in a globalizing world, and completely submitting local identities to the whim of globalizing political, economic and cultural processes. Arguably both these propositions represent the same practice of drawing clearly demarcated boundaries between autonomous cultural identities and defending them in perpetual "ritual maintenance" (Appadurai, 1995:205). Yet cultural identity can never be kept vacuum-sealed to retain its original form; and culture should not be understood as "an autonomous domain that can account for the organization of behaviour," but instead, as dynamically constituted out of practice (Friedman, 1995:81), and in perpetual dialog with social imaginaries. From this perspective, purist conceptions of cultural identity go beyond merely misunderstanding the fluid nature of cultural identity to misidentify globalization as a singular, monolithic, pervasive and hegemonic force that, powered by contemporary culture industries and transnational capital, functions to efface local identities in the name of a globalization Moloch. Yet, at the same time, and contrary to some of the postulations of globalization, globalization is far from being a natural, benign process. In that vein, arguing that globalization as an agent of modernity contributes to the proliferation of new cultural identities by providing new ingredients for the cultural mélanges that spring worldwide (Tomlinson, 2003), seems to reproduce the hegemonic downplaying of the power-saturated environment in which global cultural exchanges take place.(16) In other words, as cultural exchanges do not necessarily take place between equally powerful partners on a politically level playing field, the analysis of the effects of globalization on cultural identity must be contextualized - yet in a non-deterministic fashion - in current global power dynamics and their modernist foundation. This, I find, is precisely what’s missing from the ‘globalization as hybridization’ theory.

7. Conclusion

As it may have become apparent by now, there is nothing inherent to hybridity that determines its conceptual usefulness in specific discourses. As Nabeel Zuberi (2005) reminds us, the meaning of hybridity, like culture, is unstable and open-ended, enabling its applicability to a variety of occasionally conflicting social, political and cultural agendas. However, as long as we continue to be tied epistemologically to borders and boundaries - to the extent of what Pieterse (2004) calls ‘boundary fetishism,’ hybridity and hybridization will remain powerful weapons in the struggle to overthrow the tyranny of Western dichotomies that are reified and replicated in discourses of cultural and political globalization. The question remains, however, of how to account for subject agency in a globalizing world that is marked by an accelerated compression of time-space that results in an infinite amount of potential hybrid identities. Pietrese’s sketching of a solution in which different hybrid formations are classified as ‘assimilationist’ or ‘destablizing’ based on the ratio of their components seems insufficient at best. Aside from the difficulty of drawing political conclusions from an abstracted, quasi-quantitative measurement of what often are not readily identifiable influences, predicating the political function of hybridities on the ratio of their components paints political agency in quite the consequentialist colours. In contrast, the image presented by the Brazilian cannibal points to the precedence of process over result as cultural and political agency is materialized by assuming ownership over the process of hybridization and not in the latter’s perceivably open-ended results. In this mode, cultural cannibalism functions successfully to produce locality in response to uneven globalizing cultural exchanges.(17)

Insofar as political agency is premised in the self-determination that is materialized by free choice, the potential of hybridization theory to articulate identity construction with power relations is the corollary of the influence change-agents have over the range of choices available to them, and their capacity to make the choices they deem best. And it is precisely this dimension of agency - enacted within hybridizing cultural exchanges - that is exemplified in the figure of the cannibal and his choice over what to digest.

(1) The use of ‘globalization’ in this paper follows Roland Robertson’s formulation of it as referring "both to the compression of the world and to the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole" (1992:8). The combination of these two interrelated elements, as embodied in the global scope of accelerated cultural exchanges and the new hybridized identities they create, results in the cultural flux, crisis of identity and lack of political agency this paper responds to.

(2) If we accept Appadurai’s argument that the reproduction of locality is relational and contextual rather than scalar and special (1995:204), we may understand it as corresponding to Giddens’s notion of modernity.

(3) Our continuous fascination with cannibalism was recently reaffirmed by the media attention given to alleged acts of cannibalism in the Democratic Republic of Congo (see for instance, ‘UN condemns DR Congo cannibalism’, BBC Online, January 15, 2003, retrieved December 29th, 2005 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2661365.stm)

(4) Freud’s original articulation of the oral stage can be found in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). For a short discussion on the importance of the inside/outside opposition to the creation of self through its differentiation from ‘other’ during early childhood, see Freud, 1963: 214-215.

(5) In premodern times, Homer’s Cyclops and Hesiod’s Cronos were depicted as man-eaters as far back as 2500 BC; and popular Christian myths of the middle-ages featured ingestion, digestion and regurgitation as symbols of the eternal suffering that was promised to sinners (see Hulme, 1998; Kilgour, 1990).

(6) Quite different on that landscape was Michel de Montaigne’s sensitive observation that "each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice" (Montaigne, 1976:152). Writing in 1562, Montaigne was ahead of his time in pointing to the type of Eurocentrism that operated to justify colonialism.

(7) See for instance Kilgour, 1998; 2001; Sanday, 1986.
Recently, cannibalism was employed in critiques of post-industrial consumption (see for example Walton, 2004).

(8) Arens was even accused as a Holocaust denier based, apparently, on a dubious comparison of his questioning of cannibalism’s empirical foundation to that of the Holocaust by neo-fascists (see Hulme, 1998:11-15).

(9) Kilgour employs in this argument Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the oppressive logic of antitheses, on which he writes: "[We need] to recognise that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a 'vis-a-vis', but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other… or has the upper hand" (1981:41).

(10) The infiltration of ‘technological rationality’ into the cultural realm is well articulated by Andrew Feenberg who writes: "Rationalization refers to the generalization of technical rationality as a cultural form, specifically the introduction of calculation and control into social processes, with a consequent increase in efficiency" (2003:73-4).

(11) The notion that science is socially constructed through widely agreed upon principles, methods and evidence that reflect the dominant scientific paradigm of the time more than some unshakeable natural law, is famously posited by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

(12) For a more detailed stylistic analysis of Andrade’s poetry see Schwarz, 1992:108-125; and Jackson, 1994.

(13) Other modes of employment of the cannibal image in postcolonial discourses can be found as follows: On the reversal of the cultural label by African slaves see Hulme, 1998:35. On the use of the cannibal as symbol of insurgency in the works of the Caribbean Calibanists see Colás, 2001. For an example of the use of cannibal images and vocabulary in the context of the de-professionalization of Andean knowledge see Grillo Fernandez, 1998.

(14) The cultural memory of Antropofagia had lasting effects on social, political and artistic movements such as Tropicália in the 1960s (Dunn, 2001; Madureira, 1998).

(15) According to Bellei, anthropophagy was summoned to rekindle the "primitive wisdom" that challenged the hegemony of European rationalism but was nearly extinct by four centuries of European colonization. It was to be recovered, redefined and adapted to the social needs of the industrialized, modern present (Bellei, 1998:93).

(16) In this context, Tomlinson’s argument that cultural identity is more the product of globalization than its victim (2003:269; italics in origin) seems a bit overreaching, and may represent a strand of globalization theory that heralds the standardization of locality (Friedman, 1995; Robertson, 1992). Furthermore, the location of identity exclusively in a "global-modern Western" tradition might do more to vindicate Western-centric intellectualism than effectively argue against the view of globalization as the destroyer of identity.

(17) The production of locality in this context follows Appadurai’s view of locality as "a complex phenomenological quality, constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity and the relativity of contexts…. which expresses itself in certain kinds of agency, sociality and reproducability" (1995:204).

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Tomlinson, John (2003) ‘Globalization and Cultural Identity’, in David Held and Anthony McGrew (eds.) The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate (2 nd ed.). Cambridge, UK & Malden, MA: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing. Pp.269-277.

Walton, Priscilla L. (2004) Our Cannibals, Ourselves. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Zuberi, Nabeel (2005) ‘ Mixed Blessings: Globalization and Culture as Hybrid Discourses’. Global Media and Communication (Vol.1, No.1; April, 2005), pp.105-120.

For quotation purposes:
Roy Bendor (Simon Fraser University Vancouver, Canada): Digesting globalization: Demarcation, hybridization and power. In: TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften. No. 16/2005. WWW: http://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/03_2/bendor16.htm

Digesting globalization: Demarcation, hybridization and power

1. Introduction

2. Cannibalism and incorporation

3. Cultural demarcation and the Western self

4. The scientific method of domination

5. Cultural hybridity and the Brazilian cannibal

6. Globalization and agency

7. Conclusion