404 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2­3)
Culture and Global Systems
Jonathan Friedman
C
ulture is often treated as a code, a
paradigm and more recently as a substance
that can spread throughout the world. The
position I suggest here is much simpler. Culture in
the most general sense, as generic culture, is
simply that which is specific to human societies
based on the notion of alternative ways of doing
similar things. The capacity for culture is the
capacity within the same species to constitute
different ways of getting organized. It has usually
been contrasted with the rest of the biological
world, of which we are, of course, a part, by the
fact that other species have far less leeway in the
organization of their lives, their production of ways
of going about the world. This relative fixity has
been called instinct in the past, although the
behavior of non-humans is today understood as
more complex, even displaying cultural learning.
This notion of culture as that which makes us
human is not the usual usage of the term of course,
except for those who deal with the relations
between species. Rather, human culture is a differ-
ential concept, based on the notion of difference
itself, different ways to skin a cat, different ways
to relate to the world, different ways of organiz-
ing social reproduction, etc.
That culture can be understood in terms of
specific structures, even codes, is based on a false
dichotomy between culture as specific social
practice and culture as the organizing principle of
such practice. Culture is difference, of course, but
the difference does not precede the practice.
Culture is a set of properties of practice, that which
is the specificity of the latter. It is not a scheme for
the organization of social life that has a prior exist-
ence to that life. Nor does the fact of cultural differ-
ence convey anything concerning the origins of such
difference. The embeddedness of culture within the
social is the starting point for examining the way it
is constituted as a social-historical phenomenon. In
sum, to say that social life is culturally constituted
is to say that social life is constituted of culture but
not by culture. It is of course true that there are
aspects of culture that are not embedded in actual
social relations but exist as relatively autonomous
symbolic schemes to be used to socialize members
of a particular social world and/or to interpret the
nature of social existence (as in myth). The internal
order of the cultural is related to the construction
of worlds of intentionality that constitute the
immediate, i.e., non-reflexive meaning of action.
Understanding such worlds should not be conflated
with the external observation of meaning as a set of
texts, objects or substance, as is the case in most
globalization approaches to culture. The attempt to
understand what people are doing in their lives can
never be replaced by an external interpretation of
the products of their activities. The examples of this
confusion are often quite shocking, as when it is
assumed that culture A is a melange of cultures B
and C, without any analysis of the way the so-called
possessors of such culture create their worlds. Thus,
spaghetti becomes part-Chinese, and New Guinea
masks depicting advertising for South Pacific Beer
are assumed to be hybrid works. Hybrid-for-us
perhaps, and it is often stated that such hybridity is
an objective phenomenon even if local subjects are
unaware of it. But hybridity-for-us is not objective
since it is only `for us', in fact, our own subjective
interpretation of our objectification of other
people's lives. I have suggested that discourses of
hybridity are identity discourses rather than
attempts to understand what the people we are
supposed to be studying are up to. This perspective
is symptomatic of global elites, of transnationally
identified artists, intellectuals, media people, and
global politicians. In cultural terms, it is generated
by a gathering of cosmopolitans in the West. This
elite congregation is the source of much of the
discourse of globalization as well.
The issue of globalization as related to culture
is a product of the kind of conflation referred to
above. The objectification of culture is one of its
instrumental aspects, the reduction of the practice
of difference, of meaning, to a product, a text, a
substance which liquified can thence flow across
all conceivable borders. This process is associated
with visions of a new world that we are entering,
a millennium of globalization that for some is the
announcement of a world of diasporic hybridity,
and for others, a world of increasing disorder and
inequality.
Global Process and Culture
The global field is one within which globalization,
in the sense of movement, can either occur or not
occur. Globalization itself does not define the
global. The Fordist period of nation-states was just
Keywords cosmopolitan, culture, global sys-
tems, hybridity, intentionality
as global as the contemporary world of supposedly
disintegrating national sovereignty, even if states
are as strong as ever. A systemic approach allows
us to ask the very question: why suddenly did
culture become a central figure of discourse and
why has `cultural globalization' followed suit
(Friedman, 2004b)?
The emergence of culturalist discourse
occurred in tandem with the rise of cultural
politics, with the decline of modernist structures
of identity and the fragmentation of the modernist
world into cultural specificities, the search for
roots, the demands for culturally based rights as
opposed to class rights. This was a major historical
transformation in the West and its dependencies,
stimulating a series of cultural re-identifications:
indigenous, regional ethnicity, immigrant ethnicity
and the transformation of national identity from
the issue of citizenship to one of cultural belong-
ing. This is what I have referred to as horizontal
fragmentation of the national order.
At the same time there has been a rapid
vertical polarization separating upwardly mobile
sectors of national populations and downwardly
mobile sectors, the increase in the rate of stratifi-
cation in which the lower half indigenizes while
the upper sector cosmopolitanizes. While the
bottom becomes increasingly xenophobic and indi-
genizing in its search for a secure identity, the top
identifies as the wards of the multicultural world
that has been produced by globalization. Here we
find the tendency to self-identification as hybrids,
as in `my life space is an assemblage of objects
from world cultures', or `I am a citizen of the
world'. At the bottom, those identified and some-
times self-identified as the global rednecks
become increasingly angry opponents of what they
identify as global elites: Washington, Rome, the
Jews and all other representatives of the cosmo-
political agenda. It is interesting that here as well
there are alliances across ethnic lines, the `black'
Washitaw Indians who are allied with the Republic
of Texas, the KKK in St Petersburg that trains with
local black power groups. Sometimes this is made
explicit, as when it is stated that all the trash,
white, black, red and brown, should have it out
and then get the real culprits ­ the gold card-
carrying academics (Goad, 1997) who have always
succeeded in separating themselves from the
multicultural bottom that they so celebrate.
The above polarities are not alone, of course.
There is an interesting tendency for the emergence
of geo-political polarizations that have been
suggested by authors such as Huntington (1996).
Others (Buruma and Margalit, 2004) have
suggested that a more general hatred of Western
modernity is a deeper structure of Western civiliz-
ation, from the Romantics to more recent cultur-
ally left anti-Westerners. This discourse has been
exported, they claim, to Japan in World War II, to
Russia beginning in the 19th century, as well as to
contemporary Muslim `fundamentalism'. While it
is true that such discourses have been used by anti-
Western and anti-modernist movements in order
to purify their geographical regions from the
disease of modernity, there is plenty of local
discourse that can be summoned for the same geo-
political goals. Fractures at lower geographical
levels in the global arena are thus supplemented
by these larger world regional configurations
(Friedman, 2004c).
While fragmentation is occurring in the
Western-dominated sector of the world, in East
Asia, primarily China, but also in parts of South-
east Asia, the cosmopolitan is in a weak position
with respect to nationalist and regionalist
discourses, the establishment of larger geographi-
cal units, an intensive focus on development and a
new Asian modernism, the extinction or integra-
tion, by assimilation, segmentation, rather than
autonomization of indigenous minorities.
The combination of horizontal and vertical
polarization establishes the field of forces that in
their specificity are, by definition, cultural
(Friedman, 2004a). If particular signifying
constructions are produced in such processes ­
discourses of hybridity and multiculturalism,
discourses of indigenization, nationalism, tradition-
alism and Kastom ­ these are the cultural content
or properties of the changing configuration of the
global arena itself. Is there global diffusion in all of
this? Of course, commodities, brands, technolo-
gies, the media, etc. have established themselves
across much of the globe and there has even been
a certain superficial identification with these sets
of objects among rising elites and, to some extent,
middle classes. One might wish to call this homog-
enization, although it is countered by the frag-
mented production of new identities and cultural
forms. From the outside there might indeed be
examples of what one could call hybridity, but
these are usually observer-dependent phenomena.
Hybridity only exists, and it does, of course, where
those who are so defined identify as such.
All of this of course has occurred in the past,
not least in the form of religious expansion related
most often to economic and political colonization:
the Hinduization and then Islamization of South-
east Asia (and East Africa), the spread of technolo-
gies, products, texts, all common phenomena in
world history. We note, however, that diffusion is
not a process in itself but a result. How things
move and the way they are integrated into people's
lives must be approached in great detail and with
emphasis on the actors involved. For the spread of
religion, at least, the conflicts between local elites
Problematizing Global Knowledge ­ Genealogies of the Global/Globalizations 405
406 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2­3)
in vying for control over trade and other forms of
external wealth have been a crucial aspect of such
`diffusion' in Asia, Africa, the Pacific and even in
the early history of Europe. The articulation
between different logics and strategies originating
in different parts of the world forms the site of a
true understanding of such phenomena.
References
Buruma, Ian and Avishai Margalit (2004)
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its
Enemies. New York: Penguin.
Friedman, Jonathan (2004a) `The Dialectic of
Cosmopolitanization and Indigenization in the
Contemporary World System: Contradictory
Configurations of Class and Culture',
pp. 179­97 in D. Nugent and J. Vincent (eds)
The Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology
of Politics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Global History
Bruce Mazlish
G
lobal history compels us to ask what it is
we know about our world, and how we
know it. In its simplest terms, globaliz-
ation, the subject of study in global history, takes
us beyond Eurocentrism, nationalism, and their
parochial ways of thinking, into a world of both
difference and differences being transcended in
the name of a common humanity. In doing so,
however, it raises many questions about the disci-
plines by which we try to discern the shape of
what it is we are seeking to understand.
These are lofty-sounding statements. We need
to come down to earth as well. Global history is,
to begin with, a sub-field of history (Mazlish,
1993; Hughes-Warrington, 2005). It is often used
as a synonym for world history. This obfuscates our
knowledge in an important way. While world
history is also an effort to go beyond Eurocentrism,
it does not focus on globalization. The latter is a
theme, contained within world history, that can be
traced from earliest times ­ hunter­gatherers
spreading across the globe ­ up to the present. It
encompasses interconnection and interdepen-
dence of people, trends that appear to be increas-
ing over time. Yet, teleology and determinism
must be rejected as we seek to understand
globalization's development. The story of the
latter is made up of unintended consequences and
human agency, with the result being powerful
currents that move in a global direction.
We `know' this since some time after the end
of the Second World War, when the factors making
globalization achieved a level of expansion and
synchronicity and synergy that, like water boiling,
has brought us to a new state. The very term
`globalization' only appeared around the 1960s. To
reflect our new awareness we would do well to
adopt a new periodization: the global epoch.
Previously, we spoke of ancient, medieval and
modern periods or epochs. Now we must transcend
the latter term in this sequence, modern (and its
offspring postmodern), for it has lost its potency in
orienting us in a `world' (a word derived from
Middle English meaning `earth') that has become a
globe (a word derived from Latin for spheroid,
and pointing us outward) (Mazlish, 1998). Our
consciousness of space and time has changed to
match our changed life experiences. This is knowl-
edge, a knowledge that requires us to re-examine
all our social sciences disciplines, which were
derived from an earlier transformation, that of the
Industrial and French Revolutions.
Keywords Eurocentrism, global history,
globalization, knowledge, new global history,
world history
Friedman, Jonathan (2004b) `Culture and its
Politics in the Global System', Protosociology
20: 217­38.
Friedman, Jonathan (2004c) `Choc de cultures et
logique du déclin hégémonique', pp. 261­79
in H. Dawod (ed.) Tribus et pouvoirs en terre
d'Islam. Paris: Armand Colin.
Goad, Jim (1997) The Redneck Manifesto. New
York: Simon & Schuster.
Huntington, Samuel P. (1996) The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Jonathan Friedman is Directeur d'Etudes at the
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and
Professor of Social Anthropology at Lund
University, Sweden. He has written extensively on
issues of world systems, globalization, and socio-
cultural transformation.