I want to start this introduction by looking at the three terms used in the main title of this book and by explaining why they have been put together, if somewhat uneasily, to form one single idea.

Culture, whether in its material or symbolic form, is an attribute which people(s) are said to have; globalization is a process and the world-system is a structure. Each term is a construct associated, both in this book and more generally, with a substantial though distinct body of scholarship and also, with the names of individual scholars, modes of inquiry and academic disciplines.

I...

The debate about globalization as a world process, and its consequences, has been going on now in a variety of different fields of intellectual work for some time. What I am going to try and do here is to map some of the shifting configurations of this question, of the local and the global, particularly in relation to culture and in relation to cultural politics. I am going to try to discover what is emerging and how different subject positions are being transformed or produced in the course of the unfolding of the new dialectics of global culture. I will...

In my previous talk, i tried to open out the questions about the local and the global from their somewhat closed, somewhat over-integrated, and somewhat over-systematized formulations. My argument was that we need to think about the processes which are now revealing themselves in terms of the local and the global, in those two spaces, but we also need to think of these as more contradictory formulations than we usually do. Unless we do, I was concerned that we are likely to be disabled in trying to think those ideas politically.

I was therefore attempting — certainly not to close...

The title of the symposium in which this paper was first presented contained three key terms: culture, globalization and world-system. Each of these is in one way or another problematic and contestable and it is, I think, desirable not merely to identify the main problems involved in the uses to which they may individually be put but also to address the issue of their constituting an analytical package. To some extent the rationale in the latter respect is provided by the sub-title of the symposium. “Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity” suggests that we should consider the ways in...

The very concept of “culture” poses us with a gigantic paradox. On the one hand, culture isby definitionparticularistic. Culture is the set of values or practices of some part smaller than some whole. This is true whether one is using culture in the anthropological sense to mean the values and/or the practices of one group as opposed to any other group at the same level of discourse (French vs. Italian culture, proletarian vs. bourgeois culture, Christian vs. Islamic culture, etc.), or whether one is using culture in the belles-lettres sense to mean the “higher” rather than the “baser”...

The twentieth century has been a unique period in world cultural history.¹ Humankind has finally bid farewell to that world which could with some credibility be seen as a cultural mosaic, of separate pieces with hard, well-defined edges. Because of the great increase in the traffic in culture, the large-scale transfer of meaning systems and symbolic forms, the world is increasingly becoming one not only in political and economic terms, as in the climactic period of colonialism, but in terms of its cultural construction as well; a global ecumene of persistent cultural interaction and exchange. This, however, is no egalitarian...

One cannot think of a larger domain than global nor a broader topic than culture, especially if one wants also to understand (a) howstructural characteristics and politicsshape culture-creation and flows (as does Wallerstein), (b) theprocesseswhereby such flows are unevenly articulated (as does Hannerz), or (c) theform and contentof the new globalized culture (as does Robertson). The topic seems too big to handle. Even though I consider myself a macrosociologist, I felt uncomfortable with the high level of abstraction of much of the discourse I read in preparation for this session. The field, if not...

It was a brave and far-sighted vision that collected such disparate scholars and perspectives in the same symposium. Certainly, it was time that those interested in the global dimensions of culture met together and began the process of learning from one another the theoretical developments and growth in knowledge which relate to this issue. World-systems theory, already equipped to provide an account of the complex interconnectedness of the global system, particularly with regard to its economic and political dimensions, has recently begun to recognize the importance of culture in these processes. Globalization theories, which have generally privileged culture (or at...