Globalization , Class and Culture in Global Systems

The work of Immanuel Wallerstein has been criticized by certain anthropologists for not having taken culture into proper account. He has been accused of the sin of political economy, a not uncommon accusation, a re?ex of the 80s and post-80s anthropological jargon that might ?nally today be exhausted. Years earlier a number of social scientists were engaged in a critical assessment of the social sciences from a distinctively global perspective. Wallerstein, Frank and others were at the forefront of this critique which had a powerful impact on anthropology. The global perspective was not a mere addition to anthropological knowledge, not a mere of extension of the use of the culture concept, i.e. before it was local and now it is global, before culture stood still, but now in the global age, it ?ows around the world. It was a more fundamental critique, or at least it implied a more fundamental critique. This critique could only be attained from a perspective in which the very concept of society was re-conceived as something very different, as a locus constructed within a historical force ?eld which was very much broader than any particular politically de?ned unit.

gotten by ideologists of various persuasions.The control over the way in which wealth circulated, the way it was accumulated, the destiny of any particular area or country, was not simply a refl ex of local production and consumption.On the contrary, any particular locale was dependent upon the way it related to the larger arena of the total economic process.Now there are surely differences in the particular interpretations of history involved here.There are those who would see the world systemic or global as something essentially modern, there are those who would push it back to the Medieval world with its Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese centers, and there are those who would push it back to the Ancient world, even 5000 years.The questions: are we still talking about capitalism in all of this? is there not a fundamental difference between mercantile systems of the past and the modern world system? are there parallels, at least, between such systems if their dynamics are not identical?These are all unsolved questions under debate, questions that may lead to important progress in understanding the history of the world.
With all these differences, however, there is something common in this perspective.The commonality is, in fact, twofold.First it is a realization that the conceptual structure of social sciences needs to be revised in order to account for the global nature of social reproduction.The second is the imperative need to deal with the radical issue of people' s control over their conditions of existence which is so critically recast in the world system perspective.From "socialism in one country" to survival in any country is the issue that bears down on those who urgently sense that something has got to be done.
The globalization framework has a very different origin.It is best described as a self-refl ective awareness that something new has happened.In all of its various forms it tends to insist on the specifi city of the present, often in unabashedly evolutionist terms.Before we were local but now we are global.The global is seen as a new level of social, economic, political integration that has now, fi nally, been attained.There are various prototypes, from business economics (Ohmae 1990) to cultural studies, especially of the post-colonial variety.The movement from local to global, from national to transnational is an additive process that acts upon former structures, disintegrating or otherwise transforming them.They lose their power and signifi cance as organizers of social existence, of if they don't, they should and shall.The TNC' s take economies out of the hands of the state, just as the global media, and transnational populations take social organization out of the hands of the nation.Below I shall discuss this as an ideological transformation rather than a scientifi c discovery.The reason for this is that the discourse of globalization appears as the immediate product of a growing awareness by intellectual and other elites that something has happened and not the result of serious research.This does not detract from the value of this awareness, but it requires that we situate the awareness socially and attempt to account for its appearance as well as seriously considering those aspects of reality which it claims to represent.
The fundamental difference between global systems and globalization approaches is that the former represents a theoretical framework within which the institutional structures of the world are themselves generated and reproduced in global processes which are not something that is a result of the past few decades of "evolution" but which are structural aspects of all social dynamics, while the latter is a historical or developmentalist image of a contemporary change.For example, to claim that culture today fl ows across the world, fi ltered through states, markets, movements and everyday life (Hannerz 1992), is to assume these structures are the units between which fl ows occur and are not themselves structured and transformed by global relations.If the latter were the case then the global fl ow model could not be expressed in such terms.

out of anthropology: ethnography and global systems
From an anthropological perspective, the discovery of the global dimension was quite revolutionary.After all, the ethnographic enterprise was predicated on the self-suffi ciency of the local in explanatory terms.Several generations of anthropologists were imbued with the notion that the fi eld of fi eldwork was all that was necessary to accede to an adequate understanding of the other.When we embarked upon the critique of the local in global terms, it was precisely because we had come to an understanding that the very constitution of local situations in the guise of communities and societies was only adequately accounted for in terms of a larger set of relations.If the very constitution of the social-not merely certain institutions, but the very forms of sociality in a social fi eld-is dependent upon larger processes of the global system, then the notion that society is the suffi cient explana-tory whole must be seriously questioned.This is not to say that there are no structural logics of local existence, nor that societies are in fact constituted and practiced as closed entities.On the contrary, and this is perhaps the major difference between a global systemic versus a globalization perspective, it is one thing to acknowledge the existence of such relatively closed logics and another to assume that their constitution is autonomous with respect to broader processes.This is a difference of crucial proportions.It is a difference of levels of analysis.Global systemic relations are not visible as such.They are not behavioral connections between individuals.They refer to the analytical or theoretical properties of processes that are posited by the researcher, that is hypotheses concerning the way in which social formations are constituted and transformed over time.
In such terms global system theory is epistemologically equivalent to Lévi-Strauss' defi nition of structuralism as opposed to structural functionalism.The latter is a form of abstract description.Lévi-Strauss epitomized it with the expression: "the function of the stomach is to digest food", a mere abstract reiteration of the observed processes that are summed up in the world digestion.Radcliffe-Brown proposed the study of kinship as networks of relations of descent that were directly observable and could be classifi ed into distinct types.Lévi-Strauss proposed that the constitution of descent groups was an aspect of a larger structure of alliance and reproduction (1949).He proposed that kinship could be understood as a dynamic of exchange in which what appeared as separate classes of systems could be shown to be logical transforms of one another and which could be reduced to a few basic underlying structures.The logic of reciprocity was not an observable but a theoretical model existing in the head of the anthropologist, in the same way that gravity was a model of the relation between bodies in the universe.In both cases, the model was not a description of observed reality but a hypothetical construction that could produce reality effects, i.e. falling bodies, changing tides, and eight section marriage systems.The models were not, of course, assumed to be mere constructs but to model the real properties of reality, but properties of reality are not directly observable since they do not correspond to concrete objects and events.
Globalization studies have a very different frame of reference.They are based on a direct experience or a realization of something that has changed, most often in the experience of the observer.Globalization is about some-thing that has happened, not about the basic nature of social realities.It does not propose a novel approach to the social, but instead proposes that the world has changed.This is apparent in so many of the texts whose underlying discourse is predicated on a transition from the local to the global, from the national to the transnational.This perspective is not focused on underlying structures, but on directly observable or experienced realities.It is about transnational phenomena as such, behavioral "transnational connections" of various kinds, about the movement of goods, people and information, not about the nature of such movement.This is why such discourse so often concludes with the simple statement of the existence of global realities and with its moral implications.Globalizers often seem, for clearly ideological reasons, to be very much taken by the novelty and liberation involved in the mere existence of globality.After all it would appear to be liberating for those who write about it in such terms.In a more general sense, however, globalization can, as I suggested above, be understood as the analogue of structural functionalism to global system theory' s structuralism.This is because of its pre-occupation with events and happenings and behavioral relations.But the analogy stops there since it is not terribly interested in discovering abstract principles of the observed realities.
Here another approach seems to have colored globalizing anthropology, one dependent upon Geertz' s textualization of the culture concept (1973).The latter assumes the objectivity of the "other" as text, which can be read by the anthropologist without the benefi t of the "other' s" intervention.Culture is read over other people' s shoulders.The eye of the observer becomes supreme in this kind of anthropology.It is the other for-us, the other as part of our experience which becomes the core object of analysis.This is how such posited realities as hybridity, creolization, and the like can emerge.These are the ethnographic "realities" that form the cultural mainstay of globalization.If the city landscapes in Stockholm now combine ethnically and linguistically mixed populations and store signs in American English, if We observe (at the airport) the Nigerian, Congolese or Papua New Guinean sporting a can of coke and a hamburger...is this to be interpreted as creolization in the sense of cultural mixture?Is it to be interpreted as hybridity in the sense of the liminal sphere between the modern Western and the pre-modern, non-Western, assuming that the other is associated with a whole array of pre-modern behaviors and representations of reality (Can-clini 1995)?What is really going on in such referred-to realities?Does anyone have to ask or is the observation enough.What about other peoples' experiences, intentionalities and lives?Are not such hybrids defi ned as such because they seem to be betwixt and between our own "modern Western" categories, i.e. hybrids for us?This, of course, is not merely a question for global anthropologies, but is a more serious issue of method.The tendency to substitute one' s own experience for those who we are supposed to be studying has not been discussed with respect to the anthropology of globalization.With all the discussion of ethnographic authority, with multivocality and multi-siting, there is a certain disinterest in what kind of knowledge we are aiming for.This can be concretized in terms of the different kinds of questions that can be asked of informants or of the fi eld within which informants may make their lives.Questions of the type: how do you do that?Whom do you marry, why do you adopt your own grandchildren?etc.Such questions elicit a certain frame of reference in the responses, one that takes the form of abstract formulations with generalized we' s and I' s.Very different kinds of responses are elicited by longer term and more intimate contacts, what, in clearer fashion, is present in some of the more phenomenological anthropological work and even sociological work of the past and present (Mannheim 1982, Kapferer 1998, Csordas 1994).The difference between these two kinds of anthropology is not a trivial matter.It is the difference between an anthropology that strives to grasp the living experience of others and one that is content with our objectifi ed aspects of those other lives.The presence of other people' s voices is of course an important aspect of the necessary breakdown of an ethnographic authority that was itself a structure of global hegemony.But the other voices must include more than simply objectifi ed knowledge if we are to grasp what other lives, or any lives, are about.

globalization and ethnography
There is an important connection between current versions of globalized anthropology, the way in which communication is carried out and the kinds of knowledge that are ultimately produced.The current interest in globalized objects and the identifi cation of other people' s identities as creole and/or hybrid exemplifi es this linkage between superfi ciality and globality.When I have questioned whether or not the subjects described as creole or hybrid actually experience themselves in such terms, or in terms that are easily interpreted as such, I am usually told that this is a question of objective culture and not of experience.That is, global cultural products are like texts that already contain their meaning before the reader engages them.I fi nd this a quite disconcerting understanding of cultural process.This is a notion in which meaning is actually objective, and can therefore be read by the anthropologist without reference to the subjects whose worlds we are describing.Can this actually be the case?To some extent it is implied in a strongly textual notion of culture and is an extraordinary demonstration of ethnographic authority.This authority is explicit, it assumes that culture can be read, and reading is indeed the metaphor of the authoritarian observer.No need to ask, to engage the other, certainly not to participate, as in participant observation.One need only participate to the degree that it avails one of a good spectator seat, i.e. a good place from which to observe, for reading is a kind of observation.It assumes that meaning is thoroughly public and objective and thus requires no intervention on the part of the "native".The understanding of culture as public text was fi rst emphasized by Geertz, but has become an implicit assumption for many.And while Geertz himself has been concerned with the understanding of other people' s construction of selfhood and inspired many an anthropologist to embark on such understanding, it is diffi cult to understand how his insights into the Balinese person as mask with nothing behind it could have been attained.Thick description, of course, implies that meanings are subtle, but it is not clear how one can arrive at such understanding by means of mere observation, or at least it would be interesting to know what ought to be observed to arrive at deeper conclusions concerning other people' s experience of the world.The recent critique by Unni Wikan (1995) demonstrates that a deeper understanding can be arrived at by engaging with other people in a more intensive way.Whether one agrees or not with her interpretation is beside the point.What is crucial is that she argues directly from the combination of social practices and social discourses and representations.From here it is possible to maintain a dialectical and detective like procedure in trying to grasp other strategies and constructions of life worlds.
In the aftermath of Geertz and quite to his own apparent consternation (1988), there has been a postmodern (or at least post-Geertzian) questioning of the entire ethnographic project focused very much on the issue of ethnographic authority.This has led to an important critique of many of the assumptions of classical ethnography, not least its localist bias.But this bias is more complex than at fi rst meets the eye, and it is here that things may have gone wrong.While one may have indeed rightly criticized the authority of the ethnographer, one did not get into the details of what this authority comprised.It is signifi cant that the question was fi rst raised by James Clifford, a non-anthropologist.The latter did indeed realize that the problems raised by "being there" were left in a state of tension and insecurity by Conrad, while institutionalized away by Malinowskian authority, but he does not explore this important insight further.It is here-precisely here-that the major issues can be raised.What does it mean to understand another world and what can be said about such understanding in methodological or even theoretical terms?This is a question that can be said to lead in two related directions: towards a phenomenology of social existence and towards a structuralism of the properties of social life.The fi rst concerns the nature of experienced social life, the socially shared aspects of lived reality on the one hand, and those aspects of reality that are not present to consciousness but present in the unconscious and in the non-conscious.This is that unconscious aspect of human reality that can be known and elicited at least in principle.The non-conscious refers to the properties of reality that are not available to consciousness without a process of learning.The former refer to the repressed, the forgotten or that which is in one way or another absent from awareness yet necessarily present in practice.The latter refers to those properties of reality that are simply not present in awareness because they never were part of consciousness.This category depends upon processes of knowledge and awareness production within a social fi eld itself.Thus properties of global or world system cycles or business cycles, or even the structures of kinship-based alliance systems, are not conscious unless made so by a learning process.This does not mean that their properties do not exist, but that they exist in consciousness only via their effects, and where such is the case the conscious elaboration of such effects results in partial or mythical representations.If we accept this understanding of ethnographic reality, a number of results follow: First, the understanding of another world-based on the assumption that other worlds may indeed be different from our own-can only be approached via the experiences that other people have within that world.Second, there are aspects of other worlds that can only be accessed via rather complex methods of elicitation and analysis since they are not part of immediate awareness.Third, there are aspects of other worlds, those which may also be part of our own (global systemic) reality, that can only be accessed by means of a series of analytical and hypothetical propositions since they are not available to consciousness except via their effects on people' s lives.
This kind of discussion has not been taken up recently within anthropology.Rather the issues have remained focused on the question of authority itself, on the questions of voice and location.They have been very much assimilated by the experiences of anthropologists themselves, experiences that dovetail more generally with those of many intellectuals and academics (not necessarily the same thing) as well.This has led to the confl ation, delineated above, between the experience of the observer and that of the observed.And it is this which has become the mainstay of much of the globalization literature.The latter consists primarily in statements based on external interpretation, not least of the meaning of events and objects.This is the basis of the discourse on hybridity with a few exceptions.It is significant that much of this discussion is itself focused on objects, not unoften objects at an exhibition.Clifford' s analysis of anthropologist M. O'Hanlon' s Paradise: Portraying the New Guinea Highlands, the catalogue of which is published by the British Museum, deals with the way in which local traditional objects are mixed up with western consumer goods (Clifford 1997).Foster (1999) has also discussed this in a recent article, namely the way in which a traditional shield in the exhibit can be decorated with the logo of South Pacifi c Lager.It turns out that there was a specifi c motivation for this hybrid product; that the designer "had been asked by senior men to incorporate a representation of a beer bottle on the shield, to make the point that 'it was beer alone which had precipitated this fi ghting,' and the question that springs to mind is what was this all about" (1997:68).Drunkenness was directly involved in the confl ict that inspired this shield.One might well have made a more intensive study of the way in which shields are decorated in order to grasp the way in which motifs are incorporated, i.e the way in which the "modern" might well have been a totally irrelevant property of beer in the process of creating the shield.Is this a question of hybridity in the sense of fusion and mixture, or of a very specifi c and motivated articulation, one that does not leave the experiential world of the creator but seems "matter out of place" to an anthropologist dependent on an idea of culture as text, i.e. as objectifi ed meaning?Foster suggests, following Marcus (1995), that to arrive at such understanding we need to "get up and move out of intensively investigated single sites" (Foster 1999:144).But it is precisely the de-intensifi cation of ethnographic praxis that enables us to substitute our own experience of the object for that of those whom we are purportedly trying to understand.

the anthropology of experience and cultural production
A solution to this problem can only be worked out at the theoretical level.We must propose the kinds of relations we should expect to fi nd linking global processes and the production of cultural form.This requires, in its turn, that we examine more closely the nature of cultural production itself rather than simply assuming that culture is a substance or thing in itself that can, as a result, move in global fl ows.Culture is attributed meaning and must be actively maintained as meaning in order to continue to exist.This aspect of meaning is not often taken seriously, since meaning is often stabilized in institutional forms related to the stabilization of communication itself.Any archaeologist knows that meanings cannot be read from remains without making all kinds of assumptions of equivalence to some given scheme of established interpretations.What is it that makes such attributed meaning shared meaning is a complex issue, related to the way in which social worlds are organized and enforced for larger groups of people.Power is converted into authority and the latter into forms of socialization; the formation of subjects and of subjective experience.Such processes are incomplete since the activities involved do not occur in a vacuum devoid of other intentionalities.However, such processes do create a fi eld in which shared experiences and shared modes of meaning attribution are effected.Such fi elds might be said to be fi elds of resonance in which what Mannheim referred to as conjunctive communication can occur.Such fi elds are hierarchical.They are also the fi elds within which shared cultural forms are created.
This might appear to be an argument for the local basis of cultural production, and this does not seem to square with globalization.After all most of the phenomena of world culture, from pop music to clothing styles, to green movements and popular cults, are not apparently based on the kind of shared experience that is formed in delimited fi elds of social interaction.This is an important issue and a two tiered analysis: First, one must ascertain to what degree the same meanings are being attributed to the same phenomena and/or objects in the global arena.Second, one must ascertain the ways in which there might be said to be overlapping resonances or analogous experiences being produced that allow a broader possibility for identifi cation of the same things in the same way.There are serious sociological issues here: for example might it be argued that similar kinds of youth cultures are produced in the Caribbean and in the Anglo-American dominated areas of the Pacifi c that make reggae a formidably powerful attractor and that these are related to the forms of social transformation that have occurred in both places?While the two worlds that became articulated to capitalist modernity might be very different, and this accounts for difference in the original musical forms in the two areas, it could be that more general properties of those worlds, such as egalitarian village structure lacking autonomous political structures, with strong forms of pooling rather than exchange, with a certain similar form of oppression by white colonial society all might have come together to produce a "structure of feeling" which enables such transoceanic musical resonance.This kind of approach, in any case, would seem to be more interesting than simply saying that the cultural item, reggae had become global by moving around the world on the sound waves.There are certainly more important questions to be understood here.
The argument for the centrality of socially shared experience and its constitution is not an argument against globalization, of course, but an argument for a more systemic understanding of the latter as a cultural process.By not assuming that cultural meaning is a substance (a curious essentialist tendency among globalization "theorists") by deconstructing it, it should be possible to then reconstruct the way in which it is constituted by others in the global contexts of their particular existences.

cultural transnationalism as ideology
One of the reasons that the cultural is taken for granted among cultural globalizers, is that it is an instrumental part of the very identity of those who hold this approach.This identity is not an artifi cial construction as such.It is based on a very real experience of the world, but it is a specifi c sector of the world, a sector of cosmopolitan movement, an elite transnational world.It can in itself only be understood if we take a broader view of the transformation of the world system today.While all academic discourses are situated and can be subjected to ideological analysis, in the case of the globalization literature this is much more obvious simply because there is a surprising lack of empirical research involved.The discourse is best characterized, instead, as authoritarian and often implicitly-and even explicitly-normative (Appadurai 1996).This is a style that is fully consistent with a self-relegated authority in which description and interpretation are merged.Never is a hypothesis suggested!Rather, reality is simply defi ned in a certain way dependent upon the author' s experience of everyday life (rarely) or fi lms and other media (more generally).This is fully consistent with the textualist bias in both cultural studies and anthropology.The research of others may well be used to make an argument but it is often purely illustrative rather than openly interpretive.Appadurai' s recent discussion of violence in relation to globalization is a case in point (1998).Using selected examples it is proposed that violence is a means of eliminating ambiguity, "matter out of place", foreigners who look like nationals, the liminal products of migratory hybridization.Now while there are signifi cant cases of military questioning of busloads of short Tutsi or tall Hutu as well as their murder, it is not at all clear that this is about the fear of mixture in itself.On the contrary there is evidence that it is the fear/hate of the other as such and that the ambivalence is a mere problem of identifi cation.After all most of the people killed in ethnic warfare are quite clearly identifi able.Appadurai' s cavalier use of the material to which he himself refers is evidence of the confl ation of interpretation and description.
The argument that seems to organize the discussion is that globalization is producing a world of hybridity which is causing reactionary violence on the part of those who would continue to maintain a belief in ethnic purity or ethnic absolutism as it is fashionably called today.An author like Hannerz (1992), more aware, perhaps, of the problem of the empirical material, avoids this problem by qualifying practically all his statements to the point of extinction.Thus, in an article on the withering away of the nation, we are informed after many meandering words that the nation may not be disappearing, but it is in any case changing.Such breathtaking risks can only be understood as a kind of fear of theoretical fl ying.Appadurai is quite the opposite, predicting the evolution from a national to a postnational world, an evolution that is bound to be bloody but which in the end shall free us all from that old fashioned institution, replaced at last by the cultural freedom afforded by diasporas!While this is not presented as a hypothesis and with little argument to back it up, it does have the quality of being falsifi able on several counts, not least the assumption that all' s well that end' s well, as if we were fast approaching the end of history, the multicultural diasporic and hybrid world of globalized capitalism.Why we should feel safe in our diasporas is diffi cult to understand, and why majority, non-diasporic, populations, should be defeated by these new transnationals, and why all this appears as brand new is also quite strange given the evidence that some aspects of globalization, the most powerful economic aspects have been coming and going periodically for a very long time.There is, in fact, some evidence that we may well be in the midst of a period of contraction.
The core of transnationalism appears to be a will and desire to transcend boundaries and everything that they represent in the form of closure, locality, confi nement, terms that are associated with backwardness, provincialism and curiously a lack of culture, supposedly in the sense of cultivation.This model is one that polarizes the cosmopolitan with respect to the local and defi nes the former as progressive, as the future of the world, as the civilized while relegating the latter to the barbaric, the red-necked, the reactionary and racist.This polarity is not a recent invention, but is very much part of the cosmological structure of the global system.Its historical appearance might be said to be salient in periods when real polarization occurs, when global elites exit in theory and practice from the local and national fi elds in which they were previously embedded.

globalization, class and culture
A global systemic anthropology should aim at understanding both the world and the cultural identities and derivative discourses that are generated by the structures of that world.In several recent publications (1999a, 1999b) I have suggested that there is a dual process involved in the current process of globalization.The fi rst of these is a decline in centrality or hegemony in the world system, a decline expressed in the weakening of the nation states of the former center of the world system, i.e. in the West.This has been accompanied by the disintegration of the Soviet Empire as a hegemonic structure and of some of the weakest links in the world system, espe-

Jonathan Friedman 649
Globalization, Class and Culture in Global Systems 650 cially Africa.While there is a great deal of variation involved, this process has involved massive decentralization and the emergence of new or renewed politicized identities.It has also involved massive disorder and dislocation of populations, and a resultant mass migration to traditional centers that are now facing their own internal crises.The most general property of this new disorder is expressed in a wave of ethnifi cation resulting in a cultural and political fragmentation of formerly larger units.The ethnifi cation consists in a strong re-identifi cation that is clearly advantageous for those who so identify but also increases the confl ict potential in the larger world.The rise of indigenous movements, regional movements, immigrant minority politics and increasing nationalism are all in such terms expressions of the same transformation-fragmentation process of identifi cation in the world arena.
While this was occurring in the relatively "declining" areas, the rising areas of the world system in East and Southeast Asia demonstrated an opposite rise of national and regional identities, a new modernism and a decline, often forced, of minority politics.This is not to say that minorities disappeared, but that their political demands were either accommodated by successful integrative politics or simply ignored or even suppressed.That this process has been reversed in the current Asian crisis is well exemplifi ed by the rapid increase of ethnic confl ict in Indonesia after many years of relative peace and by the apparent liberation of East Timor after years of attempted integration.
The hypothesis involved here is simply that areas rising in the system tend to become increasingly centralized within delimited zones (national states, territorial states) with an accompanying decline in sub-state identification, and that the reverse occurs in periods of loss of global position.This hypothesis refers to specifi c tendencies in a complex reality in which there are other forces that might offset such tendencies.For example there is presently a regionalization in the world that is part of the process of economic globalization that may be crucial in understanding the tendency to a threeway division of the world among the EU, NAFTA and APEC as competing potential hegemonic zones.This must be seen, of course, against the background of the dual division of the world that arose out of the Second World War and of the virtual monopoly of the United States as Western hegemon until the 60' s.The change involves a combined fragmentation in former centers and weak links and a consolidation in new rising zones.

fragmentation and indigenization
Localization in such periods becomes increasingly transformed into a real Indigenization combining often competing positions, indigenous, national and regional.Indigenization is a process of rooting and is a general process of identifi cation (as we shall see below) that is not dependent upon whether or not one is indigenous in terms of standard defi nitions.In global perspective, there is not that much disagreement today concerning the fact that the formerly homogenizing Western world, the former Soviet Empire and the weak link, Africa, are pervaded by a plethora of indigenous, regional, immigrant, sexual and other cultural political movements aimed at a kind of cultural liberation from the perceived homogenizing force of the state.In a certain perverted sense this is as true of the new elites as of the regional minorities, but in very different ways.The rise of indigenous movements is part of this larger systemic process, which is not to say that it is a mere product in a mechanical deterministic sense.There are two very different but related aspects to this process.The social process consists of the disintegration of homogenizing processes that were the mainstays of the nation state.This has led to increasing confl icts about particular rights and of the rights of "particular" people, a real confl ict between individual vs. collective rights and of the national vs. ethnic.Cultural politics in general is a politics of difference, a transformation of difference into claims on the public sphere, for recognition, for funds, for land.But the differences are themselves differentiated in important and interesting ways, not least in relation to extant structures of identifi cation.Both regional and indigenous identities in nation states make claims based on aboriginality.These are claims on territory as such, based on a reversal of a former homogenizing situation that is re-defi ned as conquest.Roots here are localized in a particular landscape.There are important ambivalences here; all nationals can also be regionals and many nationals can identify as indigenes.All of this is a question of the practice of a particular kind of identity, an identity of rootedness, of genealogy as it relates to territory.It is in the very structure of the nation state that such identities are defi ned as prior identities.No nation state can logically precede the populations that it unifi ed in its very constitution.This, of course, is a logical and not an empirical structure.There is no guarantee that the nation state did not itself generate regional identities.In fact much of the "Invention of Tradition" tradition consists in arguing precisely in such terms.Just as colonial governments created regional and state-to-be identities in Africa, so did nation states create regional minorities at home.What is overlooked in this intellectualist tradition is the way in which identities are actually constituted.The latter consist in linking a matrix of local identifi cations and experiences to a higher order category which then comes to function as a unifying symbol.The logic of territorial identity is segmentary.It moves in terms of increasing encompassment and it depends on a practice of creating of fi elds of security.It expresses a certain life-orientation, an intentionality, that cannot be waved away by intellectual fl ourishes.
The differential aspect of indigeneity is not a mere social struggle for recognition of difference.It is about the way difference must be construed and incarnated in real lives.There are extreme examples of this process that are expressive of the deep structures of the nation state.It has led the Afrikaners of South Africa to apply for membership in the World Council of Indigenous Peoples.One of the most spectacular is the formation referred to as the Washitaw nation.The Washitaw according to Dahl (1997) are a self-identifi ed tribe, inhabiting the Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma area.They are black and are allied with the extreme right "Republic of Texas".They claim to be descended from West Africans who moved to America when the continents were still joined, i.e. before the Indians: We are the aborigines-the dark-skinned, bushy-haired original inhabitants of 'so-called' north and south America (Muu, Afrumuurican).(Bey 1996:4) They have an empress who claims not only land but also an aristocratic descent for her tribe.Dahl shows that there are early references to Indians from the early 19 th Century that indeed describe the Choctaw as somehow different than their neighbors, but it is not clear that they were black.On the other hand, there are Black Indian tribes in Surinam who are descendants of runaway slaves and it is not unlikely that escaped black slaves may have been adopted into the Indian tribes of the area.What is more important is the fact that there is a local identity that may well be one that resulted from historical relations between blacks and Indians, but that it has been transformed into tribal identity in which the African is paramount and more indigenous (previous to) than the Indian.The structure of the identity is what is important here and its association with the Republic of Texas is signifi cant.For such groups, the major enemy is the state, representative of the cosmopolitan and anti-popular, oppressor of real people, imperial and posi-tively against the kind of aboriginal difference represented by the Washitaw and similar organizations.Their political aim is control over territory and governmental autonomy.They make their own licence plates (as do certain Hawaiian groups) and refuse the entire tax system of the United States.
The structure that is constructed here is one whose logic is organized by the very structure of nationhood, a relation between cultural identity and territory opposed to the territorial state which is perceived as usurper and conqueror.This kind of a structure emerges in conditions in which the state is clearly not representative of the people involved.Such conditions are variable, not only in space, but in time as well.The logic linking peoplehood and indigeneity to the constitution of the nation state is the same logic as well as a structure of opposition.

class polarization: cosmopolitanism vs. lemon nationalism
The other aspect of this process is the increased polarization between classes and a transformation of the identities of the classes involved.This is again primarily salient in the old centers of the system and consists in a combination of increasing cosmopolitanism among rising elites and increasing localism, nationalism and xenophobia among declining and increasingly marginalized classes.The new elites are the source of much of the new ideologies of globalization, just as the declining lower classes are the locus of lemon nationalisms.The ideologies are, of course, rooted in social processes that are central to the global system itself and they enter into the politics of society as powerful forces.They pit nationalists against multiculturalists, localists against cosmopolitans, but they are positions that are simultaneously generated within the same social fi eld and the complementary oppositions of modern identity.Zygmunt Bauman (1998) is one of the few sociologists who has attempted to get at the essence of the process of globalization.He has described the new elites as modern day absentee landlords, invoking the historical parallels with previous eras, but also stressing the kind of relation involved.Those who have the real control over the territories rented by the working and increasingly poor have no wish to live in the neighborhood, not just locally but regionally as well.The formation of the gated community, the isolated elite which is more closely related to other elites in similarly gated communities than to other locals, is a phenomenon of truly global proportions.The structure of Sassen' s global cities is a concentric one which is also conical, with elites and capital in the center surrounded by a descending hierarchy of servicing populations increasingly fl exible as one reaches the bottom, where a great majority are basically disposable.This is the "Blade Runner" vision of a not unrealistic futurebecome-present.
Bauman compares different kinds of mobility in the world as well.After all, while the global elites travel in one world the new helots travel in another.And we ought to be clear about the extraordinary differences involved.While one world is producing visions of a new millennium in which there is a world citizenship of happy multicultural or hybrid travelers who are translocal border-crossers, another world is plagued by an anguished fear of the truly deadly border and a daily life fi lled with concerns far removed from questions of roots and routes, except, perhaps of how to get from the sweatshop to the hood or the barrio, and how to get the rest of the family over the border-and all of this bottom life occurs in a world of increasing hostility.The hostility is not a mere product of the lack of education as it is so often advertised by elites, but a hostility based on real fear of loss of the basic elements of human existence.Lest I be taken for ideology mongering of the kind that I criticize above, I would insist that this kind of description be open to scrutiny.On the other hand, there is ample empirical evidence to ratify this rather alarming picture.In another more important sense the picture is not meant to appear out of the ordinary.On the contrary it is the normality of the processes involved, their systematicity, that ought to be upsetting.
The globalization of class structure is expressed at the elite level by an increasing self-consciousness of world position.There is a clear understanding that, in economic terms, corporate structures are not only becoming well established sources of social membership but also are encroaching on the former domains of territorial states.As one executive puts it: The corporation will pick up some of the burdens of the nation-state, as the nation states weaken.Corporate citizenship is in the realm of globalizing bureaucrats and politicians who often have offi cial responsibility for 'regulating' the corporations.(Sklair 1998: 12) The signifi cance of this is that there is a process of globalization of capitalist consciousness as well as class.And there is a growing set of elites, including cultural elites that are also involved in this process.A recent book published in Sweden makes an explicit connection between globalization, creolization and neo-liberalism which remains implicit in the work of Appadurai and others.The title of the book is revealing enough: Creole Love Song (Stockholm 1998).It is also noteworthy that this book appears in the former ideal type of social democratic national centralism, the locus of the "people' s home" and that it is in this country that inequality (according to the Gini index) has increased almost vertically in the 1990' s, and by 25% since 1979.(Bourgignon and Guesnerie 1998:24) Sweden is also rife with the kind of polarized confl ict discussed here; the recent introduction of the word "political class", increasing nationalism, and declining faith in the state while the politicians declare the people to have populist tendencies and stress the need for re-socialization of these classes dangereuses.The combination of Indigenization and cosmopolitan hybridization as two powerful polarizing cultural identifi cations in today' s globalizing world system can be represented in Figure 1.
In Figure 1 the hierarchy is cultural and not economic.The middle range distinguishes among nationals, diasporic and ethnic minority populations.The differences here refer to the fact that immigrants can become ethnic minorities via the kind of integration and re-identifi cation that localizes the group rather than practicing long distance relations.Such minorities, while not equivalent, can take on the same kind of status as regional minorities and even indigenous minorities.It is important to recognize the basis of cultural identities in terms of social practice and not external defi nitions.African Americans can identify themselves-and have done so-in diasporic, ethnic/racial, and even, as we saw above, indigenous terms.

cultural production in the global system
This discussion is meant to provide a way of modeling cultural production in the global system.The model is based on an understanding of cultural production and creativity as grounded in various substrates of shared social experience, experience that has existential meaning for those who partake in it.This raises questions of the intentionality involved in cultural elaboration and transformation, and in the resonance which makes cultural form work as a social phenomenon.Such social experiences are formed within a hierarchy of constraints and dynamic processes that link global process with the local structuring of social lives.It treats globalization as a particular phase process in the larger system, one that is linked with declining hegemony in older centers, with decentralization of capital accumulation-in other words, globalization of capital-and a double tendency toward globalization of elites and localization of middle and lower classes.The current polarization of elites and locals of the upwardly and downwardly mobile is combined with a cultural fragmentation that strikes the dehegemonizing zones of the world arena, leading to a complex combination of ethnifi cation and class polarization.The latter give rise to various cultural transformations and an intensive creativity, one that is not a celebration of cultural liberation but of deep contradiction in the real lives of the people that social scientists should be trying to understand.This understanding has been the program of World-Systems Analysis and a larger family of global analyses.It is one that is founded in a critical perspective and distances itself from pervasive ideologies, including those concerned with globalization itself.Wallerstein has dedicated his research to the understanding of the systematic nature of the historical processes of the world arena.The attack on this attempt by postmodernists, postcolonialists and others who identify increasingly with the freedom that seems to be offered to them via the advantageous fi nancing of cultural elites must become part of the analysis rather than a merely an opposed intellectual position.

Figure
Figure 1: Cosmopolitanization and indigenization in the contemporary global system