Cosmopolitanism and Tomlinson

According to Tomlinson is necessary to think about cosmopolitanism “as a cultural resource that needs to operate in a peculiarly unconvivial institutional context” (1999: 184). The condition of citizenship is very implicated in the global politic sphere, so it is important to analysis the concept of cosmopolitanism. Being citizen of the world entails having a wide cultural disposition beyond of the local limits, recognizing the global belonging and applying this condition into everyday life acts and thoughts. To reach this goal it is necessary that cosmopolitans are freed from the boundaries and predjudices of their local culture and open to the diversity of global cultures and to be disposed to be nourished and affected by the cultural perspective of the other. But Tomlinson warns that mor importantly is the need to have a sense of belonging to a world where , in terms of “environmental threats requiring lifestyle adaptation, there is no other” (1999: 186)

Tomlinson addresses the definition of cosmopolitanism through the UN report of 1995 published by the Commision on Global Governance. In this report the globalization becomes the core of the analysis of change of the world since the foundation of this organization in 1945. Tomlinson stresses the metaphor idea of the world as a Global neighborhood where the people is connected by proximity and not by communal ties. The real reason of this proximity is, according to the Tomlinson anlysis of the UN report, the fact that the shrinking of distance and complex interdependence of the globalization process produced the “enforced proximity” (1999: 181). It means that people can have expanded horizons and co-operation in political terms but on the other hand we don’t choose our neighbors and it can be problematic. This report make Tomlinson tho ask himself how people address in their everyday life the fact of belonging part to a global neighborhood, of being a literally a “citizen of the world” (according to the greek etymology of “cosmopolitan” kosmos=world, polis=city).

The author also finds some ideological problems, some related to the connotation in some cultures of “citizen of the world” and “man of the world”. The women has been traditionally isolated to local environment instead of men privileges of interacting in public life. The second problem is related to the western figure of cosmopolitan, influenced by first world countries and finally the third is linked to the bias of the cosmopolitan life belongs to elites and metropolitan life, lead for the affirmation that socio-economic advantage creates moral superior agents.

For Tomlinson the cosmopolitan cultural disposition needs to be universal and plural, cosmopolitan people can not act rejecting of one of this features. The problematic connotations of cosmopolitanism can be solved if the cosmopolitan has “an active sense of belonging to the wider world” (1999: 194), of being able to experience an identity that is not totally circumscribed by immediate locality, that “embrace a sense of what unites us as human beings, of common risks and possibilities, of mutual responsibilities ”and he have also to have an “awareness of the world as one of many cultural others. In other words, a cosmopolitan people must be ready to be reflexive and open to questioning their cultural background. Tomlison refers to the main characteristic of a human being, a “sad monkey” that continuously ask to himself “why”, “who”, “how”, “what” about his environment. (1999: 194)

Cosmopolitan is a identity not opposed to the local. According to the author a cosmopolitan people is “someone who is able to live - ethically, culturally- in both the global and local at the same time” (199: 195). The main feature of cosmopolitanism is the capacity -supporting by their own local background and respecting it- to negotiate at the same level with other people with their own cultural background. But, with make special to this kind of identity is also the capacity to transcend the local ambit when it is time to make decisions, considering both global and local consequences and, in Tomlinson’s words, “ be able to enter into an intelligent relationship of dialogue with others who start from different assumptions, about how to promote these interests.

One of the issues that Tomlinson address is the capacity of media of generating this kind of cosmopolitanism among people. He assumes that the penetration of the homes by media and communication technology inter alia “ hold the promise of vital aspects of the cosmopolitan disposition: the awareness of the wider world as significant for us in our locality, the sense of connection with other cultures and even, perhaps, an increasing openness to cultural difference” (1999: 200) and this influence of media entails the emergence a new type of “aesthetic cosmopolitanism” that make possible a seed for openness of people for contrasting between societies. Media like television, make a quasi experience on people, “it provides a different kind of cultural experience which is probably not morally sustaining in the same way that the proximate experiences and personal relations close to the core of the lifeworld are”, he continues with the conclusion that “ because of these limitations it is implausible that media experience alone will furnish us with a sense of global solidarity” (1999:202)

Likewise, Debra Spitulnik address this issue in her research Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio culture rejecting the assumption that “the audience” is a unified aggregate that receives a fixe message. In relation to the words of Tomlinson, Spitulnik establishes the necessity of address the reception studies from a more ethnographic point of view in the anthropological sense of that term. The author of this interesting article use the example of the radio reception in Zambia, where this device is the main important in the whole country in terms of ways of information and entertainment. Spitulnik demonstrates that according with “the circulation of radios in communities rests on other cultural processes familiar to anthropologists: the construction of status and the reproduction of reciprocal social ties through exchange relations” (Appadurai 1986; Mauss 1967 in Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod & Brian Larkin 2002: 339), that the economic and social factors shape Zambian’s experiences of radio, which differ dramatically from patterns of media use in more affluent societies. Factors like the price of the devices, the batteries, the work environment, the rural or urban condition define the different use of radio. Globalization of media clash against the local customs of everyplace. Spitulnik shows us through the example of being antisocial in Zambia to remain inside the dwells during the day unless the weather or domestic work (2002: 343).

This new condition of the citizens, that appears as consequence of globalization, can be easily seen in the fiction audiovisual products like cinema. According to Elsaesser (2009) the cinema can contribute its own crisis of representation in the sense of rupture that entails the “double occupancy”, a term that Elsaesser uses to force a reflection on powers and politics even in the field of culture, and “it may serve as a historical reminder that Europe is a continent, whose two or three thousand years history has been, a relentless catalogue of migrations, invasions, occupations, conquest, pogroms, expulsion and extermination” (Elsaesser, 2009) The author address the problem of cosmopolitanism from the point of view of the need to differentiate “diversity” and “multiculturalism” from “double occupancy”. Elsaesser uses the case of the European Union to show us the problem of creation of a identity. The European Union, according to the auhor, has practically ignored the term cultural identity preferring to speak of “multi-cultural competence” as a desirable goal. The lack of cosmopolitanism in Europe is creating a feeling of rejection, it is important politics like Erasmus program based in flow of people (students) from one country to other to emerge a European Cosmopolitanism Feeling based in the sense of belonging to a wider organization but always with a local background. As Tomlinson says it is important to remember that our neighbors haven’t been chosen by us, hence the process of creation of a identity in the globalization age goes by increases the cosmopolitan feeling.

REFERENCES

- Tomlinson, John, (1999). Globalization and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press

- Elsaesser, Thomas, (2009). Real Location, Fantasy Space, Performative place: Double occupancy and mutual interference in European Cinema. In Christensen, Miyase and Nezih, Erdogan (2009) Shifting Landscapes: Film and Media in European Context. UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

- Spitulnik, Debra, (2002). Mobile Machines and fluid audiences: Rethinking Reception through Zambian Radio Culture. In Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod & Brian Larkin, 2002. Media worlds, anthropology on new terrain. London, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press

Tomlinson, modernity, globalization and deterritorialization

According to “Structural anthropology”, Lèvi-Strauss and the Structuralist Theory, “culture” is a message that can be decoded both in its contents, and in its rules. In the structuralist perspective, the role of history in shaping the culture of a society is not so important. The key is to elucidate the rules underlying the articulation of the symbols in a culture, and observe how they lend meaning a company's performance (Lèvi-Strauss 1977) However, the marxist conception of culture is understood as the product of relations production, as a phenomenon that is not detached from the mode of production of a society. Also considered as one of the means by which reproduces the social relations of production, allowing the time spent in conditions of inequality between classes.

Regarding to Tomlinson’s book “Globalization and culture” , nowadays, Culture is one of the different dimensions that compound the multidimensional concept of Globalization. While in the prior studies about culture this concept were linked to a physical space conception, the complex connectivity and the global unicity have move out the context of study from the local to a more general scenario. The “annihilation of space by time” and the “time-space compression” have altered the course of the traditional concept of a big and widely world, connectivity comes from a increasing global-spacial proximity. Both the improving of physical transport and communications have lead this change. Undoubtedly, this flow of information lead a change in all aspects: economic, politic and cultural aspects. Regarding to Tomlinson point of view, it is a bad way to start that any of this dimension is the master discourse. “A better way would be to identify the specific way of describing the world that is contained within an economic, a political or a cultural discourse” (Tomlinson 1999: 17). For Tomlinson, culture is a concept that refers the order of life in which human beings construct meaning through practices of symbolic representation, “the ways in which people make their lives, individually and collectively, meaningful by communicating with each other”. But, what the author considers important is not to isolate this dimensions people could be acting “the economic” at the same time at “doing the cultural”. As the definition as above said, the traditional consideration of culture linked to the products of art is skewed, despite of this important as product of everyday life of people they don’t define the “cultural dimension”.

Moreover, the author establishes that his conception of culture also refers to the mundane practice that directly contribute to stories through which people interpret our existence. The globalization is, undoubtedly, changing the people´s sense of identity , therefore, the culture and all other dimensions are broadly being affected.
Tomlinson also discussed the importance of media in the enculturization of people. Despite of the debilitation of the concept fostered because the relation that people establishes with media technologies because of the cultural representation that are transmitted. According to the author, mass media and telecommunication are increasingly taking part of our everyday lives but “they are not the only source of a globalized cultural experience” (Tomlinson 1999: 21). Thus any cultural study focused in mass media wouldn’t have a direct relevance in discussion about culture.
Culture has a crucial role in globalization because of being “an intrinsic aspect of the whole process of complex connectivity” as well as a constitutive aspect of it. According to the author culture also “marks out a symbolic terrain of meaning-construction as the arena for global political interventions” and also the processes and practices by which people furnish for themselves meaningful accounts of their social existence ate becoming somehow more closely articulated with the economic sphere. Hence cultural, political and economic sphere interact within the process called globalization.

Culture is, for Tomlinson, a “fundamental” dimension to globalization rather than the simply analysis of the impact of communication technologies.

Modernity is, in the words of Tomlinson, the most powerful of the mediating categories and theories by which we already understand the social and cultural world. These categories lead us to the “complex connectivity” evident everywhere in the world today, an empirical condition referred to Globalization. Therefore, if according to the author Complex Connectivity is peculiar to the “modern period” and Complex Connectivity is a empirical condition of Globalization., Globalization is a consequence of modernity.

Tomlinson addresses the modernity through Giddens research where argues that the peculiar dynamic properties of modernity is to to make possible the technological developments and also the social capacity to handle time and space. Before the modern era communities were in the vast majority small local rural communities where isolation and immobility were the main characteristic of their way of life. Regarding to Tomlinson we have to study modernity regarding to Globalization as a “Consequence of Modernity. It changes and frees social relations from face-to-face interactions in the localities of pre-modern societies and allows the closer system of relation across time and space: The core of Globalization.

Through the book Tomlinson relates the cultural change to the term Deterritorialization, the change of the social relations affects directly to the traditional localities where we live. Deterritorialization links the aspects of a globalized culture to one key assumption, where globalization fundamentally transforms the relationships between the places we inhabit and our cultural practices, experiences and identities, assuming that places are not so important than in the past to define and support our identity. Deterritorialization is a concept used by Tomlinson for describing the loss of the natural relation of culture to geographical and social territories. The existential comforts of localities decrease while the abstract social forces which structure our live increase. The real localities are replaced by Non-Places, places where people make this abstract interactions like airports, supermarkets, service stations, etc... the traditional link between our cultural experience and our location changes as never in the past. This new experience is crucial to understand our way of life in modern societies. The condition of deterritorialization is destructive of real localities.

According to Mosco (2004:92) the myth of Geography’s end starts from the view that computer communication makes space infinitely malleable the logical extension of a process of freeing people from spatial constraint with all its confining social and economic implications. You are no longer defined by where you come because you can construct you own electronic identity The space in cyberspace has no location this is an entire domain where the rules of traditional geography no longer apply. In his work about “geographical imaginations and relational space” Richad Ek (2006) establishes that, in academic research about space and place in late modernity the notion of “placelessness” is often discused. It indicates a growing existential hollowness when it comes to the connection between human individuals and the places they are in contact with. A combination of an established consumer society, increased mobility and a technological development with mass media and information technologies is blamed for a rapidly acceleration of society places. The author uses the example of business streets, terrace house areas, shopping malls, tourist destinations, hotels, airports and theme parks as “non-places”. And the modern economy will be probably based in this kind of spaces, where the time is relative to the activity of people.


REFERENCES:

- Tomlinson, John, (1999).Globalization and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press

- Lévi-Strauss, Claude ,(1977) [1953]. Antropología estructural. Eudeba. Buenos Aires.

- Mosco, Vincent, (2004). The digital sublime. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT press

- Ek, Richard.(2006) Media Studies. Geographical imaginations and relational space, In Jansson, André & Falkheimer, Jesper, (2006). Geographies of communication. Göteborg: Nordicom