18/1/2017

AAL10B Identities in a Diverse World

National Institute of Education,
Singapore

Week 2:
Modernity, Globalization,
Identity

Dr Yang Peidong
NIE3-03-135
peidong.yang@nie.edu.sg
Clarification about SASS Tutorial
Date Week Topic Tutorial Lecture Tutorial

10/1 1 Introduction: Orientation

What is identity? Why does it No tutorial
matter?

17/1 2 Modernity, globalization, and SASS Mini lectures

identity Teams 1, 2

24/1 3 Nation(ality), race/ethnicity, Mini lectures

culture*, religion* SASS Teams 3, 4

31/1 4 Migration, (post)coloniality, Mini lectures

diaspora, language SASS Teams 1, 2

7/2 5 Social class SASS Mini lectures

Teams 3, 4

14/2 6 Superdiversity, complexity,

intersectionality, hybridity SASS Mini lectures
Teams 1, 2

21/2 7 Cosmopolitanism SASS Mini lectures

Teams 3, 4

RECESS
17/3 8 Assimilation, integration, SASS Mini lectures
transnationalism Teams 1, 2

14/3 9 Gender, sexuality, body and SASS Mini lectures

identity Teams 3, 4

21/3 10 The sensory/sensuous and SASS Mini lectures

identity Teams 1, 2

28/3 11 Internet, social media, and SASS Mini lectures

identity Teams 3, 4

4/4 12 Essay consultation

Writing week. No lecture. (optional)

13/4 ESSAY DUE

SASS Team-based Tutorial

Something to Ask, Something to Share

5 minutes Break
Myths (M) and Clarifications (C)

 M: I have to understand everything in the reading materials.

 C: NO. It is useful to remember writing is always a product of certain
historical times and intellectual traditions; without familiarity with those times
and traditions, it is normal not to understand everything. The key is to grasp
the big picture, the main thrust, the core ideas.
 M: I have to understand everything immediately.
 C: NO. You have one semester to digest the course materials.
 M: Everything found in the writing is correct.
 C: NO. Scholars disagree and debate with each other. The worthier scholars
they are, the more fiercely they might disagree and argue. Ideas in the
readings are to stimulate your own thinking, to help you arrive at your own
understanding and stance.
 M: I have to remember exactly everything found in the readings and
lectures in order to succeed in this course.
 C: NO. Other people’s concepts and ideas are meant to help you. They are
crutches or ladders that can be discarded once you can fully walk on your
own or reached certain height.
 Moderntiy

 theinstitutions and modes of behaviour

established first of all in post-feudal
Europe, but which in the twentieth
century increasingly have become
world-historical in their impact.
 ‘Modernity’ can be understood as
roughly equivalent to ‘the industrialised
world’, so long as it be recognised that
industrialism is not its only institutional
dimension.
Dimensions of modernity

 (1)the social relations implied in the widespread

use of material power and machinery in
production processes
 (2) Capitalism, where this term means a system
of commodity production involving both
competitive product markets and the
commodification of labour power
 (3)Surveillance: the supervisory control of
subject populations
 (4)
Means of violence: industrialized war or ‘total
war’
Nation-state

 Modernity produces certain distinct social

forms, of which the most prominent is the
nation-state.

 But what is a nation-state?

A self-determining (at least theoretically)
geopolitical entity with clearly demarcated
territorial boundaries, inhabited by a people
constituting a “nation”.
 Internally:power of organization and surveillance
(legitimate monopoly of means of violence)
 Externally: sovereign actors in an international
system of nation-states.
 Three main elements of modern social life

 (1) “Time-space distanciation”

 The “emptying out” of time and space respectively (by technology,
and technology-enabled behavior)
 Time and space separated, no longer connected through the
situatedness of place.

 (2) Disembedding of social institutions/relations

 the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts and their
rearticulation across indefinite tracts of time-space.
 Through abstract systems: (1) symbolic tokens; (2) expert systems
[Trust is required]

 (3) Institutional reflexivity

 the susceptibility of most aspects of social activity, and material
relations with nature, to chronic revision in the light of new
information or knowledge
 Modernity and globalization

 Modernity has inherently globalizing tendencies

Globalization

 Definition(s)

“transformation in the organization of human affairs by

linking together and expanding human activity across
regions and continents” (Held & McGrew, 2000, p. 54)

“a set of processes which involve the increasing

multidirectional flows of things, people and information
across the planet” (Giddens & Sutton, 2013, p. 127)
 Appadurai understands globalization as…

 Disjunctures between:  “-scapes” – landscape

 there are not objectively given relations
 (1) “Ethnoscapes” which look the same from every angle of
vision, but rather that they are deeply
perspectival constructs, inflected very much
 (2) “Technoscapes” “Material”
by the historical, linguistic and political
situatedness of different sorts of actors
 (3) “Finanscapes”
 (4) “Mediascapes”  Disjunctive
“Cultural”
 (5) “Ideoscapes”  …each of these landscapes is subject to its
own constraints and incentives […] at the
same time as each acts as a constraint and
a parameter for movements in the other.
 …people, machinery, money, images, and
ideas now follow increasingly non-
isomorphic paths
 Understanding globalization – keywords

 “Time-space Distanciation” (for Giddens)

the concept of globalisation is best understood as expressing
fundamental aspects of time-space distanciation. Globalisation
concerns the intersection of presence and absence, the interlacing of
social events and social relations ‘at distance’ with local
contextualities.

 “Deterritorialization” (for Appadurai)

“territorial / territoriality”
Border-crossing travels (NB not without friction) of people, technology,
money, images and ideas beyond their origins
 Globalization and Diversity
homogenization/heterogenization
 Theglobalization of culture is not the same as its
homogenization, but globalization involves the use
of a variety of instruments of homogenization
(armaments, advertising techniques, language
hegemonies, clothing styles and the like), which
are absorbed into local political and cultural
economies, only to be repatriated as
heterogeneous dialogues of national sovereignty,
free enterprise, fundamentalism, etc. in which the
state plays an increasingly delicate role: too much
openness to global flows and the nation-state is
threatened by revolt […]; too little, and the state
exits the international stage…
 State = arbiter of “repatriation of difference”
Modernity, Globalization, and Identity – Collective

 With globalization and the disjunctive flows along its

various constitutive dimensions (ethno-, techno-, financial,
media, and ideational/ideological), “[m]ore persons in
more parts of the world consider a wider set of possible
lives than they ever did before” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 53).

 “Imagined worlds” inhabited by imagined “them” and

“us” and “selves”
Modernity, Globalization, and Identity – individual

 Recall “reflexivity“
 the reflexivity of modernity actually undermines the
certainty of knowledge, even in the core domains of
natural science.
 Science depends, not on the inductive accumulation of
proofs, but on the methodological principle of doubt.
 No matter how cherished, and apparently well
established, a given scientific tenet might be, it is open to
revision — or might have to be discarded altogether — in
the light of new ideas or findings.

 The reflexivity of modernity extends into the core

of the self. Put in another way, in the context of a
post-traditional order, the self becomes a reflexive
project.
Modernity, Globalization, and Identity – individual

 Lifestyles
 Routinized practices (e.g.
habits of dress, eating,
modes of acting and
favoured milieux for
encountering others)

 Choices

 Life-planning
Modernity, Globalization, and Identity

 “The fetishism of the consumer”

the real seat of agency […] is not the consumer but the producer
and the many forces that constitute production. Global
advertising is the key technology for the worldwide dissemination
of a plethora of creative, and culturally well-chosen, ideas of a
consumer agency. These images of agency are increasingly
distortions of a world of merchandising so subtle that the
consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an
actor, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser.

Do you agree?