Dynamics of Local and Global Culture

Globalization’s contemporary omnipresence has resulted in an emphasis on the conflicts

between the local and the global. This emphasis has blurred our ability to have insights that may be
gained by recognizing that the local and the global are interdependent and cannot exist without each
other. Underlying these various visions of globalization is a reluctance to define exactly what is meant
by the term culture. During most of the 20th century, anthropologists defined culture as a shared set
of beliefs, customs, and ideas that held people together in recognizable, self-identified groups.
Scholars in many disciplines challenged this notion of cultural coherence, especially as it became
evident that members of close-knit groups held radically different visions of their social worlds. Culture
is no longer perceived as a knowledge system inherited from ancestors. As a result, many social
scientists now treat culture as a set of ideas, attributes, and expectations that change as people react
to changing circumstances. Indeed, by the turn of the 21st century, the collapse of barriers enforced
by Soviet communism and the rise of electronic commerce have increased the perceived speed
of social change everywhere. The term local culture is commonly used to characterize the experience
of everyday life in specific, identifiable localities. It reflects ordinary people’s feelings of
appropriateness, comfort, and correctness—attributes that define personal preferences and changing
tastes. Given the strength of local cultures, it is difficult to argue that an overarching global culture
actually exists. Jet-setting sophisticates may feel comfortable operating in a global network
disengaged from specific localities, but these people constitute a very small minority; their numbers
are insufficient to sustain a coherent cultural system. It is more important to ask where these global
operators maintain their families, what kind of kinship networks they rely upon, if any, and whether
theirs is a transitory lifestyle or a permanent condition. For most people, place and locality still matter.
Even the transnational workers discussed by Appadurai are rooted in local communities bound by
common perceptions of what represents an appropriate and fulfilling lifestyle.

Cultural differentation are the various beliefs, behaviors, languages, practices and expressions
considered unique to members of a specific ethnicity, race or national origin. Some examples of
cultural differences as they pertain to the workplace include employees who are younger or older than
their co-workers, employees who hold higher degrees than others in the workplace and individuals
who grew up in either metropolitan areas or small towns. It is said that employees often have more
similarities than they do differences, but those differences can sometimes outweigh the similarities.
While these various differences can create a more vibrant office, they can also lead to more than a
few problems resulting from culture clash. Cultural differentiation involves barriers that prevent flows
that serve to make cultures more alike; cultures tend to remain stubbornly different from one another.
It is a lasting differences among and between cultures, largely unaffected by globalization. They
remain much as they always have been. Those barriers lead cultures to remain largely distinct from
one another.

Cultural hybridization is the blending of elements from different cultures. I feel that without cultural
hybridization, the world we live in would not be anywhere near as interesting and integrated as it is
today. Hybridization has become part of an ongoing trend in cultural production, with both the
globalization and localization of the culture industry. Hybridization, however, is not merely the mixing,
blending and synthesizing of different elements that ultimately forms a culturally faceless whole. In the
course of hybridization, cultures often generate new forms and make new connections with one
another. This study looks at two globally popular films that were adapted from Chinese
works, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Mulan, as examples to illustrate the complexity involved
in hybridization and the implications that it has for the debate on the globalization of culture. It was
found that ‘deculturalization’, ‘acculturalization’ and ‘reculturalization’ can be used to characterize the
hybridization of cultural products and that often the producer, with his/her background, aspirations and
work style, has a key role to play in deciding how these features are organized and manifested.
Cultural convergence is the theory that two cultures will be more and more like each other as their
interactions increase. Basically, the more that cultures interact, the more that their values, ideologies,
behaviors, arts, and customs will start to reflect each other. This trend is especially pronounced
between cultures that are heavily engaged with each other through communication and transportation
technologies, as well as organizational associations. In today's world, these associations and changes
are pretty evident. If people in the United States and Japan are frequently in communication via social
media, transportation between these countries is relatively easy, and both cultures participate in the
same athletic organizations or multinational institutions like the United Nations, then cultural
convergence theory predicts that American and Japanese cultures will start to become more similar.
Cultural convergence very often follows lines of communication, as well as the ability to communicate
with people of other cultures. It's essentially what really makes convergence possible. This means that
we can often see the impact of cultural convergence through the spread of language. Throughout the
20th century, and continuing into today, this has largely been seen through the spread of English
around the world.English became an international language of business and diplomacy in the 20th
century, and as more countries adopted English, pathways were opened that permitted cultural
convergence. Nations with no history of Western-style constitutional politics established Western-style
nation-states. Western styles of dress and conduct became ubiquitous. English-language movies,
books, and other forms of popular culture became widespread. While the convergence of cultures
towards these Western (and particularly English) values may be obvious to people of European
cultures, convergence is not simply a one-way street. European cultures also changed from increased
contact with the rest of the world. Flavors and recipes from other parts of the world became part of the
standard cuisine in the English-speaking world. Artistic conventions from Asia inspired Europe's
Impressionism, and aesthetics from Africa inspired Cubism, as well as much of modern urban culture.

Cultural deterritorialization is when referring to culture, anthropologists use the

term deterritorialized to refer to a weakening of ties between culture and place. This means the
removal of cultural subjects and objects from a certain location in space and time.[1] It implies that
certain cultural aspects tend to transcend specific territorial boundaries in a world that consists of
things fundamentally in motion. In the context of cultural globalization, some[weasel words] argue
deterritorialization is a cultural feature developed by the "mediatization, migration,
and commodification which characterize globalized modernity". This implies that by people working
towards closer involvement with the whole of the world, and works towards lessening the gap with one
another, one may be widening the gap with what is physically close to them. According to the works
of Arjun Appadurai, this cultural distancing from the locality, is intensified when people are able to
expand and alter their imagination through the mediatization of alien cultural conditions, making this
culture of remote origin one of a familiar material. This makes it difficult for a local entity to sustain and
retain its own local cultural identity, which also affects the national identity of the region.[2][3] From
Appadurai's 1990 essay "Disjuncture and Difference": "Deterritorialization, in general, is one of the
central forces of the modern world because it brings laboring populations in to the lower-class sectors
and spaces of relatively wealthy societies, while sometimes creating exaggerated and intensified
senses of criticism or attachment to politics in the home state. Deterritorialization, whether of Hindus,
Sikhs, Palestinians, or Ukrainians, is now at the core of a variety of global fundamentalisms,
including Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism. In the Hindu case, for example, it is clear that the
overseas movement of Indians has been exploited by a variety of interests both within and outside
India to create a complicated network of finances and religious identifications, by which the problem
of cultural reproduction for Hindus abroad has become tied to the politics of Hindu fundamentalism at
home. At the same time, deterritorialization creates new markets for film companies, art impressions,
and travel agencies, which thrive on the end of the deterritorialized population for contact with its
homeland. Naturally, these invented homelands, which constitute the mediascapes of deterritorialized
groups, can often become sufficiently fantastic and one-sided that they provide the material for new
ideoscapes in which ethnic conflicts can begin to erupt.