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Globalisation and
changing questions of ownership in culture and society stocktaking and defining new research priorities |
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| description of an international conference to be held at Leiden, April 2002 |
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Globalisation and
changing questions of ownership in culture and society stocktaking and defining new research priorities |
|
| description of an international conference to be held at Leiden, April 2002 |
home page | programme | abstracts | papers |
The 1990s have seen a spate of social-science research
on globalisation. While the specific theoretical harvest in terms
of new concepts and theories to understand a multicultural,
globalising, meta-local world has been limited, a number of
interesting trends have either been initiated in the context of
globalisation studies, or have been strengthened by them:
• The critique of fieldwork as a naively
localising strategy
• The rise of neo-diffusionism
• The emphasis on global religious movements
as important vehicles for the movement of ideas, people and
organisational forms
• The elaboration of (problematised, and
actively constructed) locality as a critical concept in
the light of which to re-read and re-analyse much of the
pre-existing anthropology
• The elaboration of virtuality as a new focus
on the relation between the imaginary, the ritual, and the social
organisational
• The increased emphasis on commodities and
commodification (hence consumption) as a key to understanding
processes of localisation and globalisation
• The closer approchement between anthropology
and contemporary philosophy (critique of the concept of culture;
increased epistemological sophistication; the adoption of
post-structuralist models for thought)
• The acknowledgement of other, para-academic
forms of globalising knowledge construction and representation,
facilitated by the technologies of globalisation (ICT,
international travel etc.), with an increasing impact on
identity, performance and conflict (Afrocentricity, Islam,
diasporic ethnic networks etc.)
After a
decade in which globalisation has been a major shibboleth for the
organisation and funding of social and intercultural
philosophical research, we are faced with the challenge of
defining the priorities, blind spots, red herrings and dead ends
of such research, especially of research with a regional - more
specifically Africanist - focus. This renders the above topics of
considerable importance. How can we permanently capture the
inspiration of recent globalisation studies, without resigning
ourselves to the low level of theoretical, empirical and
methodological sophistication? A certain malaise has inevitably
crept into the study of culture as a machine for the production
of difference, once we came to realise that under globalisation
this machine produces not just difference (in the proliferation
of myriad new identities, often with forceful technological and
widespread geographical backing, and optional and multiple rather
than total and integrative) but sameness at the same time:
consumers, world citizens, ICT users, etc.
Under
globalisation, there is no longer a one-to-one relationship
between a person and the specific attributes (identity, material
objects, religion and ethnic adherence, sets of ideas etc.) by
reference to which that person identifies herself or himself as
situated within a plurality of more or less localised spaces, and
ultimately within the global system. This increasingly widespread
academic insight — it is also a condition of which social
actors themselves are increasingly conscious.
They
raise perplexing questions of ownership, authorship, and
appropriation. Who owns a locality? By whom is it
produced? Which group perceives of itself as the rightful owners
of a space, an intellectual domain, a set of ideas, knowledge of
any kind, an identity, a nation, a state, even a continent like
Africa? Who are the owners of means of production and
consumption? Who owns transnationalism, capital flows of any
magnitude, multinational corporatism or any economic force that
penetrates even the most remote corners of the world? Who owns a
human body and who can be perceived to be the rightful owners of
organs, or of his or her sexuality? What do calls for
autochthony, roots-inspired actions, right-wing political
sentiments tell us with regard to changing ideas of ownership of
the things, both material and immaterial, enumerated here? What
is ownership of a culture and by whom and how is it expressed?
And above all, in a globalising world, how can ownership of
anything be defined in the first place? Constantly we are made
aware of the virtual, strategic, implicitly fluid, nature of
boundaries and boundary markers of identity in globalisation.
This is
what we would call the panic of conscious globalisation.
This awareness leads to articulated movements seeking to
collectively redress this loosening of ties and of identities:
anti-globalisation; fundamentalism; ecological romanticism, etc.
(‘new cocoons’).
How
are we as social researchers and intercultural philosophers going
to address the poignant questions of ownership that both Africans
and academics are facing and the contestations of globalisation
that result from such reflections and expressions? Obviously,
issues of ownership lead to challenges of globalisation and
world-wide have set in motion anti-globalist sentiments —
sentiments that concern Africa to a great extent. Ownership has
become a deeply contest terrain, which to a great extent has also
been instigated by the rapid developments in ICT. Ownership has
become profoundly illusive, affecting even the foundations of
social scientific and intercultural philosophical research and
its intellectual products.
How
to come to terms with ownership in today’s globalising world?This
is the question we are asking from a number of prominent
international scholars who have contributed substantially but
critically to the debates on globalisation, and beyond.
The conference marks the termination of the African
Studies Centre’s Theme Group on Globalisation, whose intended
life span was to extend from 1997 to 2001, and the beginning of a
new Theme Group, whose focus of research is currently being
defined.
A two-days conference, 6-8 papers per day, the web of
constructive exchange widened by the strategic selection of
chairpersons and discussants, in addition to the contributors of
papers. Sessions in principle open to a wider academic audience.
The conference is to lead to a collective volume in English, to
be edited by the convenors.
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| page last modified: 12-04-02 14:50:25 |
