Globalization as Hybridization

Abstract

Cultural hybridization refers to the mixing of Asian, African, American, European cultures: hybridization is the making of global culture as a global melange. The very process of hybridization shows the difference to be relative and, with a slight shift of perspective, the relationship can also be described in terms of an affirmation of similarity. Hybridization as a perspective belongs to the fluid end of relations between cultures: the mixing of cultures and not their separateness is emphasized. At some stage, toward the end of the story, the notion of cultural hybridity itself unravels or at least needs reworking. To explore what this means in the context of globalization, the chapter contrasts the vocabularies and connotations of globalization-as-homogenization and globalization-as-hybridization. Globalization/hybridization makes, an empirical case: that processes of globalization, past and present, can be adequately described as processes of hybridization. It is a critical argument: against viewing globalization in terms of homogenization, or of modernization/westernization, as empirically narrow and historically flat.

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