Globalization, Culture, and Identities in Crisis

Culture in its various forms now serves as a primary carrier of globalization and modern values, and constitutes an important arena of contestation for national, religious, and ethnic identity. Although reactions in Europe, Japan, and other societies where modern values prevail, tend to be symbolic, in areas of the developing world, especially in Muslim countries where traditional values and radically different notions of identity and society predominate, reactions tend to be very intense and redirected at external targets through forms of transference and scapegoating. Ultimately, this is not so much a clash between civilizations as a clash within civilizations.     

Identities and the Indian state: An overview

The importance that IR theorists have traditionally given to sovereign statehood has decreased their ability to explain new issues of global heterogeneity and diversity. The need to explain the end of the cold war, the disintegration of the former Soviet Union and the revival of old identities as well as the eruption of ethnic conflict in various parts of the world has, therefore, led to the return of culture and identity in IR theory. The concept of nation-state in international relations is based on the assumption that humanity is divided into nations and each nation is entitled to a state of its own. Although a state can exist without a nation it does not have the same legitimacy as a nation-state. Thus post colonial states like India, which are often considered to have artificial boundaries and are made up of many ethnic groups, feel obliged to embark on nation-building and prove that they are a nation-state even though homogeneous nation-states are a dwindling minority. The rise of the BJP in India emphasises the importance of religious and cultural identities but still does not prove that India is a nation. There has always been a tension between national and subnational identities in India. Not everyone who lives within the territorial borders of India considers him/herself to be an Indian nationalist-for example, Kashmiris seeking independence. The central government has always been aware of this and has always given priority to the preservation of the unity and integrity of the country. Indeed the constitution of India, while giving recognition to the fact that India is a multi-ethnic state, does not given anyone the right to secede from the Union. However, it is difficult to say how far India has progressed in the past 50 years beyond mere political integration and towards the creation of a nation-state through the transfer of loyalties from regional or ethnic groups to the nation, whose legal expression is the Indian Union. In the long run this is the only thing that will preserve the Indian state as it exists today.     

Chinese capitalism: Cultures,the Southeast Asian region and economic globalisation

Globalisation is often presumed to be an economically, socially and culturally homogenising force. The deterioration of capitalism's major rival in the early 1990s has paved the way for a truly global economy in which all participants increasingly operate under the general logic of capitalism-that is, a market-orientated system of production and exchange, private ownership and a flexible labour market predicated upon self-interest. Yet, while the pressures of globalisation are obviously formidable and increasingly felt by all, economic societies remain diverse and have responded to these pressures in unique ways. This article makes its case for the continued diversity of capitalism by emphasising the unique mode of economic organisation that has emerged in Southeast Asia; one rooted in the demands of globalisation as well as in the cultural foundations of the Overseas Chinese. The evolution of ethnic-Chinese business networks, which define Southeast Asia's political economy, constitutes a unique reaction to the pressures of globalisation and has laid the basis for a distinct articulation of capitalism in the region.     

For the Rest of Asia,America Might Be a Friend,but China Cannot Be an Enemy

In 1990, right after the Berlin Wall fell, NPQ published our Spring edition, titled “The New World Disorder,” about the nationalistic chaos and up‐in‐theair sensibility of that fraught new historical moment. Nearly a quarter of a century later, the regime of globalization that had supplanted the Cold War world of blocs is itself coming apart at the seams. Even Henry Kissinger these days says “the world order is crumbling.” Will this New World Disorder 2.0 revert to a system of conflicting blocs, as during the Cold War, or will we be mature enough to save the interdependence of plural identities that is the foundation of a new global civilization? In this section our contributors offer their perspectives on what the future holds.     

National Identities and Virtual Foreign Policies among the Eastern Slavs

The three eastern Slavic states-Russia, Ukraine and Belarus-have virtual foreign policies towards each other that are a product of weakly defined national identities inherited from the former USSR. In addition, this virtuality has been compounded by the presence of centrist, former high-ranking nomenklatura elites who have led all three countries at different times since 1992. Former “sovereign communist” centrist oligarchs are ideologically amorphous, in both the domestic and foreign policy arenas. Of the three eastern Slavic states, Ukraine had the strongest ethnic national identity by 1917–1918 when the Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed. A Russian ethnic identity had not been promoted in the Tsarist era, in contrast to an imperialstatist one. Belarus was heavily Russified and all of its territory was to be found within the Tsarist empire. Of the three ethnic groups therefore, only Ukrainians made a major attempt, unsuccessfully, to create an independent state in 1917-1921. In the USSR the situation did not radically improve, with the exception again of Ukraine. Russian and Soviet identities were deliberately intertwined, especially after 1934. Belarus emerged from the former USSR with a stronger Soviet Belarusian than Belarusian ethnocultural identity. For Ukraine the record is mixed with nation building accompanied by nation destroying. The Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (SFSR) was the only Soviet republic to never declare independence from the USSR, Ukraine held a highly successful referendum on independence while Belarus failed to hold a referendum after declaring independence a day after Ukraine.     

中国和拉美文化的对比及交流合作

文化学界将埃及文化、苏美尔文化、迈诺斯文化、玛雅文化、安第斯文化、哈拉巴文化、中国文化等7个古代文化称为人类原生形态的"母文化".     

Narratives of Translocation,Dislocation and Location: Armenian Youth Cultural Identities in Southern Russia

The findings presented here are based on ethnographic research and are concerned with subjective definitions of ethnic belonging of young Armenians in Krasnodar krai. It is demonstrated that Armenian ethnic identifications are not ‘fixed’ but rather entwined within a complex web of diverse cultural attachments, involving many ‘routes’ of translocation, dislocation and location. It was found that most of the research participants saw themselves as Armenian while drawing occasionally on cosmopolitanism as an identity resource. This enabled them to construct a sense of belonging both in terms of ethnicity and of multicultural location.     

‘Cultures of healing’: spirituality,interdependence and resistance in the African diaspora

ABSTRACT

Concepts of healing and spirituality have remained crucial to generating agency and empowerment for both black women and black men, especially in their diasporic displacement from Africa to the US. Healing has been consistently deployed to fight against the systemic racism and sexism that has pervaded and continues to persist in the lives of African diasporic subjects. Placing the discussion of healing within the current debates about interdependence and spirituality, the paper traces the notion back to its African roots and enslavement times, and attempts to delineate a genealogy of healing up to the present that grounds interdependence and interconnectedness within an ‘ethics of resistance’.