Anthropological Perspectives

Author: Mikołaj Jarmakowski

The problem of globalization is a very popular one in the contemporary discourse: anthropological, sociological, historical, political etc. It is especially important and emphasized now, during the war in Ukraine, which is ideologically built, among others, by the neo-imperial Russian idea of “Euro-Asianism”, which is presented by Russian elites as an alternative to Euro-American “Atlantism”. Therefore, we can find a very good background for reflection and analysis.

In the text which is the opening point for this essay, namely the first chapter of the book “The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader” (Inda, Rosaldo 2002), several general problems concerning the anthropological recognition and understanding of globalization processes were addressed. It is, in other words, an explanation of how globalism is being reworked – by Barbados airport workers, by a charismatic priest in Africa, by the people of the Amazon Forest, etc.

The main thesis of the text is that the globalized world is a world that redefines certain “permanent” structures which were known as obvious and permanent in the pre-global world.

The authors indicate four aspects of the globalization process that are a significant extension of the earlier thoughts of Giddens and Harvey. These are: 1) “speeding up of the flows of capital, people, goods, images, and ideas across the world, thus pointing to a general increase in the pace of global interactions and processes”; 2) “intensification of the links, modes of interaction, and flows that interconnect the world, meaning that ties across borders are not sporadic or haphazard but somewhat regularized”; 3) “stretching of social, cultural, political, and economic practices across frontiers so as to make possible action at a distance – that is, so that happenings, decisions, and practices in one area of the globe can come to have consequences for communities and cultures in remote locales of the globe”; 4) “heightened entanglement of the global and local such that, while everyone might continue to live local lives, their phenomenal worlds have to some extent become global as distant events come to have an impact on local spaces, and local developments come to have global repercussions” (Inda, Rosaldo 2002: 9).

The world of internal connections endures borders (linguistic, cultural, religious, states) that were once considered immutable but these values still remain alive and important for many people as a tradition and that is a part of processes that are currently visible.

The economic basis of these changes is the free flow of goods, which endure borders once considered permanent. From classic anthropology works (eg Marvin Harris, Malinowski) we know how much economy influences culture and worldview; how much culture “circulates” around problems of economics.

Nevertheless, the authors of the text emphasize the “space-time” dimensions of globalization. These dimensions are the “contraction” of time and space, which is visible in a massive combination of events and factors taking place in once distant (physically) places. Following Giddens, they wrote about the intensification of life in such spheres which connects the global and the local.

The basic cultural dimensions of globalization are, as they write, the “deterritorialization of culture”, that is the disappearance of the organic relationship between culture and territory (Inda, Rosaldo 2002: 10-11). This process is based on the massification of global types of culture (eg American, European) – “the world is synchronizing to the West”, but in this perspective, the West is also transformed by global cultural networks and talking about the existence of an integral and separate Western culture is not fully correct, according to the authors (Inda, Rosaldo 2002: 22-23).

However, this is not a one-way movement. While globalization is stereotyped viewed as the “synchronization with the West”, the West itself has lost its coherence as a result of it. Filled with goods from China and technological fashions from Japan, it has become only a tool of the globalization process, an element of an essentially supra-Western network. Here is a question that appears to be a challenge for contemporary anthropological and sociological thought: if not in “the West”, where lies the center of the globalization process? Is there any centre of this process?

Similarly visible, as the authors wrote, is the process of taking over the “western” elements by the inhabitants of the “peripheries”. Their subjectivity and agency is expressed in that how they “transform” what is global and finally change it into the local.

Several conclusions can be proposed from reading the text.

First of all, the above processes were presented in a very “useful” way (i.e. with high applicability) once by a Russian scientist Yuri Lotman. According to him, culture is a “semiosphere”, i.e. continuity (spatial, linguistic) of mutual intelligibility between people related to the symbolic sphere and natural language (especially its semantics). The semiosphere has its core, the centre: the most important and constitutive concepts and ideas, which are most noticeable in practice, culture, language and action. The centre is active – it sends and generates messages (in a literate society, it is e.g. literature), which cover the entire semiosphere and make that a group of people in a given space have common points of reference in daily life, common connectors which binds them into “culture”, “tradition”, “nation” etc. The boundaries of the semiosphere are close to its periphery. These are the places far from the centre that are exposed to other semiospheres. These connections are crucial because they allow us to notice the processes of filtering the content of culture from one semiosphere to another.

The vision of culture proposed by Lotman is based on a dialogical perception of the meeting point of various cultural realities. Cultures concentrated around various centers (geographical and ideological) send messages and influence each other – in a balanced way. How does this vision of culture relate to the theory proposed in the chapter analysed here?

In the world of “liquefied borders” and the global network of culture, it is increasingly difficult to talk about diversity and polycentrism. Traditional divisions that have been shaping for hundreds of years are disappearing, which is visible, for example, in the growing influence of the Asian (especially Chinese) world on the Euro-American. Perhaps, in relation to Lotman’s theory, the global world would appear to be one semiosphere within which successful implementation of a globally standardized (based on a corporate system) system of production and flow of goods takes place? In addition, the process of global unification includes an important element, which is the inclusion of concepts and phenomena from the global scope to the “local” semiospheres. Therefore, there are fewer and fewer cultures or “semiospheres” that could be radically different from others, because the number of common elements – resulting from the global network of culture – is becoming greater and greater (exactly as, for example, the number of anglicisms in the languages of the world). On the other hand, referring to the words of the authors about the heterogenization of Western culture, the reversibility of the semiosphere contact process is fully visible (Inda, Rosaldo 2002: 22).

Let us consider one example in this context. Research conducted by Lublin ethno-linguists and CBOS proves that for contemporary Poles and Lithuanians a very important, even the most important, value is the family, or family happiness (Bartmiński, Bielińska-Gardziel, Żywicka 2015). Referring to the theory of Yuri Lotman: people for whom this value is common have a common a common semiosphere. Where is it, what are its determinants, boundaries, what is in it?

Here we come back to the problems of globalization. The popular political discourse talks about the “traditional family” and various adversities against it, which, as we know, divides Polish society very much, almost in half. In popular view: liberalism in the sphere of values, including the “progressive” perception of the family, is the domain of the global world (EU, American democratism). This is what is present in the local semiosphere because it is present in texts, speeches, practices, and marches. Not wanting to get into political matters, I only point to certain “lines” where the semiospheres of “globality” and “locality” intersect. Nomen omen – in the text, there is a thesis claiming the fact of “differentiation of the Western world” – “the idea here is simply that a primary effect of the peripheralization of the core, or of the reverse traffic in culture, has been to turn the spaces of the West into densities of cultural heterogeneity” (Inda, Rosaldo 2002: 22). The heterogeneity of the West is very multi-faceted and, apart from the current contexts related to migration, is associated with the gradual expansion of its geographical, political, and cultural boundaries after 1989.

The problem raised here of the difference between thinking and acting within the semiospheres – present at the level of the “conflict” discourse (tradition vs. progress; “Polish values” vs. the West) seems to be a good illustration of the internal complexity of the West.

Moreover: it can be seen that inside the one semiosphere (“family is the most important value”) we have ideological and political conflict which is founded (inter alia) on the definition of the family (“liberal” or “conservative”). It is very possible that both for the one and the second half of our nation, family stays in the core of the semiosphere. But there is something that makes its understanding varied. Both attitudes also refer to the global world, e.g. to the EU.

The second problem which seems to be interesting is the question of the point from which we look at globalization. The colloquial understanding speaks of “Westernization” or the Americanization of life and culture. So they are not “a view in itself”, but towards something; maybe towards globalization? Another question: if today everything refers to global, was the past semiosphere (for example semiosphere of XIX c. villagers) more structured “in relation to itself” in the local world?

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If we look at the phenomena happening in Asia and their penetration into the eastern peripheries of Europe – we can notice other elements of this process, other semiospheres present in the global world.

The Russian program of expansion, visible in the Ukraine war, raised, among other sources, from the ideology of Alexander Dugin. In his works, Dugin proclaims that the world needs “multicentrism” based on the conservative guarding of differences and borders. The way to the multicentrism: a) acceptance of the teleology of history resulting from geopolitical philosophy (the place where a nation life has its own teleological destiny, for Russia it is of course expansion) b) Eurasianism.

Both paths indicate that Russia is to be the leading force in changing the world (which destroys the assumption of multicentrism and indicates an internal contradiction in Dugin’s thought!). Firstly, Russia as the “heir” of Byzantium, and third Rome is “obliged” to take the first role and firm attitudes in the world; Russia’s goal justifies Russia’s activities. The goal is: to create a multi-dimensional world in which the counterweight to the US will be “Eurasianism”, i.e. a parallel world centre, connecting Asia and part of Europe in opposition to the US. In this thought, the USA is perceived as the source of evil – liberalization, the disappearance of the values of Christian conservatism, the primacy of individual values over the sacred, teleological collective.

Although Dugin’s ideology is causative, acts on the Russian elites- it can be seen after the war in Ukraine – it is not fully reflected. Russia’s pan-Slavic expansion plan, based on Eurasianism, is in fact an extension of China’s interests, to which Russia remains servile.

Here again we reach an interesting and not obvious “short-circuit” indicating – exactly as the authors of the book wrote – that the heterogeneous processes shaping the global world are also taking place outside the West. Putin’s ideology of expansion grows from the roots of cultural imperialism combined with the ideas of Russian Pan-Slavism. It is aimed at countries that want to feel like members of the Western community in the sphere of discourse and practice, although, as indicated above, they do not always fully participate in it. The idea of ​​Russia’s pan-Slavic expansion is a good example of the internal differentiation of the processes shaping the global world. Ethnolinguistic research claims that freedom is one of the basic values of the linguistic and cultural world of the Slavs, which is denied by China and Dugin’s thought (growing out of the Russian philosophy that negates individual freedom).

It is a real clash of two semiospheres, both of which do not fully belong to the “Western” world. On the one hand, we have the Slavic world (growing primarily from a common image of the world in language), and on the other, Russia, which “impersonates” the Slavic, which is an instrument in the hands of the Chinese “semiosphere”, radically different from the world of Slavic values. This essay is just a little reflection. Its idea was to show that some thoughts are not as clear-cut as they seem to be. Many questions arise. For example, the relationship between the idea of Slavic freedom and the “Western” liberal slogans of democracy and freedom remains an open question. The Slavic world (e.g., Serbia and Poland) has in recent years entered into numerous worldview conflicts with the European world (EU).

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