Page 68 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

THINKING ABOUT CULTURE IN A GLOBAL ECUMENE

few words should be said about its various meanings. Some would use it to
refer rather narrowly to the deregulation of capitalist markets in the last decades
of the twentieth century. Others might think of it as a more broadly defined
process which yet has had much to do with the new technologies of com-
munication and transportation of that same century – with large numbers of
people rapidly moving across the surface of the earth by jumbo jets (even
moving quickly back and forth), and just as large numbers getting sights and
sounds, ideas and images, by way of radio, television, and electronic mail. Cer-
tainly, for a great many people, the last few decades have brought major
changes along such lines. Yet if (as I do here) we take ‘globalization’ to refer
most generally to a process in which people get increasingly interconnected, in
a variety of ways, across national borders and between continents, and in which
their awareness of the world and of distant places and regions probably also
grows, then it becomes a more multifaceted notion, and one involving a greater
historical time depth. It has gone through different phases, with different inten-
sities; it does not proceed inevitably, irreversibly, in one direction, but may
sometimes indeed move backwards in the direction of deglobalization. And
it can involve different areas of the world in different ways at different times.
The centuries of the transatlantic slave trade had been a long period of very
traumatic globalization, not so much in the precise area where Kafanchan is
now, but in a wide region not so far to the south of it. And among those who
thus found themselves forcibly globalized were, of course, the first black
Americans – ancestors of the people I had come to know in Washington.
And then, with regard to culture, ‘globalization’ is also frequently taken to
mean global cultural homogenization. In recent times, a certain sweet brown
beverage, a certain ground beef sandwich, and a certain stylish, long-haired
favorite doll of young girls have turned into powerful and controversial
symbols: Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Barbie together are taken to tell us that
we live in a world of increasing sameness, that growing global interconnected-
ness will lead to the death of cultural diversity. If not always a description of the
present, this notion of globalization often involves at least a scenario for the
future.
Familiar as I already was with the scenario, it did not correspond to what I
saw in Kafanchan (although it is true that Coca-Cola had arrived). What I saw
seemed to be rather more of a creation of new culture, even perhaps another
civilization, born in the cultural encounters of global connections. This was
neither a simple persistence of West African traditions nor the wholesale
acceptance of ideas and cultural forms imported from overseas. It was not just a
matter of cultural loss, as a necessary consequence of cultural homogenization.
Here once more, then, were questions of a familiar kind coming back at me:
what sort of culture was this, really? Who shared what with whom? What really
had been transmitted from what generation, when, and where? And, to para-
phrase yet further an old formula from communication research, with what
effect? The engagement with late twentieth-century, postcolonial African town

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