Page 33 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

24 Cultural change and ordinary life

of the other processes. Thus, the consumption of a CD as part of a way of life of
an individual will depend on the social interaction of those who made it, who
may be globally separated, the political processes that facilitate trade and
the economic patterns of production and organization that led to it being
produced and marketed in the first place.
Third, the practices of globalization are contested and struggle takes
place around them. This may be the overt struggle that has led to violent
and explicit confrontations around specific meetings of the global elite, organ-
ization of pop/rock concerts, and so on. However, the practices of hybridiza-
tion also involve modes of contestation as well as accommodation and the
production of new forms through collaboration.
Good examples of these interactions around globalization and hybrid-
ization can be found in the processes of production and consumption of
popular music. These illuminate the complex reconstitution of cultural forms
rather than the flattening out or elimination of a local form by the juggernaut
of globalized sameness. There are a number of examples of this dynamic
process (Bennett 2000; Taylor 1997). Ho (2003) analyses the development in
Hong Kong of Cantopop (music that is sung in Cantonese). He argues that this
form developed in the 1970s as part of a desire for music sung in the local
language rather than in English or Mandarin Chinese. This can be seen as
a process of localization. However, as time passed, Cantopop has been
developed by the globalized large companies of the music industry and has
been influenced and hybridized by music from other parts of the world. Ho
argues that through this process, Cantopop has become multicultural. Indeed,
as pressure has developed to increase market share as a part of what can be seen
as a globalizing process, Cantopop artists now sing in Mandarin as well as
Cantonese and have explored a range of different genres, not just ‘formulaic
romantic ballads and brain-dead dance tunes’ (Ho 2003: 151). In Ho’s argu-
ment, Hong Kong pop has been influenced by music from the USA and Britain,
as well as Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea. In the production of ‘new creative
fusions’:
The story of Hong Kong pop in its global-local interaction is not only a
case of cultural (western) imperialism and the Asianisation of Asia, but
also involves a process of negotiated cultural identities as expressed in
the language of Cantonese and other representational means.
(Ho 2003: 154)
A key theme in the debate about globalization and hybridization is that of
local belonging. I will take this up in some detail in Chapter 5 and, as with other
aspects of this debate, only seek to introduce it here. In the earlier period of
consideration of globalization, it was often suggested that the significance and
meaning of local culture and local ways of life were being overrun by the global-
ized processes. This sort of idea was in continuity with earlier ideas of cultural
imperialism, and so on. Apart from the impact of globalized cultures, it has
also been argued that mobility affected the commitment of people to local
areas and their perception of those areas themselves. In a common phrase,
‘roots’ were being replaced or overrun by ‘routes’. Such a dichotomous simpli-
fication has little purchase, even if it were ever meant to in such a simplified