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van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999, ‘Globalization, consumption and development: A key note address’, in: Fardon, R., van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & van Dijk, R., 1999, eds., Modernity on a shoestring: Dimensions of globalization, consumption and development in Africa and beyond: Based on an EIDOS conference held at The Hague 13-16 March 1997, Leiden/London: EIDOS [ European Interuniversity Deveopment Opportunities Study group ] , pp. 1-7
© 1997-2002 Wim van
Binsbergen*
International
conference organised by EIDOS (‘European Interuniversity
Development Opportunities Study-Group’)/WOTRO programme on
‘Globalization and the construction of communal
identities’/Afrika-Studiecentrum, 13-16 March, 1997
This conference explores the connection
between two dominant features of the world today: globalisation
and consumption, and seeks to interpret their interplay from a
perspective of development. Our approach is interdisciplinary,
and our delegates hail from such diverse fields as the sociology
of development, development economics, anthropology, history,
ethnic studies, media studies, cultural studies and religious
studies. The conference has an anthropological slant in that one
of our aims is to understand the experiences, conceptions,
actions and interactions of actors in local and regional contexts
in Africa, Asia and Latin America by situating these local and
regional contexts in the wider, ultimately global context. We
realise of course that for an understanding of that global
context in itself, more is required than the extrapolation of
local and regional case studies, and we expect our
non-anthropological delegates to help us fill in those aspects.
Yet at the same time that global context remains an empty
abstraction unless mediated, translated, towards concrete
settings where we can discern concrete actors.
The three catch words of the conference
make for three pairs:
•
globalisation and consumption
•
globalisation and development
•
consumption and development
Each of these
pairs conjures up a world of connections and images, but they are
not all equally familiar and obvious.
But let us first briefly define the
youngest catchword among our three: globalisation, as the
social (including economic, political, cultural and religious)
effects of dramatic advances in communication technology.
Given the globular shape of the earth, even fairly rudimentary
communication technologies of earlier millennia (those of the
footpath, the hand-written text, the horse and camel as mounts,
the sailing boat) have given rise to early forms of
‘proto’-globalisation — early globalising political
projects such as the Akkadian, Assyrian, Roman, Chinese empires;
globalising religious projects such as Christianity and Islam;
globalising intellectual projects such as the emergence and
spread of philosophy and science. However, in the second half of
the twentieth century AD communication technologies have advanced
so dramatically as to reduce the costs of time and place to
nearly zero. This has produced massive qualitative changes in the
world at large — changes for which the term globalisation in
the narrower sense of the word is appropriate.
‘Globalisation
and consumption’ is probably the most obvious pair of themes,
reminding us of the fact that in the world today it is mainly as
consumers, far more than as producers, that individual actors
position themselves vis-a-vis the world-wide stream of
manufactured goods, of information, ideas, images that the
dramatic increase of means of communication (both physical and
electronic) in the course of the second century has made
available right down to the very peripheries of the earth.
Apparently, sub-Saharan Africa with its c. 60% agricultural
producers occupies an exceptional position in this overall
set-up. Yet stagnant production has relegated more and more poor
African people to the status of consumers of purchased
food-stuffs. Meanwhile, in the course of the last decade, the
opening up of African markets under conditions of Structural
Adjustment Programmes has meant — if not active and massive
consumption — then at least potential, desired, frustrated
consumption of many other manufactured items besides food.
On the general point of globalisation and
consumption, the essential point to explore during our conference
is that this apparently global flow, this apparently unchecked
play of world-wide market forces, is in fact neither
ubiquitous nor unimpeded, nor does it produce sheer uniformity.
One of the most important ideas coined in
the first half of the twentieth century has been that of the
plurality of distinct, equivalent human cultures. This
presupposes that social meaning (as distinct from individual
idiosyncrasy and delusion) is being created by a process of
localisation, in the course of which a set of people, through
their converging interactions, create a collective identity
underpinned by meanings peculiar to them as a social group. In
the process they raise around themselves both conceptual and
interactional boundaries so as to protect the locus of meaning
and identity which organises their experience and justifies their
actions. In the articulation of such boundaries, objects
tend to play a dominant role as potential items of consumption
and elements in a life style. One positions oneself e.g. as a
member of the urban middle class by a certain type of house,
furniture, clothing etc.; one identifies e.g. as a member of an
Independent African church by the purchase of a church uniform,
by participation in particular types of services and in the
contribution of particular donations, and by the rejection of
specific other forms of consumption, e.g. those involving alcohol
and tobacco, and various other taboos on food and dress.
In this set-up, the intrusion of a global
flow of potential consumption items in principle disrupts
the loosely bounded localities of meaning and identity hitherto
in existence. At first view it may be supposed to produce
chaos and meaninglessness and (in resemblance to the products it
brings along) a temptation towards uniformity which destroys
identity. In actual fact little of the sort turns out to
happen. The new objects are co-opted into pre-existing and
— more typically — into new identities, within which they
acquire new, localised meanings; thus their flow is no longer
unimpeded, and instead of creating uniformity, brings about
eddies of new identities hitherto unpredictable.
In many cases, the global flow of new
objects is imagined rather than real anyway, since many actors
especially in the South lack the means to effectively acquire any
of the globally mediated manufactured objects, and instead have
to creatively make shift with dreams and local imitations —
with ‘lecher la fenetre’ (Mbembe), impotently and insolvently
staring at the shop windows.
Meanwhile we have to appreciate that the
globalisation process implies a trend towards commodification
which is manifested not only in regard to new manufactured
products coming in from the outside, but also in regard to
locally available aspects of culture, whose value is increasingly
defined not by reference to time-honoured local cosmologies and
social practices in the fields of ceremonial exchange, kinship.
ritual etc., but is drawn into a market context, where all these
historic (‘traditional’) local cultural forms have to compete
with the actors’ increasing commitment to individual and
household consumption.
Central research questions in this field
concern, among others, the organisational and conceptual
conditions under which new identities emerge and consolidate
themselves, the transformations which practices,
conceptualisations and meanings surrounding objects undergo in
the process, the ways in which this gives rise to new definitions
of the person, of space and time, new inequalities, and a
dramatically widening horizon of reference, mimesis and
commitment within which the person relates to the world.
From a successful
local strategy, first in the North Atlantic, then in Japan, to
industrialise economies and to create the affluent consumers that
keep those economies going, development has primarily become a
framework in which to organise North-South relations. For current
development thinking, globalisation means at least two things:
•
development increasingly situates itself in a context largely
determined by processes of globalisation
•
as a result, development in itself has increasingly taken on
globalising features
In recent
development thinking, the earlier hegemony of the theory of
development economics has largely given way to an ideology
of development in terms of neo-liberal emphasis on the market
and on competition. Whereas in earlier decades developing
countries had a choice between capitalist and socialist
blueprints, the demise of communism is interpreted as the victory
of the neo-liberalism as the sole remaining alternative. Besides,
a greatly increased attention, in development thinking, for local
cultural factors is to reveal how development (now conceived in
terms of the free flow of market forces) can be facilitated by
good governance and by the curbing of local cultural practices
such as patronage.
These shifts in development objectives in
recent decades, far from being a merely fashionable rotation of
paradigms, bear witness to the fact that development thinking
takes place in the context of globalising processes, and
their effects, on the local scene in African, Asian and Latin
American context.
The effective power of nation-states in
the South and East has been surrendered to globalising market
forces (making for unprecedented flows of capital and
international labour) which cannot be contained within the
boundaries of the nation-state. In the face of these market
forces nation-states are increasingly incapable of preventing the
demolition of the natural environment. They are equally unable to
stay such ethnic and religious conflicts as are inherent in any
complex society. Ethnic and religious conflicts have also
internationalised and have acquired logistic and military
resources in a global market, thereby dramatically enhancing the
scope and intensity of their violence. As I said above, Islam and
Christianity have been (proto-)globalising projects from their
very start in the first millennium CE; however, in the most
recent decades the spread of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism
has been greatly facilitated by advances in communication
technology, whereas these fundamentalisms situate themselves in
two further ways in the globalisation process. They offer
retreats within enclaves of identity and meaning against the
chaotic outside of uncontrolled global flow; and they offer such
retreats particularly to those who, as the urban poor, as
unemployed youths, are the most conspicuous victims of the free
lay of global market forces; subjected to increasing
impoverishment they may well dream up the globally mediated
images of consumption but are more frustrated than ever from
actual consumption.
Meanwhile these social and political
processes have changed the very texture of development thinking.
Even since World
War II, development has constituted one of the most conspicuous
globalisation projects in the world today in that it sought to
effectively impose upon all local peripheries the same
universalist logic of incorporation, participation and
rationalisation which had produced the viable economies of the
North Atlantic and Japan. As a movement of concern and
intervention, development has spanned the globe. In doing so it
has had to make full use of a state-of-the-art technology of
communication, management and control.
However, under recent condition of
globalisation in the narrower sense of the word, significant
shifts have taken place in development thinking. Of course, the
principal objective of poverty alleviation has not been
abandoned. But the framework in which desired effects of
intervention are defined and assessed, has expanded so as to
reach world-wide dimensions. The familiar image of local
development projects aiming to produce a specifically local
effect of increased production (albeit through the
application of universalist concepts and theories), has given way
to an emphasis on world-wide objectives which are no longer
predominantly formulated in production terms. Sustainable
development today means nothing less than an appeal to all
mankind’s shared stewardship of the earth in so far as natural
resources are concerned. It is explicitly situated in a context
of the containment of ethnic and religious conflict at a
supra-national, continental and intercontinental scale. Through
Structural Adjustment Programmes impediments to the free flow of
global market forces are cleared out of the way. Even ecological
concerns can be expressed in this idiom, e.g. by ecological swaps
of forest conservation as against a reduced debt load. In a
similar conditional manner, the globalised concern for human
rights is appended to the North-South development discourse, and
so may be the staying of religious and ethnic fundamentalisms and
the support for cultural diversity. The interests of the
entire world (and therefore, by implication, also those of the
North) have come to dominate development thinking to such an
extent that it is no exaggeration to speak of globalisation as
having captured development.
Under the
sub-theme of globalisation and development, therefore, obvious
topics for research include: exploring the largely uncharted
implications of the nature of development as a globalising
project and as an endeavour caught in globalisation; and
defining, on the basis of profound descriptive, historical and
comparative research, recent transformations in structures of
conflict, violence, the state, the market, identity, ethnicity,
fundamentalism, in order to feed and to critically assess
development strategies and their implementation. Broad and
ambitious as this research agenda is, many of its topics do
overlap with the present conference; others are pursued in other
contexts, in which many of our delegates also participate.
Given the convergence in topics and
agendas between development planners and current academic
research on globalisation in Africa, Asia and Latin America, what
we now need most urgently is a serious dialogue, a constructive
exchange of views based on proper knowledge and appreciation of
the respective positions, specific procedures and working
routines, and structural constraints, on each side.
Macro-economics
including development economics have always concentrated on
identifying the conditions for consumption, and while even
glossing over distribution, have tended to consider consumption
as the over-obvious, relatively uninteresting end-piece of the
economic process; as if consumption mainly means, to the
economist’s relieve, the condition under which we can produce
all over again. To the extent to which development thinking has
been dominated by economic theory, it is therefore hard to make
meaningful pronouncements with regard to our third and final pair
of concepts. However, this is somewhat easier within a
development philosophy that, in the 1980s, has discovered
culture, and within the framework of a conference concentrating
on the effects of new modes of global consumption upon culture
and identity.
From a perspective both of
globalisation and of current ethnicity studies, ‘cultures’
are no longer to be considered as bounded, self-contained,
distinct entities encompassing entire societies. Today the
academic researcher of culture would raise all sorts of questions
with regard to the emerging development discourse on culture.
Ironically, we have become somewhat less prone to put culture on
a pedestal, less inclined now than in the heyday of cultural
relativism to advocate a total, unconditional respect for the
self-staged claims of identity and authenticity of vocal cultural
actors in the world scene today. We would stress, e.g.:
•
invented tradition under elite instigation (so that what poses as
time-honoured, uncompromising ‘authentic culture’ is more
often than not recently re-modelled optional folklore)
•
cultural convergence under the impact of globally mediated models
and images, and the selective nature of such convergence both in
terms of cultural items and of sections of the population
involved
•
the transformation (partly in emulation of, but often as a move
away from, a global trend to manufactured uniformity) of
pre-existing local cultural idioms, and the emergence of new
cultural idioms. These are no longer coterminous with local,
regional or national societies, but are typically found in
distinct subgroups, in a bid to create new identities and new
boundaries to stay the global flow, and to create new meaning
informed by transformations of both local meaning and the
globally mediated meaning of a very different provenance.
As I have argued and as the present
conference will elaborate, current processes of cultural
reorientation in the South and East are intimately linked up with
consumption, including the subjective frustration of consumption.
Consumption, and the attainment of such income levels for
specific individuals, households, and social groups as to enable
them to engage in more than mere ‘virtual’ or ‘symbolic’
consumption (cf. ethnic and religious fundamentalism), is the
necessary implication of a development discourse aiming at
poverty alleviation. Recent anthropological work has demonstrated
that an understanding of current shifts in consumption in the
South and East, requires the joint efforts of macro-economics,
development sociology and an anthropology more than in the 1970s
and 1980s geared to symbolic processes and material culture. Our
conference will explore the great extent to which shifts in
consumption are relevant for development, and in this exploration
will lie its particular significance to development planners.
Without slighting the essential contribution
from the WOTRO programme on ‘Globalization and the construction
of communal identities’ and from the African Studies Centre,
Leiden, The Netherlands, this conference is mainly conceived as
the second in an EIDOS series called ‘The retreat from the
real’, and as such mainly funded by the wing on development
co-operation of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The
series’ objective has been to formulate a constructive critique
of development thinking and practices, by investigating patterns
of sustained unreality, both in the development field, and in the
South and East settings at which development practices
concentrate. Assessing the virtualities (but also the realities
and achievements) of consumption and cultural production in the
South, with a critique (but also intellectual support) of
development thinking on these topics, the agenda of this
conference is hoped to live up to the original objectives of the
EIDOS series’ initiators, both in academia and in the planning
field. Dialogue and cross-fertilisation have been prominent among
those objectives, and it is by exhorting you to engage in
eminently constructive forms of exchange that I wish to end this
key note.
* Wim van Binsbergen holds the chair of ‘ethnicity and ideology in development processes in the Third World’ at the Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; he is also head of the Theme group on ‘Globalisation and socio-cultural transformation’ at the African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands. He is one of the convenors of the present conference, with Richard Fardon and Rijk van Dijk. The conference situates itself within a wider framework, set by the EIDOS conference programme ‘The retreat from the real’ (initiated by Flip Quarles van Ufford and Marc Hobart); the WOTRO programme on ‘‘Globalization and the construction of communal identities’, initiated by Peter Geschiere & Wim van Binsbergen, and subsequently directed by a Steering Committee comprising, in addition, Bonno Thoden van Velzen and Peter van der Veer; and the research objectives of the African Studies Centre and specifically of its Theme group on ‘Globalisation and socio-cultural transformation’.
** I am
indebted to the policy-makers J. Boer, P.J. Sciarone, W.A. Erath,
W.J. Veenstra, and to my academic colleagues F. Quarles van
Ufford, R. van Dijk and H. Meilink, for extensive discussions
which have helped to inspire and improve the present paper, for
the shortcomings of which, however, I remain solely responsible.
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