Carla Freeman
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country … In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants … the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.
(Karl Marx in Marx and Engels 1979 [1848]: 476–77, italics added)
Globalization is arguably today’s favorite buzz-word, and as with all buzz-words, there is both substance and vacuity in the degree to which it signals everything from the purported homogenization of life-ways and “world culture” to the primacy of world markets and the transnational flow of finance capital, and the supposed decline of the nation-state. The vastness of globalization as both a concept and a set of contemporary processes makes it difficult to grasp in all of its complexity and its apparent embrace of virtually all domains of life and corners of the world. Indeed, globalization and neoliberalism, in many ways its economic synecdoche, have become, to use Henrietta Moore’s term, “concept-metaphors that float between and across popular and academic domains … as theoretical concepts and as descriptive referents to a seemingly endless range of contemporary processes and experiences” (2005: 25).
Ironically, although because of its scope, globalization would seem to demand analytical holism, in fact it has often been tackled from the primary perspectives of either economy or culture, and contained within debates about homogenization or hybridity (Hannerz 1991; Yudice 2003; etc.). To boot, academic discourse has largely accepted a division of labor between economic and cultural perspectives such that macro processes are explored in political-economic terms, while attention to culture more often appears in micro or “local” case studies. Economic systems of globalization are portrayed as causing a range of effects that take shape both economically and culturally on “local” or national ground. Concomitantly, it has been the realm of production that has constituted an early and dominant site of globalization analysis, while efforts to examine the cultural dimensions of globalization have inclined toward the growing circulation and consumption of new media, commodities, and technologies, and the culture industries of film, television, and internet communications, etc. (Pieterse 2004; Featherstone 1990; Friedman 1994). The tendency to polarize macro, masculinized forces of the global capitalist economy against micro, feminized spheres of local culture has also subtly but powerfully privileged the former, macro scaled, analysis as bearing the weight of globalization theory, while treatments of the latter, local, and particular domains are generally ascribed the status of illustrative ethnographic case studies (see, for examples, the theoretical and historical works of Jameson 1991; Harvey 1989; Robertson 1992; and recent ethnographic works of Liechty 2003; Lan 2006; Pun 2005, to mention but a few).
Efforts to examine the convergences, clashes, and knotty articulations of the scale, dimensions, and expressions of globalization have been suggested in such various concepts as “glocalization” (Robertson 1992), “frictions” (Tsing 2005), and “global assemblages” (Ong and Collier 2004). However, retaining both dialectical complexity and a nuanced reading of the particulars of globalization—the gendered and racialized permutations of economy/culture, production/consumption amid what Harvey (1989) evocatively called the “time–space compression” of postmodernity—remains a challenge in the enterprise of globalization theory (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 305). Where Jameson (1991) and Harvey have arguably contributed the most weighty and enduring treatises on late capitalism as a distinctive phase of capitalist accumulation and commodification, it is not only in the provocative spheres of high art, literature, architecture, and “mass” or commercial culture that these complex processes are to be seen. Whereas for Jameson and Harvey the cultural logic of postmodernity is inextricable from its economic fragmentation and form, the questions of where culture is located and how it gets articulated and contested in people’s lived experience are harder, and yet essential, to address. Globalization is enacted in the particulars of social, cultural, and economic life, in the “otherness” or “difference” that Harvey himself concedes has been underrecognized. It is precisely to understanding such realms of particularity that much of the recent ethnography contributes, and in so doing, I would suggest, it contributes indispensably to our very capacity to theorize globalization.
This essay promises neither definition nor conclusion as to globalization’s limits, threats, or promises. Instead, my discussion takes as its focus the relationship between culture and “the global”—what is “cultural” about globalization and how does “the global” work in and through the stickiness and particularities of culture? What I propose at the outset is simply that we question the pervasively generic pretense of globalization. Globalization is always both imagined and manifested in and through cultural and historical particulars. My premise is not that globalization threatens and refashions culture, but that globalization itself is imbricated within various cultural forms and meanings that come into increasing and intensified contact with one another. This argument can be broken down into two very simple but critical parts. The first is a refusal to read globalization as a singular and monolithic force that operates outside the fabric of culture, in the US, India, China, or anywhere else in the world. The second is a purposeful engagement with culture/economy not as dual spheres—as they are often portrayed— but rather as mutually constitutive forces, and domains of practice and meaning. Economic relations themselves are understood as embedded in specific cultural understandings and constructs (e.g. what kinds of people do what kinds of work and why, how these people are situated within class and other hierarchies, and how they can move within and outside these groupings). Cultural forms and meanings involve both structural economic, affective dimensions, and meanings. I highlight in this essay the dialectics of culture/economy across the domains of production/consumption in order not only to examine the political economy of global labor and commodification, but to provide a window into the changing contours of “selfhood” the project of identity-making. Exploring how globalization works in and through culture to foster new concepts of the self—and, specifically, how the notion that under neoliberal capitalism the person becomes an “entrepreneur” of the self—offers a particularly powerful lens on the simultaneity of cultural/economic forces and meanings.
As prescient as Marx was in the quotation on p. 577, to anticipate the global expansion of wants and goods in the capitalist system, his and Engels’s understanding of labor and capital lay largely outside the specificities of culture, arguably limiting their imagination as to the manifestations and meanings this globalization would entail. Indeed, what many of the case studies of global production suggest is that although multinational capitalists have criss-crossed the globe with assembly lines whose goods bear no marks of their makers, production is not generic in the organization of labor, the recruitment and discipline of laborers, or the meanings and identities attached to these complex processes. However much multinational corporations have attempted to minimize the interfering “noise” of culture as they set up assembly plants across the world, culture and historical legacies resurface at every juncture, whether as challenges to the mandate that “global” workers be uniformly young, single, and childless women (Freeman 2000), in the form of spontaneous production stoppages due to outbreaks of spirit possession and calls for local religious mediation (Ong 1987), or in numerous other ways. Indeed, dominant discourses of globalization have often portrayed the weighty and powerful engines of a masculinized global capitalism as tapping into local and feminized labor and incorporating it into a highly disciplined and standardized orbit of production. However, ethnographic accounts reveal that such imagined “docile” and “available” labor pools are often already, or soon become, agents of globalization capable of reshaping not only production processes, but also their ideological foundations and future possibilities. That cultural forms and expressions—whether religious rituals, structures of kinship, styles of music and art, ideologies, or ethics of labor—are increasingly entangled within a global consumer marketplace prompts a broader interpretation of how “the global” is articulated in people’s lived experience. This interpretation entails not only discussion of the ways in which people come to understand and experience their own identities through specific cultural idioms and relations of production, but at the same time, increasingly, how consumption represents a potent medium through which dimensions of self are enacted and experienced.
The yearning for new goods, media, and styles as a medium for modern self-expression—especially among the youth and aspiring middle classes of the world—offers a window into some of the most fascinating and daunting aspects of globalization. Not only is global consumption in the popular domain full of arresting expressions of juxtaposition—the Maasi warrior sporting Ray-Ban glasses, burka-clad women enjoying a refreshing Coca-Cola, the outpacing of salsa over ketchup in the American diet—but it also represents an especially fertile ground in which to analyze the tensions and inversions inherent in the familiar binaries of global/local, homogeneity/hybridity, modernity/ tradition, macro/micro.
According to some observers, new modes of consumption offer liberating pleasures and creative identity-making projects for a growing number of social actors. Others see a never-ending swirl of desire, trapping youth in a ceaseless hunger to adorn themselves with the signs of modernity, offering little to address the chasm between rich and poor, and proving ephemeral in their satisfactions at best. Some have argued that in the de-industrialized West, consumption has trumped production as the basis for class consciousness and identity and therefore “class” as we knew it is dead (Pakulski and Waters 1996). I suggest that precisely the ambiguities—anxieties, desires, and dreams— introduced by new modes of consumption beg for deeper analysis. And the increasingly complex interconnections between consumption and production as sources of self-identification and social/economic practice offer a critical opportunity to re-examine how such meanings and boundary projects are reframed under globalization.
Clearly influenced by Marx, one model that first drew attention to the critical juncture of production and consumption under globalization was proposed by Maria Mies (1986). Path-breaking at the time, her study not only characterized the active dialectic of domination/dependency entailed in the First/Third World dyad of industrialization and development, but located the gendered deployment of women as a key nexus of this exploitative relationship. She proposed that the emerging global system was predicated upon the simultaneous proletarianization of Third-World women and what she called the “housewifization” of First-World women. In short, Mies argued that what was then referred to as the “new international division of labor” rests simultaneously upon the creation of cheap feminine labor forces in developing countries and the creation of an active pool of eagerly consuming “middle-class housewives” in the West. However, what Mies could not have anticipated was the rapid rate at which mass consumption, mass media, and information would circulate multidirectionally. The neat boundaries of Mies’s model—in which the “Third” World represented a repository of poor women workers and the “First” World represented the site of middle-class (feminine) consumption and domesticity—failed to imagine both the internal complexities of labor and consumption within “First” and “Third” Worlds, and the ways in which these articulations would become increasingly dynamic.
Indeed, both global assembly lines and global commodity markets have become increasingly diversified and complex. In an expanding array, labor-intensive industries in search of cheaper labor are migrating to developing countries. The movement of jobs from “global north” to “global south” has extended from agricultural extraction and low-level manufacturing to include “white collar” services like graphic design, accounting, and even medicine. At the same time, other global circuits have stimulated a flow in the opposite direction, from “developing” to “post-industrial” nations, of jobs in seasonal agricultural labor, temporary domestic work, to highly trained IT and other professional arenas. Within these movements, the powerful reach of global consumption has expanded to include all corners of the world—from those people in flux to those who stay put, those whose labor is directly tapped by global industries and those aspiring to new middle-class status, to those who remain in the hungry shadows either un- or underemployed. We now see in abundant ways that what appeared to be unidirectional circuits of production and consumption are increasingly multidirectional and in constant flux.
Pei-Chia Lan (2006) illustrates, for example, the critical importance and contradictory meanings of cell phones for Indonesian and Filipino domestic workers in Taiwan. On the one hand, they serve as highly valued status markers and key communicative devices to maintain contact with children and kin networks oversees and to foster social ties with new friends. On the other hand, the cell phone becomes a monitoring device used by employers intent to keep tabs on their employees—both while minding their children and on their ostensible “free” time. Thus, cell phones are both highly desired signs of modernity and mechanisms of surveillance and control. For Ngai Pun (2005), young Chinese factory workers urgently embrace new modes of consumption (fashion, makeup, accessories) as much desired elements of leisure in order to ease the exhaustion and alienation of production and to disguise their rural migrant marginality in the modern city. Many find, however, that rather than achieving their consumerist dream of transformation, such consumption instead reinforces the very gendered and localized peasant identities they seek to overcome.
If, as Marx argued, production is an alienating process in which workers lose control of themselves by losing control over their labor, Pun suggests that it is in the realm of consumption that producers attempt to rectify their alienation, and that therein is to be found the dialectic of production/consumption (Pun 2005: 163).
Like Lan and Pun, I want to draw attention not only to the ways in which globalizing modes of consumption are inextricable from global production but how together these forces come to bear upon new dialectical articulations of gender, class, race, culture, and location. To do so, I turn to the Caribbean island of Barbados, long understood to be not simply steeped in a history of globalization but created by its very forces.
Shaped by British conquest and colonial settlement in the name of colossal export production (sugar), peopled entirely by migrants—enslaved, indentured, and free—Barbados offers a vivid example of the central dialectics of globalization. In this region long spurned by social scientists for its apparent lack of “pure” cultures, the now popular concepts of “creole” and “hybridity” find evocative renderings, and local–cultural paradigms offer powerful clues for interpreting contemporary globalization and locality. To illustrate a rich and complex conjuncture between Caribbean cultural history and the contemporary forces of globalization, I introduce a group of social actors I have studied over the past decade who represent an emergent fraction of the Barbadian middle class, as well as, in essence, a new direction in the national development strategy for a small island economy in the changing tides of global capitalism. Their lives and dreams give expression to many of the global dialectics mentioned above, and illustrate the cultural complexities and particularities of globalization itself.
This group of new middle-class entrepreneurs is made up of a wide variety of women and men who have departed from a longstanding Barbadian tradition in which upward mobility and middle-class status have been associated with the pursuit of education, stable long-term employment, and a heavily bureaucratized public sector. By eschewing higher education, or leaving secure jobs in established public-sector or private-company domains, and entering into entrepreneurial endeavors that often depend upon global imports, exports, and styles of management, these individuals mark both a new social landscape of the middle-class in the Caribbean, and also a new and growing subject of globalization—the “global” middle classes. Indeed the new entrepreneurs challenge boundaries and understandings of social class in ways that hinge upon changing relationships between production/consumption and illustrate not only structural economic transformations but transformations in people’s intimate and emotional lives and self-images. Intricate convergences between their productive labor and a growing sphere and intensity of consumption actively reconfigure the forms and meanings of work and self amid neoliberal globalization. The manifestations of this convergence are wideranging. They include new modes of travel, new styles of dress and comportment, changing religious and spiritual practices, new therapeutic interventions, and new forms and expectations of intimacy, marriage, and parenthood. And they provide evocative renderings of the ways in which contemporary globalization is articulated in and through local cultural practice.
In order to unpack these convergences and challenges, and their particular significance for women forging new entrepreneurial livelihoods and identities, I make use of one of Caribbean region’s most powerful and controversial gate-keeping concepts—that of “reputation–respectability,” first proposed in the 1960s by anthropologist Peter Wilson (1973: 9). I want to suggest that this regional cultural paradigm provides an indispensable tool for challenging the notion of globalization as a singular or homogenizing force of contemporary social change comprehensible through a singular epistemological frame. Wilson argued that the Anglophone Caribbean region can be broadly understood as steeped within the structures and ideologies of two competing but dialectically related value systems or cultural models: respectability—the inescapable legacy of colonial dependence through which patterns of social hierarchy are upheld and reproduced; and reputation—a set of responses to colonial domination and the elusiveness of respectability through which people enact creative individualism and at the same time achieve a social leveling, or “communitas.” Although this formulation has been critiqued by scholars of the region as too rigidly binary, it has also retained enduring analytical valence as a heuristic for the contemporary context.
Respectability, for Wilson, encodes a set of colonially defined values and mores endorsed and practiced largely by the middle class (women, in particular, and old or married men as well). Ideals of social order, propriety, monogamy, and domesticity are enacted through the institutions of formal marriage, schools, and the Anglican Church. Respectability sanctions the nuclear patriarchal family over the more fluid “visiting union” and casual sexual relations, and enshrines the white Christian church over other nascent syncretic denominations. The essence of reputation, by contrast, is a kind of improvisational adaptability or flexibility associated primarily with a lower-class and masculine public sphere of performance and sociality, encompassing such venues as street corners, the political platform, the rum shop, the market, and the musical stage—all associated with such attributes as sexual prowess, verbal wit, musical flair, and economic guile. Whereas the path of respectability in Barbados historically has been marked by formal education leading to a place in the secure hierarchy of the civil service or the crowning professional achievement of a career in law or medicine, the qualities that Wilson describes as central to reputation can be thought of as the embodiment of an entrepreneurial esprit—always adaptive, self-defined, and in opposition to bureaucratic hierarchy. How this Caribbean model brings into relief the dialectics of culture/economy integral to contemporary globalization is evocatively demonstrated by considering emerging entrepreneurs who seek to navigate new paths of economic mobility and personhood.
No figure better embodies the demands and qualities of neoliberalism than the entrepreneur—whose flexible capacity for self mastery, responsiveness to market changes, and willingness to retrain and retool make the entrepreneur a widely celebrated hero of global capitalism and the epitome of modern individualism (Beck 1992; Bourdieu 1998). De Toqueville and Schumpeter, among others, equated economic adventurism and entrepreneurship with the essence of American Protestant culture from its inception. However, in the Barbadian cultural and historical context, the entrepreneur has had adifferent resonance. Here, this figure has signified a more marginal identity—of economic survival and a path of last resort more than one of leadership and status. Because of the recent decline of the island’s sugar industry—its economic backbone for some three hundred years—and a precarious position in the global marketplace of tourism and off-shore services, entrepreneurship has been identified by the state as the new-found key to economic growth, and has become not just a new profile of economic possibility, but a new framework for Barbadian selfhood.
The growth of entrepreneurship today is encouraged zealously by the Barbados government, NGOs, and the local private sector, which have all introduced a wide range of initiatives, from youth training programs to small-credit schemes, to spur new entrepreneurial endeavors. Simultaneously, government efforts to restructure and whittle down the social-welfare system and the public sector (the single largest employer) mirror such steps elsewhere in the developing world, compelling people to look for new economic directions. Indeed, a government sector that once demonized the informal economy as an unauthorized (untaxed) drain on the formal economic structure now eagerly promotes self-employment and independent business not just for “micro-entrepreneurs” but for members of the middle class—black as well as white. This local promotion of entrepreneurship closely resembles the global capitalist agenda of neoliberalism at large— market-driven competition spurring individuals toward self-propelled economic enterprise that is flexible and responsive to changing conditions and demand, and industriously operates outside the support and unwieldy bureaucratic intrusion of the state.
However, for Barbadian women and men, entrepreneurship represents a dramatic departure from traditionally idealized paths of upward mobility and respectable middleclass status. Where former generations emphasized education, a university degree, a secure and long-term job in government or a large private company, today young people increasingly set their sights on business and resist the rigidity of large institutional hierarchies. The Oxbridge tradition of the region’s early prime ministers—including Eric Williams, Norman Manley, and Grantley Adams—once set the standard for achievement to which children even of the island’s poorest families might aspire. But now, in a radical turn, the aspirational goals have shifted toward American icons of self-invention like Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, and Bill Gates. Titans of American entrepreneurship who have made their own way in the world without the imprimatur of prestigious credentials now capture the imagination and dreams of Barbadian youth and parents alike. The shift constitutes a decisive break with the past for this post-colonial nation known both proudly and mockingly as “Little England” for its Anglophilic culture of bureaucratic order, conservatism, and respectability. As the government sector and corporate arena are shrinking and unstable, individuals are forging new paths of economic enterprise, embracing the discourse of neoliberal self-sufficiency, industry, and flexibility—all key aspects of the local cultural tradition of “reputation.” In so doing, they are actively both redrawing the local profile of the middle class and giving new shape to the Barbadian landscape of respectability, middle-class lifestyles, and culture (Freeman 2007).
The “global” frames these transformations in unmistakable ways. New business owners quote familiar US business gurus like the late Peter Drucker and the Microsoft giant Bill Gates; they make contact with US firms to source materials and supplies, and they view US business culture as a goal to be achieved while fashioning regional and even global circuits of distribution. Nevertheless, they simultaneously employ social networks and cultural resources that can only be understood within national and regional frames. Entrepreneurship, for them, represents a new promise of upward mobility and social esteem once perceived to be the preserve of other, more “respectable” occupations. Entrepreneurial pursuits are motivated frequently by the goal of creativity and self-regulation, dispensing with hierarchy, bosses, and the “establishment” in ways that are reminiscent of reputation’s longstanding anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and oppositional qualities. Entrepreneurship also allows for middle-class women to enter fields (manufacturing, transportation, etc.) that would otherwise be viewed as unsuitable for “respectable” Barbadian ladies. For these entrepreneurs, increasingly, flexibility is being decoupled from its lower-class associations with reputation, and is being harnessed to the goals of class mobility, economic security, and middle-class self-invention in the context of the contemporary global economy. Flexibility thus embodies simultaneously the marks of neoliberal capitalism and the local cultural value of reputation.
Yet, if entrepreneurship is strongly associated with the values of “reputation” in the constant demand for adaptability, travel, and the capacity to navigate various public domains and a wide range of social groups, “respectability” continues to be sought and romanticized in the realms of marriage and church. In a country known for its kinship tradition of “matrifocality,” I discovered a striking reversal of this national profile at work. For, whereas according to the latest census, only about 25 percent of the adult population are reported to be married and nearly half of all households in the country are headed by women, an inverse of this picture emerged from my research: roughly 60 percent of the entrepreneurs I studied (n = 85) were married and only 15 percent were female heads of households. In the realm of religion, too, intriguing transformations speak to the reaches of globalization. Most entrepreneurs I interviewed eschew the Anglican Church of their childhood in favor of a range of new individualized spiritual activities as well as Pentecostal and “new-age” churches. We see in these patterns that some longstanding codes of respectability associated with middle-class life in Barbados are being upheld not only as ideals but in practice, albeit in new guises. Entrepreneurial women are strongly invested in the institutions of marriage and the church. Notably, however, the forms of marriage and expressions of religious practice that they are keen to enact—and the close relationship of these new practices to a general spirit of entrepreneurialism—have imbued these revered institutions of respectability with signature elements of reputation.
Women and men entrepreneurs use the language of “partnership” to describe their marriages and enact relationships in new ways that prioritize the couple over traditional single-sex social groups of friends and “crews” and in a new range of associated activities meant to enhance romantic and emotional compatibility, all of which they describe as new, “modern,” and less typical among their parents’ generation. Based on active rejection of the traditional patriarchal household, these new partnerships are forged around the ideal of sharing responsibilities, economic support, decision-making, household expenses, and leisure time. At least as important is an emphasis on sharing feelings, values, intimacy, and the stresses and pleasures of life. Like entrepreneurship and the consumption of new goods and media, companionate marriage and ideals of romance are rich domains of global cultural practice, unmistakably familiar but situated in the particular complexities of each cultural context (Hirsch and Wardlow 2006).
The emphasis on romance, intimacy, and emotional needs, as expressed especially powerfully by entrepreneurial women, is also reflected in the kinds of new business they themselves initiate and frequent—from cafes and romantic wine bars to catering services and prepared foods for dual-career couples who wish to entertain but have little time, and to small specialty boutiques and art/craft galleries; from day spas and beauty services to personal (and personality) trainers, therapeutic massage, health and nutrition consultation, therapists specializing in holistic healing, iridology, and religiously inspired psychology, marriage counseling and yoga studios, organized transportation services, and team building exercises for high-end tourists and for the children of busy working parents—all newly expanding niches of this middle-class marketplace geared toward soothing/nourishing/adorning new middle-class subjects and fostering new middle-class selves. Not only are new businesses reflecting a new cultural economy of globalization in which increasing domains of life are becoming embedded in market relations, but personhood itself is increasingly understood as a project forever under construction.
Such reconfigurations of marriage and transformations of religious practice and spirituality signal a subtle but powerful re-crafting of respectability. The new entrepreneurs are, in growing numbers, attending US-style charismatic churches whose “prosperity gospel” preaches economic flourishing and individualism to middle-class congregations and whose interactive style departs from the “stiffness” and “formality” of traditional, mainline churches. Others favor a range of individualized forms of spirituality—from yoga and meditative practices melding elements of Eastern religions to rigorous daily exercise infused with Christian belief and biblical reading. Meanwhile, patriarchal marriage ideals (though certainly not all patriarchal practices) are giving way to a vision of intimate partnership and the extended family veers toward nuclearization and the primary “investment” in and cultivation of children, while the bureaucratic order and hierarchy of the Anglican Church and government sectors are ceding to Pentecostalism, living-room churches, and both economic and personal entrepreneurialism.
The pressure to become not only an economically self-sufficient entrepreneur but an “entrepreneur of the self” by retooling one’s intimate relationships, spirituality, parenting style, and manner of marking social class challenges some of the nation’s longstanding bureaucratic conventions, models of matrifocal kinship, patriarchal marriage, and hierarchical Anglican traditions. These dialectical convergences of economic, cultural, social, individual, and emotional spheres in which such self-making unfolds call for new tools of analysis that transcend a rigidly binary treatment of production/consumption, economy/ culture, and global/local. It might be tempting to read the transformations I have described as illustrations of the homogenizing force of globalization; however, by applying the local cultural matrix of reputation/respectability, we see that such a reading is both partial and inadequate.
One might easily feel a “déja-vu” sensation as one glimpses seemingly ubiquitous signs of neoliberal globalization that have recently emerged in Barbados as a post-colonial nation. Others described similar transformations in the globalizing logics of production and consumption recasting selfhood through the particular prisms of history and culture (Liechty 2003; Pun 2005; Fernandes 2006; Walkerdine 2003). In Pun’s (2005) account, we see that self-invention is central to Chinese women’s passionate desires when they migrate to urban factory centers. The wide range of evening classes, self-help books, romantic possibilities, and religious offerings are both familiar signs of globalization, and framed within particular Chinese characteristics. In Lan’s (2006) study, state-sponsored circuits of migration cast domestic workers as dutiful long-distance mothers and “ambassadors” whose remittances are integral to both their family’s livelihood and their homeland’s national economy; at the same time these women are actively engaged in fashioning themselves as savvy, independent, and feminine subjects in both their privatized workplaces and the global marketplace.
However, it is precisely the ways in which apparent similarities are framed within the particular contours of culture—in the case of Barbados, the rubrics of a dynamic cultural logic of Barbadian reputation/respectability—that reveal the most complex and in some ways most important cultural meanings of globalization. Globalization is driven by economic forces, and is increasingly expressed and mediated through new technologies, it is true. But many facets of the global are enacted through the textured fabric of culture by people who in effect create new social relations and new selves embedded in the particulars of place, culture, and time. The creation of new subjectivities cannot be accomplished ex nihil but instead is achieved by people who mobilize existing fragments of cultural practice and invest them with new meanings in new configurations and contexts.
As prophetic as Marx and Engels were in foreseeing the tremendous reach that global capitalism would attain, even they might have been surprised by the intricate ways in which production and consumption would become inextricable economic and cultural forces. The implications of these dialectics for redefining personhood and for redrawing the contours and class, gender, and race as lived, felt, and imagined through the particulars of culture remain some of the most potent questions of this “global” age.
I thank the editors Ming-Cheng Lo, John Hall, and Laura Grindstaff for their patient and generous engagement and conversation surrounding the broad themes of globalization and culture in the various stages of my article’s emergence. Thank you to Robert Goddard, Cory Kratz, Viranjini Munasinghe, and David Nugent for their close reading of and helpful suggestions with several longer versions of this paper, and to Gul Ozyegin, my ever generous interlocutor, who has sharpened my prose and collaborated in the development of my thinking on these matters of particularity and globalization. The Barbados fieldwork presented in this paper has been generously funded by the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Comparative and International Research at Emory University, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s MARIAL (Myth and Ritual in American Life) Center. I am grateful to them all for supporting this research, and to the brave and generous entrepreneurs who shared their time and experiences.
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