Deterritorialization, Globalization and Culture

Deterritorialization

Deterritorialization can be defined as the diluting of a certain native population’s or habitat’s social, cultural, or political practices. As a result, it has the potential to become a culturally general state resulting from the spread of global modernity, with the implication that it affects more people in the world than ever before by drastically affecting their day-to-day lives. The term “deterritorialization” has numerous connotations. According to Tomlinson, many scholars identify the vocabulary of deterritorialization when discussing the globalization process. He claims, however, that some researchers would still prefer to use comparable terms such as “displacement” or “delocalization.” It stresses on different points adopted by the use of different terms, but primarily, we can easily understand these words in the perspective of the transformation between the local and that of the global modernity cultures. Tomlinson here uses “deterritorialization” to put into perspective the phenomenon rather than using “delocalization” (Tomlinson 100). We can reveal that “deterritorialization” was broader and focused on the liberation of the “local” natives, which is a process that is affected by factors beyond neighborhood and familiar locality, to the in-depth influence of the distant place.

World cultures and globalization

World cultures influence national and ethnic cultures because of accelerating globalization. Globalization process also affects other sectors such as economic system and the political system. Alongside a complex connectivity, “cosmopolitanism” and “deterritorialization” are the two principal points in interpreting and describing the cultural globalization (Tomlinson 102). Culture is traditionally linked closely to places, and it is immovable. However, under the globalization conditions, the relation between cultures and venues is reconstructed.

Expanding the meaning of deterritorialization

According to Tomlinson (105), “deterritorialization” expands its meaning beyond travel and transformation of cultures to an ever-widening horizon. For instance, the American popular music e.g. rap and rock and roll spread to Beijing and China. Globalization is not limited to “cultural deposition,” or locality, but instead, thinks globally, while integrating the concerns of others into the mundane practices. The view reveals the enthusiasm for humanism. Tomlinson’s cultural globalization expands to food culture which transformed British food culture after the development of food industry. This was accelerated by what was known as global industrial food production which involved canning of food, processing that brought about something referred to as supermarket culture (Tomlinson 111). Consumption of food by the Western countries from production in the developing countries developed.

Impact of globalization on cultural sphere

Tomlinson indicated that imperialism has ceaselessly been the target of criticism since it was started. The advent of globalization was motivated and promoted by technology and media, and it accelerated the logic of modernity. Tomlinson was very optimistic about globalization and seemed that the developmental course is unclear and ambiguous. There are many views concerning globalization, but with interdependence and interconnection increasing, it paradoxically reveals more vulnerability. Globalization might not lead to desirable outcome even from a perspective of cultural sphere. The cultural heritage is entirely influenced by the hybridization, homogenization, and differentiation, and this profound hybrid character precisely provides it with a better complexity and introduces into it the conflicts derived from growing multi-culturally.

Work Cited

Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. University of Chicago Press, 1999.