Globalisation

It is argued that globalisation does not necessarily result in the domination and erasure of local cultures but rather engenders a resistance which can take the best of the global and reinforce and revitalise the potency of local cultures. Discuss with reference to the readings and concepts encountered in the subject.

Globalisation does not necessarily result in the domination and erasure of local cultures, is a positive statement one can make from the reading Understanding Globalisation: History and Representation in the Emergence of the World as a Single Place, (Holton 1998). We will be looking at where globalisation comes from, or as far back as we can trace it in history. Globalisation engenders a resistance which can take the best of the global and reinforce and revitalise the potency of local cultures. Also, with looking at the reading mentioned previously and defining the term globalisation one can see that it would be quite the best of the global cultures which are taken and reinforced and revitalised into the local cultures, that is that my understanding of the term ‘global’ in the question is to mean ‘global cultures’. As we all know, it is a simple fact of history which is able to show that global cultures are where the best come from in order to revitalise local cultures.

Globalisation is historical, and was present in the vast past of the world. It is through the history that we can see globalisation did exist and took several forms, history, politics, economics, religion, capitalism, social behaviour, modernisation, and imperialism. These were all present in history from the beginning. There was the developing of ‘The West’ which did create dominance of local cultures from those who claimed to be superior. We know that ‘The West’ was a social level of development, which first occurred in Europe. In Hall’s definition of ‘The West’ in, Formations of Modernity, we are told that a society of the west is “developed, industrialised, urbanized, capitalist, and modern”(p277). These societies were “a result of historical processes - economic, political, social and cultural”(p277). Therefore, it can be said in broad terms that it is the rising of the west which enables the west, the globalised nations, to gain dominance and near to total erasure of local cultures. With this rising of the west there is also capitalism and imperialism without a doubt and it is though these elements that there is domination and almost total erasure that occurs.