Globalisation, Hybridization And Globalization

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The term globalization is too broad to define with just “the world as a single place” (Robertson, from Gopinath, 2008, pg. 8). It links people to several concepts such as global warming, clash of civilizations, war on terrorism, and to products of consumption goods like Coca-Cola and MacDonald’s (Gopinath, 2008, pg. 1). Peter Burke (2009) claims that despite this phenomena’s implication of breaking physical barriers and melting existing diverse cultures to create one giant global culture, the world is still unlikely to become completely homogenized. However, cultures will change and develop to a certain extent, and this change will have the potential to maintain civil social relations by increasing and encouraging tolerance. This essay will support that statement by using examples of several case studies.
Culture is defined as “beliefs and values shared by a group of people”, and an individual belonging to a culture behaves and makes decisions according a pre-established set of rules and beliefs (from Martinez-Lopez and Sousa, 2004, pg. 31). Professor of Sociology T. K. Oommen explained in an interview (from Kumar and Welz, 2003) the process through which the global culture is created, which is made of four processes: homogenization, pluralisation, traditionalisation, and Hybridization.
Homogenization is the system through which the global culture communicates. It links people and allows them insight into “what is happening in different parts of the world” (Kumar and Welz, 2003, pg. 103). This leads to pluralisation, which strives to meet the needs of the local people. Indian democracy serves as an example, “with its numerous parties that are anchored in religion” according to the varying beliefs of the regions, unlike the Unit...

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...al differences. Taking the English language as an example, despite being dominant Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese are still widespread and as equally powerful. The same applies for varying religions, they’re too influential and strong to disappear, but at the same time they’re influencing each other and producing sub-religions that could be one of both, such as Zen-Catholicism and Zen-Judaism (Burke, 2009, pg. 110-111). The Hong Kong case study further supports this by indicating that along with language, norms and religion even education is powerless against change as technology develops and ideas and values shift with time (Ho and Law, 2009) and Burke (2009) comes back to this by comparing cultures to construction sites that will require changes with age, as well as paint jobs and reconstructions, but the base will pretty much remain the same.

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