How "American" Is Globalization?

2. The Resistance of the Local

On Sunday morning most of the French who live in old Avignon pay a visit not to church but to Les Halles. In this cramped market at the center of the city, they meet their neighbors, co-workers, their dentists and doctors, friends in from the country, their children’s teachers, and, later on,the priest.The food sold here is mostly local—mushrooms and cheese from the Luberon, truffles and some boar in season, seafood from Marseilles , mounds of fruits and vegetables from the Rhone valley. The few imports are fruit from Italy, Israel, and Morocco, English jellies and canned goods. There are no organically modified foods, no Coke, no fast food, no logos, no chains, no advertising, and few tourists. The language of the vendors is French, spoken with tu-vous distinctions and the singsong intonation of commercial custom. Many customers reply in Proven çal,a few in Occitan.I would not be understood in English.Many stall owners are third or fourth generation, and at least one traces his lineage back to a fournisseur of Clement, one of the “black” popes. There are comparable scenes all over the world. Once we can see this local resilience, resistance to globalization is everywhere. Yet critics like Jameson see not resilience but fragility: “Each national culture and daily life is a seamless web of habits and habitual practices, which form a totality or system. It is very easy to break up such traditional cultural systems, which extend to the way people live in their bodies and use language, as well as the way they treat each other and nature. Once destroyed those fabrics can never be recreated.”¹ In fact, it is not “very easy to break up such traditional cultural systems.” And his colleague Sherif Hetata’s notion that “the spread of global culture is the corollary of a global economy ” is just a bad metaphor.² Culture does not work by corollaries—it is 2 The Resistance of the Local not math—and it is only partly rational or economic. Culture is local. It is incredibly durable, and I detail some, but hardly all, of the reasons why in this section. One of the major reasons for local resistance, as Dusan Kecmanovic has explained, is that the global economy itself raises insecurities that intensify regionalism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism—in short, the global economy intensifies local culture. Even if nation-states disappeared, Kecmanovic argues, ethnoregionalism would endure. This is not hard to understand: from infancy onward, customs of food, language , gender, use of space, education, work patterns, cleanliness, thrift, religion, racism, honesty, and regard for authority overwhelm the individual . These forces truly create us. Any individual who could escape the formative grasp of his or her early acculturation to adopt “globalized culture ” would be quite extraordinary. Most of what we call “culture” is formed in infancy. Mountains of scholarship exist that document the predisposition for early cultural imprinting ; these show that infants acquire much of a culture before they can speak. As children, they learn foods, languages, spatial systems, gender relations, and family structure long before they are ever exposed to anything commercial,much less “globalized.”They are initiated into educationalpatterns ,religion,aculture’sapproachtowardwork,towardhonesty , and toward authority.Attitudes toward race, foreigners, mechanization , and migrants follow. As sociologists Geert Hofstede and Ronald Inglehart have shown in large pan-national studies, these cultural attitudes have proved extremely obdurate to globalization.Let’s examine just a few of these features. Language Language acquisition is the subject of an immense literature, but it can be bowdlerized by stating that there is no language like la langue maternelle . The language learned in infancy is not only the one learned best, but also the one that structures an individual’s expression most importantly , even in speaking other languages. Only professional translators and those who have grown up truly bilingual have full command of a second language. To give but one example, the subtle shift in English meaning caused by a change from the indefinite article a to the definite article the escapes the first notice of nonnative speakers even after decades in the United States. Comparable difficulties exist in the other languages that I know (French, Spanish, German, and Japanese). Most multilingual people speak their second language in a patois, missing prepositions or 82 How “American” Is Globalization? liaisons or postpositional markers. The rising and falling intonations of...