Das Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien und das Studium generale laden im Rahmen der Vortragsreihe “Konsum, Lebensstile und Globalisierung” zu folgendem Gastvortrag ein:
Prof. Dr. Jonathan Friedman (Lund)
Globalization as Will and Idea
Dienstag, 25. April 2006, 18.15 Uhr, Hörsaal 15 (Forum 7, Becherweg 4)
Cosmopolitanism can be either rationalist-modernist, culturalist-hybridist or some combination of the two. The polar tendencies in this identity, discussed years ago by Marcel Mauss, generate different results. The first associated with political internationalism seeks a common global project in which specific cultures have only a secondary place. The second is one, associated with the current situation of Western hegemonic decline, in which the celebration or at least the identification with the world’s cultures is a goal in itself. Cosmopolitan identities are primarily class-based and associated with global elites and with their wanna-be followers, often intellectuals. In its current variant, which has a long history of its own, it can be said to be the source of the discourses of globalization-multiculturalism-hybridity.
The paper addresses the logic of this production process, i.e. the way in which cosmopolitan identity can be understood as the social origin of such discourses. The fact that the latter tend toward hegemonic status is also central to the analysis attempted here. This ideological complex has had an impact on anthropology as well as other disciplines and intellectual domains where it has produced a strange conflation of normative and objectivist propositions about the world, where the emic has been totally conflated with the etic and where the theoretical has become increasingly reduced to ideological representations of the world via a simple suppression of any distance between statements about reality and something out there that might falsify such statements.
Jonathan Friedman is directeur d'études at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Lund, Sweden. He has done research and written on Southeast Asia, Oceania and Europe. His has written on more general issues concerning structuralist and Marxist theory, models of social and cultural transformation, and, for the past 25 years, on the anthropology of global process, cultural formations and the practices of identity. He is editor of Anthropological Theory, and a member of the editorial collective of several journals journals, including Social Analysis, Ethnos, Theory, Culture and Society. He has contributed to international journals and books on issues ranging from globalization, to ethnicity, to the nature of political correctness. His books include Cultural Identity and Global Process (1994, London: Sage), (ed.) Consumption and Identity (1994 London: Harwood), System, Structure and Contradiction in the Evolution of 'Asiatic' Social Formations (1998; 2nd edition: Globalization, the Sate and Volence, Altamira 2002); with R. Denemark, B. Gills and G. Modelski, World System History: The Science of Long Term Change (London, Routledge 2000), with S. Randeira, Worlds on the Move: Globalization, Migration and Cultural Security (London, Tauris 2004); with C. Chase-Dunn, Hegemonic Declines: Present and Past (Boulder, Paradigm Press 2005), and with Kajsa Ekholm-Friedman, Essays in Global Anthropology (Altamira, in press).