Caralde | Global Capitalism and dynamics of culture

Abstract
The dynamics of culture is complex and diverse and are often characterized, not only by the
hegemonic control of social and political structures, but of contradicting processes that subsume
politics, spaces, identities, power, media, consumer products, history and our very own bodies
through global migration. While the means and relations of production from colonial to the post
colonial periods of our civilization have greatly transformed society and the individual, there are
residual traces that capitalizes on race and gender rather than class, that slowly emerged to
become the most salient and effective means of global capitalism in taking the upper hand in
cultural reproductions that in turn serves their political and economic survival. Foregrounded in
this paper are the notions of global flows of capital, labor and cultural practices specifically in
the current moment of global or late capitalism; our understanding and construction of ethnicities
and identities through media; and the gendered and racialized global organization of labor that
brings forth an even more intense, rearticulated and internalized form of inequality.
Keywords: culture, global capitalism, identity, race, labor

Ang dinamikong pag-inog ng kultura ay masalimuot at masaklaw na kinatatangian hindi lamang

ng pagdomina or pagmonopolyo ng panlipunan at pulitikal na istruktura, bagkus ay kakikitaan
ng matingkad na proseso ng kontradiksyon na kinabibilangan ng pulitika, espasyo, identidad,
kapangyarihan, midya, produktong pangkonsumo, kasaysayan at ang mismong ating mga
katawan sa pamamagitan ng global migration. Habang ang pwersa at relasyon sa produksyon
ang naging pangunahing salik ng panlipunan at indibidwal na transpormasyon mula sa ating
kolonyal at post-kolonyal na sibilisasyon, mayroong mga bakas at latak pa rin ng nakaraan na
nagpapatingkad sa usaping race at gender imbis na usaping uri, na ngayon ay unti-unting
nanunuot at nagiging pangunahing skema ng kapitalistang globalisasyon upang manaig sa
paglikha at sirkulasyon ng kultura at sa tuwirang pag-igpaw nito sa mga krisis. Inihahain ng
papel na ito ang mga konsepto ng pandaigdigang daloy ng kapital, lakas paggawa at
produksyong pangkultura sa kasalukuyang yugto ng pangdaigdigang kapitalismo; ang ating
pang-unawa at konstruksyon ng identidad at etnisidad sa pamamagitan ng midya; at ang

Caralde | Global Capitalism and dynamics of culture

makabagong pagorganisa ng lakas paggawa batay sa race at gender na lubhang nagpapatindi

at nagpapalalim ng di pagkakapantay-pantay.
Keywords: kultura, pandaigdigang kapitalismo, identidad, race, lakas paggawa

The dynamics of culture, as discussed and explored in the articles that we have discussed in
class, reveals not only its complexity and diversity but also its contradicting processes that
subsume politics, spaces, identities, power, media, consumer products, history and our very own
bodies through global migration.
Consequences of conquests
European voyages of exploration and discovery of the uncivilized Orient did not only generate
new territories, raw materials and slaves/laborers for their emerging industries, but more so, it
subtly crystallized a peculiar gaze towards the ethnic tribes of conquered territories, framed as
prized possessions and cultural collectibles in world trade fairs and exhibits (Corbey,1995).
These voyages on the other hand marked the ocean and seas as political and economic
battlefields for both the colonial masters and the ethnic tribes that sprung out of this movement
of trade and capital, and from which their ethnic identities were circumscribed unfairly as
savage pirates (Warren, 1997). Warrens arguments on how Europeans constructed the ethnic
identity of the Iranun and Balangingi points us to consider the unitary historical process rather
than isolating the phenomenon of maritime raiding and slavery from the context of the demands
of China trade for commodities like tea, sea cucumber, birds nest and firearms which, in the first
place, was the driving force of these supposed piracy (p.414). Maritime raiding and slavery
alone were not the bases for the consolidation of the Sulu Sultanate, but interestingly on how
they managed collective identities (of captive slaves from different parts of Southeast Asia) for
social organization and mode of government (Warren, 1997). These two articles by Corbey and
Warren described how territorial and political conquest dissolved cultures and identities as much
as it also stimulates the creation or emergence of new cultures or patterns of cultural practices.

Caralde | Global Capitalism and dynamics of culture

Negotiating identities
It is also important to note that any assertion of an ethnic identity carries with it significant stakes
of economic mobility and political recognition as discussed by Resurreccion (1998) on the
claims of ancestry between the Kalanguya and Ikalahan, and Stoler (1997) on the identity crisis
of the metissage and the metis as cultural contaminants thus implicating their inclusion or
exclusion from the privileges otherwise made available to bona fide citizens. Stoler and
Resurreccions studies demonstrate how identity and ethnicity becomes a matter not only
externally between contending ethnic groups, but also internally and within an ethnic group
where contradictions and negotiations have to be dealt with. In this case, ethnicity is thought as a
primordial phenomenon, wherein the burden lies on how persuasive and objective an ethnic
group can prove its own genealogy, through shared language, customs, resource use and oral
historical narratives to gain recognition and rightful claims to ancestry.
Weber (1997) problematized this when he discussed the nuances of how one identifies with an
ethnic group based on shared language, practices, territory, history, oral and written literature,
and blood or common descent, which for him and as exemplified by Stoler and Resurreccion, is
not always the case. By citing Moermans study on the Lue ethnic group in Thailand, Weber
quoted the former in his statement that ethnicity cannot be strictly defined with reference to
objective cultural features or clear-cut boundaries but rather through an emic category of
ascription (Eriksen, 1997 p.38). To put it simply, ones identification to an ethnic group depends
on how an individual believes and associates himself/herself to be a member of that group, and
on how he acts according to the practices of that ethnic group.
An important point in Eriksens discussion is the concept that ethnicity is essentially an aspect
of a relationship, not a property of a group (p. 39) and thus can only come about when there is a
political and economic need to culturally differentiate one group from another. This aspect of
social relationship and interaction also applies even to what Gans described as symbolic
ethnicity (1996) or that which draws affiliation and identification based on nostalgia of the past
or of ones ethnic or country of origin. With the disintegration of indicators of ethnicity such as

Caralde | Global Capitalism and dynamics of culture

language, territory and physical attributes, symbolic ethnicity serves as a bond or remaining
identifier of what would otherwise be an unnoticeable cultural difference.
This in turn leads us to consider how identity and ethnicity becomes closely associated and
tangled with the way nation-states govern their population, a kind of biopolitics that heightens
the stakes involved as this would be the basis of the states resource allocation and social
organization, thus disturbing an ethnic groups certainty of survival or at least its maintenance.
If the assertion of ethnicity is manifested in how individuals or groups participate in the
production and circulation of cultural practices, the processes of its production and meaning
making are equally significant. Hobsbawn (1983) then leads us to the examination of traditions,
whether old or recent ones, as invented and not naturally occurring, currently moving and
evolving rather than being static. This notion of constructedness of traditions is not devoid of
interests and reference to the past and future aspirations of a certain group. In fact, traditions
evolve and develop because society reacts and re-appropriate meanings from the past to serve
their current context.
Global capitalist flow and its unevenness
This dynamic development of historic practices and consequently of identities is further
elaborated by Appadurai in his discussion of the ethnoscapes (1996) and Brodkin (2000) in her
discussion of global capitalism and the inevitable resurgence of new modes of racialized labor,
and the reconfiguration of gender roles and class.
Appadurai suggests that in understanding the forces that propel the reproduction and circulation
of cosmopolitan culture prevalent in our current local and global realms, a close analysis of
transnational cultural flows and its increasing disjuncture with ethnoscapes must be of primary
importance. Deterritorialization or the loosening of the holds between people, wealth, and
territories that fundamentally alters the basis of cultural production (Appadurai, p.49) poses not
only a dilemma on representation but more so on how individuals as subjects imagine their status
in terms of global politics. Central in the formation of a deterritorialized world is the role of

Caralde | Global Capitalism and dynamics of culture

media in projecting images and realities in both the local and global spheres that fuel our
imagination of possible lives that we can live beyond our current spatial boundaries.
Related to this transnational flow of people, media, money and consumer products is Brodkins
discussion on how global capitalism is causally and systematically linked to the construction of
race and racismclass and gender construction (p.151). Her argument brings to fore the
unevenness and striking contradiction in the process of subject formations as consequence of
global capitalism. That instead of decreasing the gap between social and economic differences
and fostering cultural tolerance, the more that it is intensified precisely because of the necessary
categorization of labor, gender and class to maintain the relations of production in a capitalist
setup. It is to say that capitalism have overcome its chronic crisis through its strategy of reorganizing its relations of production not explicitly by class but by race and gender. As Brodkin
aptly puts it, race and gender constitutes capitalisms class relations of production (p.248). She
further elaborates this cunning capitalist technique by linking this new configuration of capitalist
relations of production and racialized labor with state policy, civic discourse and state-sanctioned
nationalism (p. 248). She argues that gendered race organization came about because it is
systematically legitimized and facilitated by the state or is a consequential result of nationalist
projects.
Discussion
Global capitalism, by its current strategy of blurring class contradictions and watering down race
and gender issues through the idea of multiculturalism and nationalism, seem to have found the
antidote for contending radical social upheavals. But is this really the case? Has global
capitalism indeed triumphed and fortified itself as a formidable economic, political and cultural
force championing the monopoly of identity formation and cultural reproduction?
In attempting to answer these questions, I would draw some arguments and theorizing from
Brodkins discussion of racialized labor (2000), Appadurais notion of deterritorialization and
disjuncture in global cultural economy (1996) and Clarke & Thomas elaboration of Brodkins

Caralde | Global Capitalism and dynamics of culture

study of how globalization and race brings about new structures of inequality, sovereignties and
citizenship in a neoliberal era (2013).
Appadurais lament over Marxist and neo-Marxists inadequacy to explain the state of
disorganized capitalism (Lash and Urry as cited by Appadurai, 1996), referring to the schemes
of global capitalism in skirting away its self-induced crises, was somehow answered and filled in
by Brodkin. What we presume as seemingly disorganized capitalism after all is not as it may
seem, in fact it may be the other way around---that capitalism has systematically created or
invented this configuration, this beautiful mess by racializing and gendering labor with the aid
of the state or through pseudo-democratic nationalist projects. I call it pseudo-democratic
nationalism because these projects are easily coopted by capitalisms global expansionist stance
by giving in to pressures of liberalization and free trade, thus compromising the states mandate
to the people. This grand and complex process on the other hand is what Appadurai describes in
his framework of different disjuncture in the dimensions of the ethnoscape, mediascape,
financescape, ideoscape and technoscape. This disjuncture or disconnectedness between our
imagined lives or worlds and of the current flow of capital, labor and cultural reproductions are
replete with contradictions that must be critically understood and theorized. As he describes it,
the world is imploding or exploding from within because of conflicts and contradictions like the
issue of race, gender and class that all the while we thought have been resolved by globalization,
only to find out that it has only been re-articulated, re-invented and utilized underhandedly for
the survival of capital.
Thomas and Clarke on elaborating Brodkins theory asserts that while capital has become
flexible, this flexibility has primarily benefited the new regional centers of the global economy
(p.310). The global economic restructuring, liberalization of free trade and displacement of
populations as a result of environmental destruction became the opportune conditions for older
forms of inequality to persist along the lines of racialized, gendered, ethnicized and nationalized
segmentation of the global labor force. Interestingly, Thomas and Clarke further argues that this
material structures are internalized by the individual, it encroaches the interiority, emotionality,
and self-fashioning associated with the neoliberal project as well as to the dimension of
expectations and anxiety surrounding economic and political participation (p. 310). This turn

Caralde | Global Capitalism and dynamics of culture

towards the affect of individuals only serves to reinforce an emotional common sense that
heightens a process by which race is psychologized and affect is racialized (p. 313). What this
brings to light is that in producing the capitalist relations of production through race and gender,
global processes and individual subjectivity molded by neoliberal values must go hand in hand.
But while this kind of configuration is at play, the same schemes will also trigger striking uneven
differences and inequality that in no time will strip global capitalism of its mask and reveal its
deceitfulness.
From what Warren described in his arguments early on in this paper regarding the consequences
of pre-capitalist global conquests on the identity and social structures of the Iranun and
Balangingi communities, down to Brodkins contention that of the global shift as reinvigorating
age-old notions of racism and consolidating gendered labor, we could say that understanding the
dynamics of cultures must always be seen from a broad angle or from a unitary historical process
(Warren, 1997) as much as in its particularities, not simplified and singularly integrated, but in
fact as a globally fragmented discourse (Trouillot 2001 as cited by Thomas & Clarke, 2013).

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