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In the article, “The Cocacolonisation of Difference: Homogenized Diversity in 21st Century Cultural Practice”, the author is talking of globalization and its effects, by using the word ‘Cocacolonisation’. ‘Cocacolonisation’, as the author employs, is a metaphor that is used to stand for globalization (Stock 16). He argues that globalization is in someway likened with Americanization since Coca-Cola is one of the US most familiar enriching symbols. In addition, most of the culture that is produced in the US, account for the country’s major export.
More over, some of the features that encompass Coca-Cola as a company, a product, as well as a routine product, that is desired by many, are similar to the features of globalization. They include; both dominate the whole world ranging from, controlling of the world markets economically, in dispersion of monoculture, in affecting cultures because of tastes and values that are exported from the US, as well as quick and immediate fulfillment and accessibility ( Stock 18).
The factor has affected artists, because they are unable to maintain their practices of sovereignty and honesty, as globalization pressurizes them to give ‘content’ to the artistic industries ‘information economy’. He, however, argues that globalization philosophies frequently deform cultural doings and products, which commemorate cultural pluralism. This is through commercializing and normalizing pluralism and dissimilarity.
Disadvantages of Globalization
Globalization is neither entirely good nor entirely bad, but according to research, the term globalization seems to have more cons than pros. One of the cons is that the term is used to stand for too much dissimilar stuff, which is not essentially unified, for instance, use of email that is mostly controlled from the US. In addition, the term is said to mask more than it discloses.
For instance, in modern Australian culture, a considerable semantic progress is noted with globalization having taken over its traditions. As worldwide financial domination and cultural capital are the main contents of globalization, cultural capital has stimulated circumstances for cultural pluralism through the help of a double dichotomy that is dispersed through speed. This speed is in terms of transactions, communication, and change (Stock 18). Speed of change and movement brings about freedom.
Despite globalization encouraging movement of capital, culture and labor around the globe most individuals are not able to move because, poverty and oppression do not give them the freedom to do so. Such people are not only held back by freedom of movement, but also access to resources (Stock 18).
Regardless of global mechanisms being a “positive’ thing of globalization, numerous numbers of people live outside the gates of modernity because they do not choose to do so, but because of poverty. Globalization also has anti-democratic trends in the increasing submission to the “capital story”. Moreover, globalization is shorthand for all the habits in which gap and time have been compacted by the hastening of fiscal, resource and information flows, so that far-away dealings have local effects (Wiseman 28).
Globalization on cultural practice
Accumulative creation and distribution has enriched many people worldwide through art and entertainment. However, those who contribute to the creation of those cultural products receive less. An example of this is the Australian artists who seem, to receive very little for compensation despite the hard work applied. Regardless of this discouraging situation, there is also rising opposition to this kind of control of culture through a rising rebellion of local cultural practices and as a result the declaration of difference.
This is making populations to look for ways to declare the secret codes of their own distinctiveness in the face of economic forces, in order to match. Globalization itself offers novel ways of communicating these to the globe. In addition, globalization comes with economic essentials.
An example is Australia again, where performing and touring is so costly, thus the need to create work for international market. For instance, Circus Oz, an Australian arts company, whereby the performers have to multi task, performing with minimum resources and hence proving to be innovative thus, adapting to make a living (Stock 19).
Intercultural context in a globalized world
According to the author, intercultural context has changed a lot because of globalization. She argues that, cultural dissimilarity in the 80s and 90s was renowned by making conflicting cultures to team up in conversation. Additionally, issues that seemed to create conflict included exotism and orientalism, appropriation, ethnicity progress and re-inventions, the connection between one and the other, and crossing of genre, customs, and personalities (Stock 20).
However, due to ongoing postmodern susceptibility, in the novel millennium, what has been embraced is the cultural hybridism. This has affected the local cultural doings in that they are revalued and reappraised in order to grant the imminence needed to generate cross-cultural forms, especially through the help of digital expertise (Stock 20). On the other hand, cultural ‘Cocacolonisation’ leads to random sampling of non-circumstantial cultural wreckage in order to produce new products.
Though intercultural context does not substitute tradition, it is one way of dealing with custom and modification as it is described as a continuing gathering process, where cross-pollinating is done in order for new work to be produced from new ideas, new techniques of communication, and creation. This makes one to wonder as to whether, like Coca-Cola, is cultural difference a commodity on trade. (Stock 21).
Effects of ‘Cocacolonisation’ Homogenization
According to the author, cultural identity is among the effects that ‘Cocacolonisation’ homogenization has brought about. Nowadays, as compared to the past, society or cultures do not determine identity, but it is built through societies of interest for instance, worldviews or sex (Stock 22).
This makes people to live in, as the author terms it, a “cut and paste” globe, whereby identities can be assumed. According to the author, one may opt to define their identity by themselves other than inheriting it. In addition, it can be revealed, or even developed. Furthermore, identities are also considered as commodities. That is, they can be projected, acculturated, repackaged, built and sometimes purchased.
An example that the author gives is the World Trade Agreement that was made between Australia and US in the year 2004, which includes a free trade in terms of culture (Stock 22).
Recently, though, Australia has managed to build up a cultural identity that is typical and varied through a huge practical support for novel Australian creative work. Considering that Australia has no serious mass or market forces for local goods, it is very undermining to deregulate the country’s content, thus encouraging inexpensive American cultural goods in their places of entertainment.
Another effect of globalization homogenization is loss of dance identity. The spread in globalization is the one that causes enormous dislocation and relocation as well as ethnicity flows and thoughts in valid and essential surroundings, all of which compose cultural concerns, proficient, and individual character that are more complex.
The author argues that a rising figure of dancers’ bodies and minds are programmed with techniques and approaches that are numerous and assorted. This is with numerous modern practices changing from definite body-centered dance to cross, interdisciplinary diverse media practices in which circumstance, yet, still plays an important role (Stock 23).
Hence, distinguished perspectives become a vital factor in upholding multiplicity in this globalized and arbitrated humanity. The author argues that by steering dance practices transverse cultures in this ‘cocacolonised’ surroundings, we are supporting a change from a rational intercultural to one of conversion whereby the articulated rather than hybridized body replicates shaded variations in terms of spatial responsiveness, timing, and vigor.
This makes the dances to be more created than cultural. However, he supports the frequency of globalization in terms of monetary and cultural transformation and supremacy with an example of a survey carried out among Asia- Pacific youths. According to the survey, most, if not all, of the participants chose Coca –Cola products as their preferred foodstuff and beverage. This shows the spread of cultural buyer homogenization that is in a momentum world, whereby philosophies are borderless.
Globalization on monoculture
Economics and culture tend to be related. Though globalization is accused of stimulating increase in monoculture, it can also be viewed as having optimistic or pessimistic binaries of approval and opposition (Stock 24).
Among the binaries highlighted, the main ordinary is the worldwide capital control as a financial monolith in the hands of the minority, in comparison with cultural pluralism that is caused by augmented simplicity and diversification of communication, which can make or assemble particular groups of people through worldwide set-ups.
In addition, worldwide capital control does not sustain environmental or cultural multiplicity, while cultural pluralism has the likelihood of granting sustainable answers and guarantee practice and resource multiplicity through local and regional answers (Stock 25). What globalization has done is that it has shaped a globe of ‘worldwide pillage’, whereby the numerous are oppressed for the always more advantaged few.
However, the information and thoughts of worldwide communication can generate an alertness that can care for, as well as overpower, perceptions of diverse voices and dissimilar traditions of living. As a result, many disagree that homogenization and multiplicity survive side by side in our globalized planet as they have formed anxiety among cultural practitioners due to difficult changes in the manner in which many artists’ work is professed, shaped, and experience provoked.
Ways to accent the numerous characteristics that we have
According to the author, technology plays a big role in globalization. He asserts, “Technology tends to foreground one culture and one language with its roots in corporate and military America” (Stock 26). An example of this is that with 80% of the websites using English as their language, only 10% of them in the entire world speak the language.
According to research, a proposal has been made for all to agree to a cultural pluralist attitude, in order for all the humanity’s ethnicity biodiversity to be conserved. This is about the mixture, which is the inventive conciliation and recognition of distinction. The concept of crossbreed was initiated by post rejuvenation in a de-contextualized, uneven way, but it was legalized by globalization.
Other than context, in order to cross the boundaries of communication some kind of conversion is needed. This is in terms of the difference in tales, familiarities, as well as the susceptibility of our personal cultures. This translation should not be in form of language alteration, but an opening or stillness (Stock 25).
That is, the space amid shape and content, the artistic and the inspired, the cognitive and the perceptive, which is the intuitive recognition of the job that is interpreted into a comprehensible context to amalgamate with our own lived familiarity.
In addition, dancers should also apply the conversion allegory since their bodies and minds consist of numerous encodings. The codes should be cultural, proficient, hereditary and autographic. A proficient dancer should be able to become accustomed to any technique or genre that the market requires (Stock 26). When this is practiced, the created dancing body takes on a primarily commoditized personality that can be interpreted into many surroundings in a factual and effective manner.
Notions of hybridism and numerous identities appear to work in some logic against the holistic environment of the forthcoming and animated dancing body. Each body is noticed of its exclusivity, due to the notion of ‘accention’ other than hybridization.
Considering that hybridization is the vigor shaded variations, spatial susceptibility, and timing with ethnically or created traces, or remainders of many dancing lives, how we choose to inflect our numerous identities is how we present our skill and personality. In ‘cocacolonised’ humankind, integrated accented differences other than the ones that are set apart or added on, can navigate our dancing bodies’ (Stock 27).
Works Cited
Stock, Cheryl. The Cocacolonisation of Difference: Homogenized Diversity in 21st Century Cultural Practice. Kuala Lumpur: Cultural Centre, University of Malaya and Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage, 2005. Print.
Wiseman, J. Thinking and Acting Locally and Globally. In Globalisation and the Live Performing Arts. Melbourne: Circus Oz & Monash University Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies. Print.