Globalization and cultural mosaic: An Asian perspective

This course is designed to understand what globalization is all about in today’s world. Globalization is a buzzword we frequently hear and use, a concept that from the 1990s has become part of our everyday ways of understanding and describing the world. Yet when we look closely at it, we find it is a contested concept with slippery meanings. Among the few agreed-upon meanings of the concept, there is an underlying idea that the world feels today smaller thanks to the technological advancements in transportation and communication, leading to a level of interconnection and exchange flow unseen in the world’s history. Although cultures were never were isolated and homogeneous, multicultural contact is more common today than in the past, as well as a sense of the world as one single place.

The study of globalization cuts across boundaries of the currently established academic fields, benefiting from an interdisciplinary approach. Usually, globalization is seen as a primarily economic force transforming the world, as national borders become increasingly irrelevant before the global flow of money and goods. However, globalization also has a great impact on cultures across the globe, as products like McDonald’s, technologies like Huawei 5G, international tourist flows, and media like TikTok, reach almost everywhere. With and through them, intangible things like ideas, lifestyles, but also ideals and ideologies are flowing almost everywhere. Eventually, this transforms the meaning of the same concept of “culture”, as increasingly we no longer belong to a society based in a certain place only. Rather, as Mathews (2000) has argued, we have access to a global “cultural supermarket” from which, to some extent, we can choose who we are.