Democracy, Diaspora, Territory by Olga Oleinikova Jumana Bayeh

Democracy, Diaspora, Territory by Olga Oleinikova Jumana Bayeh

Author:Olga Oleinikova, Jumana Bayeh [Olga Oleinikova, Jumana Bayeh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000710847
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-10-14T00:00:00+00:00


What was from the outset radical about Hannerz’s work was its challenge to the container model of culture. While still using (as the focus for his critique) the reference point of national societies, Hannerz showed (ahead of Beck and others) that societies, especially modern mediated societies, are not natural cultural ‘wholes’. The notion of national cultures was based, he argued, on a wholly implausible notion of ‘cultural sharing’. As Hannerz wrote: ‘there is nothing automatic about cultural sharing. Its accomplishment must rather be seen as problematic’ (1992, 44). Hannerz reinforces the point by bringing out how individuals’ involvement in all aspects of culture is affected by factors that divide, rather than unite, them: taste, education, income, occupation and divisions in knowledge resources. ‘Contemporary complex societies’, he concludes, ‘systematically build non-sharing into their cultures’ (1992, 44).

The unsustainability of a holistic view of national cultures is shown by Hannerz in an argument that moves in the opposite direction to that of the social theorists considered earlier. Rather than showing that the societal or culture overflows national boundaries, Hannerz demonstrates conclusively that national cultures have always been split from the inside. His argument is only reinforced when we consider the forms of spatial segregation that developed in the late twentieth century as levels of intra-societal inequality have grown vastly: the ‘gated communities’ of the United States; white urban South Africa, Brazil and Argentina;9 the high-security complexes that now comprise the offices and hotels of the global business elite (Sklair 2001); the competing tensions in Ukraine between those who support Europeanisation and those who prefer solidarity with Russia. Diasporas, often viewed as outward dispersals from a particular national space, can also be counted as examples of cultures split from the inside. Yet until now, little or no work has been done to map the distinctive media cultures that accompany these new forms of segregation and their uneven ‘power-geometry’ (Massey 1997, 234). If cultural order, even when it seems to be present, carries within it a hidden degree of differentiation and disorder, then we urgently need to know more about the corresponding variety (or perhaps, in some respects, of commonality) of media cultures and what drives them.



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