Editors' Comments
The Editors and Editorial Community
Our principal goal in starting this journal is to create an intellectual forum for interaction among those concerned with global cultural flows. Such flows, by their nature, are reflected in the emergent public cultures of many nation-states. Furthermore, these public cultures constitute the centers of new forms of cosmopolitanism in many linguistic and cultural ecumenes. Thus we seek to report on these burgeoning public cultures, on the debates they represent and create, and on the phenomena in which they are inscribed. Implicitly, they raise the theoretical problem of conceptualizing modernity as a multi-directional, open-ended process, in which the Euro- American experience is significant, but neither singular nor always the exemplary center.
From the point of view of theory, therefore, we are concerned to erase the distinction between 'first,' 'second,' 'third' and 'fourth' worlds, not because these terms do not define significant differences (on the contrary they do), but because they have often misguided the understanding of emergent global forms of cosmopolitanism, and obscured the processes that animate them. Especially in regard to what is considered to be theory, we wish to expunge the moral and canonical verities of Euro-American modernity. This poses a considerable challenge for it means finding colleagues and voices in different parts of the world who can and do speak for themselves, and encouraging them to anthropologize the West while, at the same time, continuing to draw on our own capabilities to report on and to interrogate the cosmopolitanisms of the rest of the world. Despite this challenge, we seek to deparochialize debates about modernity and cultural hegemony, and to widen the tradition of intelligent observing of places and their practices. In this spirit, we encourage the observation of otherness assuming that all observers are situated.
In general, we oppose the view that the emergent transnational cultural forms and flows of today's world are radically homogenizing, and that the burgeoning cosmopolitanisms of the world are but thin replicas of an experience we in the West are connoisseurs of 'always already.' Much of the non-Western world has now adopted forms of technological representation, consumption and commodification which are harnessed to the idiosyncracies of their own traditions, and to the ways in which indigenous elites reconstruct these traditions.
Thus our concerns in this journal are not simply voyeuristic. We are concerned with the asymmetries that characterize transnational cultural flows, but we do not wish to be mummified in any existing notion of the world-system, especially since there is good evidence that flows of money, information, commodities, and images now emerge from many centers and reach out to many peripheries. World-systems, regarded especially from the cultural point of view, now emerge as much from Bombay, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and Hong Kong as they do from Los Angeles, New York, London and Paris. This multiplicity of world-systems undergirds the explosion of cultural modernities that we wish to explore.
To some readers the shift to the term transnational from words like neocolonial might carry the risk of eliding the problem of inequality. But this shift does allow us to analyze cultural processes, traffic and flows that are hard to deal with imaginatively with those images of the term neo-colonialism with which we are familiar. The new forms of transnational, cosmopolitan cultural traffic do facilitate, even create, new forms of control, of desire and of terror. But do the old images that we associate with neo-colonialism (western capital, non-western labor, compradors and the like) exhaust what is happening? Is a Bombay film distributor making profits from audiences in Nigeria easily described within any existing theoretical framework for analyzing inequality on a global scale? The important thing, we believe, is to find the middle path between the assumption that all new things are nice, and the assumption that all the evils of the world are grasped by terms that served us well in the past.
Furthermore, the dialogue between elites and masses, or from another point of view, between cultural producers and consumers, grows ever more complex. National elites raid each other's cultural repertoires for useful representations of themselves, while the masses, who are their audiences, themselves as tourists, television-watchers, immigrants and gastarbeiter, constitute a partially deterritorialized and occasionally counter-cosmopolitan audience whose tastes and knowledge are ever-changing. Thus the foundations of the sort of critical theory that emerged from the Frankfurt school need fundamental rethinking before they can be brought to bear on the emergent global forms of public culture.
The dialogue between elites and masses (terms which might eventually be replaced with better ones), in whatever national setting, can be represented as a complicated dialogue between form and function, a dialogue that works at many levels: (a) many elite forms require mass labor for their production and reproduction; (b) elite forms are often functionally exploited by non-elites, though our attention has usually focused on the reverse pro-cess; (c) elite forms provide the backdrop for mass movements, spectacles and ideologies, as in the case of the Olympics; and (d) mass forms, reappropriated by elites, serve the functional purpose of (re)presenting the masses to themselves via the languages of the nation-state.
Public culture is thus inseparably tied to politics and involves a profound theoretical problem surrounding the nation-state. The state is increasingly dominated by elites who are transnational cultural producers and consumers, forming a global class with few real cultural allegiances to the nation-state, but who nevertheless need new ideologies of state and nation to control and shape the populations who live within their territories. But as these populations themselves are exposed, through media and travel, to the cultural regimes of other nation-states, such ideologies of nationalism increasingly take on a global flavor. These paradoxes constitute the cultural epicenter, in our view, of the cultural politics of the nation-state.
Finally, in speaking of the politics of transnational cultural flows, as well as of local expressions of them in many emergent public cultures, we wish to avoid two traps: the traditional anthropological trap of focusing on distant cultures, and thus exceptionalizing the West through its absence from the discursive stage; and the inverse trap, which characterizes a good deal of the discourse that accompanies 'cultural studies' in the academy, especially in the United States: treating the Third World (and such other forms of the other as race and gender) as interchangeable with one another, and as providing a convenient instrument for debates over such issues as 'decanonization,' debates which themselves have a sharply parochial character.
Thus we intend to proceed with a deliberate naivete, to mix observers and theoreticians, vignettes and opinions, debates and controversies from as great a multiplicity of voices and places as we can. We hope that the silent Western panopticon as well. as the current American debate over decanonization can give way to new ways to theorize not just the 'other' or the 'third world,' but the global cultural ecumene, something which we assume is a decentered and decentering reality. We know we are not alone in holding these views, and we hope that this and future issues of the Bulletin will help realize a vision that must necessarily be provisional today.
The American voice in this issue is louder than we might like. We hope that this is simply an artifact of a time lag in communication, and that this will be corrected in future issues. In order to build the transnational audience that we seek, we solicit your suggestions and advice as to how to reach your colleagues and friends, and their libraries, beyond the borders of the United States, whose interests are relevant to this journal. We welcome their names and addresses, and would appreciate your sending this issue to one of them, after you have read it. It is our intention that this should be a multidisciplinary and multi-regional forum, and we need your assistance in making it that.
Lastly, for her human and technical generosity, we are grateful to V.S. Rajam; for their continuing support and encouragement, we thank Richard Cohen, Bernard S. Cohn, Alan Heston, Francis Johnston, Igor Kopytoff, David Szanton, and Toby A. Volkman; and for its vision, format and theoretical stance, we acknowledge our indebtedness to Inscriptions: Group for the Critical Study of Colonial Discourse, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz.