Culture and Development

Obafemi Awolowo University Press, 2018

Much attention has been drawn to the issues surrounding globalisation and culture in recent times especially since the beginning of the 21st century. The major concerns have been on the effects of globalisation in creating and preventing ‘world culture’ as well as on the contribution of culture in facilitating globalisation process. It should be noted from the onset that globalisation is both the cause and the consequence of cultural diversities and cultural similarities. Therefore, the continuous widespread of cultures generates three possibilities. First, powerful culture dominates frail ones thereby giving room for stronger culture to reign while ‘killing’ weaker ones (convergent thesis). Second, cultural interaction leaves the distinctiveness of each culture untouched (or unaffected) thereby creating real gap among cultures of the world (divergent thesis). Third, cultural mixture engenders unique culture (combination thesis). To address these, the chapter begins with the general explanation of culture and globalisation before discussing the three possibilities of cultural spread across the globe.

How can we differentiate cultures? It is a difficult question for westerners to distinguish Hong Kongese culture from Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese, for they are too similar to each other. In order to maintain the political security and the national unity of China, Chinese Communist government keeps on oppressing local cultural identities, particularly Hong Kong cultural identity in recent year, although Hong Kong is an autonomous region (known as " Special Administrative Region ") which should be free from Chinese political intervention. Traditional philosophy of culture, which de fines culture as " spirit " or value systems, can hardly help us differentiate cultures in East Asia, particularly when globalisation and regionalisation further diversify the values of cultures there. For instance, you can hardly de fine a clear value system of Hong Kong Culture. As the author of the new book A Discourse on Hong Kong Culture (Traditional Chinese: 香港文化論), in my presentation I would like to introduce a new definition of culture in my book (known as " existential hermeneutical definition "), that culture as a power of interpretation provided by the community. I would argue that without our own culture we shall lose our ability of interpretation. When the people in a community shares a similar existential situation (similar history, same geographical location and social-economic interaction), the same language, similar values, similar ways of living and they are linked by a community network, they form a cultural self. Using Hong Kong culture as a case study I am going to demonstrate that the cultural self is emergent when an individual member realises that someone is culturally different from him. The new concept of culture may be applied in not only cultural studies, but also the political theories and social activisms for separatism, nationalism or localism.

International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 2010

Comparative Education, 2012

This essay argues against a simple, reified view of culture as a set of ideas and norms belonging to a group or nation and considers implications of a more complicated concept for discussion of world culture and the global/local nexus. Most anthropologists define culture as the making of meaning, with an emphasis on the process itself as contested. It follows that world culture is locally produced in social interaction, and that meaning are then reconstructed in the global/local nexus. Power matters, particularly the hidden power to make resources for meaning making widely available, and to make them attractive and scientifically persuasive. How actors succeed in claiming particular ideas as global and how the locals strategically respond are questions where anthropologists can contribute to understanding the global/local nexus and the exercise of power within the world polity.

There can be little doubt that each of us perceive people from other cultures to be different, that the way they do things is not the same as the way we do things, that the things they say are different to the things we say. At a national level it is highly unlikely that a Frenchman and a German, for example, will think they are the same and neither is likely to think that they are similar to the English. Indeed, these differences are the very foundation of how we think about other people: how much they differ from us and how much they are similar. And many are the occasions when people have drawn binary conclusions – right vs wrong or good vs bad – when what they are really saying is that the other person is like me and thinks the same as me and, by extension, they must be right or good, whereas a different person is not like me and doesn’t think the same as me and must, therefore, be bad or wrong. While there is unlikely to be any major disagreement over the concept of difference suggested above, it is less clear that our acceptance or rejection of ideas may be based on whether those ideas come from the same or a closely similar cultural environment as we do ourselves: in other words, it is possible that ideas and the attitudes that arise from them are culturally specific. Using an evidence-based approach and his own case studies, the author explores the concepts involved and draws the conclusion that we are all simply different, needing different paradigms, and that models, especially economic models, are culturally specific.

Shraddha

In the traditional conception, culture is viewed in terms of art, aesthesis, literature and refinement. The modern social scientist and management thinker conceives culture as a source of values, customs, behaviour and patterns of living. This article, while accepting and incorporating these views, presents a perspective based on Indian thought and looks at culture as a source of development. The article begins with the organic view of Indian thought, which corresponds to the modern systems concept of the collective mind. It proceeds further to explore the pragmatic consequences of this Indian perspective for motivation, human development and nation-building

2009