Cultural Identity and Global Process

by Jonathan Friedman

Book Overview

This fascinating book explores the interface between global processes, identity formation and the production of culture.

Examining ideas ranging from world systems theory to postmodernism, Jonathan Friedman investigates the relations between the global and the local, to show how cultural fragmentation and modernist homogenization are equally constitutive trends of global reality. With examples taken from a rich variety of theoretical sources,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803986386
• ISBN13: 9780803986381
• Release Date: December 1994
• Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A brilliant book in anthropology, criticizing essentialism.

Jonathan Friedman's brilliant Cultural Identity and Global Process, among other things, calls attention to the essentialistic use of such words as "culture" and "civilization". He presupposew that no eternal essence of actual entities exist. Of course "culture" in the abstract does not exist: no Platonic separated form (Idea). He never veers from this "axiom." For he constantly refers to cultural or civilization events in term of "identity space," "self identity," "citizen," etc. all such phrases referring to individual persons. He is the only world systems analyst I know of who brings the unconscious into his idea of culture. His approach is Freudian. He adroitly ovoids using the word unconscious in his fine remarks on narcissitic behavior at the social level. But what is important: he underscores an anthropological recognition of divers mental events in the citizens of a culture. He could have gone further using C.G. Jung's psychological types. Then, he could have discussed _scientifically_ how specific subliminal events shape culture. But his book is a great tour de force. A first class mind at work.