Socio-Economic Restructurings of the Local Settings in the Era of Globalization

Abstract

In every society and every era, socio-economic practices are continually under way to organize, manage or restructure the territorial space as a place for people to live and for production. In other words, this space is the result of social processes of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction.¹ Localism was a common feature of such processes in all traditional societies. These were a heterogenous mosaic of more or less isolated, highly diversified and plural socio-spatial units, with virtually independent economies untouched by exogenous influences. Each one of these units was characterized by cultural homogeneity and by ways of life inextricably linked to a space, closed as it was to outside influences, all of which nurtured autarchy, conservatism, traditionalism, ethnocentrism and, altogether, narrow localist visions of socio-economic problems and processes. This gave rise to a cyclical and unfaltering concept of time, life and the course of cosmic phenomena, whose stability was seen in the transformations of the natural world with each coming of the seasons and in the everyday sequence of birth, growth, death and regeneration of all living material.² In its turn, this meant that the processes of formation and reproduction of society usually occurred within its own specific territory and people’s everyday life ran its course in a local spatial scenario. In this space there developed the socialization process which molded people’s ways of thinking, attitudes or behavior patterns; their habitus, indeed, which placed and identified them socially in relation to self and others.³ There was usually a clear correspondence between the spatial field, in which the socio-vital activity of the population was enacted, and the symbolic-cultural framework which determined people’s behaviourial habitus, as the latter usually developed within the former. This explains the localist character usually manifested by this habitus.