Glocalized Identities: Political Culture between Place and Space

Abstract

A central concern of modern political sociology was a consideration of the ways in which political beliefs and political action were related to the generation of symbolic meanings or ‘culture’ and the patterns of ‘being’, ‘belonging’ and ‘becoming’ associated with individual and collective identity. In modern society, culture and identity were determined by the spatial and temporal dynamics of modernization: political-cultural identity was both ‘placed’ and inexorably bound up with the temporal unfolding of the modernist project. Modern political-cultural identities were forged as individuals and groups in diverse localities responded to and resisted the structural changes unleashed by the universalizing dynamics of capitalist modernity. The dynamics of modern development had a corrosive effect on pre-modern identities, and modern identities have been unable to solidify owing to the dissolving and corrosive effects of (de)industrialization, urbanization and migration. The institutions of modernity simultaneously fragmented modern cultural identities and provided the institutional glue which attempted to impose coherence and stability on the fragments. The constant tendency towards fragmentation was only ever partially and temporarily overcome by cultures of resistance within communities and workplaces that challenged the abstract dynamics underpinning the money economy and the power of the nation state to construct and maintain patterns of being, belonging and becoming through the ‘imagined community’ of nationhood (Anderson, 1991).