Introduction: Globalization and the Crisis of Identities?

Abstract

The literature on contemporary identities and social change abounds with terminology and images of radical transition, disorientation, turbulence, confusion, rootlessness and constant motion. The possibility of crisis or even the chaos of a Humpty-Dumpty world where no amount of trying will ever succeed in putting things back together again, seems an ever-present reality. Thus, societies are fragmenting and disintegrating; their internal structures are becoming dis-assembled and merged into the maelstrom of the ‘global post-modern’ (Hall, 1992: 302). The boundaries of societies and cultures are being breached by vast, criss-crossing flows of ideas, images and information, their former impermeability lost forever. Communities, once invested with deep meanings and encapsulating close-knit relations, are becoming de-localized — torn from familiar and particular places (Albrow et al., 1997). Everywhere the once-separate items in the global mosaic of cultures are leaking, merging into one another (Friedman, 1994), losing their distinctiveness. Meanwhile nations have become ‘unbound’ and experience deterritorialization as multinational corporations (MNCs) weave chunks of local economies into their own global empires, as migrant diasporas refuse permanent assimilation, preferring to develop transnational ‘networks … that span their home and host society’ (Basch et al., 1994) and as global social movements embed national citizens in worldwide commitments.