Monday, June 1, 2009

Cosmopolitan Tribalism

the so-called democratic definition of global (pop) culture by urban youth

"Cosmopolitan Tribalism arises from the democratization of creative, experimental youth culture: a multitasking generation, attuned to the world, armed with freedom and the tools to create and mix references in its own way..."

I stumbled across the video 'Cosmopolitan Tribalism' on the blog of design agency Bola Sociology Design. From their website: "Bola is a design institute which uses behavioral research as a premise to its projects. We believe that in investigating and understanding what happens in society in order to develop ideas whi
ch are in tune with its aspirations. This is the foundation for what we call meaningful design. We work with the same research methodologies used by our sister-company, Box 1824, and with a multidisciplinary structure that includes anthropologists, semioticians, photographers and, naturally, designers."



The video begins with an Animal
Collective-esque soundtrack - echoey samples in a chorus that sounds both old and new - and a man's voice transposed over a futuristic background of shifting stars.

"Looking forward to a futuristic world rooted in a primitive unity. Blurring the boundaries between irony and truth, ancient and new, the collective and the individual. This is a cultural impulse to create a new, united, global culture. We can define it as cosmopolitan tribalism," he says.

The premise behind this project - commissioned by "a group of technology and style companies"- is that the
Internet and a new modern connectively has shifted modes of consumption and self-identification. "The urban world, connected and cosmopolitan, opens door for a return to the primitive, where nature worship, spiritual quests and new states of being are again in the discussion. This is how we define a new way of thinking... driving the cultural and consumer goods industry towards updating and rejuvenating its direction."












http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVnRzEjpUmE

The video introduces "concepts" such as
celebration, dance, hedonism, tribal patterns, and sacred geometry, alongside videos and still images culled from the fashion, music, and art worlds [like clips from the "tribal" or "primitively" inspired MGMT video above.]

Of course, this representation of the "new global culture" is troubled by the homogeneity of its authors. Bolo Sociology Design say in their introduction to the project: "We see here a little of the “globalist spirit” made tangible. It does not represent most of mankind and global youth, but rather a niche of globalized young men and women living an interconnected culture in the most economically active capitals of the world. This is an inspiration video, aesthetically organizing how a culture expresses itself."

According to this interpretation, being globalized is to be in a position of luxury. This version of cosmopolitanism is not a modern trend sparked by the internet; rather it has a long history. Waldron in a response to Benhabib's essay illuminates different uses of the term:
"'Cosmopolitanism,' Professor Benhabib rightly observes, 'has become one of the keywords of our times'(17). But "cosmopolitan" has a number of different meanings. For some, it is about the love of mankind, or about duties owed to every person in the world, without national or ethnic differentiation. For others, the word "cosmopolitan" connotes the fluidity and the evanescence of culture; it celebrates the compromising or evaporation of the boundaries between cultures conceived as distinct entities; and it anticipates a world of fractured and mingled identities. For still others--and this is the theme that Benhabib explores--cosmopolitanism is about order and norms, not just culture and moral sentiment. It envisages a world order..." 83, Waldron.

The cosmopolitanism we see depicted in this inspirational advertising video falls closest to Waldron's second definition. It is interesting that the agency sees the future, driven by globalization, as a single culture based on a Western interpretation of the other - other in both place and time - that they are able to come into contact with and define by virtue of their globalized privilege. It is not even a world of "fractured and mingled identities" - the modern cultural trend sees globalization as a return to a "primitive unity."

This depiction is complicated when voices selected to define these primitive, ancient, yet ultra-modern trends themselves from the location of the periphery.


http://www.miauk.com/

M.I.A. is a musical artist of Sri Lankan Tamil descent. She is quoted on the Tamil Nation website as saying, "Nobody wants to be dancing to political songs. Every bit of music out there that’s making it into the mainstream is really about nothing. I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked." By joining the dominant Western trend (or even by being selected or favored by the niche group of privileged, globalized, urban youth) M.I.A. gained global influence (she was recently voted by Time Magazine as one of the world's top 100 most influential people.) Her success in the Western world does not mean that diverse global culture is being built from the bottom.

Walter Mignolo's concludes his essay on border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism with a visual metaphor for a new, just, working world order: "If you can imagine Western civilization as a large circle with a series of satellite circles intersecting the larger one but disconnected from each ohter, diversality will be the project that connects the diverse subaltern satellites appropriating and transforming Western global designs. Diversality can be imagined as a new medievalism, a pluricentric world built on the ruins of ancient, non-Western cultures and civilizations with the debris of Western civilization. A cosmopolitanism that only connects from the center of the larger circle outward, and leaves the outer places disconnected from each other, would be a cosmopolitanism from above..." (Mignolo 183-184).

It is also worth commenting on the fact that this video, made for the purposes of directing and inspiring successful advertising campaigns, both justifies the cultural agenda-setting of a small privileged group of globalized urban youth and forwards the aims of capitalism.

Watch the full video for many more examples, including depictions in youth culture of "totems, idols, primitivism, neo-psychedelia, shamanism, rituals and carnival."



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