Cultures, Values, and Identities: What Are the Issues?

This article reviews the state of the social sciences with respect to the study of culture and cultures. It also examines the closely related concepts of values and identities. It does not attempt to be comprehensive—a task that would be daunting given the diverse and rich literatures that quickly come into focus. Rather, the purpose is to highlight a limited number of issues central to moving an international, comparative, and interdisciplinary agenda forward, in the hope that Global Perspectives will become a recognized and central address for current and future research in this field. Even limiting oneself to key issues is no easy task, as various disciplines regard culture as their terrain. Anthropology, economics, political science, sociology, history, and the humanities, including cultural studies and the arts themselves, all lay some claim to the topic. Diverse and dispersed literatures complicate matters. Frequently divided by methodology and a split between quantitative and qualitative approaches, disciplines function too much as closely guarded silos, discouraging interand transdisciplinary dialogue of the kind that Global Perspectives encourages. Moreover, there are strikingly contrasting presuppositions within the social sciences toward culture: Too often, culture is treated as a residual once the "hard" economic, political, and sociological factors are considered. Alternatively, it can become the all-encompassing construct that supposedly explains everything. Similarly, culture is seen as something that either prohibits or accelerates progress, or it becomes a politically innocent reference category to paint over increasingly absent shared values and common narratives. There are also deeply rooted clashes of national cultural interest that have been set in motion as globalization has advanced. Is the world moving toward cultural uniformity or toward tensions and conflicts? Or are there signs of an alternative set of outcomes rooted in a more polycentric system of cultures in terms of meaning and identity, production or consumption? What is the meaning and validity of a Western or an Asian "cultural imperialism" thesis, or a "clash of civilizations" between East and West? In contemporary society, there is a deepening intersection between the economic and the cultural, as Singh (2011, 2017) demonstrated in his analysis of globalized art markets and North-South trade relations. The media presents one dramatic illustration of this intersection: that is, commercially produced cultural artifacts. At the same time, culture has come to be seen as an instrument of economic development and urban revitalization—a view encapsulated in terms like creative class, creative cities, and the creative economy. Yet culture is also about the arts. Notions of l'art pour l'art, or "art for art's sake," in the sense that culture is first and foremost about creative expression, are challenged by the deepening intersection of culture with economics and politics. Interpretative frames for what counts as art, what can be regarded as cultural innovations, and who "owns" or represents art imply many changes for how works of art are appreciated, collected, presented, bought and sold, and preserved. The concepts of culture, value, and identity are as intricate and multifaceted as their relationships are to each other. Anheier and Isar (2007, 3) write in their introduction to the five-volume Cultures and Globalization Series "that globalization has a profound impact on culture, and that cultures shape globalization may seem like a truism. Yet the two-way interaction involves some of the most vexed and at the same time taken-for-granted questions of our time. " This interaction challenges previously more stable cultural systems, forms of everyday life, and identities, and it does so in very uneven and diverse ways. The triangle of collective heritage, identity, and memory, long assumed a foundation of societies, has become uncertain and is being transformed (Anheier and Isar 2011). Globalization is both a process and an outcome that involves economic supply and distribution chains, financial flows and investments, international law and institutions, and communication and mobility. Castells (1996, 1997) uses the apt imagery of "decentralized concentration" to describe this phenomenon. He argues that a multiplicity of interconnected tasks that take place in different sites results in people and organizations forming a metanetwork at the transnational level. Held (2002) argues that the 1990s globalization spurt reached an extensity and intensity that went beyond previous phases, and with greater impact on different cultures and societies.