ANEXO II I. Cuestiones generales:
IMPUESTO GENERAL INDIRECTO CANARIO AUTOLIQUIDACIÓN TRIMESTRAL 420
The rising concern with identity is partly a reflection of a growing awareness of the way that societies and individuals are affected by global flows. In the globalised setting, the boundaries of autonomous cultures are becoming increasingly subject to interpenetration and perforation. Cultures are becoming ‘deterritorialised’ through flows of information, images, and people, such that individuals and communities are faced with a repertoire of cultural scripts with which to construct their identities.
108 See Peter Berger, & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1967; Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspectives and Method, Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1969; Castells, Identity, 7.
109 For instance, Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction, 174, suggest that identity emerges from the interaction between the individual and society.
110 Giddens, Sociology, 30. See also Castells, Identity, 7, who maintains that individuals and groups construct identities using a variety of building materials (from history, geography, collective memory, imagination, religion), which are then processed according to social determinants rooted in social structure.
Globalisation became a fashionable concept in the 1990s among social scientists, and there is now an extensive literature on the subject. Indeed, Waters describes it as the concept of the 1990s, ‘a key idea by which we understand the transition of human society into the third millennium.’112 Economists, political scientists, and mass communication theorists were the first to address globalisation, and it has been increasingly used in debates within politics, economics, the media, and culture, including religion. In fact, interest in globalisation theory is one reason that religion has moved back into the mainstream of social scientific study since the 1980s.113
There has been considerable debate over the concept of globalisation, both in terms of definition and impact. As Giddens notes, while most people accept that there are important transformations occurring, ‘the extent to which it is valid to explain these as
“globalization” is contested.’114 Early approaches by economists, political scientists, and mass communication experts focused on homogeneity. Through the impact of flows of information, people, and goods, cultural difference was supposed to disappear.115 Associated with this was the assumption that globalisation is Westernisation and is driven by imperialistic ambitions. A common interpretation of
111 For a discussion of essentialist and constructionist approaches to identity, see Kathryn Woodward,
‘Concepts of Identity and Difference’, in Kathryn Woodward (ed.), Identity and Difference, London:
Sage, 1997, 8-47.
112 M. Waters, Globalization, London: Routledge, 1995, 1.
113 Helen Rose Ebaugh, ‘Return of the Sacred’, 389-90. The sociologist Roland Robertson was especially responsible for calling attention to the relationship between globalisation and religion, and in particular the role of religious movements in heightening the consciousness of living in an increasingly interdependent world. See Roland Robertson, Globalization, Social Theory and Global Culture, London:
Sage, 1992.
114 Giddens, Sociology, 58.
115 Birgit Meyer and Peter Geschiere, ‘Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure.
Introduction’, in Birgit Meyer and Peter Geschiere (eds.), Globalization and Identity. Dialectics of Flow and Closure, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999, 1-15.
globalisation was that the world was becoming increasingly uniform through technological, economic, and cultural flows emanating from the West. However, the more recent entry of anthropologists into the debate has made this one-sided emphasis problematic.116 Meyer and Geschiere argue that the process of globalisation itself
‘appears to lead to a hardening of cultural contrasts or even to engender new oppositions.’ They suggest that the homogenising tendencies of globalisation imply continued or even reinforced cultural heterogeneity.117 The consensus among scholars is that globalisation implies an intensification of worldwide social relations such that societies and cultures have become closer together, resulting in a compression of time and space, and stimulating processes of homogenisation and differentiation.118
Social scientists acknowledge that interactions between cultures and nations have occurred over a long period of human history.119 Thus, Coleman observes that ‘world-wide interconnectedness . . . is not new in itself.’120 These processes, which provide the historical roots for current developments, include the emergence of nation-states (stimulated by European colonisation), the effects of the technological and industrial revolutions, the growth of a world capitalist economy, and the missionary enterprises of
116 For example, A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 11, who maintains that the discipline of anthropology has predisposed him towards the idea that ‘globalisation is not the story of cultural homogenization.’
117 Meyer and Geschiere, ‘Globalization and Identity’, 2.
118 See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, 64; Giddens, Sociology, 51-3; Robertson, Globalization, 8; Ray Kiely, ‘Globalisation, (Post-)Modernity and the Third World’, in Ray Kiely and Phil Marfleet (eds.), Globalisation and the Third World, London/New York:
Routledge, 1998, 1-22; Kevin Robins, ‘Encountering Globalization’, in David Held and Anthony McGrew (eds.), The Global Transformations Reader. An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, 195-201.
119 See for example, Robertson, Globalization, 58-60.
120 Simon Coleman, The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity. Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 52.
the world religions.121 It is possible to regard globalisation either as the later stages of this process, associated with the development of a world market, Western imperialism, and modernity,122 or as a long-term process, which accelerates under particular conditions (the spread of technologies, religions, literacy, empires, capitalism).’123 It is in the former sense that I use it here. This thesis argues that current developments involving the intensification of global processes have helped to shape contemporary Igbo neo-Pentecostalism. Yet because these processes were already present at the movement’s inception, albeit on a smaller scale, the vision and values of the Civil War Revival continue to have relevance today.
Scholars differ over the impact of globalising processes on contemporary society. Held et al. divide participants in the debate into three schools of thought: sceptics,
hyperglobalisers, and transformationalists. While ‘sceptics’ argue that globalisation is overrated, a primarily ideological or mythical construction, and differs from the past only in the intensity of interaction between nations, ‘hyperglobalisers’ insist that its effects can be felt everywhere.124 This thesis aligns itself with the
‘transformationalists’ by taking a middle ground, which regards globalisation as a significant force behind a broad range of changes in economics, politics, and culture, but insisting that many of the old patterns remain.
121 Jeff Haynes (ed.), Religion, Globalization and Political Culture in the Third World, New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1999, 15; Jan Nederveen Pieterse, ‘Globalisation as Hybridization’, in Frank J. Lechner and John Boli (eds.), The Globalisation Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, 101.
122 Robertson is among those who see globalisation as a recent phenomenon.
123 Pieterse, ‘Globalization as Hybridization’, 101.
124 David Held et al., Global Transformations. Politics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge: Polity, 1999, cited in Giddens, Sociology, 58-61; David Held and Anthony McGrew, ‘The Great Globalization Debate: An Introduction’, in Held & McGrew (eds.), Global Transformations Reader, 1-45.