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A fixed up car from the Australian Aborigine TV show “Bush Mechanics” http://icarusfilms.com/new2002/bush |
In his article “Culture, Globalization, Mediation”, William Mazzarella looks at how media and globalization are affecting culture, especially through the process of mediation. I found this article to be fascinating, because although it maintains a very distanced, almost overly scholarly dialogue that is hard to connect to, Mazzarella makes some very good observations about how people connect with each other in the brave new world of globalization. Mediation is the main focus of Mazzarella’s argument, largely because he feels that mediation is a process that exists even before the production of “media” in any given society, whether or not they have been affected by globalization, and it is really these processes of mediation that express cultures the most, because of their reactions to and interpretations of ideas. What these processes of mediation create is an opportunity for cultures to become aware of themselves – one of the facets of mediation that interests Mazzarella the most is the ability to assert a strong sense of national or group identity, despite the supposed homogenizing aspects of globalization.
What Mazzarella suggests about the effects of globalization is that “contrary to longstanding expectations of McWorld-style homogenization, globalization has in fact led to a revitalization of the local.” (Mazzarella 2004: 352) Because globalization is so present all over the world, many groups are becoming aware of how they want to present themselves through mediation, and aware of mediation itself, which makes cultures aware of other cultures as unique entities to a larger extent. Mazzarella’s argument on globalization brings up three main points that he says are three important aspects of the globalizing process: "’the resurgence of the local,’ ‘cultural proximity,’ and ‘hybridity.’” (Mazzarella 2004: 348) In the process of mediation, these are also the main aspects that express and mediate culture, the three aspects that make cultures reflect inwards in their own selves and think of themselves in relation to others. The resurgence of the local has individuals thinking about what it is they want to display to the world about their culture, and “cultural proximity” and “hybridity” form grounds for cross-cultural dialogue in amongst strong assertions of group identity.
What comes to mind when thinking of Mazarella’s concepts of mediation, for me, is a show I once read about in another anthropology class called Bush Mechanics. Bush Mechanics is a television program where Australian aborigines living in rural areas fix up beater cars that run down fast in the tough environment of the Australian outback. The style of the show is a light-hearted and documents the ingenuity and bush know-how needed to get around in the outback. As the site describes, “both the documentary and the series use the memories of Warlpiri elder - Jack Jakamarra Ross - in his early encounters with both white men and motor vehicles.” (Walpiri Media 2002) The show is a representation of Australian Aborigine identity to the world, and a fun and entertaining television program, mediating Aborigine values and lifestyle in the form of a TV documentary. The show also riffs on contrasting traditional Aborigine life with the fact that they are fixing up old cars, a Western product.
The most striking of Mazzarella’s statements for me was how “Difference is no longer so much a measure of the distance between two or more bounded cultural worlds; rather, we may now understand it as a potentiality, a space of indeterminacy inherent to all processes of mediation, and therefore inherent to the social process per se.” (Mazzarella 2004: 360) Mediation and globalization are inevitably changing and strengthening methods of cultural expression. These in-between grounds and new understandings are not something that should be ignored and shunned by anthropologists as destroying culture, but rather studied by anthropologists as a new way that cultures are expressing themselves in the age of globalization.
Citations
Mazzarella, William
2004 "Culture, Globalization, Mediation". In Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 33 (2004), pp. 345-367
Walpiri Media
2002 Bush Mechanics. www.bushmechanics.com. Accessed February 8, 2011
Youtube
2009 Bush Mechanics 1962 EJ Holden Part ½. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WopdIgBG1dA. Accessed February 8, 2011
2009 Bush Mechanics 1962 EJ Holden Part 2/2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wxQWwD9f6Y&feature=related. Accessed February 8, 2011
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