In 1975 we moved to Manila. In one of those chance events, Manila seemed to become a gravitational point in the landscape of global nomads, at least those involved in the development and aid community. That is, in Manila we suddenly began running into people we had known in other countries over the previous decade and a half. Everyone was ending up in Manila.
Manila has continued to have a strong gravitational pull. We left in 1979 and I have not had the pleasure of returning. But reminders of the Philippines crop up at the most unexpected times and places. This chain of thought came to mind because my sister just forwarded me links to some old videos someone had uploaded to YouTube: Philippine TV commercials from the 1970s. These are things I had not seen in decades, and yet could sing along to as if they were yesterday (White Castle Whiskey, or the San Miguel Beer song). But they become a kind of touchstone for a time and place.
A few years ago I was flying back from a conference and struck up a conversation with a fellow scholar in the row in front of me. I had attended her panel. Somehow in the course of the conversation it came up that we had both attended the same school in Manila and may have even overlapped a year. She knew folks in my sister’s year and older kids as well. We then bonded instantly by annoying people in the seats around us by singing…old Filipino TV jingles.
In another coincidence, I was teaching a class in cultural globalization and during discussion a student mentioned being at school in Manila in the 1980s. Turns out we went to the same school, though I was there in the late 1970s. The next week she turns up with an old yearbook of hers, thinking that though I wouldn’t know the students, I might recognize the teachers and just get a kick out of seeing the place in the 1980s. As I looked over the yearbook in my office later I suddenly realized that the student and I were the same age, which means that we were the same class. The students I had known as 11-year olds were her peers for her high school years. And there I was seeing all my friends, now grown. It was a fantastic present. Of course, I was seeing their graduation pictures fifteen years after they graduated, so I wasn’t seeing them now, though it felt like it.
The cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai once argued that the best way of understanding the chaotic nature of globalization today is to see it as a series of landscapes: the landscape of people, the landscape of finance, the landscape of technology, the landscape of media, and the landscape of ideologies. On each landscape, things move in their own particular circuits. I realize that there’s a landscape of global nomads, perhaps competing landscapes since migrants, refugees, military personnel, business folk, missionaries, and tourists move across the world in quite different ways. But there certainly seems to be a landscape of international school students, not just from Manila, but from across the IS system. It was an IS alumni who pointed out to fellow alums those old commercials on YouTube. This is not just to make the point that it’s a small world, but that to understand globalization we need to understand these competing landscapes and how they shape our movements. This means not only understanding these global interpersonal networks but also the global media network that puts old Filipino commercials on the Internet.
One last story. A good friend of mine from Manila also moved to Phoenix. He worked as an actor and landed a role in a TV commercial for beer. So there he was, playing a cowboy out in the Arizona desert, pretending it was Christmas out on the range. During a break someone asked the director when the ad would air, if they would see it the next holiday. The director said no, it wouldn’t air in the US. It was being made exclusively for broadcast in Manila.
J
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Betwixt and Between
1. By way of introduction
This blog is about global culture seen from a global nomad perspective. What I hope to do here is help explain some of the ways that this perspective is important, what a global nomad perspective affords us. I am an academic, a scholar of communication and cultural studies. I grew up in Asia and the Middle East but now live and teach in Arizona. My writings are usually about the cultural dimensions of technology, the globalization of culture, and the nature of media.
Briefly, what I consider a global nomad perspective is one of ethics, of care for the other now that, to cite an overused phrase from Marshall McLuhan, we’re in each other’s backyards. McLuhan thought that once global electronic communication made us all neighbors that we’d recognize a responsibility for each other. Ha! McLuhan apparently didn’t realize that there are no politics like neighborhood politics (especially when it comes to neighbors cutting across your yard or borrowing your stuff or throwing loud parties to which you are not invited). Responsibility and respect do not come automatically, following contact and close quarters. They require work. This is the work I think global nomads are best suited for.
2. Movement and rest
There are any number of ways to become a global nomad. Some come to it as adults through career, a call to service, a need for a vacation, or political or economic exile. Others have it thrust upon them, like the kids in the tow of the voluntary global nomads. I am one of these latter ones, a Third Culture Kid. Third Culture Kid (or TCK) is a term coined by sociologist Ruth Hill Useem to refer to children who spend a year or more of their formative years in a country that is not their parents’ country, and who then return to that home country. They find themselves a part of neither their parents’ country nor the country or countries in which they grew up, but rather form a third culture, betwixt and between.
In 1960, following a mutually shared wanderlust and a call to global service, my parents, both Americans who grew up in California, went overseas. They joined the American Friends Service Committee and ended up in East Pakistan (as it was at the time). They enjoyed the ex-pat community, and the work. My Dad went to work for CARE and, after the birth of my sister, ended up in Sri Lanka. I was born in California in 1966 but at age three months was on a plane to Pakistan. From there we moved to Turkey, then Jordan (briefly—a matter of a civil war aborted our stay), India, and Korea (where my Dad served as Director). He switched firms again, moving from the non-profit sector to work as foreign representative for a US-based milling company selling high nutritional grain mixes to aid agencies. We were based in the Philippines for four years. The reasons for our return stateside are complicated, but we ended up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I attended High School. My life since has consisted of primarily domestic moves: San Antonio, Urbana, Clemson, Atlanta, and now Phoenix. Early on in there I managed a year abroad in the UK, and since becoming a full time academic I’ve gotten to travel to Finland, Russia, Denmark, Mexico, Hong Kong, China, and Korea.
As a TCK I often feel in but not of the places I live. I know some fellow TCK’s and global nomads who are eternally restless, always looking for something new, finding that it’s time to move on. I know others who have planted themselves firmly after an itinerant upbringing and almost refuse to budge. I find myself in the middle. I love to travel when I can, but I found a respect if not a need for roots and habits. For example, though I have moved many times in my adult life, I always cherish being a “regular,” and find myself seeking out places (coffee shops, restaurants, a couple waffle restaurants in South Carolina) which become part of my routine. I have written about the idea of home. But home for me is less a place than it is a process. Home is the continuous process of the creation of a space of comfort, of arranging spaces and the feelings of spaces, the personal habits, idiosyncrasies, and repetitions that shape a space into a space of comfort. While we express our habits, affect, and culture on the spaces we create, the spaces we move through also in turn press back and shape us. The global nomad is the one who recognizes when one’s habits aren’t matching with the habits of the spaces outside our doors, but we go out seeking ways for our rhythms and spaces to mesh and resonate.
I’ll talk more about home and culture in future blogs (and ideas about difference, cosmopolitanism, nomadism, global flows of media, youth culture, and music). I’m looking forward to the conversation.
J. Macgregor Wise teaches at Arizona State University and is author of, most recently, Cultural Globalization: A User’s Guide (2008, Blackwell).
This blog is about global culture seen from a global nomad perspective. What I hope to do here is help explain some of the ways that this perspective is important, what a global nomad perspective affords us. I am an academic, a scholar of communication and cultural studies. I grew up in Asia and the Middle East but now live and teach in Arizona. My writings are usually about the cultural dimensions of technology, the globalization of culture, and the nature of media.
Briefly, what I consider a global nomad perspective is one of ethics, of care for the other now that, to cite an overused phrase from Marshall McLuhan, we’re in each other’s backyards. McLuhan thought that once global electronic communication made us all neighbors that we’d recognize a responsibility for each other. Ha! McLuhan apparently didn’t realize that there are no politics like neighborhood politics (especially when it comes to neighbors cutting across your yard or borrowing your stuff or throwing loud parties to which you are not invited). Responsibility and respect do not come automatically, following contact and close quarters. They require work. This is the work I think global nomads are best suited for.
2. Movement and rest
There are any number of ways to become a global nomad. Some come to it as adults through career, a call to service, a need for a vacation, or political or economic exile. Others have it thrust upon them, like the kids in the tow of the voluntary global nomads. I am one of these latter ones, a Third Culture Kid. Third Culture Kid (or TCK) is a term coined by sociologist Ruth Hill Useem to refer to children who spend a year or more of their formative years in a country that is not their parents’ country, and who then return to that home country. They find themselves a part of neither their parents’ country nor the country or countries in which they grew up, but rather form a third culture, betwixt and between.
In 1960, following a mutually shared wanderlust and a call to global service, my parents, both Americans who grew up in California, went overseas. They joined the American Friends Service Committee and ended up in East Pakistan (as it was at the time). They enjoyed the ex-pat community, and the work. My Dad went to work for CARE and, after the birth of my sister, ended up in Sri Lanka. I was born in California in 1966 but at age three months was on a plane to Pakistan. From there we moved to Turkey, then Jordan (briefly—a matter of a civil war aborted our stay), India, and Korea (where my Dad served as Director). He switched firms again, moving from the non-profit sector to work as foreign representative for a US-based milling company selling high nutritional grain mixes to aid agencies. We were based in the Philippines for four years. The reasons for our return stateside are complicated, but we ended up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I attended High School. My life since has consisted of primarily domestic moves: San Antonio, Urbana, Clemson, Atlanta, and now Phoenix. Early on in there I managed a year abroad in the UK, and since becoming a full time academic I’ve gotten to travel to Finland, Russia, Denmark, Mexico, Hong Kong, China, and Korea.
As a TCK I often feel in but not of the places I live. I know some fellow TCK’s and global nomads who are eternally restless, always looking for something new, finding that it’s time to move on. I know others who have planted themselves firmly after an itinerant upbringing and almost refuse to budge. I find myself in the middle. I love to travel when I can, but I found a respect if not a need for roots and habits. For example, though I have moved many times in my adult life, I always cherish being a “regular,” and find myself seeking out places (coffee shops, restaurants, a couple waffle restaurants in South Carolina) which become part of my routine. I have written about the idea of home. But home for me is less a place than it is a process. Home is the continuous process of the creation of a space of comfort, of arranging spaces and the feelings of spaces, the personal habits, idiosyncrasies, and repetitions that shape a space into a space of comfort. While we express our habits, affect, and culture on the spaces we create, the spaces we move through also in turn press back and shape us. The global nomad is the one who recognizes when one’s habits aren’t matching with the habits of the spaces outside our doors, but we go out seeking ways for our rhythms and spaces to mesh and resonate.
I’ll talk more about home and culture in future blogs (and ideas about difference, cosmopolitanism, nomadism, global flows of media, youth culture, and music). I’m looking forward to the conversation.
J. Macgregor Wise teaches at Arizona State University and is author of, most recently, Cultural Globalization: A User’s Guide (2008, Blackwell).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)