Effects on Globalization in Culture Differentiation
. Defining concepts
1.1 On Culture
“The whole world is my native land”
Seneca
One of the first difficulties that needs to be overcome whenever trying to make a globalization approach is the lack of a universal acceptation of a unique terminology. As we will be trying to identify any relationship between cultural difference and globalization on the following pages, and knowing about the recurrent problem stated before whenever making these type of analysis, I consider that the clearest way of starting one is by giving a detailed explanation of the terms that I will be using in it.
A nice starting point in setting out to navigate around these intellectual terrains would be the concept of Culture. Several past intellectual experiences have demonstrated that it is quite a risky task to discuss Culture, as the disambiguation surrounding the term is quite huge. But I will prefer to use here an anthropological approach to the concept of Culture, as I consider that the most important role that Culture involves is a human-involving one.
Culture should be regarded “as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs“. Culture can also be understood as communication, in the sense that all the involving features stated before are trespassed inside the social groups through both direct and subtler ways of communication. In a broader sense, Culture enriches communication itself. Culture is the reason why some levels of close communication between social groups can be reached. The hallmark of this process is the Cultural Identity that every social group bears.
In the past, a social group bearing a unique cultural identity could have been development itself as a form of civilization occupying a specific...