People’s identities are an object of study in a range of fields, but it’s the field of cultural studies that has most singularly, even obsessively, sought to understand how identities interact with politics in changing media environments. Cultural studies first emerged in a British milieu marked by very specific relations between socio-economic classes, media industries, and an industrial-capitalist economic system. As it has struggled to keep up with a changing and increasingly globalized world (e.g., Abbas and Erni 2004, Bachman-Medick 2014, Connery and Wilson 2007, Freeman and Proctor 2018, Szeman 2011), cultural studies has become necessarily more informed by the sociology of globalization and by the anthropology of “multiple globalizations,” with their late colonial, postcolonial, and decolonizing contexts and their various relationships with the transnational capitalist economy.
Developing theoretical frameworks that cover the entirety of global culture has been challenging, and there seems to be a shared sentiment among scholars that no single such framework can ever adequately encompass the study of cultural identities writ large across the world. The following is a framework that I have been finding useful in thinking about the cognitive (or worldview) dimensions of “global culture,” including emerging manifestations of “ecoculture” or “ecocultural identity.” It is intended to help us think about how people, as individuals and as communities, make sense of their place (and time) in the world in relation to others.
The framework is structured along two intersecting axes, one separating “tradition” (and “traditionalism”) from “modernity” (and “modernism”), the other distinguishing what I am calling “monology” (or “monologism”) from “reflexivity.” Below are some definitions, caveats, and other notes on how I am thinking about these. Together the axes offer an admittedly blunt tool for analysis, and the terms in the blue boxes (or quadrants) are intended to be at best suggestive. I welcome any thoughts, suggestions, or criticisms of this model.
Definitions, clarifications, and caveats
1. Neither “tradition” nor “modernity” (nor the latter’s various cognates, such as “development,” “progress,” or “advancement”) are stable signifiers. There are multiple “traditions” and “traditionalisms,” and there are multiple “modernities,” “modernisms,” and “modernizations.” There are multiple emic (i.e., localized, “insider”) understandings of this tradition-modernity dichotomy. But some form of it, encompassing some understanding of change toward what is or takes itself to be “modern” (and/or “progressive” and/or “developed” and/or “advanced”) is as close to being a universal trope as anything in our historical era.
2. Cultural analysts need not, and indeed should not, take any of these constructs of “tradition” and “modernity” for granted. They are what is to be explained, as are the meanings ascribed to the “modern” and its connections to other cultural and economic processes, such as colonialism and capitalism in their multiple variants and phases. But the presence of something loosely connected to or derived from “modernity” and “modernization,” and by implication something that this modernity either challenges, threatens, or displaces (i.e., “tradition”), can rarely be avoided in understanding how people interpret their place in the world. Whether one is a Davos financier, an African farmer or hunter-gatherer, or a refugee or illegal migrant laborer, one is aware of the fact that the world has become or is becoming “modern” and that in doing so it has been moving away from something that more closely resembled the way one’s ancestors lived. And chances are, one is identified in part with how one locates oneself within that relationship.
For instance, “tradition” may tend to suggest repetition, inertia, and constraint, while “modernity” tends to suggest innovation and novelty, as well as a (unilinear or multilinear) progressive advance forward. But none of these connotations should be taken for granted: tradition can and does advance (or is invented), while modernity can affix, stabilize, constrain, and even imprison. The arrows in the diagram do not move in one direction (from tradition to modernity); they stretch in both, with the possibility of movement from either to the other, and with the possibility of both ends changing forms. Again, these are what is to be explained — they are neither fixed nor settled in their meanings, but the background assumptions around them can rarely be avoided entirely, and are liable to be found in any realm of cultural life from protest, popular culture, and sports to heritage, religion, and philosophy.
3. By “monology” I mean an unwavering commitment to a singular worldview (set of narratives about time and space, with accompanying values, etc.) and a seeming incapacity to accommodate other, radically different worldviews. By “reflexivity” I mean a capacity to self-critically accommodate or at least seriously entertain multiple and divergent worldviews or worldview possibilities.
The two terms are not obviously and directly counterposed, in part because there are multiple forms that reflexivity can take. For instance:
- Analogical or translational reflexivity accommodates other worldviews by finding pragmatic parallels and analogies between them. An example of this would be the ancient, imperial-Roman practice of incorporating foreign gods and religious practices into well-understood templates by which the existence of multiple deities were thought to be distributed across a multitude of functions and domains. Thus, Mercury was understood to be another name for Hermes (Greek) and roughly equivalent to Thoth (Egyptian), and so on.
- Paralogical reflexivity is a cognitive capacity to not only seriously consider radically divergent ways of making sense of the world (using whatever means are available), but also to seek new interpretive tools where none might be available, and, most importantly, to accept the possibility of paradox and ambiguity as constitutive.
- We might also identify an alogical reflexivity, which would be an ability to consider the world or universe as lacking in logic (Logos, reason, order, pattern, ultimate or transcendent meaning, etc.) and as therefore putting into question not only one’s own cognitive biases and preferences but also any cognitive biases and preferences. This option seems uncommon, but it’s reasonable to see it as a possibility. (And we should also acknowledge the possibility of an unreflexive and monological “alogism,” that is, a dogmatic denial of meaning.)
4. Unlike the tradition-modernity axis, the monology-reflexivity axis tends not to be an emic one, but only an etic (outside analyst’s) construction. The analyst is likely to notice it, whereas the insider (member of the community that follows this form of thought) might well be unaware of it. That said, “outsiderness” and “insiderness” are parts of the constructs of “tradition” and “modernity,” so insofar as this theoretical framework implies that there is value in distinguishing monologism from reflexivity, it is itself arguably modernist. And insofar as it does this self-consciously, it is reflexively modernist. And as with the horizontal axis, the vertical one is dynamic, with movement possible in either direction.
5. The question naturally arises, then, as to whether the model privileges the movement from the bottom-left to the top-right quadrant, i.e., from a kind of conservative or “fundamentalist” form of tradition towards reflexive modernization or postmodernization. The simple answer is: no, that’s why both arrows go in two directions. If anything, the model valorizes the bidirectionality of both axes, which means the constitutive uncertainty of how tradition and modernity, and how monologism and reflexivity, do and will play themselves out in concrete circumstances around the world. This means that, insofar as the model captures something about our world, it assumes that there will be no final and ultimate modernization, secularization, or for that matter “retraditionalization” of one or a thousand forms. We are fated, for now, to oscillate between traditions and modernities, and between monologisms and reflexivities. The combinations of these are diverse and potentially endless.
6. Since I’ve admitted that monologism and reflexivity aren’t exactly antonyms, another question arises: Is it possible to be reflexively monological? The diagram suggests that that would mean locating oneself roughly at the mid-point of the vertical axis. Reflexivity necessitates an ability to contextualize one’s own beliefs and commitments within a wider terrain of options. This means that one is both committed and well aware of the contingency or at least questionability of one’s own commitments. I think that’s a good place to be.
7. The big caveat is this. While there are some people who get their identity bearings from categories like “tradition,” “modern,” “progress,” and the like, most do not. Mapping the specifics of their own categories (for instance, “African-American,” “Evangelical Christian,” “queer Mestiza,” “Thunderbird clan of the Anishinaabe nation,” or the hybrid and overlapping identities most people have) onto the loose spectrum of “tradition” and “modernity” is fraught and bound to ultimately fail. So then is it merely a theoretical construct, useful only for broad generalizations, and, if so, how does it compare with others that are out there?
That’s a big question that requires a long answer. But for starters: racial, ethnic, and religious categories tend to be specific to their national, subnational, or transnational but subcultural (e.g., religiously specific) contexts. They come closer to people’s actual self-identity categories, but they do not necessarily map well across cultural contexts. Economic class categories tend to be etic categories with only occasional emic analogues (e.g., how many people actually identify as part of the bourgeoisie, the globalist elite, the global precariat, the human capital stock, or even of the international working class?). Other global categories, like membership in the “global North” versus the “global South,” are too distant from most people’s life experience to have much direct meaning.
“Tradition” and “modernity” arguably does no worse than most of those, and quite possibly does better. “Monology” and “reflexivity,” on the other hand, does not do well by this measure of being a meaningful identity indicator in most people’s lives. So the above framework makes, at best, for an uncomfortable hybrid. I find it personally useful, and I may illustrate how in a future post. But I am still thinking it through.
8. None of this says anything about the affective, as opposed to the cognitive, dimensions of cultural identity. While that is another topic for another time, it’s worth mentioning that much of the writing in affect theory (as, for instance, the work of Teresa Brennan, Eve Sedgwick, and Kathleen Stewart) carries important implications for the theorization of what we might call styles of knowing, which include the “monological” and “reflexive” styles I have been referring to. It’s precisely that work that I think provides more support for the case I’ve been attempting to make for the vertical axis in the above diagram. More on that to come at some point.
Note: I’ve added a few things to this post since it originally went up, and may add a few more links to relevant external resources.
