JONATHAN FRIEDMAN

Globalizing Languages: Ideologies and Realitiesof the Contemporary Global System

ABSTRACT Globalization is best understood as a phase of decentralization of wealth and power in the world arena that is a hallmark

of a decline in economic hegemony, a phase accompanied by enormous dislocations and migrations of people, by class polarization

and cultural fragmentation, and by the rise of new powerful regions. The current period of globalization is also characterized by a de-

cline in the capacity of states to nationalize, and, consequently, by the upsurge of a series of alternative identifications, such as those

based on indigenousness, regional location, and immigrant status. These fluctuations in power, as well as the formation of new iden-

tities that accompanies them, have significant implications for understanding contemporary linguistic ideologies and practices: Recon-

figurations of identification lead to the formation of hierarchical spaces reflected in ranked local usages of languages. Using the

example of Hawaii, this article outlines fundamental relations between contemporary global processes and cultural identity with an eye

to assessing their significance for understanding linguistic change. [Keywords: globalization, linguistic change, language identity, Ha-

waiian language]

IT IS IMPORTANT, TODAY MORE THAN EVER, thatanthropology and linguistics maintain close relations,

especially in light of the developments of the last few dec-ades. Since the 1970s, the importance of pragmatics forlinguistic theory has been highlighted, primarily by a dis-cussion that has taken various forms—from the sociolin-guistics of William Labov (1973, 1982) to the recent criti-cal work of Pierre Bourdieu (1982) on the social practice oflanguage and its relevance for the understanding of lin-guistic structure. But long before these studies, I rememberbeing impressed by Edmund Leach's remarks on linguisticvariation in Upper Burma (1946, 1954). Leach suggestedthat in periods of relative political centralization amongthe Kachin, language usage also became centralized, andthe Jingpaw language became dominant; during periods ofpolitical decline following the famous gumlao revolts, nu-merous dialects and languages reappeared.

Although Leach did not contextualize this claim with-in the framework of globalization, his work is surely appli-cable to our understanding of linguistic transformation,especially to processes of language loss and revitalization,and linguistic homogenization and heterogenization. Glo-balization is best understood as a phase of decentralizationof accumulation, one that is accompanied by enormousdislocations and migrations, by class polarization and cul-tural fragmentation, and by the rise of new powerful re-gions.1 This understanding draws on the work of Fernand

Braudel (1984), for whom globalization is a historically spe-cific phenomenon within a larger regional or global sys-tem, one that recurs in cyclical fashion. Braudel argues thatglobalization is what has occurred and still occurs in peri-ods of declining hegemony in which old centers transfermassive amounts of wealth or capital to new rising centersand in which investment, therefore, becomes generally de-centralized. In the current moment, declining hegemony hassignificant implications for understanding contemporarylinguistic ideologies and practices, particularly as they relateto reconfigurations of identification and practices of identity.

It appears that the same correlation that Leach discov-ered in Upper Burma between political centralization andlinguistic homogenization, on the one hand, and decen-tralization and linguistic heterogenization, on the other,occurs in many regions of the world. In numerous exam-ples it is not so much the actual extinction of a languagethat makes it appear lost. Instead, minority languageshave often been subordinated, enabling their return as he-gemony is overturned. This complex issue of dominant andsubordinate languages is clearly one that must be dealtwith in terms of the social contexts from which theyemerge and within which they are sustained. Extinction isa more extreme transformation of such relations, but itmay also be possible here that relations of hegemony overtime are crucial aspects in any attempt to grasp the lin-guistic situations involved.

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 105(4):744-752. COPYRIGHT © 2003, AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

Friedman • Globalizing Languages 745

The clearly oversimplified assumption suggested abovethat functionally relates political and cultural hegemonyand linguistic homogeneity does point to interesting rela-tions between political process, identity, and language.We might try the same kind of approach on a world scaleto see what kinds of results we obtain. In my own work, Ihave found interesting relations between processes of po-litical and economic hegemony on a global scale and cul-tural and linguistic "homogeny," just as in periods of de-hegemonization there would seem to be an equivalentdehomogenization of cultural identification and, perhaps,linguistic identification.

Globalization might be reformulated in more preciseand historically informed terms if we were to construct itaround more specific phenomena such as language change.As I have suggested, globalization is a historically specificphenomenon, one among many contradictory processeswithin existing global systems. In this article, I outlinefundamental relations between contemporary global pro-cesses and cultural identity with an eye to assessing theirsignificance for understanding linguistic change, using,primarily, the case of Hawaii to illustrate my points.

HEGEMONIC CYCLES

Hegemonic GrowthAlthough globalization is associated with the decline ofhegemony, it can be instructive to outline the processes ofidentification associated with hegemonic growth. Figure 1illustrates the relationship of hegemonic cycles to culturalidentity.

The lower curve represents the process of expansionof a particular hegemonic center or group of centerswithin the larger global arena. Expansion entails the emer-gence of centralization and of peripheralization, which to-gether form a dynamic continuum rather than a fixed or-ganization. The upper curve corresponds to the processesof integration into and liberation from expanding andcontracting global systems. The expansion process is oneof gradual incorporation entailing significant and oftenviolent resistance, but also accommodation by means oftrade and the integration of elites within larger imperial

Cultural Identity

HEGEMONY

centra^ action

resistance.

'decentralization /traditionalism

cultural decline pluralism /

CivilizationalCycle

FIGURE 1.

modernism

u HOMOGENY"

x post-modernity

fragmentation

orders. The articulations between particular local systemsand the expanding global order are of course complex andare not covered by this kind of graphic. Generally speak-ing, there are two significant classes of processes: first, thematerial process of integration whereby local populationsare reproduced increasingly via the circuits of the largersystem; second, the simultaneous process of cultural as-similation whereby hegemonic institutions, representa-tions, and cultural forms are integrated within the logicsof local life worlds. These two processes are dynamicallyrelated to one another over time.

For example, in the history of the integration of theCongo basin into the expanding world system (Ekholm1972, 1977; Ekholm Friedman 1992; Friedman 1992), therewas a powerful articulation between local political eco-nomic practices dominated by the accumulation and dis-tribution of prestige goods and the emergent slave trade,which led to the disintegration of the area in politicalterms without direct colonization and reorganization ofthe area by direct foreign intervention. The transforma-tion of Congolese polity, society, and culture was endo-genously orchestrated even if externally activated andconstrained until the advent of direct colonial interven-tion. Even in the colonial period, and in spite of the geno-cidal activities of the Leopold regime at the end of the19th century, it can be argued that political structures,while greatly transformed, were not replaced by foreignorganization to the degree that one finds in cases of totaldemolition, as in Hawaii. In Hawaii, direct interventionwas much more complete insofar as local political and so-cial organization was almost entirely eliminated and thepopulation was integrated directly into U.S. political andsocial forms.

The linguistic results of such variation in periods ofexpansion and penetration resulted in two quite differentsituations. In Hawaii the plantation system—in which thepopulation of the islands was largely replaced by immigrantworkers of different origins and the islands themselves in-corporated into the United States first as a territory andthen as a state—virtually eliminated the Hawaiian lan-guage (it was largely forbidden at the Turn of the Century)and induced the gradual transformation of island pidgininto a "neo-pidgin" dialect of English. Belgian and Frenchcolonial regimes introduced their own politically domi-nant French in the Congo Basin as well as a strongly as-similationist education system. But they largely left intactlocal languages and the previously existent if coloniallyelaborated "trade" languages such as Monokutuba andLingala, a three-tiered system that contrasts markedlywith the Hawaiian situation. There is a tendency for tradelanguages to become standard national languages, al-though this process is very different than the clean sweepin the Hawaiian case. In global systemic terms periods ofhegemonic expansion lead to the formation of hierarchi-cal spaces reflected in ranked local usages in which socialmobility is often linked to linguistic mobility. Develop-mental language, evolutionism, and socialization are all

746 American Anthropologist • Vol. 105, No. 4 • December 2003

linked here with the usage of such words as evolues tocharacterize those who managed to move up in the colo-nial order. There is, of course, a great deal of variation inthese processes, but it might be argued that there is certainuniformity in the parameters involved.

Hegemonic DeclinePeriods of declining hegemony are, conversely, periods inwhich struggles for separation, autonomy, and recogni-tion lead in concert and in various degrees to the fragmen-tation of the formerly hierarchic order. This gives rise to"horizontal polarization," or the increasing differentiationinto culturally identifying groups (ethnic, indigenous, re-gional, national, sexual, etc.) that are not defined by hier-archical (and, therefore, vertical) power relations. That is,these groups are defined in terms of a specific cultural con-tent rather than a position in a relationship, even if suchpositional, and hierarchical, factors are ultimately the ori-gin of how such identity is constituted. This polarizationis not the cause of decline but is, rather, part of a processof increasing costs and decentralizing tendencies in the ac-cumulation of wealth within the global arena. Globaliza-tion is the manifestation of this process of decentraliza-tion and consists in a massive transfer of accumulationfrom old to potentially new centers.

The period of declining Western hegemony beganaround the 1970s. Jn terms of identity politics it is the pe-riod in which an assumed tendency toward increasing as-similation was reversed. If experts discussed the rate atwhich immigrant identities would be integrated intolarger national identities (Deutch 1957) until this point, itwas suddenly evident that this was no longer occurring atthe same rate and in many cases was being reversed. Thisis exemplified by the rise of regionalist movements inEurope, the ethnicization of national identity among im-migrant populations, and the rise of indigenous move-ments on a global scale (Friedman 1994:78-90; Lijpart 1977).

The current period is characterized by a decline in thepower of states to nationalize, the decline of modernist ide-ology in general, and the upsurge of a series of alternativeidentifications. In terms of the state itself, the rise of in-digenous, regional, immigrant, and even national identi-ties, which have become more cultural and less modernistin form, are expressions of this process. The word culturalrefers here to what might be designated as the concrete,fixed, and specific within the space of modernity (see be-low), and not to the more general notion in which allidentifiable social forms are also cultural. I have previouslydiscussed this in terms of "rerooting," that is, indigeniza-tion as process or practice, which has proliferated not onlyas an expression but also as a constitutive aspect of the de-cline or disintegration of larger fields of identification.This fragmentation can take on violent proportions in cer-tain conditions in which there is an increase in competi-tion due to declining resources. This has occurred in East-ern Europe with the disintegration of the Soviet empire

and it has run rampant in Central and now West Africawhere state structures have collapsed into ethnic rivalry.The "identity" aspects of such processes can be seen in thefollowing phenomena—processes of horizontal polariza-tion—which characterize zones of hegemonic decline in theglobal arena:

1. Diasporization. This can be defined in part as the eth-nicization of migration, the reinforcement of transna-tional relations, economic, cultural and social. Ethnici-zation refers to a practice of cultural identification inwhich origins, language, and history are summoned inthe construction of collectivities. This is to be under-stood in contrast to mere demographic movement thatin itself need not imply the formation of transnationalidentity as opposed to assimilation to the host popula-tion. It occurs in periods of large-scale transnational mi-gration but it is in periods of hegemonic decline thatthe ethnification of such movement becomes salient.The lack of integration, exclusion from labor markets,and enclavization has been evident in many urban are-nas of Europe where immigrants have tended, wherepossible, to gather in particular zones where there is anintensification of endosocial intercourse, where na-tional languages are not being adequately learned bysecond generations, where local creolized dialects arebeing produced, and where multicultural states have in-troduced pluralist possibilities facilitating what has be-come an increasingly hierarchical segregation. There isevidence of this development in the recent PISA Report(2001) on language and other skills in cross-nationalperspective in which Sweden, for example, exhibits aninteresting correlation between segregation and failureto learn Swedish. This is of course perfectly logical insituations in which residential segregation is such thatimmigrant children have little or no contact with thelarger society and where even the local schools arehighly segregated. The emergence of local dialects hasbeen noted for such segregated areas.

2. Indigenization. This process is marked by the rapid in-crease in indigenous movements throughout the worldand a tendency for individuals of mixed parentage toreidentify as members of an indigenous population.American Indians more than doubled as a populationbetween the 1970s-1980s, an expansion that includesthe rise of several new "tribes" after a century of demo-graphic decline. This demographic change is not merelybecause of biological reproduction but also to the pro-cess of cultural identification. This process has includedthe reconstitution of numerous cultural activities, his-torical narratives, and language learning. This is also thecase in Hawaii. These movements have achieved a globalpresence, if not a global force, at least a global forum inthe World Council of Indigenous Peoples. But indigeni-zation should not be conflated with the mere reappear-ance of suppressed populations and identities. It alsoexpresses a practice of rooted identification that can

Friedman • Globalizing Languages 747

generate new collectivities, even if there are always his-torical continuities of some kind, strands and fragmentsof the past that can be woven into new identities. It isimportant to note that this practice is not limited to of-ficially recognized indigenous identities. It informs re-gional and national identification as well and is in im-portant respects the core practice of "rooting" (Friedman1999a, 1999b). The major differences here relate to theinstitutional context, not least of which is the contextof the state.

3. Regionalization. Regionalization refers to reidentifica-tion of subnational areas as culturally unified groups,demanding cultural (linguistic) and political rights,sometimes including sovereignty. It has occurred spo-radically and with varying effects since the 1970s withthe emergence of movements for the revival of lan-guage and other cultural rights in areas such as Bre-tagne, "Occitania," northern Italy, Wales, Cornwall,and, of course, Scotland—which has gone furthest in acountry where political decentralization has becomeprogrammatic. In Eastern Europe this process has be-come violent. In many cases such movements havemade demands for political as well as cultural or linguis-tic sovereignty. The appearance of such movements inEurope in the early 1970s first triggered the realizationamong researchers that assimilation into the nationstate was not proceeding as predicted.

4. Nationalization. This tendency consists in the ethnifi-cation of nation-state identity in which citizenship isincreasingly paralleled or even superseded by a culturalidentity. In some countries where national identity wasmonolithically associated with participation in a com-mon, culturally specific, public arena and with a set ofmodes of behavior and expression, not least linguistic,national identity has now become an issue of pheno-type, dialect, accent, and other phenomena. These areincreasingly associated with origins in a world of iden-tity politics, not only by host populations but also byimmigrants as well. Thus, the lack of interest and desireto assimilate to host populations reinforces the appear-ance of cultural differences. And the practice of identifi-cation is increasingly individualized, embodied in thesubject. Identity is thus marked on the body rather thanexisting as a property of a larger social sphere withinwhich one participates. This has led to the emergence ofhyphenated identities in some countries and debatesconcerning the introduction of new census categories ofnational identity, such as the French term frangais desouche (lit., "rooted"). The emergence of militia groupsin the United States and of the so-called New Right inEurope is an expression of a kind of indigenization ofnational identity that comes close to a fusion of the na-tional with the indigenous, especially since such groupstend to disassociate themselves from the nation state assuch, or at least the state term in the nation-state amal-gamation.

The Hawaiian Case

Let me return for a moment to the case of Hawaii since itillustrates the long-term relations that I have tried to de-lineate. The incorporation of Hawaii into the U.S. politicalrealm, a process that began in the early 19th century andthat culminated in 1959 when Hawaii became a state ofthe nation, entailed the disintegration of indigenous Ha-waiian political and social institutions and the suppres-sion of much of its culture, including its language. Fromthe early 1970s, Hawaiians began to reemerge both cultur-ally and politically. While there had always been local re-sistance to U.S. dominance—to some extent in the enclaviza-tion, self-isolation, and formation of an internalized socialworld of Hawaiian communities—the 1970s mark a seriesof relatively successful and increasingly visible acts of mo-bilization. Claims to specifically cultural rights, land rights,the achievement of a Hawaiian renaissance, and the estab-lishment of a sovereignty movement came as quite ashock to some of the people I interviewed: Many believedthat Hawaiians had all but disappeared. In fact, much ofthe "invention of tradition" (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983;Keesing 1989; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982) onslaught ona reemergent Hawaiian identity might be understood as areaction to what appeared as an impossibility. How couldan ostensibly lost culture be reaffirmed so suddenly bypeople who claimed to be Hawaiian (Friedman 1992, 1994;Linnekin 1983)? While some anthropologists engagedthemselves in debunking the authenticity of such move-ments, I argued that in existential terms the process ofreidentification is no mere game of indexicality or of rei-fied symbols of identity. This would be to misconstrue areality in which a population might engage in culturalpolitics while at the same time maintaining practices andforms of sociality that resonate both historically and ex-perientially with those identities. Thus, the strands andfragments that are built into reconstituted identities arenot mere intellectual objects, they are integrated intomore powerful matrices of social existence than are oftenassumed to exist by intellectualizing observers whose un-derstanding of reality partakes of their own alienationfrom that reality.

In any case, the reemergence of a Hawaiian identityhas included a widespread trend of reidentification withinthis population. In previous decades, many had chosen toidentify not as Hawaiians but as members of other ethnicgroups; this was possible because of the ethnically mixednature of "part-Hawaiians" as they are defined in the cen-sus. However, as part-Hawaiians found new pride in a pre-viously marginalized identity, they began to take on theirHawaiian names. The revival of hula and the proliferationof hula halau (dance schools) was part of a larger politicalmovement for sovereignty.2 This move also entailed claimsto substantial land areas, territory that since has been ac-knowledged as illegally confiscated (even by U.S. legalstandards).'*

748 American Anthropologist • Vol. 105, No. 4 • December 2003

Part of this process included the rebirth of the Hawai-ian language, the establishment of language schools, andthe introduction of Hawaiian into the public school cur-riculum. Many older Hawaiian activists who had neverlearned the language now found that their children werebecoming quite fluent. While I do not have statistical ma-terial, I do know of settlements where speaking Hawaiianhas become predominant among the younger generation.Some new speakers of Hawaiian can now converse withtheir grandparents but not with their parents. The extentto which this will continue depends on the possibility ofmaintaining a social context that provides relevance forthe language. The Hawaiian movement(s) and the rein-forcement of Hawaiian identity are clearly the founda-tions for this linguistic reversal and depend, and will con-tinue to depend, on the persistent practice of culturalcontinuity and nature relevance of this identity.

Such examples of emergent cultural identification, ofrooting—of multicultural politics—express some of the ma-jor identity processes related to the decline of hegemonythat are typical of the West and, more recently, of Japan,which has experienced an unprecedented rapid expansionand contraction of economic centrality, never havingachieved real hegemonic status.4 These processes, as I havestressed, are related to globalization via the following sys-temic relations: The decline of strongly centralizing andeven assimilating hegemonic states is related to the factthat these are centers that are on the decline in terms ofproduction and accumulation. The decline follows logi-cally from the massive export of capital (i.e., globalization)from such centers, which, in turn, generates downwardmobility, public sector crisis, social polarization, and agradual loss of faith in the future, thus a decline in mod-ernism as a hegemonic project. This finally leads to thesearch for more stably rooted identities for a large part ofthe population in a situation in which the maintenance ofintegrative politics is increasingly difficult. This is theprocess of fragmentation.5

LANGUAGE LOSS AND LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION

The rise of identity movements and the cultural fragmen-tation of larger political units may not necessarily lead tothe renaissance or birth of new dialects and languages. Ona global scale languages are disappearing at a remarkablyrapid rate (Hagege 2000; Nettle and Romaine 2000). Thisis related in part to large-scale global transformations, tothe history of empire, and to the expansion of imperiallanguages in situations of social hierarchy, in which socialmobility is often dependent on learning the language ofthe regional or global interaction sphere. But nationaliza-tion, not least in postcolonial situations, may have beeneven more destructive of local languages and dialects. Thecurrent expansion of English on a global scale is related toan interesting process of stratification or even specializeddifferentiation—both within the domain of English andbetween local and national languages and an increasingly

dominant elite English, which is often itself a localizedvariant of the original. There are a number of emergentspecialized dialects of English as well, related to variousdomains of business, consulting, and the like. This mightbe understood in terms of a process of pidginization of theEnglish language, like the formation of trade languages,with reduced levels of internal structure and admixtureand simplification (Trudgill 2002). Insofar as this processdifferentiates linguistic space—however hierarchically—itis a less powerful extinguishing force than nationalization.

In spite of such tendencies, however, there is clear evi-dence that cultural politics can and have played an impor-tant role in language renewal (Hagege 2000). So what isunderstood as globalization may in fact signal the begin-ning of a reversal of language extinction. This is a complexissue, of course, since the political conditions conduciveto such reversal are probably quite exigent. It is also im-portant not to forget that many political movements andprojects of decolonization from the top, such as the one inMelanesia, have led to the establishment of new nationalvernaculars, such as Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, aphenomenon that may have reinforced the extinction oflocal languages (Kulick 1992). The fragmentation of largerpolitical units into smaller identities is only one of theconditions for language development.

In the example of Hawaii, the establishment of theHawaiian movement(s) has clearly led to the revival oflanguage and language teaching. The locus of languageconsolidation also may well be the locus of political iden-tification, so that when nations are formed they absorbthe minorities that they contain, including minority lan-guages and dialects. This is not a process that is limited tothe nation-state or state formation in general. Research onthe Kachin and surrounding peoples of Upper Burma,China, and Assam has suggested that the formation ofcentralized polities, even chiefdoms, leads to the homog-enization of language use within the larger territory, andthat the disintegration of such polities leads to linguisticfragmentation as well. These kinds of issues have been ex-plored on a world scale in recent literature (Hagege 2000;Nettle and Romaine 2000).

It might be suggested that the relation between domi-nant and minority languages is a function of the complexbalance of power between different social actors. Thiswould imply that in areas of declining hegemonic power,there ought to be an increase in minority language devel-opment as part of the process of cultural-political frag-mentation; in areas of increasing hegemony, the reverseshould be the case. While admittedly oversimplified, thisinverse correlation is meant to highlight a logic in ten-dency rather than an actual outcome, which is often theresult of more complex interaction of specific contextualfactors. Increasing hegemonic power implies the formationof social fields in which ranking between dominant andincorporated minority cultures is strong; in the strongestcases, assimilation is the rule. Decreasing hegemonic powerimplies the fragmentation of such fields, the liberation of

Friedman • Globalizing Languages 749

formerly integrated subcategories, and the increased auto-nomy of subfields within the larger formerly unified field.

It should not be assumed that decreasing centralitywithin a global system—what I refer to in terms of declin-ing hegemony—is necessarily a decline in the status andpower of elites. On the contrary, it is in such periods thatelites become globalized: These globalized elites and thosewho identify with them bear the image of a new multicul-tural world order, just as in a period of rising hegemony,international elites represented modernist versions of asecular and modernist world order as in the socialist internationals.

Vertical Polarization

If cultural and social fragmentation are seen as a kind ofhorizontal polarization that is, nonhierarchical differen-tiation—there is also a substantial tendency toward verti-cal polarization. Much of the fragmentation discussedabove has been greatly amplified by downward mobilityand marginalization, although this is not the entire story.Some indigenous groups have been able to profit greatlyfrom cultural politics, but this is by no means the usual

state of affairs. Furthermore, it is important t note thatthe success of some indigenous rights movements oftenentails internal stratification within emerging indigenousgroups (Friedman 1999a, Rata 1999).

At the top of the global arena there is a process inwhich elites transcend local and national identities to be-come cosmopolitans (see Figure 2) and experience theworld from a vantage point that is "above it all." This \er-tical distance is a politically powerful means of producinga particular discourse of the global, one that is associatedwith much of the current globalization literature in an-thropology. Cosmopolitan discourses are not new, ofcourse, and much of the content that one finds in currentglobalizing literature can be found in earlier forms—forexample in the Freemasonry, especially that which devel-oped within the British Empire. It is, I would argue, also aspontaneous—that is "authentic"—representation of acertain experience of the world. In a global consultingfirm, for example, a study by one of my doctoral studentsof internal communication (intranet) among employeesreveals clear statements that resonate well with globali-zation ideology in the academic sphere (Chemin 2001).

CO

N

is

u Hegemony

Dasponfti

PoliticalIntegration

De-culluralizalion

PoliticalFragmentation

Multicicujtiiralizati

CosmopolitanizationRoutes

A

Indigenization

Roots

CivitfzationalUycle

Homogeny

TimeFIGURE 2. This graph contrasts periods of nation-state formation and increasing hegemony with periods. .f declining hi-gomony. The formerare characterized by a power process of assimilation and modernist international elte formation. The latter are characterized by fragmen-tation and hybrid cosmopolitan elite formation.

750 American Anthropologist • Vol. 105, No. 4 • December 2003

FIGURE 3. The dialectic of cosmopolitanization and indigenization.

Expressions like "opening up to the world," being "con-nected to the rest of the world," but also "being part of thewhole world" were frequently used:

The world is borderless when seen from a high enoughperspective, and this has all kinds of implications: so-cially, politically, economically and even spiritually. . . .Regardless of how the awareness began, it generally cul-minates in a sense of global citizenship. The best ap-proach is to develop a sense that "I belong anywhere I am,no matter who I am." [Barnum 1992:142]

This text is not from a popular cultural studies journalsuch as Public Culture but the words of a business consult-ant. The same kind of language can be found not only inmanagerial New Age discourse and elite media discoursebut also in the kinds of representations of the world prof-fered by UNESCO's various statements and documents on"our creative diversity," such as the World Culture Reports:

The world is hearing a magnificent overture of culturalpossibilities. People everywhere, however, are reposition-ing themselves in this vast global commons in order topreserve part of their traditions, while at the same timeengaging in cultural exchanges and redefining their rela-tionships with neighbors on this tiny planet. [UNESCOWorld Culture Report, in Trudgill 2000:8]

This kind of discourse is also being produced by nationstates attempting to redefine themselves as multiculturalstates. Sweden is an excellent example of this process: Untilrecently, the country was noted for its homogeneity—which is, of course, the product of cultural practices ofidentification, not biology. A recent government proposi-tion stresses that the country no longer has a common his-tory since there are so many different immigrant "ethnic"groups, including Swedes. A new kind of integration is pro-posed, one based on a model closer to the classical versionof the "Plural Society" (Furnivall 1948). Similar tendenciesare occurring in the constitution of the European Union.Interesting in this respect is the emergence or reemergenceof something similar to an imperial or even colonial repre-sentation of governance. The discourse of hybridity is essen-tial for those at the top of the system. Looking down fromthe increasingly fortified balconies of the world system,the elite encompasses the multitude of cultural differencesbelow and appropriates this multitude in the form of ob-jects to place in its living rooms—in other words, the elite

seeks to furnish its localized life spaces with the accumu-lated paraphernalia of a world of differences.

As the expression and discourse of a particular posi-tion within a globalizing global system and the formationof transnational elites, cosmopolitan identity may indeedhave important effects on language policies, but it is un-clear what these effects will be. While expressive of a willto consume and, thus, to preserve difference, a cosmopoli-tan identity reinforces the use of particular elite languagesat the summit. English has indeed become this dominantworld language. English usage ought best to be under-stood in a continuum of declining grammaticality andvariability that might form a kind of dialect continuum ofits own insofar as many elites ostensibly make use of thesame language. Thus, the pluralism of culture and even oflanguage is a form of stratification on a world scale, an in-teresting parallel to the imperial structure of language usein contemporary Mongolia where social mobility dependson entering the Mandarin universe while cultural identityand, thus, Mongolian linguistic identity is sorted at thebottom of the scale (see Bulag this issue). On the otherhand one should note that since transnational elites arenot necessarily unified in a single project, the dominanceof English may be challenged. Some years ago I attended aconference in which Japanese and Chinese scholars ex-pressed dissatisfaction with the pervasiveness of English incomputer operating systems. They further revealed thatresearchers were developing systems based instead on EastAsian languages.

From a vertical perspective the fragmentation de-scribed in the preceding pages is a process that occursfrom the middle to the bottom of the system. The dividedbottom is the source of cultural enrichment for globalizedelites, it is the zone of production of cultural differences ina world of mass migration and diasporization. But it is alsoa world in which the identities related to the bottom areopposed to those of the top; they are potentially danger-ous in their local xenophobia. If the top is moving beyondthe state into the global cosmos, the bottom remains "im-prisoned," as globalizes would have it in its local enclaves.

SMALL WORLDS

Social positioning in the elite transnational circuits of theworld system produces a discourse of the openness of thetransgression of borders, of "trans-x" discourse that I havedescribed elsewhere (Friedman 2001, 2002). However, weshould not confuse the celebration of global hybridity andcosmopolitanism that is part of the spontaneous self-iden-tity of this kind of elite representation of the world withthe actual social lives and worlds in which it is embedded.That is, cosmopolitans construct worlds that are just assmall as those of the common people on whom they gazeand whose cultural differences contribute to the parapher-nalia of their social spaces or salons. Their encompass-ment of the world is essentially a form of consumption, anappropriation of culture that becomes part of their social

Friedman • Globalizing Languages 751

fields. But just as with Creole populations in historical andethnographic reality, cosmopolitans live in small worldswith others who live the same way and share the samekinds of experience. These are elite worlds that have astrong tendency to endosociality and even to endogamy,worlds—like the other social worlds that are being consti-tuted in the process of global fragmentation—that areseparate and segregated. So the apparently open and hy-brid content of such worlds belies the social closure thattypifies their social existence (see Wagner 1998).

The discourse of cosmopolitan openness is not com-ing from people who are integrated socially with the diver-sity that they espouse. It emanates from the gentrified for-tresses that form the urban centers of global power. Itsvoice is the royal "we" and in this way it conflates its ownreal segregation with a vision of global solidarity. It is, infact, this social closure that may contribute to the verticalpolarization of English. If exclusivity of education appliesto the reproduction of such elites then it is bound to pro-duce a linguistic ranking as well. One can already see howthis affects the tendencies among middle classes to scram-ble to learn English in both non-English-speaking centersand peripheries.

Globalization then is a process of segregation, espe-cially in terms of vertical separation of increasingly polar-ized segments of national populations. Horizontal segrega-tion is a more face-to-face phenomenon that might accountfor the face-offs, the social conflicts and violence of thestreet, and the disintegrating polities of Eastern Europe,the Mideast, and Africa. So while we are currently absorbedin what is being billed as a "war of civilizations"—howevermistaken this appears to intellectual elites (bin Laden, atleast, may have read Huntington)—there is plenty of po-tential conflict right here at home.

I tried living's in the big-city multicultural thingie fortwelve years, only to realize that most of multicultural-ism's proponents—rich white people—didn't want me. SoI moved to a neighborhood that is redneck, blue-collar,white trash. Low rent. Low class. Lowlife. Truckers, weld-ers, meth dealers, pit bulls, rotted picket fences. . . . It'sthe Gold Card whites who've always paid to segregatethemselves, leaving the rednecks, niggers and spies tofight over day-old cookies. [Goad 1997:35]

The realities of globalization are in the point of view pre-sented here, not in the one that stresses flow, openness,and mixture. For all our transnational, transsexual, trans-local, transcendent, boundary-busting talk, there is evi-dence that something else is going on.

JONATHAN FRIEDMAN Ecolc des Hautes Etudes en Sciences So-ciales, Paris, France 75006, and University of Lund, LundSweden, 22100

NOTES

1. This is not to lie confused with the more general expansion ofimperial systems that characterize periods of colonization—whether by track- or military might—and that are often associated

with political and cultural "dillusion." Sometimes the two may belinked as in the case of the colonial expansion of the end of the19th century, but this is an area that requires more systematic re-search.2. Hawaiian identity was deepened and elaborated in the activitiesof these schools that combined a strong religious engagement di-rectly expressed in the kinesthetics of dance with a sense of politi-cal identity. The hula, after all, had been forbidden by the U.S. gov-ernment.3. In November 1993 President William Clinton signed into Jawthe Apology Resolution in which the United States confessed to itsinvasion of Hawaii and participation in the overthrow of the Ha-waiian monarchy. It should be noted, of course, that even Presi-dent Cleveland acknowledged the illegality of the overthrow andrefused to accept the rebels' attempt to annex the islands to theUnited States. It might also be noted that there has recently devel-oped a growing resistance from other dominant ethnic groups tothe sovereignty movement.4. Japan is noteworthy in this context since there apparently hasbeen a shift to multiculturalism there. This is in marked contrast toJapan's previous tendency to strongly enforce national identity(Graburn 2003) and to represent internal ethnic differences as dif-ferences in social status or even caste, rather than as issues of eth-nicity.5. It is necessary to include a brief remark on the current post-September 11 world in the United States since it might seem tocontradict my argument. First one might note that the rise ofglobal terrorism, whether associated with the Middle East or otherregions of the world, is not brand new. It developed throughoutthe 1980s and much of it among the diasporic elites, often middleclass, in the West who may have had to face conditions of declineand ethnic conflict in a situation in which their own integrationmeant estrangement from "traditional values." The topic of globalterrorism produces interesting discourses on the decadence of theWest as well as what might be described as a post-Ottoman bluesin which a revival of the great former empire can be understood asarising on the ashes of an enfeebled and immoral West. The in-crease of Islamic identification among the increasingly marginal-ized and downwardly mobile reinforces this trend and provides re-cruits to the cause. In 1970 there were ten Mosques in the Parisregion. By 1980 there were almost two thousand. This is not aproduct of immigration but of religious rebirth among a largelysecularized population who were largely of North African originand had been formerly integrated mostly at the bottom of society.Global terrorism is related closely to the articulation of these twokinds of phenomena. And the U.S. reaction to terrorism—the at-tempt to create empire—might be seen as part of the same process.The wars in the Middle East are attempts to restore order in a worldover which the United States has been losing control, from eco-nomic accumulation to political decision making. The cost of thisattempt may well prove to be disastrous, of course, given the feebleeconomic foundations on which the effort has been based. Theshort-lived military expansion of empire on the fragmentingground of a former hegemony is an often-reappearing phenome-non in history. It should not be forgotten that formal empire usu-ally occurs at the end rather than the beginning of hegemony.

REFERENCES CITED

Barnum, Cynthia1992 Effective Membership and the Global Business Community.

In New Traditions in Business: Spirit and Leadership in the 21 stCentury. J. Renesch,ed. Pp. 141-158. San Fransisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Bourdieu, Pierre1982 Ce que parlor veut dire: I'economic des echanges linguis-

tiques. Paris: Fayard.Braudel, Fernand.

1984 The Perspective of the World. New York: Harper and Row.Chemin, Christine

2001 Rhetoriquesmondialisantes, rhetoriquesde la nioiulialis.ition et production des champs sociaux en enterprise. MnnoireDEAenAnthropologieSociale. Paris: KHI.SS.

752 American Anthropologist • Vol. 105, No. 4 • December 2003

Deutch, Karl, et al.1957 Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: Interna-

tional Organization in the Light of Historical Experience. Prince-ton: Princeton University Press.

Ekholm, Kajsa19 72 Power and Prestige: The Rise and Fall of the Kongo Kingdom.

Uppsala: Skrivservice.1977 External Exchange and the Transformation of Central Afri-

can Social Systems. In The Evolution of Social Systems. JonathanFriedman and Michael Rowlands, eds. Pp. 115-136. London:Duckworth.

Ekholm Friedman, Kajsa1992 Catastrophe and Creation: The Transformation of an African

Culture. London: Harwood Academic Press.Friedman, Jonathan

1992 The Past in the Future: History and the Politics of Identity.American Anthropologist 94:837-859.

1994 Will the Real Hawaiian Please Stand: Anthropologists andNatives in the Global Struggle for Identity. Bijdragen tot deTaal-Land-en Volkenkunde 149: 737-767.

1999a Indigenous Movements and the Discreet Charm of theBourgeoisie. Taja: Australian Journal of Anthropology 10(1): 1-14.

1999b Class Formation, Hybridity and Ethnification in DecliningGlobal Hegemonies. //; Globalization and the Asia Pacific: Con-tested Territories. K. Olds, P. Dicken, P. Kelly, L. Kong, and H. Ye-ung, eds. Pp. 183-201. London: Routledge.

2001 The Paradoxes of Real Existing Globalization: Elite Dis-courses and the Grassroots. In Images of the World. Pp. 52-65.Copenhagen: UNESCO.

2002 From Roots to Routes: Tropes forTrekkers. AnthropologicalTheory 2(l):21-36.

Furnivall, John Sydenham1948 Colonial Practice and Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press.Graburn, Nelson

2003 Communities of Foreignness: Models of Cultural Diversityin the New Japan. Paper presented at the Third InternationalConference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Na-tions: "Cultural Diversity in a Globalizing World." East-WestCenter, University of Hawaii, February 13-16.

Goad, Jim1997 The Redneck Manifesto. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Hagege, Claude2000 Halte a la mort des langues. Paris: Odile Jacob.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds.1983 The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press.Keesing, Roger

1989 Creating the Past: Custom and Identity in the Contempo-rary Pacific. The Contemporary Pacific 1 (1-2): 19-42.

Keesing, Roger, and Robert Tonkinson, eds.1982 Reinventing Traditional Culture: The Politics of Kastom in Is-

land Melanesia. Mankind 13:4.Kulick, Don

1992 Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization,Self, and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinean Village. Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Labov, William1973 Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-

vania Press.1982 The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Wash-

ington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Leach, Edmund

1946 Cultural Change with Special Reference to the Hill Tribes ofBurma and Assam. Ph.D. dissertation, University of London.

1954 Political Systems of Highland Burma. London: Althone Press.Lijphart, Aaron

1977 Political Theories and the Explanation of Ethnic Conflict inthe Western World: Falsified Prediction and Plausible Postdic-tions. In Ethnic Conflict in the Western World. M. Essman, ed.Pp. 46-64. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Linnekin, Jocelyn1983 Defining Tradition: Variations on the Hawaiian Identity.

American Ethnologist 10:241-252.Nettle, Daniel, and Suzanne Romaine

2000 Vanishing Voices: The Destruction of the World's Lan-guages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PISA2001 Knowledge and Skills for Life: First Results from the OECD

Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2000.Paris: OECD.

Rata, Elizabeth1999 The Theory of Neotribal Capitalism. Review 22(3):231-290.

Trudgill, Peter2000 World Culture Report. Paris. UNESCO publications.2002 Sociolinguistic Variation and Change. Washington, DC:

Georgetown University Press.Wagner, Anne-Catherine

1998 Lesnouvelles elites de la mondialisation: Une immigrationdoree en France. Paris: PUF.