Transforming Study Abroad

A Handbook

Neriko Musha Doerr

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789201161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

Written for study abroad practitioners, this book introduces theoretical understandings of key study abroad terms including "the global/national, " "culture, " "native speaker, " "immersion, " and "host society." Building theories on these notions with perspectives from cultural anthropology, political science, educational studies, linguistics, and narrative studies, it suggests ways to incorporate them in study abroad practices. Through attention to daily activities via the concept of immersion, it reframes study abroad not as an encounter with cultural others but as an occasion to analyze constructions of "differences" in daily life, backgrounded by structural arrangements.

1

THE GLOBAL AND THE NATIONAL

Does the Global Need the National, and If It Does, What’s Wrong with That?

The Global and the National

If we are currently in a globalized world, has the nation-state become obsolete? Or is the nation-state instead accentuated, because its existence is needed for things and people to be “global”? That is, does the global rely on the existence of the national? What is problematic about continuing to use the notion of the national? What is problematic about celebrating “globalization”? What is the relationship between the notion of the global—as in “global competence” or “global citizens”—and race and class? Can anybody, regardless of race or class, gain “global competence”? Do immigrants—documented or undocumented—have “global competence” in the same way study abroad alumni students do? Who decides? This chapter seeks answers to these questions.

The global is a key term in study abroad. For instance, study abroad is considered “uniquely suited to promoting an appreciation for cultural differences in today’s interdependent global community” (Laubscher 1994: xiv). And the goal of study abroad is often cited as nurturing “global competence” in students, turning them into “global citizens.” Here, as we will see, the notion of “global” relies on the existence of “cultural difference,” which is then connected to the idea of the nation. Globalization is defined as crossing “national” borders and/or rendering them obsolete, as well as dismantling the ideology of the nation-state. In his influential work on globalization, Arjun Appadurai (1990) characterizes globalization in terms of deterritorialization—people moving out of the territory to which the nation was supposed to be linked—and disjunctive flows of people, technologies, finance, media images, and ideologies across national borders. He thus discusses the dismantlement of the ideology of the nation-state—one nation, one people, one culture, one language, one territory, as will be discussed in this chapter—as a sign of globalization.

Paradoxically, however, this formulation of globalization actually works to perpetuate the nation-state ideology because it focuses on the national border that demarcates people, culture, and language. Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller (2002) call it “methodological nationalism,” a type of nationalism that emphasizes the importance of the nation-state as a unit by privileging national border crossing over crossing borders on other scales, such as regional borders. For example, while many researchers investigate history, changes, and contours of migration across national borders, regional migration within the national border tends to receive less academic interest and scrutiny mainly because it is not considered “global” flow, even if such regional migration have significant effects locally. Thus, the global relies on the unit of the national as what is connected to or crossed, leaving the nation-state ideology intact (crossing borders also maintains them). This is also the case in study abroad, as this chapter will show.

It is thus important that discussions of the global in study abroad revisit the notion of the national, critically analyze its ideologies, and avoid perpetuating them when formulating guidance for study abroad students. In what follows, I will review the notion of the national as it is discussed in the fields of political science and cultural anthropology; introduce critiques of the ideologies of nation-states; describe theories of globalization in general, in education, and in study abroad; discuss their ideological aspects as globalism; and suggest ways to incorporate these critiques into our discussions and implementation of study abroad programs.

The National

Imagining the Nation

The political scientist Benedict Anderson (1991) argues that the nation is an “imagined community.” It is imagined because a member has a sense of shared belonging with the other members, even though the member will never meet most of them. This sense of shared belonging was developed through several “technologies.” The spread of print capitalism, manifested in newspapers, gave individuals access to news about what was happening in the rest of the national territory, aiding development of a sense of community as a nation. The map, with its bird’s-eye view, offered a visual framework for thinking and imagining the borders of a national territory, thus the nation. Indeed, it acted as the model for the nation, bringing the nation to be felt as a natural entity. And the totalizing classificatory grid of the census, which regarded individuals as countable and serialized into replicable plurals, created a human landscape of perfect visibility. Through these technologies, the nation-state came to be imagined as constituted by homogeneous people who speak a homogeneous language and all reside within the territorial boundary of the nation-state: the ideology of one nation, one people, one culture, one language, and one territory.

Other researchers suggest different ways in which the notion of nation came to be prominent. For example, Ernest Gellner (1983) argues that a shared learned language is what begets the sense of belonging to a nation. An industrial society with a complex division of labor needs mobile individuals with generic training, including literacy in a certain language to enable them to follow occupational instructions. The rise of mass education in this context, Gellner suggests, helped create interchangeable individuals for the labor force. The boundary of interchangeability, based on the boundary of the education system, then became the boundary of the nation.

Some suggest that language acts as a metaphor for the nation’s homogeneity. Etienne Balibar (1988) argues that a language can provide a group of people with a clear grasp of their continued existence. Shared language makes it possible for “people” to be represented as an autonomous unit. Here, language is what John Comaroff (1987) calls a significant medium of the totemic consciousness of social relationships.

In late eighteenth-century Germany, Johann Gottfried von Herder argued that each nation was set off by “natural” characteristics of language and the intangible quality of a specific Volksgeist. The touchstone of a people, or Volk—what is essential to its national identity and spirit—is its possession of its own distinctive language. Herder argued that a Volk, a nation, a culture, and a polity must be homogeneous, and that diversity is unnatural and destructive of the sentiment that holds a people together. In fact, however, Herder was contributing to the creation of the Volk, more than describing his contemporary situation. His idea became a model for the nation rather than a model of the nation, resulting in an ideology of a one-nation, one-language nation-state. Following Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1968) argued that speaking a common language is the essence of a social bond. Language creates, within the members of a nation, an “internal border” that separates nations (see also Balibar 1994).

Others further posit various means by which individuals developed the sense of belonging to this “imagined community” that is the nation. A family metaphor is used to foster individuals’ intimate and sentimental belonging to the nation (Borneman 1992; for different family metaphors for nations, see Brading 1985; Haberly 1983). In the predominant European imagining of the nation, fathers pass on land (which is the land they defend with their weapons rather than the land they cultivate) and mothers pass on the national language or “mother tongue” (Calvet 1998). Doris Sommer (1991) considers foundational novels that, by depicting founding European fathers and indigenous mothers with their mestizo offspring, connected readers’ identification with the protagonists to their national belonging. Involvement in war also generated a feeling of shared nationhood in various ways, not only through patriotism encouraged by the government and shared sacrifice but also from different nations fighting alongside each other. For example, the sense of national belonging heightened among New Zealanders during the Second Boer War in South Africa and World War I when they fought alongside Australians and Britons that made them realize their “uniqueness” in relation to them (Sinclair 1986). Religion can mobilize a sense of solidarity and belonging in individuals who become connected to nationalism, as in the case of Ireland and Northern Ireland. And the devotedness some show in religion sometimes is used as metaphor of one’s nationalistic feelings, calling patriotism a civic religion (Hobsbawm 1990).

The specificity of the notion of the nation-state is evident in the new treatment of minority groups within a national boundary as a nation-state established itself. In premodern Japan, for example, the appearance and lifestyles of marginalized groups such as Ainu in the north and Ryukyu people in the south were seen as totally foreign and exotic. This attitude stemmed from the ka-i order worldview imported from China, in which the farther away people live geographically, the more foreign and exotic they become. Rather than fixing a clear boundary, this perspective envisioned gradual differences in space in the world seen as concentric circles. Later, though, as Japan sought to become a nation-state in the late nineteenth century, it incorporated the ideology of the nation-state into its stance toward these marginalized groups so as to homogenize everyone in the nation and separate it from other nations with a single, unequivocal line. Hence, these marginalized groups could no longer be viewed as different and instead came to be seen not as foreign exotics but as “Japanese” at an earlier stage of development in “becoming” Japanese. Their forced assimilation into Japan’s dominant ways was justified as “bringing them up to date.” That is, in the new way of viewing their difference, they were no longer synchronically different (“foreign”) but now diachronically different (“backward”) (Morris-Suzuki 1998). This logic of nation-state and the corresponding assimilationist policies were seen all over the world: diversity within the nation, if recognized, was supposed to disappear through assimilation policies.

Challenges to the National

Challenges to the ideology of the nation-state arose in the 1960s. A first challenge took the form of resurgences of minority groups within nation-states. Frustrated by discrimination against them despite their successful assimilation, minority groups changed their strategies to encourage recognition of their cultural difference. Having to learn the dominant group’s linguistic variant as the “standard” language came to symbolize oppression in some cases, such as the Occitan movement in France. Viewing assimilationist policies as internal colonization, ethnic movements challenged the façade of the one-nation, one-culture ideology of the nation-state: it never was homogeneous, assimilation policies to create homogeneity were oppressive, and minority ethnic groups’ difference should be recognized and respected (Comaroff and Comaroff 2004; Kymlicka 1995; Omi and Winant 1994; C. Taylor 1994).

The reconfiguration of world alliances after the Cold War as various new nation-states emerged also pushed governments to allow minority groups’ expression of their difference rather than to risk their political secession by forcing assimilation on them (Appadurai 1990; Kymlicka 1995). This shifted the scale of discussion of cultural difference to the level of “ethnic groups.” Meanwhile, the emergent “globalization” of the 1990s came to be theorized as a challenge to the notion of the nation-state. As mentioned earlier, that same theorization retained the nation as the unit of cultural difference, which I further discuss in the next sections.

The Global

Researches into “Globalization” Processes

The changing contours of international relations that have increasingly been known and analyzed as “globalization” since the 1990s are discussed from various angles. One early influential theorization (though it does not use the term globalization) by the geographer David Harvey (1990) describes the post-Fordist development of time-space compression: as air travel and communication technologies developed and became available to many, the space across the globe became more accessible to more people, shortening the distance to people in these places.

Another influential theorization of the phenomena of globalization by the aforementioned cultural anthropologist Appadurai (1990) argues that globalization occurred with the breakdown of the ideology of the nation-state that unites a single territory, nation, people, and culture. This involves deterritorialization marked by global flows in five disjunctive landscapes: (1) the ethnoscape, in which people move across the globe; (2) the technoscape, in which technologies of communication and other domains are shared around the world; (3) the finanscape of financial systems that are increasingly connected globally; (4) the mediascape, in which TV and film from other countries—mainly the United States, but also India and other areas—are bought and broadcast worldwide; and (5) the ideoscape, in which ideologies such as “freedom,” “human rights,” and “democracy” spread around the globe. The flows in these five distinct landscapes are disjunctive: they do not necessarily go in the same directions.

While Appadurai’s framework suggests uninterrupted global flows that go anywhere freely, others emphasize that these flows are channeled along certain paths as a result of individuals’ and groups’ active pursuit of linkages to globality (Broad and Orlove 2007) and that they may furthermore be interrupted or resisted, causing friction (Tsing 2005). For example, people’s movement is unevenly restricted through differential access to visas in their countries of origin. Tariffs and trade regulations channel the flow of material goods as well.

Some researchers focus their analyses on the sensibility of individuals by examining the development of the global connectivity that allows individuals to feel that distant places are routinely accessible (Tomlinson 1999) through travel, the internet, commodities originating elsewhere, and so on. Others incorporate macro-level analyses to discuss the development of global governmentality via the spread of commodities (Bayart 2007).

While earlier discussions of globalization focused on the debate on whether globalization means homogenization of the world through the spread of “Western” things such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, more researchers came to agree that such globally spread commodities are indigenized differently to particular locales’ tastes and needs (Howes 1996). Susan Philips (2004) contends, in terms of the flow of ideas, that whereas some ideologies that enter into a particular configuration in a society may become incorporated in the local ideologies, others may not. Philips calls this an “ecology of ideas” akin to a locale where only certain plants take root.

Analyzing globalization from another angle, some researchers have examined various phenomena and events around the world in terms of how they are influenced by the global distribution of capital and technological expertise, regulated by national and local political and ideological institutions, and “territorialized in assemblages—they define new material, collective, and discursive relationships” (Collier and Ong 2005: 4). For example, particular research institutions may hire researchers from various countries and local technicians, receive funding from developed countries and research designs from yet other sets of countries, and disseminate their results in a particular pattern.

While many discuss three levels—the global, the national, and the local—and examine their interconnections, Richard Wilk (1995) highlights the emergence of “global structures of common difference” that organize diversity and allow us to communicate our differences to each other in ways that are widely intelligible. For example, cultural difference is expressed how cuisine or artworks differ among cultures. Here, areas of activities—cuisine, art—serve as shared frames to measure that difference. We can “measure” difference between Ghana, China, and Brazil by comparing their food and art, somewhat standardizing how they differ by reducing diverse contours of difference into these set criteria. Now that all cultural differences are defined by universal categories and standards, Wilk observes, people are becoming different in very uniform ways all around the world (see also C. Taylor 1994). Wilk’s viewpoint is distinct from those of other researchers with similar ideas in that he regards the local not as in opposition to the global but as constitutive of a shared global system that organizes diversity. For Wilk, the prevalence of global structures of common difference is a form of global hegemony.

Globalization and Education

While the above researchers focus on analysis of globalization processes, educationists start with the understanding that globalizati...