from local to global to local

What first came to my mind when asked about a real life example of hybridization is this website that I came across earlier in the year - it says mee goreng is a dish that is culturally representative of Singapore because its preparation entails the labour and commodities from the different racial groups in the 'multiracialism' image that the city-state wants to project to the world.

I then took a trip to a nearby hawker centre to see if what is being posted in that website is true. Indeed, I realized that except for Indian mutton and Chinese cabbage, the rest of the details are true. But I'm also sure that the mutton and cabbage do not come from Singapore as well. I thought it is a good example of a cultural hybrid because of the various elements present in the final product. With globalization (after rationalization and mcdonaldization), we obtain everything from almost everywhere as the production, distribution and consumption processes of goods and services are all sophisticatedly separated for better efficiency and quantity.

But as said in the tutorial discussion, this example simply remains a product globalization/hybridization that is not so much of a sociological interest if I do not consider the social reception and consequences of this product in the market. To that, I say that we have come about to make use of the global flows of goods and services to preserve a local culture and shape it accordingly to our wants and desires, such as an Indian hawker relying on the global distribution of his ingredients to keep cooking and selling a national dish, which is consequently marketed by our tourism board to the global and the media to the local. Likewise for French, Japanese or any chef who consistently has to maintain the local culture through preparing certain kinds of dishes. In so doing, the cultural products that we claim to be local are in fact, in our analytical attention, cultural hybrids.

This suggests that what is hybrid can already be synonymously local and global as well. People here know that food production mainly comes from other parts of the world and produced by other local cultures, but paradoxically a national and/or local culture can be preserved as long as such globalized processes of distribution and consumption are present. The culture and product are only hybrid if we want to deconstruct or make sense of them in theoretical ways. To express it mathematically, Local + global = local. That's the social reception of this product (and many other supposedly national or local products and services) today and I find this relationship interesting and noteworthy to be considered one of the many social consequences of modernization and globalization.

Kean Bon.