Deglobalised in a Gion Heterotopia

Kyōto, Gion, 15/03/2007 - 15:33

Heterotopia?

A Greek friend of mine defined it as 'a site where numerous objects (commodities, peoples, cultural ideas) that (logically) shouldn't be together are converging, seizing, interacting within a single space at a certain time.'

I don't know how much my friend referred to ideas by Foucault, Baudrillard (+) or Homi Bhaba, but he gave examples: Jean-Claude Van Damme VCDs in Borneo kampungs, Britney Spears T-Shirts worn by Indonesian fruit vendors. In short, the contemporary world we live in no longer produces semblances of 'originality', a sense of place or time. Commodities from distant places are now floating free in a borderless world. It is a world full of pastiche, 'bricolages' - in short, the world has become a collection of spatial orders full of dislocated and disjunctured objects that are interacting, borrowing, reproducing each other within endless possibilities of new meanings.
All these processes that are now celebrated as 'Globalisation' : borders opening up, people coming together and the instantaneous embracing of 'multiculturalism'...or so they said.

Kyōto's Gion district, the historical leisure quarter of old Japan and 2 weeks away from Miako-Odori, the famous Gion festival of spring. Anticipating to see increasing preparations for the festivities, I strolled along Hanamikoji-dori, but soon found myself stranded in a Starbucks outlet for a macchiato and a cigarette.

I opted to sit on the patio for a better view on the Hanamikoji-dori junction where I would anticipate geikos (geishas) and maikos arriving for their ochaya (teahouse) appointments - but soon I found myself focusing on the objects on my table. A Starbucks Macchiato (an Italian trait, patented in Seattle, containing coffeebeans from God knows where Starbucks got them from), my Indonesian clove cigarettes (sold in vending machines around Japan) and an enamel ashtray ('Made in Thailand'). I began thinking back about 'heterotopias'.

How are the poor Thai labour that made these ashtrays for the classy femme-fatales next to my table connected ? - or similarly, what kind of social networks exist between African or Indonesian coffee farmers and Starbuck's Gen-X management in Seattle ? Sure, these aromatic expressos and macchiatos would be more associated with Jazzy NY lifestyle than anything with these coffee producing countries. My table was in that sense a pure heterotopia. All these objects came together - divorced and disconnected from their origins. Decontextualized.

But surely, heterotopias - if this terminology expresses something meaningful at all - should be as old as human's dawn of existance. An archaelogist found in 1965, for example, that some beads found among Bornean ethnic groups have Venetian, and even Mesopotamian origins. Even during the days of rampant headhunting in Borneo during the late 19th century, Singapore traders were tailor-exporting beads to Borneo catering specifically to colour and size demanded by these 'headhunters.' This is just one example.

Take a look at Japan, and it's hard to find anything that has been originally 'Japanese'. Kanji script has been imported from China, as did Buddhism, Zen, street grids and other cultural elements one would usually associate with traditional Japan. Around the world, and one may find millenia-old technology or cultural ideas that was as widely diffused worldwide as today's images of a baldy Britney Spears, pervert anime movies or violence in Iraq.

So if heterotopias aren't that new after all, what about Globalisation?

Ideas centuries ago were transmitted by direct human interaction, and so every appropriation process must have been immensely build on inter-personal contact, inter-cultural learning. Just imagine how Gujarati traders had to propagate Islam to a largely illiterate population that spoke a totally different language? - at least, the structure of 'globalisation' in the past was build on direct human interactions. With the advent of technology, the dehumanizing large-scale industrial division of labour, these processes were radically speeded up. Humans dropped out from the process, and everything became automated. No longer does a trader have to journey half-a-globe away to convince peoples from another culture that tobacco smoking is cool. Today's global structure is more discriminating (for example, migrant workers are not expected to mingle with host populations), hierarchical and impersonal (expats in Third World countries are merely overlooking the machinery of capital).

Does anyone in Gion today, despite daily images of 'Third World' poverty on cable televisions, care about underpaid coffee farmers or Thai labour after all ? Are we humans actually de-Globalised ?