The Fragmentation of Identity Formation in the Age of Glocalization

Abstract

Although the issue of identity has been a concern since the dawn of time, the globalizing drive has triggered more interest in the phenomenon, quite often leading to geopolitical and social crises. As a matter of fact, with the advent of a new age of glocalization—generally characterized by its deterritorializing tendencies—identity construction has proven to be fraught with a number of fragmentations, only to suggest that our understanding of how our identities are co-construed is still way too far to be accounted for in its entirety. This study argues that identity is a process of becoming rather than being, and it is thus formed in compliance with the exigencies of each and every time. While accompanied in theoretical perspectives, the study attempts to lay bare the different processes involved in one’s identity construction as it has been negotiated in the “pre-modern,” “modern,” and now “(late-)post-modern” ages. Such genealogical perspective paves the way to uncover the contentions inherent in the phenomenon, especially as we are nearing times where the blend of the local and the global has been exacerbated today more.

Introduction

This article investigates the processes through which the formation of individual identities as embedded in a sense of collective identity have gone over many years to transform from, more or less, a stable sense of identification to an unstable and fragmented ways of constructing one’s self-concept. It is more of a sociological review of different ways of constructing individual identities, as they have been negotiated in the “pre-modern,” “modern,” and now “(late-)post-modern” ages. The discussion of identity and globalization/localization is very timely and indeed pressing to understand the processes, influences, mechanisms, and outcomes of the complex interplay of identities over many years now. Admittedly, the term identity has always been at the heart of many sociological debates that endeavor to unravel the way according to which people evolve and adapt to different contingencies and conditions of every time. In the last four or five decades, the debate over how identities are constructed has reached its apex, thus furthering new criteria shaping its whole scope of analysis. As the world is shrinking and becoming something of a small village, questions of identity, cultural heritage, traditions, and values, among others, change and require new answers as to how they can be dealt with in such compacted time-space periods. If these social and cultural changes imply anything, it is the fact that the human nature is on a constant search for novel ideas, lives, appearances, and, most importantly, identities. As such, a Man’s identity has been a mere process reflecting a state of becoming rather than being over many years. As a social phenomenon, identity is formed by dint of interaction with the others or against the others (Martin, 1995, p. 6). Drawing on this approach, Denis-Constant Martin (1995) contends that

Identity implies both uniqueness and sameness [. . .] one cannot be defined in isolation: the only way to circumscribe and identity is by contrasting it with other identities [. . .] It gets its meaning from the other: like a word in a crossword puzzle, it is located in a place where uniqueness [. . .] meets a sameness which needs an “elseness” to exist. (p. 5)

To provide their psychological and physical security, individuals are inclined toward adopting and adapting to the culture, behaviors, social values, ethics, or doxas of their community. The result is an identity that comprises shared values, norms, and morals by which a community comes to identify itself. By identity, people seek to differentiate themselves from others, all for the sake of forming a new offshoot of identity that is common to a group of people who experience the world in the same way. In other words, people generally tend to distinguish themselves from others by carrying out some distinct practices. These practices, in turn, include only those who exert them, and thereby endowing them with a collective identity that differentiates them from others exerting with different practices. Hence, to acquire an identity one must either identify oneself with someone and/or be perceived as different from someone else (Martin, p. 5).

In fact, the whole question of identity is not only contingent on variables of sameness and/or difference, but it is also governed by special conditions of time and space. What used to work for the past as markers of identities may not work for either today or tomorrow. Change comes with continuity. As individuals move through time and space, new means of making sense of their identities arise, and so are the markers and mechanisms they use to shape their being and mold their personalities.

In any certain period of history, a kind of identity might be comparatively more influential over the people. For instance, while the religious identity was more influential and determinant in pre-modern Europe, with the modernization process the national identity gained very critical significance and evenly universal character spreading over almost all countries. (İnaç & Ünal, 2013, pp. 224–225)

Such change in the nature of identities over time has been further exposed by Haller and Ressler (2006) who argue that “since traditional social groups and institutions, such as kinship, the village, religious and other communities, have been weakened or dissolved, identification with the nation can provide a substitute” (p. 819). In this sense, the condition of time has always governed the construction of identity in as much as it has become a process of becoming as long as humans experience life through time and space. By such token, what seems to be a more urging matter is the nature of today’s late (postmodern) identity, which has been strongly influenced by globalization.

As people draw closer to an intensified age of communication, technology, and human interaction at a global basis, peoples’ identities have witnessed a great deal of metamorphosis. The sociological anthropologist Roland Robintson (1995) theorizes such intensified global/local interactions under the name of glocalization. ¹ For him, the evolutionary forces brought about by this newly coined term allude to the existence of hybrid local and global exchanges of symbols, cultures, and experiences that have all come to epitomize today’s glocalization turn (Roudometof, 2016). Consequently, these very hybrid local and global exchanges have caused tensions between attempts at cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization. Such tensions, in turn, have resulted in a number of paradoxes inherent in one’s identity formation. This fact appears when people tend to preserve who they are based on their local specificities (where they come from and what they believe in), and at the same time attempt to commingle in a world web of relations and cultures. Doing both has given leeway to different shapes of identity fragments and paradoxes, which is the focus of this article and will be discussed at length at a later section.

In this respect, this study is divided into two parts, each of which is subsequently split into two sections. The first part will define identity and trace the genealogy of identity construction in the pre-modern and modern eras, which were, respectively, characterized by religious and nationalist tendencies. Tracing this time-line of progression of identity construction shall center mainly on the European history, since it is believed to have been the driving religious, political, and cultural force behind the phenomenon (Moore & Lewis, 2009). Afterward, the second part will attempt to demonstrate the different contradictions and fragmentations in the formation of identity in the age of glocalization.

What Is Identity?

Identity is a set of meaningful ascriptions attached to the self, such as social roles, interests, a structure of values and norms, a web of acquaintances, and social attachments that make up a unique conception of one’s personality. It is the concept we distinctively possess to differentiate us from other people, and that which we cultivate about ourselves over time. This self-concept may include,

The traits and characteristics, social relations, roles, and social group memberships that define who one is. Identities can be focused on the past—what used to be true of one, the present—what is true of one now, or the future—the person one expects or wishes to become, the person one feels obligated to try to become, or the person one fears one may become [. . .] Identities make up one’s self-concept variously described as what comes to mind when one thinks of oneself, one’s theory of one’s personality, and what one believes is true of oneself. (Oyserman et al., 2012, p. 69)

Such type of personal or individual identity implies a mutual interaction with other external factors to guarantee its continuity. For the “self” to exist and be recognized, a forging of a relationship with an “other,” a wider social collectivity, is extremely necessary. Not only is identity something we uniquely possess, but also a matter of what we share with other people we regard similar to us (if not precisely the same) to define and represent something bigger, all-encompassing and greater. This is the case for some types of identities, such as social identity, national identity, cultural identity, religious identity, or gender identity, among others. Here identity presents a match between who I am (who I think I am) and who or what I am trying to identify with. In this respect, Ruthellen Josselson (1987) explains such causal relationship arguing that

Identity provides a match between what one regards as central to oneself and how one is viewed by significant others in one’s life. Identity is also a way of preserving the continuity of the self, linking the past and the present [. . .] at the same time that our identity if fundamentally interwoven with others’ to gain meaning, contrasting ourselves with others heightens our sense of what is uniquely individual. (p. 10)

Quite significant in Josselson’s (1987) wordings is the idea of continuity shaping the whole scope of identity. The fact that identity develops over time through relations with others attests to the importance of considering the question of history in molding one’s identity. Not only is the element of time significant in the procedural development of identity, but also space can exert a considerable influence on our sense of being. What we think of ourselves, what we hold dear to us, or what we wish to become is constructed within the social/spatial and historical framework. In so doing, the time and space sense of identity presuppose a number of procedures whereby identity is positioned within the historical process and is made to change and adapt to different social/spatial settings and historical stops (Jenkins, 2008, p. 48). In other words, it is the experiences we develop through time and the sum of situations we encounter on a daily basis and in different places that bear the potential to either have a positive or negative impact on our identity and the way we should live our life. For instance, if a person is exposed to an embarrassing situation, this will somehow negatively affect his or her self-esteem. If this same person is repeatedly exposed to other embarrassing situations or social events in some particular places, his or her behavior, thoughts, deeds, and/or attitudes will change. Consequently, the sum of experiences, both positive and negative, modify and shape our self-concept. Therefore, to mark out the multiple situations and practices whereby identity construction is made relevant through time, the following related section addresses the manner wherein identity has been constructed during the pre-modern era.

Pre-Modern Times

This section addresses the importance of typologizing the concept of identity according to time periods to get a full picture of how it has been changing over the years. The prefix “pre” usually refers to something that comes before something else, but, in our context, it highly denotes a moment that has been viewed as an inspiration to the subsequent phases of the history of Mankind. Pre-modern means essentially prior to modern times, mostly referred to as prehistoric. Most anthropologists refer to the period of time from the most primitive proto-humans in paleoanthropology up to the end of the Middle Ages as pre-modern (Connelly, 2008). In this era, people’s sense of self and purpose was often expressed via blood, kinship, and land connections as well as sacred traditions, mostly articulated through faith in some kind of divinity (Giddens, 1991, pp. 27-28; Gross, 1992, p. 20). To further understand the very way wherein identity was formed in primitive societies, ² a close investigation will be directed to Man’s relation to his natural surrounding as well as his relation to others.

In their ritual interactions with their natural surroundings, primitive people—mostly referred to by theoreticians, such as Max Weber and Emil Durkheim, as undifferentiated and intransitive (Durkheim, 1995; Weber, 1993)—sought to establish solid and stable collective identities (Durkheim, 1995, p. 127). Identity was determined and prescribed by the so-called “local-cosmic narrative,” according to which an individual’s life is driven by a divine force or the inscriptions of the past (Harland, 1987, p. 26). People at the time relied on interpreting certain natural phenomena, whose perception is beyond their elementary and basic knowledge, so as to provide themselves with a center to follow as a main determinant of their collective identities (Durkheim, 1995; Weber, 1993). This idea has been elaborated on by Durkheim’s influential totem-system explanation of the primitive people’s elementary religious beliefs. Durkheim accounted for the fact that primitive people came to build their collective identities by worshiping distinct totem-signs, be they animals, plant-species, or scary storms. In this regard, Richard Harland (1987) says that

Durkheim takes his examples of totemism from the aboriginal tribes of Australia, though the practice of totemism [was] common to virtually all primitive societies. In totemism, each clan within the tribe holds certain things sacred, and maintains with these things certain special—and unnatural—relations. (p. 22)

Maintaining a division between what is sacred and what is profane clearly served to reinforce the collective identity of each primitive tribe. It is in identifying oneself with either the sacred or the profane that helped fortify peoples’ ties with their traditions, thereby strengthening their sense of being. As an example of identifying with sacred rituals, David Gross (1992) speaks of traditional sacred ceremonies which “helped affirm the notion that one had to look backward toward some distant origin to find the source of all value.” He goes on to explain that

The key, then, was to get back in touch with the primordial time of the beginnings and draw on its power for renewal in the present. One way to achieve this was through sacred rituals or ceremonies of reenactment that made symbolic contact with the origins. (Gross, 1992, p. 21)

It is both difference and unity that structure the whole scope of the totemic system, which is a system of social structuring based on “a specific relationship of an object, usually a natural object and in the purest types an animal, with a particular social group” (Weber, 1993, p. 35). It is no surprise that the primitive Man had a sharp intelligence that helped him figure out a way whereby to build up a solid and collective identity that unifies distinct groups experiencing the world in the same way (Weber, 1993, p. 14). Therefore, the sacred came to define peoples’ choices, while it also constituted a compacted ground upon which people from pre-modern times had to deal with life changes. Hence, people adapted all their resources and means to unifying clans to which they belong through giving people something to look forward to in order to stick together through better or worse times (Durkheim, 1995, p. 86).

Moreover, social interactions of the primitive Man, such as exogamy, kinship relations, and many other related social transactions, determined the way a given collective groups’ identity should be. It was essential to cherish and maintain social relations in primitive societies with the aim of establishing a link that would bring individuals from different clans or tribes together, and thereby construct a novel collective identity (Weber, 1993, p. 39). In line with this, Levi-Strauss’s theory of kinship relations viewed kinship exchange as a system of communication, which can bring about transformations in people’s identities (Harland, 1987, p. 25). According to him, for a vital and fruitful communication among individuals to be realized, there should be a social and conjugal exchange expressed in exogamy, which provides the means of binding men together; binding not just a husband and wife together but their families as well. This way, families married to each other we supposed to share the same identity. Consequently, kinship relations, forged by means of exogamy, contributed to strengthening people’s sense of being as a collectivity which has distinctive traditional rituals and, by extension, a distinct collective identity.

Concisely, the way ancient societies conceived the multiplicity of phenomena surrounding them was in itself an intelligent interpretation of the world with the means available at the time. Such different tools whereby primitive people came to form a distinct collective identity perspective can be equated with modern means of identification. Therefore, this issue will subsequently lead us to examine important constituents and conditions of the Modern Man’s ³ identity.

Modern Identity Formation

Importantly, covering the formation processes of identity during modern times is justified by the fact that modernity played a crucial role in laying the ground for most definitions against which most people of today identify. In other words, if the modern ways of identifications were inspired from nations and based on a sovereign territoriality, the late-modern identity formation is bound toward deterritoriality and openness. In this sense, the focus of this section is on how identity formation of individuals is transitioned from a modern to a late modern age. Significantly, the term modern has a long history which is beyond the capacity of this study. Etymologically, the term modern refers to anything sophisticated, novel, and imbued with rational status. Modernity is characteristic of an era that is distinguished by its rational, artistic, enlightened, and innovative orientation. It is the age of Enlightenment and reason that has come as a reasoning era breaking away from the primitive forms of identifications (McCracken, 2008, p. xxii). Generally, what many may label as modernism or modernity is a historical phase wherein grand-narratives or meta-narratives have been invented so as to explain and interpret the world and its phenomena. Such grand-narratives have been the very constituents of an age whose characteristics are an artistic as well as scientific evolution toward rationalizing the human mind (Lyotard, 1979).

More importantly, the modern mode of thought has been much oriented toward the nation-state which usually provides its citizens with a source to draw their identity. To better understand this relationship between identity and nation-state, a clear distinction between what both the state and nation designate must be laid down. On one hand, a nation is a community instituted by communal beliefs and distinguished from other nations by its unique culture and traditions. It practically refers to a group of people who have a strong sense of unity and common consciousness. Common culture, race, values, folkways, religion, history, political aspirations, and/or language, among others, are the constituents that help the formation of a nation (Miller, 1995).

On the other hand, a State is a political entity which refers to a piece of land with a sovereign government. States demand special conditions of sovereignty, territory, and a group of people who “are unified under a government which in internal matters is the organ of expressing their sovereignty, and in external matters is independent of other governments” (Gilchrist, 1921, p. 20). In brief, a nation has to do with identity and State with political institutions in the sense that people may live in different States but still share the same nation. In this respect, the modern era stirred people’s national identities as derived from nation-states as territorially bound political and cultural entities. In support of the powerful bonds bringing nations, territories, and identities together, John Agnew (2009) writes that “identities themselves, our self-definitions, and the interests that follow from them, are inherently state-territorial [. . .] Rather than merely incidental, territories are intrinsic to group formation and perpetuation” (p. 208).

Interestingly, to understand the way people co-construct identities in relation to nation-states, one needs to explore what it means to be rooted in a certain place. In this respect, the concept of territorialization has been a stated premise in much of the literature of nations in the sense that the world is composed of separate sovereign units (Giddens, 1987; Hobsbawm, 1990). These sovereign entities, in turn, provide people with links with which to identify themselves. In other words, ideas of soils and roots provide the basis on which the modern Man would define himself as being grounded in a certain territorially bound entity. By such token, such sort of national and territorial definition usually takes on forms of associations with metaphors of soils, roots, motherland, or fatherland, which metaphysically denote rootedness and continuity. That is to say, to belong to a tree as a metaphorical catalyst of a sovereign territorialized nation presupposes being nourished from its roots and thereby extending its legacy to many other subbranches. In this sense, people feel that they are naturally tied to their nations-states which nourish their identities as distinct from other people on other soils (Benedict, 1983, p. 131). A case in point is the idea of the British oak as “an emblem of the British people” (Keith, 1983, p. 220) given its connotations of groundedness and motherhood. Here the tree has historic and geographic linkage to a specific land. It stands for the mother nurturing its branches (kids) while providing them with a continuous bonding and a source of identification. There are also other instances depicting this analogous relationship bringing people and their nation-states together, such as the case of the plane tree leaf in the Canadian flag or the cedar tree in the Lebanese one.

Interestingly, whether or not nation-states are still providing people with their national identities has become a nagging concern under challenges of displacement, exile, migration, and refugee crises. Whether or not people can still identify with a geographical setting that is far from where they live is a central query of the modern era. In line with this, Arjun Appadurai (1992) argues that “natives are not only persons who are from certain places, and belong to those places, but they are also those who are somehow incarcerated, or confined, in those places” (Appadurai, 1992, p. 35). Interesting in appadurai’s statement is the idea that people can also be confined in places. It is the case with immigrants/migrants or minorities, who are not necessarily born in the places where they have come to socialize and naturalize. Examples here can be taken from waves of immigrants transported during colonial times to different plantations around the world. Interestingly, displacement or immigration did not cut off immigrants from their nations, from which they were originally transported; rather they sustained an emotional communion with their ancestral homes, which have been their very source of national definition. A number of immigrants see themselves through their origins and not their host countries. In this sense, a national public radio in the United States asked a number of African Americans about the nation they identify with, and a respondent named Amare answered that it is because of the influence of the skin color linked with Africanness and the spread of racism in the United States, “I’m African. I identify as black. But I don’t see myself as an African American” (Wang, 2018). This and other testimonies prove that geographically delineated States no longer define who one is; rather it is the nation that sticks with people throughout their whole life.

Consequently, the idea of the nation’s sovereignty as providing people with definitions and orientations starts to lose its significance as people draw closer to an intensified age of communication and technology. This goes hand in glove with Arjun Appadurai’s (1992) argumentation when he has recently expressed his uncertainty as regards notions of territorial sovereignty and nativeness as still providing the ground on which identity is constructed in such an open space-time and deterritorialized era. Therefore, people now identify themselves with deterritorialized roots and homelands (Appadurai, 1992). In line with this, John Agnew (2014) writes that

In the contemporary world, [. . .] people’s interests and identities are not readily and neatly associated with a clear state territorial address. Flows of people, capital, regulatory authority, and security threats are not easily tied to specific territorial locations. In turn, multiple sources of effective authority suggest that sovereignty is no longer usefully thought of in terms of the conventional wisdom of a close territorial matching between functional area and geographical scope of sovereign control and authority. (p. 123)

The openness of time and space has culminated in different global metamorphoses along with which go new trends of reasoning. For instance, the age of the globalized modernity, which is characterized by acts of deterritorialization, instantaneity, and velocity of proliferating technology, has proven that identity can no longer be comprehended as a static construction, for our sense of “self” as integrated and collective subjects is increasingly undermined as we become decentered and dislocated; decentered and dislocated in the sense that we no longer interact in territorialized areas. Yet, human social, economic, and political interactions, to mention but some, have transcended traditional borders. In addition, the fact that such borders become porous has resulted in a free mobility of people, services, or goods. Consequently, our sense of integration and collective being is dispersed and utterly blurred. That is to say,

With the increasing spatial mobility of people, goods, capital and information and the more or less parallel process of dynamizing mobility in social space, there is a tendency towards destructuring, flexibility and even fluidity with the melding of even the underpinnings of former collective and especially territorial identities. (Mlinar, 1994, p. 144)

Importantly enough, the literature on deterritorialization is marked by its subverting tendencies. It causes the disruptions and destructuring of the conventionally recognized stable social norms or structures of a nation especially as a sovereign territorial entity. Dramatically, such disruptive drives of deterritorialization usher in a series of disconnections governing humans in relation to their places of origin. In this sense, territories are no longer the sole source constituting the lines from which people can draw a sense of belonging and cultural attachment. Subsequently, the conventional understanding of a territory as an environment of a collectivity and a shared national identity is being challenged as we are heading toward an open space-time, deterritorialized age. In so doing, people are now inventing homes and identities in the absence of national, territorial markers. Such inventions usually occur through memories of a lost home and a hope of a new one constructed in the image of the homeland. In other words, deterritorialization fuels changes in attitudes and behaviors, thereby leading to the invention and restoration of identities that are characterized by both global and local tendencies. In support of this, Arjun Appadurai (1996) contends that

an important fact of the world we live in today is that many persons on the globe live in such imagined “worlds” and not just in imagined communities, and thus are able to contest and sometimes even subvert the “imagined worlds” of the official mind and the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them. (p. 33)

The cultural distancing of people from any territoriality is intensified when they begin to use their imagination to picture and reinvent their lost homelands in other alien geographies and spaces. It is, in fact, the work of imagination that can turn an unfamiliar place into something of a homely scent. Retaining local traditions and habits, among many other things, in global settings helps in coming to terms with lost origins and serves as a comfort zone in remote areas where one had to move either willingly or forcibly. In so doing, reterritorialization is an active mode of thinking and imagining that has come in handy to so many of those who are looking for establishing lost homes and popular cultures of their own choosing elsewhere. ⁴ To further explain this latter point, Arjun Appadurai (1996) mentions examples of media consumption to demonstrate attempts of reterritorialization exercised by Diasporas. He writes that

Electronic media provide resources for self-imagining as an everyday social project [. . .] with the rapid flow of mass-mediated images, scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities. As Turkish guest workers in Germany watch Turkish films in their German flats, as Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea, and as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving images meet deterritorialized viewers. These create diasporic public spheres, phenomena that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the nation-state as the key arbiter of important social changes. (Appadurai, 1996, p. 4)

It is when consumers try to reclaim markers of identity from anywhere or anything and by any means that they start engaging in active reterritorialization. Now, Media has served to expand peoples’ lives and imagination in the sense that they can still retain parts of their lost origins, while developing transnational cultural links. In fact, these nostalgic feelings fuel peoples’ move toward imagination and mediatization to picture an alien space as a homeland, familiar yet juxtaposed to a homely grounded geographical space of origin. There are also many other instances of persons’ preserving their cultural pride through the marketing of local specificities globally. Examples, in this regard, can be taken from Indians when establishing Indian restaurants with local Indian specificities in many parts of the world or many diasporic Moroccans who have taken it upon themselves to be ambassadors of so many types of local Moroccan food (such as Couscous or Tagine, among many other food types) or handicrafts (carpets, pottery, and leatherwork). These examples echo an interesting study conducted by Jain and Forest (2004) on the changing identity of immigrant and second-generation Indian Jains. The study maintains that Jains, who constitute a religious minority in India, develop social practices and an ethnic identity to uphold social cohesion after transnational migration to the United States (Jain & Forest, 2004).

Interestingly, studying religious minorities and ethnicities in their host countries proves a worthwhile enterprise. Many recent ethnic and religious conflicts have been linked to attempts at reterritorialization. In one of his well-known studies on identities in the age of the network society, Manuel Castells (1996) argues that religious fundamentalisms or ethno-nationalisms, among many other ideologically driven fractions, are today’s newfangled expressions of deterritorialized, globalized identities (Castells, 1996). An example, in this sense, can be taken from a violent incident in which the “cultural pride was at the roots when French men and women attacked a McDonald’s restaurant for its assumed assault on French culinary culture” (Kale & Zlatevska, 2009, p. 159). It is no surprise that the cause of a number of violent incidents around the world is mostly ethnically or religiously spurred. In so doing, Appadurai (1998) contends that

As large populations occupy complex social spaces and as primary cultural features (clothing, speech styles, residential patterns) are recognized to be poor indicators of ethnicity, there tends to be a steady growth in the search for “inner” or “concealed” signs of a person’s “real” identity. The maiming and mutilation of ethnicized bodies is a desperate effort to restore the validity of somatic markers of “otherness” [. . .] it is such facts that set the stage for the body as a site for resolving uncertainty through brutal forms of violation, investigation, deconstruction, and disposal. (p. 242)

Causing harm to others has come to be perceived as one of the markers of reterritorialization in the sense that many people would blame their poverty and ethnic problems on others. Violence and ethnic killings are now committed in the name of justice and equal opportunities for all. That is to say, just as some may think that Americans are the source of their nations’ poverty and suffering, they start to think of how to retaliate albeit with collateral damage just because they bear this identity grudge against their ethnic groups who cause them to suffer. This always sets them against the other whoever that happens to be, thereby harming this very other is perceived as a way into retrieving one’s identity. Many examples of resurgent religious groups (Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, or ISIS, among many others) can be brought into light to account for reasons why would some people kill others in the name of religion. More importantly, this is not to say that issues related to ethnicity and religion are always marked with violence. It is true that there are some who would take advantage of ethnicity to reclaim his or her identity as someone who belongs to that ethnic group, thus feeling the imperative need to defend it against all odds and by all means.

Similarly, attempts at reterritorialization may also take peaceful pathways. For instance, there are many Muslims living in the United States, who boycott the American products when they know that these products are manufactured by the same country which harms their people back home. For example,

In February 2001, the American Muslims for Jerusalem, a political group in Washington, called for a worldwide Arab boycott of Estee Lauder products. The group was acting in protest against Ronald Lauder, chairman of Estee Lauder International and Clinique Laboratories, because of his “activities in support of Israeli right-wing extremists.” (Mikkelson, 2002)

Also there have been many other calls to boycott the American products after Donald Trump implemented a ban on Muslim refugees and people entering the United States (Mills, 2017).

Having gone through major historical epochs that have characterized the process of identity construction throughout the years, we now need to turn to an equally important point that concerns the ways in which identity manifests a number of paradoxes, especially in the age of glocalization.

The Discourse of Glocalization

As the construct of glocalization has come to epitomize hybridity and fusion, this section is concerned with how identity formation of the late modern times of today, which are also characterized by their glocal drives, is a set of fragments and contradictions leaving individuals with almost no sense of identity. Therefore, in its newly hybrid form, globalization has been given the credit of mixing up local cultures with global ones, thereby culminating in both homogeneous and heterogeneous ways of life. Roland Robertson’s thesis about the global-local nexus has gained much temporality and debate owing to its expressive and evaluative intentions. Generally, the argument that sustains the complementary and supplementary relationship between globalization and localization is the catch phrase “think globally, act locally,” which gained much popularity in the current transforming age. However, this is not to deny the existence of precedents of the current glocalization trend. Contrary to what is commonly held, globalization is an old human phenomenon; it has been taking place since the dawn of time (Moore & Lewis, 2009; Steger, 2003). It has accompanied humanity throughout its history. For many years now, societies have constructed unifying rules to bond their people together and, at the same time, conduct successful commercial transactions with other societies outside of their territories. An example of the classical globalization model—often goes by names such as the archaic globalization or the early globalization—“existed in the Eurasian part of the world is Hellenism, which is already about two and a half thousand years old” (Iskandaryan, 2017).

In fact, the idea that we now have different technologies that have fuelled the globalization drives does not deny the existence of earlier forms of globalization often with deep historical roots to these new forms of technologies (Steger, 2003. p. 17). It has always been the case that societies adapted global means of technologies to their own local needs and the exchange of cultures and local products with the outside world. Despite the disproportionality of it, the exchange has always been both ways. The ones with better technologies and products had the upper hand. Yet, it is the cyclic nature of this form of globalization that is of our concern. Indeed, such cyclical globalization accounts for its evolutionary drives in the sense that, now more than perhaps ever before, there is a widespread acceleration of flows and mobility of human capital across borders as well as a heavy reliance on technologies of communication almost in every walks of life. It is quite interesting, meanwhile, to look at how such intensified forms of contemporary globalization/glocalization have contributed to shaping our present sense of being to the extent that contradictory forms of identity construction have emerged. In so doing, in the next sections we will try to see how the application of the term glocalization has been limited to the contemporary period while keeping in mind that the dynamics driving these processes actually started thousands of years ago.

In fact, glocalization is taken to express a condition in which, “the growing importance of the continental and global levels is occurring together with the increasing salience of the local and regional levels. Tendencies toward homogeneity and centralization appear alongside tendencies toward heterogeneity and decentralization” (Dimitrova, 2002, p. 358). Consequently, it can be argued that the paradox of today’s identity construction can be clearly traced to the “tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 32). To account for such paradox further, one should see how culture is both homogenized and heterogenized. Indeed, while cultural heterogenization is more related to the modernist approach of identity construction, it is also marked by drives toward “cultural and ethnic purity” in the sense that cultures or ethnic affiliations should be unique in their own way, and thereby people have the right to claim a shared history and cultural heritage within the confines of a nation. This, in fact, presupposes shutting all doors to the world out there, while trying to preserve cultural and ethnic specificities.

On the other hand, cultural homogenization refers to situations in which cultures are made to resemble one another through global influences. Such homogenizations, therefore, occur

As forces from various metropolises [. . .] brought into new societies, [. . .] tend to become indigenized in one or another way: this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spectacles and constitutions. (Appadurai, 1996, p. 32)

Examples in this account are numerous ranging from peoples’ new tastes of global fashion, hair-cuts, Western technologies which have become indigenized and adapted to different local settings. Even the act of grabbing bites of a hamburger in an Arab house testifies to this homogenization turn in the sense that what used to be alien to a culture is now being welcome. Therefore, such tensions between preserving what’s ethnic and opening up to global changes result in people going global, while trying to convince themselves that they are still living local. An expressive example of such a contentious situation would be the image of a bearded terrorist dressed in his culture’s traditional garments, while holding a gun made by the same global culture that this man is now trying to destroy (or the same jihadist using a smart phone for that matter).

To take this debate of the tensions between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization a little bit further, it is important to lay down two levels of explanations for the term glocalization, which, in turn, accounts for the contradictory pathways of constructing identity in the present times. In this respect, in trying to explain whether today’s global modernity has culminated in either a cultural heterogenization or cultural homogenization, Joachim K. Blatter (2007) adopts two models of reasoning for the word glocalization: a two-level system and a three-level system (Blatter, 2007, pp. 157–159). The two-level system of glocalization consists of a dialectical relationship between both what is local/subnational and global/supranational. It is at this level that local cultures or identities have to be scaled up to the global level. In other words, having realized that the world is becoming a small village where all entities should be grouped, some local cultures have started to form new linkages, be they social, cultural, or economic, with the encompassing global village. As a result, convergence between the local and the global has brought about both cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization. While the former is realized as the local starts to adopt a number of global dealings—thus getting shaped by trans-global interactions, trends and comparisons—the latter exemplifies a condition wherein differences are intensified while reterritorializing practices arise, thereby urging people to reinvent new cultures and identities in the image of the original ones. Cultural homogenization can be exemplified in a number of situations, such as when some Moroccan families feel it a necessity to educate their kids in foreign languages other than their local ones; when some individuals feel embarrassed to do a host of local, traditional activities starting from using a fork and a knife instead of eating with one’s hands; or when persons feel uncomfortable to dress in their traditional clothes in, say, an international festival. Therefore, such different types of Moroccan families would try to educate their kids, dress or eat, among many other things, just like the others around them only to fit in. In so doing, what results from such tensions between the local and the global is contentious as regards the formation of identity, for persons strive to be both global and local. In other words, people start facing the dilemma that, on one hand, they have to preserve their local and traditional specificities as well as those of their young generation, but at the same time, they want for themselves as well as their younger generation to keep up with the global changes and try to integrate into a world of technology, sophistication, or to use Victor Roudometof’s wordings, “digital glocalization” (Roudometof, 2016). In a nutshell, the situation of these people illustrates that they are in the process of negotiation on how to find a proper combination of the local and the global which results in neither homogenization nor heterogenization; however, a mixture or a middle way of both (Koç, 2006, p. 23).

Viewed from a different angle, cultural homogenization is itself the cause of cultural heterogenization in the sense that the former provokes peoples’ reactions in a way that they start considering the reinvention of lost markers from their cultures or identities. As discussed earlier, reterritorialization involves coming into term with one’s origins through reinventing indigenous cultures and identities anywhere in the world. Such reinvention intended for preserving one’s cultural heritage and identity provokes the revocation of globality. This is like purifying cultures from such “Westernization” or “Americanization” trends. However, what emerges from such conflict for “purification” is a set of hybrid practices in the sense that people end up embracing globality while starting to juxtapose their changes and reinventions on it. Examples can be drawn from

The incorporation of Eastern and African beats within American rap and pop music in the US, the increased use of the Indian curry spice in English recipes amongst Anglo-Saxons in England, and the increased popularity of ancient Eastern philosophy such as Buddhism, in contemporary “modern” psychology. (Laura, 2011)

The three-level system, Joachim K. Blatter (2007) maintains, is made up of national, local/subnational, and supranational/global level. In the course of their interactions, the three entities require mediation that should normally be executed at a national level as a gatekeeper. Glocalization is best understood here as intensifying the increasing interactions between the local and the global, and thus circumventing the national or the gatekeeper authority. The local is then involved with the global seeing that its interests are no longer retrieved at the national level. A case in point is a city which occupies a nodal economic point between the national and international. In this regard, the city’s interests are more connected globally than nationally given that it gains more economic and technological leverage. What is interesting about this level of explanation is that it manifests the way people living in such examples of cities behave. The example of the Moroccan city of Tangier can be helpful in this account. People from this Moroccan city have a tendency to embrace a global culture mainly the one coming from Europe. In so doing, their food is an amalgam of different cultures: Moroccan and Spanish. The language is a mixture of Arabic, Spanish, French, and English given the fact that Tangier has been an International Zone (1923 to 1956) ruled by eight Western countries during the colonization of Morocco. The hybrid nature of food and language is not the only marker of the city; instead, there are different lifestyles that resemble the Spanish more than the Moroccan. One would notice the difference between the present and the past when it comes to the way people are dressed in this city. For instance, until the nineties women used to dress in Moroccan traditional clothing: Elhaik—initially replaced by a veil and a djellaba. Now, given the international drive the whole country experiences, women are dressed in skirts, tight jeans, and many other styles. What this proves is the fact that peoples’ identities are being drawn from a mixture of the local and the global with overwhelming preferences for the global (in this case of Tangier) following Blatter’s three-level system analysis of Glocalization.

It follows then that glocalization has been employed to illustrate a situation in which a global culture encompasses local ones. The result is the complete overlapping of the local cultures, and thereby creating a multiplicity of cultures and identities. To that effect, Dimitrova (2002) explains that

When local cultures are integrated in the global mass culture, their specificities seem obliterated. In this sense, global mass culture resembles a split of different cultures, which are absorbed and given a common universalized form. But, in another sense, global culture is not as unitary as that, for it is a patch of various local traits and identities. (p. 323)

We need not ignore the role of the introduction of different technologies; as mentioned earlier, they too contributed a great deal to influencing people’s identities and cultures. People no longer define themselves according to a collectivity or shared norms, but they get into a riddled labyrinth where they start creating identities predicated on their own personal likings. A case in point can be derived from a student who may watch a comedy play, which features scenes of violence and recklessness, and in the very next morning start creating trouble in the class by making fun of the teacher just in imitation of a learned behavior. Subsequently, this is one way to say that the age of glocalization has culminated in having patches of miscellaneous arrays of identities conditioned by change.

More importantly, electronic technologies have a considerable influence on the work of imagination; a fact which subsequently challenges the construction of identities. To date, much consideration has been devoted to the question of identity in relation to the spread of information technologies (see, e.g., Castells, 1996; Morley & Robins, 1995; Pacey, 1992; Poster, 2001; Turkle, 1995). The increase of such technologies has played an important role in shaping, mainly, teenage group’s identities. Today, most youngsters cannot do without computers, smart TV, or smart phones thanks to their availability (Lenhart et al., 2010). In fact, the multiplicity of images and the flow of symbols, which are made accessible by means of TV sets and computers, facilitate imaginary and virtual travels. Nowadays, individuals can travel anywhere they like and meet whoever they desire in imaginary journeys. Subsequently, such journeys have influenced, in a way or another, the formation of identities to the extent that individuals end up having a set of fragmented, virtual identities. For instance, a multiplicity of identities are now being created, such as digital identities, musical identities, or fashion identities, among many others. For that matter, Brown and Larson (2009) have cautioned against the fact that

Another context is emerging as a major focus of peer interaction, namely, the world of the electronic media: text messaging, internet web pages, and other portions of cyberspace [. . .] Electronic media have the capacity to alter the nature of peer interaction dramatically. Adolescents are no longer confined to developing relationships with age-mates whom they physically encounter in three-dimensional space. Through websites and chat rooms they can link up with other adolescents thousands of miles away [. . .] they can adopt fictitious personae and pursue relationships with other individuals on the basis of completely false identity. (p. 99)

In effect, the model of imagination buttressed by a heavy use of electronic technologies has transcended the conventional model of center-periphery paradigm wherein the dominant culture strives to impose its own course on the indigenous cultures. Now, Media, following this example of teenagers, has come to constitute an essential key player in this process of identity construction of today. Most teenagers or youth have developed virtual identities that make them neither global nor local, but, somehow, a fragmentation of both (Baldil, 2016, p. 86; Buckingham, 2008, p. 5). Such fragmentation is hypothesized by claims that owing to the instantaneous open access to the internet, for instance, teens and youth alike can now experiment with their identity online in the sense that they become much obsessed with too many models and lifestyles they view online. “As a result, they may experience confusion and difficulty in integrating all these new views into their (already fragile) identity” (Valkenburg & Piotrowski, 2017, pp. 228–229). Accordingly, such confusion introduces many internet users to “a new electronic cultural space, a “placeless” geography of image and stimulation [. . .] a world of instantaneous and depthless communication [. . .] provoking a new sense of placed and placeless identity and a challenge of elaborating a new self-interpretation” (Morley & Robins, 1995, p. 112). Therefore, it is in this placeless geography that the internet users develop sophisticated strategies with their devices to express themselves (Escandell, 2016, pp. 163–209). To set such identity confusion and placelessness within the fragmentation hypothesis framework, media proves an effective means influencing choices regarding the formation of children’s self-concept.

In his book, Mi avatar no me comprende. Cartografías de la suplantación y el simulacro, Daniel Escandell addresses identity in new media, virtual reality, video games, and so on (Escandell, 2016, pp. 211–244). His research explains how identity is even more fragmented nowadays by conscious and unconscious actions when interaction is mediated by screens (Escandell, 2016, pp. 290–294). Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Snapchat, etc.) constitutes a major part in almost everyone’s life nowadays and children are no exception. “According to Common Sense Media, teens spend an average of nine hours a day online (paywall)” (Anderson, 2018). Such a heavy exposure to the internet suggest that most of their actions are drawn from the internet. The language they speak or chat with is something they have unconsciously learnt while interacting with each other on the net. Even the ideas they have about what is right or wrong or lifestyles are now things they can learn from sources other than those of their family circles or other state institutions. This is the case, as many teens have to always deal with an almost daily online huge influx of information about their idols or favorite celebrities in the sense that they try hard to mimic them in every way possible. As part of their gender identity, little girls, for example, may strive to copy the way a Disney princess talks, plays, dances, or is dressed only to change that as soon as they are introduced to a new celebrity or character who shall influence them in a different way. The feeling which media users have that they can be anything and anyone they choose is now available through avatars. Even users with disabilities, social anxiety, and other issues have been able to improve their wellness, mental health, and proprioception by using avatars in contexts such as MMORPG (Escandell, 2016, pp. 246–262). For some reason, media has come to explain a chainless and placeless world of simulation where anyone can be able to do anything away from indoctrinated social and cultural rules.

The accrued conviction that people are living in a “placeless” geography of images and simulation, or say imagination, has triggered the necessity of looking out at identities. It is no surprise that an individual in the age of instantaneity and horizontal and flat communication is seeking a new identity that would go hand-in-hand with every change. It is undeniable a fact that electronic technologies have come with new sophisticated changes that have both positively influenced the lives of people worldwide. However, electronic technologies are as the same as a coin that has two joint faces: gains and losses. In other words, what is now being created following the implementation of these technologies is a new hybrid offshoot of identity that is likely to appear on the stage progressing along extensive and emerging routes of glocalization. In this way, segments of identities are subject to appropriation, rectification, and, why not, improvement. Therefore, “such a journey is open and incomplete, it involves a continual fabulation, an invention, a construction, in which there is no fixed identity or final destination” (Chamber, 1994, p. 25). To further explain such an endless journey, mention can be made of a riddled situation in which migrants are caught up acquiring the habit of living between worlds with different languages, religions, musics, dresses, and life styles in their new exilic environments.

Conclusion

It is no surprise that the construction of identities is born out of crises. The interplay between the territorial and the deterritorial, the global and the local, the homogeneous and the heterogeneous, or the individual and the collective, among many other collocations, has been interpellated to address many of the intricacies related to identity formation, thereby clarifying many interesting facts about how identities come into being in these glocalized times. This is so given that identities are no longer predicated on shared rationales, but turned out to be products, if one can call them so, to be used for a certain period of time and then disposed of when worn out. The modern man is metonymic of a revealing situation in which a person tends to dress in a certain way that fits specific situations so as not to confuse, for instance, a dancing party with a racing competition. Such an example can be pertinent if only understood to reflect a state of mind in which some individuals are predisposed to vote for change and condemn monotony. Consequently, a myriad of contentions/conflicts that have prevailed the present times and come to define the age of glocalization have also been interpellated.

Much work has been conducted on this glocalization phenomenon (see, e.g., Robertson, 1995; Roudometof, 2016), but more interesting is how we humans tend to change and adapt to different contexts. Of course, the future holds a lot of mysteries for us to discover later on, especially as related to the way we define ourselves. It seems, indeed, that the case of glocalization is not the end of the story. It may be one of the cycles of change designed to mark the present times. Therefore, the questions which press themselves here are how far are we willing to go to keep negotiating the terms of our being through times? Is it really a fact that we are living the same versions of life going by different names, or are we really going through concrete changes, especially in terms of identity formation? These and other questions will be unfolded, one way or another, as we get onboard of open and incomplete journeys of inventions and fabulation. In a nutshell, just as some web sites are constantly under construction, so are peoples’ identities.