1. Chapter 4
(Dis) Placing Culture
&
Cultural Space

2. Chapter Objectives
 To understand the relationships among culture, place, cultural
space, and identity in the context of globalization
 To understand how people use communicative practices to
construct, maintain, negotiate, and hybridize cultural spaces
 To explore how cultures are simultaneously placed and
displaced in the global context leading to
segregated, contested and hybrid cultural spaces
 To introduce the notion of bifocal vision to highlight the linkages
between “here” and “there” as well as the connections
between present and past

3. INTRODUCTION
Explore the cultural and intercultural
communication dimensions of PLACE,
SPACE and LOCATION.
WE WILL EXAMINE:
 The dynamic process of placing and
displacing cultural space in the context of
globalization.
 How people use communicative practices to
construct, maintain, negotiate, and hybridize
cultural spaces
 How segregated, contested, and hybrid
cultural spaces are both shaped by the
legacy of colonialism and the context of
globalization.

4. Placing Culture and Cultural
Space
CULTURE:
CULTURE, by definition,
is rooted in place with a  “Place tilled” in Middle English
reciprocal relationship  Colere : “to inhabit, care for,
between people and till, worship” in Latin
place
In the context of
globalization, what is the Culture is both PLACED and
relationship between culture and DISPLACED
place?

5. Cultural Space
CULTURAL SPACE
The communicative practices that construct Cultural spaces are constructed
meanings in, through and about particular places
through the communicative
practices developed and lived by
Cultural space shapes verbal and nonverbal people in particular places
communicative practices
EXAMPLES: Communicative practices include:
Classrooms  The languages
Dance Clubs
 Accent
 Slang
Library  Dress
Courtroom  Artifacts
Construction Site  Architectural design
Amusement Park  the behaviors and patterns of
Home interaction
Restaurant  the stories
Movies  the discourses and histories
Baseball Game
How is the cultural space of your home, neighborhood, city, and state constructed
through communicative practices?

6. Place, Cultural
Space and Identity What’s the relationship between place
and identity?
Avowed identity:
LOCATIONS OF ENUNCIATION:
 Sites or positions from which to  The way we see, label and make
speak. meaning about ourselves and
 A platform from which to voice
a perspective and be heard Ascribed identity:
and/or silenced.
 The way others view, name and
Place
describe us and our group
Culture
Identity How is place related to STANDPOINT
Difference and POWER?

7. Displacing Culture and Cultural
Space
(Dis) placed culture and
Time-space Compression:
cultural space:
A notion that captures the
complex, contradictory and
contested nature of cultural A characteristic of globalization
space and the relationship that brings seemingly disparate
between culture and place cultures into closer proximity,
that has emerged in the intersection and juxtaposition
context of globalization. with each other.

8. Displacing Culture and Cultural
Space
“IN-HERENESS AND OUT- GLOCALIZATION:
THERENESS”:
 The dual and simultaneous
 A characteristic of forces of globalization and
globalization in which a localization.
particular “here” is linked to
“there,” and how this  First introduced in 19802 to
linkage of places reveals describe Japanese business
colonial histories and practices
postcolonial realities.
 The concept allows us to
 The particular “here” is think about how globalizing
linked to “there” and this forces always operate in
linkage of places reveals relationship to localizing
colonial histories and forces.
postcolonial realities.

9. Cultural Space, Power and
Communication
Power is signified, constructed and
Throughout history and today, regulated through SIZE, SHAPE,
space has been used to ACCESS, CONTAINMENT and
establish, exert and maintain SEGREGATION of space
power and control
Can You Think of an Example?
The use of space communicates…
Can You Think of an Example?

10. EXAMPLES:
 The word “ghetto” originally referred to
an area in Venice, Italy where Jews
were segregated and required to live
in the 1500s.
 The reservation system imposed on
Native Americans.
 The Jim Crow laws (1865-1960s) that
segregated Blacks.
Segregated  The isolation of Japanese Americans
during WWII.
Cultural Space  Sundown towns or “whites only” towns.
 Schools today are re-segregated to
the same level as in 1970s
Cultural spaces that are
segregated based on socio-  In Hurricane Katrina, low-
income, working class neighborhoods
economic, racial, ethnic, were hit the hardest
sexual, political and/or
religious differences:  Gated communities
Voluntary or
involuntary/imposed

11. Contested Cultural
Space
Cultural space where people
with unequal control and
access to resources engage
in oppositional and
confrontational strategies of
resistance and/or
contestation.
EXAMPLES:
 Chinese immigrants who came to the U.S. to work from the 1850s onward were forced to live in
isolated ethnic enclaves known as Chinatowns in large cities such as San Francisco and New
York
 In the early 2000s, in Hudson, New York, a small town of 7,000 just 100 miles north of New York
City, residents joined together to protest the building of a massive, coal-fired cement factory
 Occupy Wall Street; Occupy Oakland; Occupy Boston, etc.

12. The intersection of intercultural
communication practices that
construct meanings in, through
and about particular places
within a context of relations of
power.
Examples:
 McDonald’s in Russia
 Wal-Mart, Starbucks and other American
companies are mixed into local cultural
spaces around the world
Hybrid culture spaces are not simply
the blending of cultures and cultural
practices.
Rather, hybrid culture spaces involve
a negotiation of power

13. Hybrid Cultural
Space
As Site Of
Intercultural
HybridNegotiation
cultural spaces as innovative and
creative spaces where people constantly
adapt to, negotiate with and improvise
between multiple cultural frameworks.
EXAMPLES:
 Cultural space of “home”
experienced by Asian Indian
immigrants in the U.S.
 Immigrants create hybrid cultural
space to creatively maintain their
relationship to their culture and
tradition.

14. Hybrid Cultural Hybrid cultural spaces where people
challenge stable, territorial, and
Space As Site static definitions of culture, cultural
Of Resistance spaces and cultural identities.
EXAMPLE:
 Asian Indian immigrants create hybrid cultural space as a form of resistance to
the dominant American culture.
 Hybrid cultural space allows them to avoid total assimilation and a loss of their
own culture.

15. Hybrid Cultural
Spaces As Sites Of
Transformation
Hegemonic structures
are negotiated and
reconfigured through
hybridization of culture,
cultural space, and
identity.
EXAMPLE:
Chicana feminist Gloria
Anzaldua uses the notion of
“borderlands” to transform the
experience of cultural
marginalization into a space of
oppositional and liberatory
identity.

16.  Placing Culture and Cultural Space
 Place, Cultural Space, and Identity
 Displacing Culture and Cultural Space
 Segregated, Contested, and Hybrid cultural space