Culture in the New Reality: Beyond Economics - The Quality of Life.
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THE SARAWAK MUSEUM JOURNAL |
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Title :
Culture in the New Reality: Beyond Economics - The Quality of Life. |
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Author :
Zawawi Ibrahim |
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Abstract:
Culture in the new reality has to be contextualized in its own history and political economy. This broader picture would give us a sense of its genesis and genealogy. In essence, it requiresus to reflect critically upon our own biography with the western world (the Industrialised North,or the “Centre”), since it is from the fact of this encounter, mediated initially through the midwifery of European imperialism that both peoples and cultures of the “periphery” have been reconstituted in both homogenous and diverse ways. Indeed long before the term ‘globalisation’ became a catch term, Worsley, an anthropologist, (1969) already saw imperialism as a phenomenon which created the world into “single social system”. For Europe, the periphery was a “people without history” (Wolf, 1982), notwithstanding its repertoire of rich and diverse civilisational contents pre-dating European contact. For Wallerstein, the global social system which emerged was the “modern world-system”, which divided the world into the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ (1980). In this model of the global capitalist economy, it was already clear that the relationship between the centre and the periphery was based on exploitation and domination, in which the periphery was relegated as the providers of raw material and labour required to fuel the expansion and the capital accumulation process of the “centre” (or “central capitalism”, after S. Amin). Culturally, the non-European peoples of the periphery became ‘the other’ - the object of the orientalist discourse (Edward Said, 1978) and representation in much of the European depiction of the peripheral or colonised subjects.
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| DOI: XXXX |
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How to cite:
Zawawi Ibrahim. (1999). Culture in the New Reality: Beyond Economics - The Quality of Life. The Sarawak Museum Journal, LIV (75): 47-59 |
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References
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