The global, the local, and the hybrid: A native ethnography of glocalization

Abstract

International communication processes have been alternately understood as part of an overriding world process of globalization, or in terms of a polarity, between local audiences and global media, whose terms are disputed by the cultural imperialism and active audience formations. Departing from an interdisciplinary literature coalescing on cultural hybridity, I argue that hybridity is a pervasive but evasive cultural condition. I then theorize and utilize native ethnography to empirically examine how Maronite youth in Lebanon articulate local practices and global discourses to enact hybridity. Hybridity is construed as a space of oblique signification where power relations are dialogically reinscribed. Demonstrating that hybridity is not the negation of identity but its quotidian and inevitable condition, I advocate native ethnography as an epistemological approach and cultural hybridity as an ontological grounding for the ongoing internationalization of media and cultural studies. Finally, the concept of “glocalization”; is proposed as a more inclusive and heuristic alternative to “globalization. “