At the same time that scholars have questioned the totalizing opposition between “the global” and “the local,” a great deal of academic research of late has focused on tensions between vast movements of people, capital, culture, germs, goods, and forms of violence across space and the distinct, often unpredictable ways that wide-spread phenomena inhabit particular places.

Scholars now tend to focus on what channels, limits, and sometimes blocks processes that were formerly over-generalized as “globalization.” George Yudice suggests that cultural forms have been thoroughly commodified, converted into goods that are exchanged globally. He argues that attempts to challenge social, economic, and political subordination undertaken by social movements and impoverished communities now often take the form of efforts to shape how “their” cultural forms are commodified and gain part of the income derived from their capitalization. In the face of the restructurings of value initiated by the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, free trade agreements, and transnational corporations, intellectual property rights become a key locus of efforts by the powerful to monopolize the extraction of value and for the poorer and less powerful producers of cultural forms to lay claim to their own creative products. How forms proliferate and travel and how value is created and controlled are both shifting rapidly in the 21st century.

Since the late 17th century, projecting a new evolutionary period or phase always seems to involve new recourse to the trope of the demise of tradition. Anthony Giddens thus defines “reflexive modernity” negatively as “post-traditional,” reiterating the familiar construction of tradition as being oral, ritualistic, the social glue of the premodern world, and the antithesis of individualism—“modernity,” he writes, “destroys tradition.” As has been true for three centuries, however, new epistemologies, technologies, and dispersions of people and culture are resulting in new sites and practices of traditionalization. Indeed, the post-911 climate of fear and insecurity has augmented postmodern feelings of fragmentation and dislocation, thereby promoting new nostalgias—and thus emerging regimes of traditional value. Nestor García Canclini suggests that producing new modernities involves creating new traditionalities; the nation-state continues to be one locus of this process, but sites of creativity and contestation now extend far beyond national borders and are shaped by institutions, elites, and social movements whose scope is global, at the same time that they occupy niches generated by the fragmentation of nation-state projects.

These processes have created fascinating new dynamics in the relationship between form and value. Technological/aesthetic transformations in the music industry, for example, blur lines between production and reproduction, as practices of sampling and mixing decontextualize “traditional” cultural forms vis-á-vis connections with particular artists and places in the process of exploiting and transforming their formal properties. One sort of example is provided by the way that musical group Deep Forest appropriated a field recording of a Solomon Islands song and converted it into a global hit that generated huge revenues—but not for either performer Afunakwa or ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp, as Steven Feld has documented. On the other hand, changes in the way that music is recorded, reproduced, and distributed enable artists without access to corporate production and marketing outlets to make their own CDs and sell them via street peddlers, thereby creating “new” modes of production and consumption for “old” cultural forms. At the same time that UNESCO’s Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage provides a regime for traditionalizing cultural forms on a global stage—as executed by nation-states—internal refugees in Colombia are creating individual archives of “traditional” forms on their laptops, recording musical forms from the regions they were forced to flee, as ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa suggests. New modes of producing and reproducing forms in generating value are tied not just to efforts to “preserve” what are considered to be “traditional values” and extract revenue but to strategies for constructing nation-states, national elites, transnational corporations, and international organizations as ethical and humane.

A new coalition of leading scholars from Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the United States has formed into order to forge new perspectives on these issues—and simultaneously to transform the field of folkloristics, the study of folklore. Much scholarship is framed by the notion that severing cultural forms deemed to be traditional from specific places and performers is somehow novel and possibly nefarious; having tracked the dislocation and travel of cultural forms for over a century, folklorists can offer vital critiques of the limited historical and analytical visions that often inform such discussions. At the same time, although following cultural forms and regimes of value around the globe is important, it is also crucial to gain detailed knowledge of what Anna Tsing refers to as the “friction” that is generated by local and national economies, political schema for regulating culture, social relations, and scholarly traditions. The dominance of academic institutions in the United States and Europe tends to provide a Eurocentric filter that stifles potential contributions by scholars from other regions, rendering them as “data” that must be analyzed using models produced in the North. The group will thus work on different manifestations of these transnational processes, examining the particularities of how they come to form “global assemblages” in specific places that are shaped by specific sets of interlocking and competing epistemologies. At the same time that this coalition will draw on the strengths of folkloristic and other perspectives on relations between form and value as lodged in processes of traditionalization, it will create a collective and globally visible locus for imbuing the discipline with new intellectual and institutional strength and help challenge its Eurocentric base.

This effort grew out of a gathering of scholars from around the world that was held in my living room in Berkeley. The goals were ambitious. Like other fields that emerged and were “disciplined” in the 19th century, folkloristics sought to find both a distinct object and set of methods, as well as to create a textual canon, professional societies, and institutional niches in academies and state institutions in order to constitute itself as autonomous and authoritative. Nevertheless, a focus on “boundary work,” on policing the boundaries that seem to distinguish folklore from other types of cultural forms and folkloristics from other disciplines, ceased being a viable intellectual or institutional strategy in recent decades. Moreover, folkloristics was specifically established as a Eurocentric enterprise—and a European academic practice modeled on European cultural forms that was then exported across the world. Similarly, 19th century subjects and objects are unlikely to provide much traction in attempting to document, analyze, and theorize 21st century transformations of form and value. As a result, the participants launched a collective enterprise that centers on re-theorizing this area of study by undertaking collaborative ethnographic and documentary research, theoretical explorations, and pedagogical projects, all tied together by information technologies and periodic meetings. Many of the members met in Quebec City on October 19 at the American Folklore Society meeting, and a second meeting of the entire group is planned for 2008.

Since this re-theorization of folkloristics and its relationship to broader academic perspectives and contemporary social life lies at the heart of the Berkeley Folklore Program, which I direct, the Form and Value in Global Traditions project seems to provide Berkeley with a remarkable opportunity to collaborate with a diverse set of scholars in forging new perspectives and producing new bodies of research and theory. I was thus willing to accept the group’s request that Berkeley play a key role in launching the project, providing logistics and seeking sources of funding for collaborative activities. I look forward to working with Berkeley faculty and campus units such as the Townsend Center in linking these discussions to conversations that are taking place on campus.

Charles Briggs is Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. 

This article can be found in the November/December 2007 newsletter.