I Don’t Make Sense as a Person

“What did you do within the last week, say, that was a global experience?” asked my professor in this week’s seminar for Approaches to Globalisation to start the discussion.

People were hesitant at first, but someone finally called out: “I saw the new James Bond movie.”

“OK, good. Anybody else?” she said as she wrote ‘James Bond’ on the dry erase board.

“My friend from New York came to visit,” I said, glad that I could think of something that seemed global.

“I had Italian for dinner on Saturday,” one of my classmates called out.

That got me thinking: “I’m not sure that I should admit this here, but on Sunday night I ate at Burger King in Leicester Square. Oh, and I had a spicy bean veggie burger, which I think could be construed as a global experience.”

“So your friend comes in from New York and you take him to Burger King?” my professor retorted.

“Oh no, I went with another friend from the US…who I know from China…who’s studying at SOAS…before we went to an Italian opera with English surtitles at the ENO…and it was an opera about India at that.”

“That’s interesting, having the high culture and the low culture together like that,” she commented.

“Oh, and on Saturday night I went to a Brazilian bar with a Canadian friend who happens to be an LSE student but who I know through a mutual friend from China. We watched capoeira and tried to samba.”

And the funny thing is, I could keep going with this. The more I thought about it, the more actions I realized fit in to the global context. All this without even having mentioned anything to do with the Internet—and believe me, I had Skyped, blogged, and chatted with the best of them over that week.

“You did this all this week? You’re not just projecting all this into this week, right?” the teacher asked with some concern.

“Oh, all this week. Otherwise I’d be talking to you about my trip to France.” I smiled coyly.

“Well ok, what did people do this weekend that was local?” she queried.

“I renewed my monthly London bus pass.”

“Wait, another classmate interjected, how did you pay for it, with your American credit card?”

“Well actually, no. I paid with my UK card (which is through a US bank, BTW) because I had had troubles before where the card readers wouldn’t accept my swipey card, they all wanted the cards with chips.”

“So how about this,” I continued, “and again, I’m not sure I should admit this here. Every morning when on my way to the LSE I cross over Waterloo Bridge, and whenever I do, I make sure to turn over my left shoulder so that I can see Big Ben and the London Eye. It’s what reminds me that I’m in London every day.”

That prompted a burst of discussion, and no, it wasn’t even about how crazy I am.

With others chiming in with their examples, we moved quickly to, “I went to a British pub,” and the discussion of British pub culture.

“On Sunday, before the Burger King incident, I went with a Brit to a Wetherspoon’s (a British chain of pubs), drank a pint of French beer, and felt more like I was at an American Red Robin’s than anywhere else as it was a chain restaurant based on concepts of, as Ritzer puts it, McDonaldization. Does that count as a global or a local experience?”

We continued on from there to an academic discussion about space versus place, and how are global experiences fit into Appadurai’s model of global flows, or ‘scapes’ as he likes to call them. But that’s not what struck me about the conversation, and nor is this why I’m sharing the story with you.

Rather, it is for three reasons:

1) Sketching out my life on the board made me realize that I don’t make sense as a person. I shouldn’t exist. I’m pulling my life from all across the world on a very intense (more intense than I even realized) and very consistent basis.

At least my friends make as equally little sense for the most part. For example, my friend who came in from NYC was here to surprise some British friends that he had made while teaching in Guatemala. This was before, of course, he went on a round-the-world trip. My friend with whom I saw the opera might be from the US, but she doesn’t even have a home to return to there anymore—her mum lives in Egypt and her dad in the Far East somewhere (can’t remember anymore, sorry).

Is this how most people experience the world? Is globalization that inevitable and all-encompassing? Or am I just lucky and confused?

2) It shocked me how much of this global activity I take for granted, or don’t even think about. When my professor first posed the question, I couldn’t really think of anything that I had done that would qualify as global, and then I got started. I guess that since I’m studying globalization, one would think that I’m more aware of my participation in the world, and yet I couldn’t see through the iron cage (to use a Weberian turn of phrase). What does this mean about the people who don’t ever sit there considering the extent to which their lives are globalized?

4) My professor’s comment about high and low culture also took me by surprised. It had never occurred to me that Burger King was low brow but opera is high brow. This might be more post-modern than part of the age of globalization (although this certainly had a factor in it because the reason we ended up at Burger King had everything to do with how we experienced McDonald’s in China). I’ve been frustrated by notions of class of late. Is this a useful analytical tool at all to look at things?! Or is it just me that likes to simultaneously mix my cultural milieux?


To finish off then, I pose a question to y’all similar to the one posed by my professor: what is the most absurdly ‘global moment’ that you can recall having, and what is the most local moment you recall having?

Tomorrow I host two Americans besides me, two Canadians, four Brits, a Spaniard, a Dutch, and two Chinese for American Thanksgiving. This has the potential to rank up there for me!

Happy Turkey Day everybody!